AWONA (Away Without Net Access) for a short time and it turns out I'm famous! After mentioning Michael Froomkin's croc experience in the last post, he noticed me and mused about (of course) my identity. I should have foreseen this. In his shoes, I would also be interested in a masked blogger. My first instinct was just to drop him an email and reveal all, but that pretty much goes against plan, here. I know better than most that a secret shared with even the most trusted person is infinitely more likely to come back to bite you. It will be difficult to post without seeming coy--I doubt Michael would recognize my name, though he might remember my face. I'll leave a breadcrumb.
He writes about
Simson Garfinkle's hobby of extracting content from used hard drives, something I do for profit rather than fun. Here is a hint to my identity, though extremely abstruse. Let's see, the first time I met Simson? It was a dark and stormy night. I remember this because I met him a large dimly-lit octagonal conference room with a huge skylight, and the rain beating down on the windows and crashing lightning made it feel like Dr. Frankenstein would walk in the door any minute. We chatted for a bit about some shared interests, especially the process of packet-sniffing local networks remotely. But the meeting itself was fairly uneventful, and, well, dull. The group I was with at the time had only a tangential interest in his work (he was in the process of writing a book), and he, IMHO, misgauged how best to extract information from them. The combination of the outside environment and the clashing cultures inside leaves it as a memory of a missed opportunity.
Luckily, today I took the opportunity of a little down-time in London. It seems the last couple times I've been here, I have been too busy to do anything fun. I usually hate working with clients' travel people, but in this case they booked me a non-stop on BA. I left at around 6 last night, got in just before noon, and actually managed to get some good sleep on the flight. I took advantage of having the afternoon to myself and caught a couple of hours at one of my favorite museums in the whole world, the Victoria and Albert, after a quick croissant and fresh orange juice at a bakery across the way. We have a decent small bakery in my current hometown, but for some strange reason it's hard to find a good croissant--the city is butter-averse, I guess. Headed up to Tottenham Court Road for a little book-hunting (most of the shops were closed) and had supper at Wagamama, a great noodle joint in a basement just south of the British Museum.
I'm staying at an American chain hotel in the north of London that is a bit older, and slightly run down. It's walking distance to the client's shop, at least. But I have no net! Feels weird to pay for access. Luckily, I noticed an
Easy Internet Cafe right near the Tottenham tube stop. The bright orange is hard to miss. These places are getting familiar In the last six months or so, I've used one in Amsterdam, conveniently located within about a hundred steps from the train station and right next to the Sex Workers Museum (I think that's what it's called), and then at the place they have just off Times Square. They are becoming almost as ubiquitous a sight in big cities as the Golden Arches or KFC.
So, brief set of meetings tomorrow, and then back home. What is with the executive face-to-face meeting? I've been working pretty closely with a liaison for the last couple of weeks on a project, and we've done fine without ever being in the same room. What is the deal with having to put on the dog-and-pony act for the muckety-mucks in person? Whatever: I think I have a nice presentation ready.
Just a quick culinary note. A posting by Michael
here reminds me of a favorite meal that is very difficult to find in my current city: croc. I had a friend who used to make crocodile steaks with an amazing white wine sauce. I do have the recipe filed away somewhere. It's not too difficult to make, if I recall correctly. Finding croc meat would be the only hard part, but isn't that what the Internet is for?
Strangely enough, I already knew one place to find it, but had forgotten: Seattle's
Exotic Meats. I love that they are selling
wagyu for about $30 a pound and a local restaurant had it last week for nearly that much an ounce. Since some places let you bring your own wine in and charge you a storage and "corkage" fee, I wonder if they would let you do the same with a cut of meat...
People complain about the postmodernists just playing games with words, but when academics from b-schools and other "practical" fields play with the whole data/information/knowledge/wisdom thing it just gets tiring quickly. Take, for example this article from the
Journal of Evolutionary Economics: "Data, information and knowledge: have we got it right?" (It's
here in Adobe Acrobat format.)
OK, I didn't spend as much time as I should reading it, but it seems to be suggesting that Shannon got it right. Is this news these days? Given the introduction, I thought they would really be getting somewhere. I've always liked to think about information through the lense of crypto. If you need a kick in the head, all you have to think about is this: the most information is stored in a message that most closely approximates random noise. Sounds like a zen koan or something. When you think through it, it makes perfect sense. Anything short of noise and you have redundancies, and redundancies aren't information.
But then, if noise is information, then how do we make sense of it. That, of course is knowledge. I mean, knowledge is information over time. You can only make sense of this noise if you have "context" and context only comes over time. That is, at some point you get a key that unlocks this noise.
Here's the trick, knowledge requires redundancy. You need to be able to query someone and get a range of responses before you know your code is right. So knowledge is the process of accumulating redundancy through interactive communication.
Is that really so hard to understand. Heck, I could do it with math, but I don't do math real well. I know people who do, but I don't talk to them about things like this, because they whip out their dry erase markers (you know who you are!) and start writing on any nearby glass surfaces. And then I get bored.
Maybe the difference is that when I get bored, I don't sit down and write an article.
Well, here it is. I've been following weblogs of various kinds for years because of my work. In fact, I would venture to guess that I have one of the longer reading-to-writing ratios among bloggers. The reasons for not keeping a blog have been easy.
I am a freelance purveyor of difficult to locate and valuable information. I know that is not exactly precise. One of the things I will need to do is work out how vague I must remain in terms of the kind of work I do. I don't break laws unless I really have to, and I try to remain ethical in the jobs I take, though once I agree to a job, I feel obligated to do almost whatever it takes to maintain my obligation to my client. I would say that I am a "troubleshooter" or maybe simply a "process consultant" (I've used both of these titles in the past.) But basically my job is to provide a client with the means to make a decision, and sometimes to help coordinate the solution.
Anyway, since my work involves providing an informational advantage to clients, a public blog doesn't mesh well with that. I don't advertise: my clients come to me because of a very strong reputation within various circles. I do have business cards, but that's about it. Those who hire me would generally (although there are exceptions) rather others did not know that they had. Perhaps that's the best description of my work: I am the ace in a client's sleeve.
There is some irony in the blog that has changed my mind:
Belle de Jour, written by someone who has a job that sometimes feels very much like my own, though sex is never part of my transaction with a client (even if in some very specific cases, I wouldn't have minded if it was ;). Along with a recent post on anonymous blogs by
Kaye Trammel--and the knowledge that if
anyone should be able to remain anonymous, it is me--I've decided to make the plunge.
Of course, I will have to be a bit deceptive in the specific information I give, and names and places (among other facts) might be changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent. But at the same time, I hope I can provide information that will be helpful for those who can't afford to hire me. The best customer is one who knows exactly what they are getting into, and there is nothing worse than wasting your time with a client who thinks they need you, but who could just hire better people internally, or become better informed themselves. That's not to say I
won't help them, but it's generally not my favorite kind of work. Usually, it means recruiting someone for them that can do the job for less than my hefty fee.
I will also probably use this as a place to spout some of my political and social commentary. It's not good to do this when you are working, so this can be a bit of an outlet for me, perhaps.
Finally, I've resisted blogging because the last thing I need is another thing to take up my time. I'm off to jujistu practice. I'm going to have to limit my posts to a few a week, and keep them short, if I'm going to be able to keep this up. Wish me luck!
