From: Nat Friedman <nat@nat.org>
To: Victoria Friedman <...>
Subject: Birthday present.

Tor,

You are 16 now, and it is important that you have a car. As your big brother, I have your best interests in mind and therefore want you to have a vehicle that will be reliable and practical, but not too fancy or sexy or dangerous.

So I have ordered a BMW for you. It's a nice car with three wheels, the steering wheel is mounted on the door, and the door opens from the front. It is made from old airplane parts.

I hope you will like it:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=4509511566&category=6056
http://www.isetta.ch/images/isetta-mini.jpg
http://photobucket.com/albums/v471/button-s/?start=0

Love,
Your brother 9 December 20049 December 2004 I can use a couple of the fingers on my right hand now, so typing is getting a bit easier. Immediately after the surgery my fingers were essentially paralyzed, and the pain was so bad I was antically mixing my blood with percocet, to little effect. That got better after a few days, but two handed typing was impossible (and is still very difficult).

He sits at the other end of my desk on a separate computer while I conduct the machine with my left hand, jumping from mail to mail, opening buffers, reading web pages, and generally doing the interactive low-latency low-volume typing tasks myself. He can see everything I'm doing because my desktop is shared over the network. And when I need to enter a large block of text, well, I just start talking, he types, and the words appear on the screen.

If I don't look up from the screen, I can pretend he's not there and that I have the world's most powerful voice recognition engine. So I have a sneak peek into what computers will be like when voice recognition works really well. And I humbly submit to you my comments.

First, voice recognition is really awesome. It's not the speed. I can talk 2-3 times faster than I can type. Fully functional, I am the fastest typer you have ever encountered: faster than my typist by a fair bit, in any case. And so the limiting factor is his ability to type, and I'm not getting any bump in my ability to put words on the screen quickly.

No, the best thing I've noticed so far is that it's really pleasant to dictate email. I can consult notes or documents or books while I compose my message without a context switch between real world and computer world. It gives me a chance to think through what I'm saying more than I am inclined to do when I'm rapidly typing the message into the computer. It slows down the pace of my thought from the otherwise frantic 130wpm speed of my typing to a more human level.

And, of course, it's just plain neat.

Attaching a video camera to an autorickshaw.

It's hard to recognize speech.
It's hard to wreck a nice beach.

And then, when he does make a mistake, I can say, "no, I meant in," or "that's supposed to be a new sentence," and he immediately understands what I'm talking about, because he understands the meaning of what he's typing. With contemporary software, I'd have to say "BACK BACK BACK BACK PERIOD SPACE CAPITALIZE FORWARD FORWARD FORWARD FORWARD." Or something to that effect.

Anyway, these are some of my thoughts on using extremely high quality speech recognition, based on a simulated automation environment. It is fun to try technology years before it exists. I wonder if there are other things we can simulate like this?

Driving around for an hour.

Awesome dinner with JP Rosevear of Evolution fame tonight at the Japanese steakhouse on the river.

This weekend Joe and I are going to New York to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I am looking for a funky place to stay while we're there. Ideally some kind of themed hotel where we have to wear ascots and talk with funny accents all the time. Suggestions welcome. 13 December 200413 December 2004 Joe, Robert and I went to New York over the weekend. Joe and Robert both posted photos of me sleeping on the train rides to and from New York. What can I say, I need my sleep; my personality has a lot of overhead.

Here comes the web

Gmail and Google Suggest have begun to lift the wool of obstinance from the eyes of the old-school fat client nerds, and people are realizing that the latest incarnations of JavaScript/DHTML/CSS really are good enough for many purposes. Users notice and care less and less whether your app is built as a local client or on "the web platform."

Fig 1. Breathing on the lens in cold weather.

This calls into question the need for things like XUL and Flash as a client platform (XUL will always be useful to extend Firefox and Flash to do animations). Why use XUL to build a richer experience for your web app if you can get most of the way there with JS/CSS/DHTML and it will run on all browsers?

I'm surprised no one's started an open source effort to build a GMail-like web interface to mail. The open source web interfaces for OGo and things like SquirrelMail could really benefit from being brought into the modern era.

Of course, markup isn't the only advantage of web-based apps. The main one is the centralized deployment model, the lack of dependencies/DLL hell, the ease of backup/configuration/etc.

It's interesting to watch the traditional application-and-platform developers (Apple, Microsoft, the Linux desktop projects) parade down the "web will never be good enough for real applications" path. Apple has Sherlock, MS has Avalon/XAML, we have Gtk/Qt/XUL/etc. Meanwhile you find more and more outlying app developers writing web apps. I wonder if, in a few years, we will look like withered old timers to the new armies of web application devleopers. Clinging to our dated ways. "I like my trackball just fine, sonny!" 14 December 200414 December 2004 I'll be in Utah the next two days, San Francisco for the following ten, and then in Mexico for a week, sleeping on the beach, probably at Playa del Carmen. I was planning to come back to Boston after Utah, before going to California, but today at the office I asked myself: why?

The downside is that I'll be gone for three weeks, but I only packed for two days.

I'd be interested in meeting people in the various areas, so email me if you want to have dinner or something.

Peach sent me yet another reason to heal quickly.

Also I forgot to mention that The Life Aquatic was unbelievably funny. I loved it. 28 December 200428 December 2004 First!

I uploaded some new data to the Internet that you might be interested in perusing:

• The Nat Friedman city guide. From my feverish life experience to your eager retinas.


• The Nat Friedman donation guide. In this season of giving, some free software related projects to which I have given money.

Creepy white balance mistake.

I will be reporting on cool things to do in and around Provo, such as the Cinemark dollar theater in Provo, Brewvies in Salt Lake City, or catching one of Theta Naught's shows in the area (highly recommended).

Getting my cast removed in Salt Lake City.

The other bit of good news is that San Francisco is only an hour and a half from Utah, so I'll probably be out here pretty often as well. Which is great because I can see my sister Peach, go out with friends, and pick up really cute, politically active girls, thereby eliciting hysterical levels of jealousy from Alex, etc etc.

In other words: same shit, different city.

I got to meet Peach's boyfriend, Erik the other day.

Erik, Alex and Peach. Alex and Peach got the boy band point-stance down pretty well, but Erik went for more of an astronomy thing.

Later, Peach, Alex and I threw a little get-together at her house.

We ate brussel sprouts and cheese.

Z is highly lovable.

The San Francisco treat!

But it is late and I am going to Mexico in the morning.

Short summary of 2004:

• >30 cities
• Many books, but only You Shall Know Our Velocity was memorable
• Released a nice desktop product
• Found out what a broken arm feels like (it feels like 14mg of morphine)
• No girlfriends (I'm in a refractory period)
• Etc.

You will not hear from me for some days. Be still! I will come thundering back. Next year.