My father, Baruch Bricklin, died peacefully a little after midnight, early the morning of March 2nd, 2010. My mother and I were by his side, our arms holding him as he took his last breaths.

The funeral was the following day, March 3rd. His three children, and one of his six grandchildren, spoke, as well as the nursing home's cantor/chaplain Hali Diecidue who knew him well from his seven-year stay there. In addition, both Hali and Rabbi Beth Naditch read from the psalms and poetry, and made very meaningful and comforting remarks.

Early in the service Beth led us in the singing of the 23rd Psalm in Hebrew, and we could feel the full participation of most of those assembled. I sang the best I could through tears and sobs.

My prepared remarks, as well as those of my sister, and a letter from a childhood friend of mine who knew my father well, are on the "Prepared Remarks at the Funeral of Baruch Bricklin" page.

Near the end of what I said, a cell phone started ringing in the pocket of one of my close friends in the front row of seats. As it got louder and he fumbled to take it out of his pocket and silence it, I felt that I should do something since it was getting distracting and I was sure people were losing concentration on what I was saying.

Rather than just stop and wait, I said something about how this should remind everybody else to make sure that they had turned theirs off.

I felt that it would be disrespectful to my father, lying there in the coffin just a few feet to my right, to have people remember his funeral for being one disturbed by a cell phone. That was too negative a feeling for such a positive, optimistic, and empathetic person. I decided to say a little more, drawing on material I used in talks previously.

I said something like: "It's OK. . . A cell phone is a very important thing to most people. It represents a connection to their friends and loved ones." Then, seeing him trying to put his cell phone into his shirt pocket, I added: ". . . and we keep them next to our heart."

This clearly moved some people. Embarrassed that I appeared to come up with the "cell phone as emotional object" idea out of the blue, I said something about "That's from my book" and then added: "One of my friends just wrote to me how a story in my book that involved her and a cell phone made her happy because it made a connection between my Dad and her."

I then finished reading what I wrote.

What the others said was much less eventful, but very moving. I think by the end you got a pretty good idea of what my father was like, both before and after the accident that impaired him, and how loved and respected he was.

Following a request I had made of her previously, Beth then led the singing of the first verse of another song, Shir Ha'Emek. (I wrote about this song -- and cell phones -- in late 2002.) My father had sung that to my sister and me as a lullaby, and it reminded us of him, and I felt that it was a fitting way for us all to help him rest in peace. We always called it by its first words, "Ba'ah m'nuchah la-yahgayah" -- "Rest has come to the weary." Again, many others in attendance sang along.

After singing the traditional prayer for a Jewish funeral, El Malei Rachamim (God, full of mercy), we left the funeral chapel, with grandchildren, nieces, and a friend as pallbearers guiding him to his final resting place a few miles away.

We returned home to start the seven-day shiva mourning period.

In the first afternoon, my mother, brother and sister, and various other family members, including some of my father's grandchildren, watched a tribute video that my sister had produced and shown at my father's 60th birthday celebration. Watching him in snippets that were included in the video, as well as hearing about all he did in those first 60 years, helped bring back the image of the vital man he was before he was so severely injured 19 years ago. No longer was the image in my mind of him in a wheelchair, barely able to say a word or two, as he was during the last few years. That video, and others that we've watched together since, are treasures that are helping bring the "old Dad" back, and are letting his grandchildren rekindle the memories of how much he loved them and how well he played with them, and them with him. Instead of just an image of him dozing off in a wheelchair, they see themselves riding on his back as they played and he sang. Old videos are indeed a blessing.

Sadly, we also listened to the exuberant hopes that others, now long gone, had for him and his future.

As my father lay in bed during his last few days, we remarked how peaceful and well he looked despite not being on any medications of note for most of that period and having gone through so many rough years (and being 84 years old). The nurses and attendants at the nursing home tended to him quite well, turning his body periodically to keep him comfortable, and keeping his skin fresh with lotion and powder, shaving his beard, and combing his hair. His skin had always been very youthful looking. My mother and I remarked, even at the time of his death, how much he looked like his younger self in our photos and videos. That, thankfully, made those old images of him even easier for us and the grandchildren to associate with him as the same person.

At one point during the seven-day period, I was singing parts of the 23rd Psalm to myself. Suddenly, as I got to "Dishanta b'shehmen rohshee", "He anoints my head with oil", I saw in my mind the image of my Dad a few days before he died, soon after the attendants had just put lotion on him. His face was, for a while, very greasy, like with petroleum jelly. At the time it looked a little strange, but I now realized that it was part of the normal caring for someone who couldn't care for themselves. So this could be one of the things I was singing about: Those lines in the Psalm were about being taken special care of, being provided rest, food, drink, and oil on one's head. The Saturday night before my father died, my sister and I had sat with him and my mother in his nursing home room and read the entire Book of Esther to them (in Hebrew, with the proper tunes, as he would have liked). In that story, in Chapter 2, we read about how the young women about to approach the king spent six months with oil treatments. Having someone else oil your skin was part of being treated as a special person. This was a nice image of my father's final days, as a transition to that traditional psalm destined to be sung.

During the evening prayers after the funeral, my mother, sister, brother, and I recited the traditional Mourner's Kaddish prayer. To my surprise, as I recited it, I realized that it felt very good to do this. I had lost so much of my father in that tragic moment in 1990 without getting to say goodbye. When he recovered somewhat, we celebrated what we had. It felt wrong to mourn too much that which we lost, as if it was an insult to who he still was. With each succeeding drop in ability, brought on suddenly by mini-strokes or who knows what else, we lost another piece of him. Another sadness, but with no religious ritual to mark it. Something of himself remained, though, always true to his original self. Now, with the thump of the dirt we shoveled onto his grave that afternoon, he was finally all gone. I could finally honor his memory, a proud memory of all that he had been those 84 years, by saying Kaddish in public.

Rest in peace, Dad. May your memory be a blessing.

Some of you who read my blog know my father, Baruch Bricklin. Others may have learned about him from posts I wrote on his 75th and 80th birthdays -- "Happy Birthday Dad!" and "Happy 80th Dad!" -- and I'd love people to read what I wrote in them.

Some of you may know him through his work as a printer in Philadelphia for many years, including one of the documents for which he helped me develop the typography and then oversaw the printing: The original VisiCalc reference card. He also did the complex (from a printing viewpoint) TK!Solver manual. Many people have told me that the VisiCalc reference card was how they learned VisiCalc, since it ran in memory with less than 48K and therefore had no help system (and many people like to dive into programs without reading the manual).

Much of what I am is a direct result of my father, something that makes me very happy. He is a model I strive to live up to. He has been an inspiration to many people who have known him over the years. I dedicated my book to my mother and him, and he appears in it multiple times. I love him very much.

My father was in a very bad car accident 19 years ago (another car spun out of control, crossed the median, and struck his minivan head-on), and sustained a severe brain injury. After 10 weeks in a coma, he regained consciousness, but was much impaired, and has progressively deteriorated ever since. He lived with my mother for many years, and then, when he couldn't get out of bed by himself, moved to a nursing home, where he has spent the last 7 years after my mother and he moved up to the Boston area.

He is now in the very final stages of that journey. I want to make people who care about him aware of the situation, and this blog post is part of doing that.

The other posts have some pictures of him at various stages in his life. Here is one I frame-captured from a video of him at the beginning of his 60th birthday weekend 24 years ago. The weekend was full of surprises as people who loved him attended and celebrated. His four sisters came in from across the country and around the world. Here he is with them and my mother seconds after they burst into the room:

[Photo in blog post]

It's a picture that captures a very, very happy, loving moment in his life and it comes from a video that shows how animated and appreciative he was as a person. I write this sitting next to him as he lies in his bed, resting comfortably, not having moved much nor eaten in days. It's comforting to remember those happy times he experienced.

I don't plan to post more for a while as we go through this transition.

Tonight was another of the wonderful Vilna Shul Speakers Series, hosted by Doug Levin. This one was "Fireside Chat with Scott Kirsner and panel on Travel and Search". It included Scott, Jeremy Wertheimer, CEO and Co-Founder of ITA Software, Mark Watkins, CEO and co-founder of Goby, and Dena Yahya, TripAdvisor Director of Revenue and Traffic Management. Unfortunately, I didn't record it for podcast and spent the time listening rather than tweeting or anything. It was pretty good. [Update: Scott posted a short report and a recording he did with his iPhone.]

I did take a few notes (using my new Note Taker iPhone app for the iPhone, of course). Dena of TripAdvisor had an interesting observation of the value of Facebook and iPhone apps to them: For engagement and for content, like reviews. I like that idea: You may use a full-screen browser for searching for hotels and vacation resorts, but you use an iPhone or social system to comment on it when you're there. Jeremy stated that anything you do repeatedly (like organize results of a search) can be taught to a computer though you may need millions of dollars. (His company does that and has that.) Mark reminded us of the acronym in the travel industry he hopes to help avoid: SNAD -- Significantly Not As Described.

This was the maiden voyage for my new camera. Here are some photos, with (from the left) Jeremy, Scott, Dena, and Mark:

[Photos in the original post on Dan Bricklin's log]

For a few years, in the "glory days" of my photo blogging, I used a Sony DSC-F717 camera. That camera had a very fast (f2.0-2.4), relatively long (5X) lens and 800 ASA sensitivity which let me do close-ups of people at events, even in low light. It also had a tiltable LCD display, so I could shoot with it on my lap or elsewhere without having the obvious "I'm pointing a camera at your face now" look. When I switched to a smaller pocket camera a few years ago I missed the good low-light close-ups and swivel back.

I thought of getting a good DSLR with a nice fast lens, but they are very expensive (for the really nice lens) and very big. Given that I want to carry lots of things on with me when I fly, and other reasons, that won't work for me. I finally found something that I think meets my needs and bought it last week. It's the somewhat bigger version of the pocket camera David Pogue liked so much in a recent NYTimes review. Both the small Canon S90 and larger Canon G11 use a generous (in the small camera world) sensor to increase the low-light sensitivity. The G11 has a flip-out screen and a 5x zoom, vs. the fixed screen, 3.7x zoom of the S90, and, at maximum zoom, the G11 has a faster lens. DPReview just posted a review today and describes it as "highly recommended" and that its "strengths are its balance between size, flexibility and image quality." It has easy to use dials and dedicated buttons for many of the settings I use.

Tonight I got to use it at an industry event. This was a good test. The lighting was pretty dark and located in a challenging place: right behind the speakers. I sat in the second row and shot looking down at the flipped-out and turned-up screen. You can see the cropped but otherwise unmodified wide angle and the zoomed photos, with lights right behind. I ran it on automatic with the "low light" setting and default exposure calculation. To do that you just turn a knob one click. That's it. You can compare these photos to a similar event with my old camera from last February. I'm pretty pleased. This will do quite well for blogging.

I've spent the last several years working in the web and Ajax world, with most of my programming first in Perl and then later in JavaScript. The browser has been my target. With the release of SocialCalc I feel pretty comfortable that I have a good understanding of those computing mediums. I've been involved in the Open Source world, and also in the sell-direct-to-enterprise world. There are other new areas, though, that I'd like to learn about, too. I'm continuing to work on SocialCalc, but it's doesn't need me full-time.

Over the last couple of months I've been working on learning a different medium and a different business environment. In mid-September I purchased a shiny new 24" Apple iMac and an iPhone 3GS. I signed up for the Apple iPhone Developer Program. I bought some books and started doing the tutorials, step by step. I came up with the idea for an app I needed and built a prototype, then plunged in and started creating a full app that would be good for others, too.

A few days before Thanksgiving I submitted my completed app for inclusion in the App Store. It's now just been approved and you can try it. 30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware.

What is it? People who know my history won't be surprised: It's for taking notes by writing on the screen with your finger. An "ink" app. Here's a screen shot:

[Photo of Dan Bricklin's Note Taker in use in the original blog post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

I found the iPhone keyboard (and even physical keyboards on other phones) too cumbersome in many cases for quickly jotting down telephone numbers, addresses, and lists -- especially when someone else is dictating them to me or when it's too limiting being restricted to single-font characters on a keyboard word-wrapped as paragraphs. I hate having to say "wait...wait -- what was that again?" as I try to correct errors with a keyboard. Looking carefully at a touch keyboard and the data entry line takes up too much of my attention while trying to interact with someone else.

Other people are more used to watching you take written notes. Written notes have many nice properties: You can use layout and special (to you) lines, marks, and symbols to give extra meaning. Minor errors made by movement mistakes are less likely to result in data loss or incorrect data -- pressing a "6" instead of a "5" on a keyboard gives you a not-obviously wrong phone number, but writing an "S" instead of a "5" in a phone number is less of a problem.

The best way to learn about my app is to use it. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can install the Lite version for free. The "full" version ($1.99 in the USA) adds some very useful features. (It eliminates the 4 page limit, and gives you a nice way to transcribe what you wrote at a later time using the on-screen keyboard and then create address book entries -- a key request from early testers.) Both versions can email a JPEG image of the page. (Emailing the image is very useful, and adds that needed viral aspect -- the free version includes a watermark with attribution.) Just search on the iTunes App Store for "Dan Bricklin". The product page on the Software Garden web site is "Dan Bricklin's Note Taker App".

I had to figure out how to deal with some major issues when I decided to create this app. The screen is very small, and the input from finger motion is too coarse to write much text in the small space of the touch screen. I decided to have you write in large letters and have my app shrink what you write into smaller ink on the page. I also had to come up with a simple way to let you write continuously yet add new ink automatically to the right of old. The editing controls I provide are pretty simple, and if you experiment with them you should be able to figure out what they do. However, with an iPhone app, many people aren't willing to spend the time to experiment. If it doesn't work the way they expect at once, they abandon the app. After all, it was either free or only a couple of dollars and they have other things to try. I decided to build a "Try It" mode into the product, so that when you first use it you get led quickly through simple versions of the interface and are introduced to the major features without throwing the whole interface at you at once. After lots of user testing I think that this mode should make it more likely that people will figure things out.

For those of you without an iPhone or iPod touch (or that hate using tutorials), you can watch a YouTube video I made that shows the product in action.

An Android version is in the works, but it's not ready yet.

So, I've learned a lot of new stuff. After having so much fun with JavaScript I had to go back to the old days of programming in verbose C-derived languages and no garbage collection (Apple's Objective-C). I had to learn a whole new API (I've never programmed the Mac except some simple HyperCard decades ago and some Perl). I've had to learn the iPhone User Interface conventions. I've also had to become quite acquainted with the App Store and the world of one and two dollar software packages in (hopefully) high volume. I've benefited a lot from the advice of others available on lots of web sites, and Apple's voluminous documentation.

When I do my consulting and providing analysis here on the web, I like to have as much hands-on experience as possible. Note Taker is giving me the opportunity to extend my experience into this new and very important world. In the process, I hope I'm also bringing a truly useful app to market, too.

According to my notebook from 1979, 30 years ago today Dan Fylstra, head of Personal Software, our Bay Area publisher, told me that he had the first production VisiCalc packages in hand. I received mine the next day (Saturday delivery). So today, for argument's sake, is the 30th anniversary of the shipment of VisiCalc 1.0. (Well, actually, we called it version 1.37, but it was the first packaged version produced and sold in volume.)

[Photos in the original blog post on Dan Bricklin's Log with the following captions: Dan's notebook entry from 1979; The package and contents: 5 1/4" diskette, reference card, manual, registration card; Apple II with VisiCalc]

Spreadsheets have aged well over those 3 decades. While computers have gotten thousands of times more powerful, and spreadsheets have zillions of additional capabilities, the same basic metaphor of a free-form grid of cells for displaying text and numbers, each backed by formulas and display attributes, along with a simple and natural interface for entering, modifying, and displaying that data, has endured. To me, to have helped bring such a useful and long-lasting tool to the world is very gratifying.

The concept of spreadsheets was not new in 1979. Text and numbers arranged in columns and rows go back a long time. (The 10 Commandments are traditionally shown as two columns of five entries each, hundred-year-old books present data in spreadsheets as a matter of course, and many timesharing programs in the 1970s had "spread sheet" output.) VisiCalc is known, though, as the first of a particular popular set of features implemented on a personal computer. There is a direct line starting with VisiCalc going all the way to today's dominant spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel. (Lotus 1-2-3 could read VisiCalc files and execute them directly. Excel can read 1-2-3 files.)

My original vision (in 1978) was of a handheld calculator that worked as a mouse with a heads-up display to give you a virtual image that made things look as big as the blackboards I sat in front of every day at Harvard Business School. That type of hardware was beyond what I could code for in those days. The spreadsheet concept, though, moved well onto the much less capable popular personal systems of the day -- character-based, stand-alone personal computers like the Apple II and TRS-80.

As personal computing advanced, spreadsheets followed along. The IBM PC was much more powerful with much more memory and better displays. Lotus 1-2-3 (the leader among many) took the spreadsheet metaphor further into that world, taking advantage of the memory and displays. Spreadsheets did quite well in that world.

With the advent of personal computer GUI systems, spreadsheets adapted well, too. Microsoft Excel emerged dominant, keeping the same grid metaphor, but taking advantage of bitmapped displays and laser printers and the increasing amounts of local storage, and wrapping it in a more accessible mouse and keyboard UI. With GUI systems you expect great control of the visual look of the output, and spreadsheets benefited from the addition of customizable cell borders, fonts, and the even more powerful computers and access to database data.

In an early promotional video about Excel for Windows, Microsoft said "Every major advance in hardware has been legitimized by a spreadsheet." Of course, it's not just by a spreadsheet, it's also by a word processor, and now accessing email and having something to do browsing with. But it is true that, at least for business, you expect desktop systems to have spreadsheet capabilities.

In the early 1990's, when I worked at Slate Corporation on software for pen-based computers, I was part of the development of a spreadsheet that took advantage of those systems, even allowing you to scribble "ink" notes into cells and to do operations with simple gestures.

Social software has moved people away from working on their own copies of documents in their own personal silos, shuffling them with email and Fedex from person to person. They now can work together on single shared copies, linked together in a web based upon topical and personal connections. You'd expect the spreadsheet metaphor to go there, too, and it is. (Of course, like the word processing capabilities of wikis, which don't come anywhere near the capabilities of a product like Microsoft Word, you'd wouldn't be surprised if social spreadsheets didn't have every Excel bell and whistle.)

I have had to privilege of being one of the participants in that evolution, and for that today is special, too: Socialtext, the enterprise social software pioneer, is releasing SocialCalc as a production product today. (It has been in various stages of beta for some time.) I wrote the main spreadsheet "engine" code and have helped guide the project. I've been working closely with Socialtext developers to bring spreadsheets to their social software system which already has wiki pages, social networking, microblogging, and more.

Again, the spreadsheet takes on some of the characteristics of the platform. In this case, that means being browser-based, having live linking, both for navigation and for getting information into and out of the sheet, and other attributes like revision history, tagging, and a connection to people's identities. Beta-test customers have used it in ways that show its potential for being an important business tool. Enough of the UI and integration is now complete to let people easily take advantage of it. For more information, see "SocialCalc, the Social Spreadsheet, Comes Out of Beta" on the Socialtext web site.

This is a great milestone for me personally. I've been working on SocialCalc, and its predecessor, wikiCalc, for four years now. It's been really gratifying over the last several months to have the code I've been writing become a common component of the One Laptop Per Child's offering around the world as one of my contributions to the Open Source world. (The release of a production version has been happening there, too, including a Spanish translation that has been done and is being integrated.) Now, finally, I can also see my work contributing to the shipment of a robust shared spreadsheet for the enterprise -- the "wiki" of wikiCalc growing into the "social" of SocialCalc and Socialtext.

You'll find more about the early history of VisiCalc in the History section of my web site and in chapter 12 of my book. There are links to many of my other writings about VisiCalc, including an early version you can run on MSDOS and Windows, on my VisiCalc page. You may also like "The paper I wrote for business school class about VisiCalc in 1978" earlier in this blog.

Happy Birthday VisiCalc! Here's to many more!

I just added a new essay to the Writings section of my web site. It discusses a simple framework for looking at how advancing technology will affect different players. It shows how different parts of what seem to be one industry may be affected differently. It was inspired by a walk through Manhattan this summer as a tourist.

Read "Signals and the Ubiquity of New Carriers".

I've traveled to New York City twice in the last couple of weeks, and also did the traveling in Colorado (blogged below) a couple of weeks before that. It's been interesting to see what it's like with the new set of equipment that I carry.

I've been carrying a cell phone since about 1990, and have often traveled with a laptop computer since the mid-1980's when I used the 9-pound Data General/One. Recently I've been carrying a Palm Pre smartphone and an Acer Aspire One netbook. For several months I carried a T-Mobile/Android G1, and I have an iPod Touch and am constantly around people using their iPhones. (My podcast listening is on an iPod nano.)

I love the fact that a netbook pretty much meets all of my needs with respect to email, web surfing, presenting (Powerpoint, photo slides, video, etc.), communicating (Skype, Adobe ConnectNow, etc., with and without video), reading (PDF, rich text), writing, and more. And it does all this with very little weight, fitting in all of the bags, daypacks, etc., I would bring for just my sunglasses and stuff. If it's not overnight, since the battery life has been superb, I don't even bring a power adapter, making it even lighter. My back really thanks those that made that class of machine possible and popular.

Even more of a change has been how I can often just use my phone for everything. If I'm not doing presentation or writing, my phone is usually all I need, even to get a YouTube video or take photos (the Pre's camera is pretty good). Its quick access to email, the web/search, contact info, and maps, has saved me many times when I need to know something. The GPS has helped me not be late when I parked in the wrong place and needed to walk to the right one, and it's helped me navigate when walking to restaurants. I really think twice now about bringing even the netbook.

Yesterday, on this last trip to NYC, I finally think I really felt what's special about the Palm Pre (vs. other smart phones). I was running around town, trying to find a type of place to pick up lunch, contact the place I had a meeting, and do the best navigation between it all. The seamless launching and switching between apps of WebOS is really something. I routinely have a few apps open at once and sometimes need to use them simultaneously. It's great how you just pull the phone out of the holster, slide open the keyboard with one and half hands (which turns it on, too), and type in a name or search query, press Enter, and have a contact ready to call or a Google query answered. Tap on an address and another window (card) has a map showing where it is and where you are. Tap on a card image and you switch from app to app; swipe up and you close one you don't need anymore. It's pretty good for a version 1.0, which bodes well for their future.

I've been looking at the Palm WebOS SDK to see what apps have access to. They still have a ways to go to give you the capabilities I think we'll need to most fully exploit such a device, but then the phone has only been out a few months and the SDK several weeks, so it's early. I hope they move quickly to give us more raw access to the capabilities of the hardware. The iPhone and Android have gotten some pretty cool uses of their systems in some apps thanks to what their SDKs let developers do, and Palm must see this.

I spent yesterday afternoon talking to some of the folks at Six Apart's Manhattan office. Anil Dash had asked me to drop over and we talked about various things and answered questions from some of the staff. Most of it was about history of recent technology and my views on where things were going. I also got to talk with him about my upcoming talk in the evening and he made some useful suggestions of what would be best for that audience.

In the evening I was one of the presentations at the New York Tech Meetup. (You can see the whole thing on their video page.) Anil had helped connect me with Dawn Barber, chair of their board, and a co-founder. She worked it out so that I could show up, talk about my book and other stuff, and even arranged for a bookseller to be there to sell books people could buy (and that I could autograph). Afterwards we went out for dinner with a few people. I got to sit next to founder Scott Heiferman, who also founded Meetup.com and Fotolog.com. (He told me how he had been influenced by some of my early photo blogging here on this site. What a surprise and a great thing to hear!) Nate Westheimer ran the meeting, which included some cool demos from researchers at Columbia and NYU. Anil introduced me and ran the Q&A. The reviews on Twitter of the meeting and my talk seemed quite positive.

Dawn had asked me to show some of my old videos, so I edited together short clips from a few funny ones that I had about spreadsheets. I was able to get my presentation down to about 10 minutes plus the 4 minutes of video, leaving time for Q&A that went on for a while. Given that they usually only allow 5 minutes for a demo and a few more for Q&A, I was happy to get so much time, and worked hard to make the most of it. It was similar to what happened at the Boulder meetup last month (and my presentation was similar, though I added some more slides about what a startup feels like at Anil's suggestion, and I added the video at Dawn's request). This is different than the old days when I'd get 30-45 minutes to talk and take questions, and I'd show 200+ slides of VisiCalc history and more.

Here are some photos:

[Photos appear in the original post in Dan Bricklin's Log with captions: Anil Dash at Six Apart's NYC office; Some of the audience; Showing my slides]

Last weekend I attended a family event in Crested Butte, Colorado. The last (and only other) time I had been there was 10 years ago in September of 1999, when I attended the Digital Storytelling Festival. My task at the festival was to cover it with daily posts to a web site -- something we now call blogging. (My task this time at the family event was to enjoy myself, eat, dance, etc.) The company that I was CTO (and founder) of back then, Trellix, produced a tool that could be used to make such sites, and in my presentation at the festival I was able to both show my web postings so far as well as how our tool worked. In those days digital cameras were relatively uncommon and my use of lots of photos as part of my "instant" narrative was something special on my web site. (I had been inspired by Philip Greenspun's wonderful "Travels with Samantha" web site from 1993, which was created with professionally scanned photos from high-end film cameras.)

The festival was a conference that explored using digital media of all sorts for telling stories and communicating them to others, either online or as an adjunct to a live presentation. While we take a lot of this for granted today, it was quite revolutionary back then. The Blogger system was launched by Pyra just the month before the festival and the term "blog" was probably just a few months old. A lot of the lessons that were covered still apply and are worth learning.

The festival was hosted by the late Dana Atchley. On his NextExit.com web site it says: "Digital Storytelling uses computers to create media-rich stories and the internet to share those stories creating communites of common concern on a global scale. Computers are just one more tool in the pantheon of tools that humankind has used to share stories. This includes the pen, moveable type, photography, film and video -- tools that have allowed us first to record and share our stories, and then to reproduce them to be shared by many. Digital stories are all about making connections."

The dual blog of both my trip and the festival itself was originally posted on the webphotojournals.com web site that I used to promote such use of the web (hopefully using the Trellix Web program) and it linked to many RealSlideshows that I and others created using a product from RealNetworks. These "slideshows" were kind of like early YouTube videos and included sound. Unfortunately, the companies that acquired the assets of Trellix didn't keep up the webphotojournals.com domain (it is now owned by a search advertising company of some sort), and RealNetworks stored our work on a temporary site now gone and I haven't found any backups of those (can someone from RealNetworks find them?). I do, though, have the original Trellix file that created my main festival blog site and I got permission a while back to repost what was on webphotojournals.com on bricklin.com. You can find www.webphotojournals.com as www.bricklin.com/webphotojournals and the festival report at the link www.bricklin.com/webphotojournals/dstory, and also an essay about Dana and digital storytelling.

I found it really interesting to re-read what I wrote back then, reporting on the presentations of others, including very early blogger Justin Hall (Thursday afternoon) and the late author Douglas Adams (Friday morning and in a detailed writeup). The web site uses the framed design with a "map" that was part of the Trellix product to show you the structure of the whole site and help with navigation.

If you are a student of the history of blogging and online usage, my report of what I saw and heard, and how I reacted to it, should be interesting. It is a shame that so many of the links on old sites like this don't work anymore (such as the slide shows and videos, and some other links). Some links, though, do still work, such as to Justin's web site (which goes back to 1994) and Dana Atchley's mother's story about red hair and other links on the "What I learned" page.

See the whole thing: "Digital Storytelling Festival".

Producing this journal of an event and others at the time led me to add a general ongoing journal to my web site a few weeks later in October 1999 and I've been blogging ever since, once in a while producing separate limited-time blogs for special events. (You can find links to some of my other event journals in my album list.)

This trip I spent a much longer time in Colorado. I gave a presentation about my book at the Boulder New Tech Meetup, hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park, did some simple biking around Crested Butte, visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and more. The Crested Butte area is one heck of a wonderful place, and I can see why one of my first cousins settled there.

Here are a few photos:

[Photos in the original blog post on Dan Bricklin's Log with the following captions:]

Boulder New Tech Meetup before I spoke -- with a few copies of my book stacked on the edge of the table

Crested Butte seen from a hill on the side of the town

The Center today where the Festival was held 10 years ago

Dan on the phone in 1999 during a lunch break with the side of the Center in the distance

Dan today (photo taken by Nathan Bilow with Dan's camera)

Rocky Mountain National Park

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

On Friday, June 4, 2009, I was one of the attendees at the Mass Tech Leadership Council's Future of Software and the Internet unConference held over at Sun's campus in Burlington, Mass. I volunteered to lead a session on the topic of "New Modes of Interaction". It was quite successful and led me to write a related essay.

Every once in a while the way we interact with computing power changes. I believe we are about to have some major steps. I wanted to explore what might become the next "common" interaction modes -- something post-GUI, post-cursor / menu / icons. I was inspired by two big announcements in the few days before the conference: Microsoft's Natal and Google's Wave.

Since most of the attendees were not familiar with the announcements, and I felt that they needed to be in order to best serve the discussion, I opened the session by showing two videos as background. I wasn't interested in the specifics of the two products but rather the underlying interaction modes that they brought up and how those may be applied in a more general sense.

We had a great discussion about how things could be changing in the near and further future. Someone even asked me if I could lead a brainstorming session like this at their company.

I've now written an essay that describes and examines some of the implications of the changes I see happening. You can use it as a springboard for more discussion. I'm sure you'll find the videos and links worthwhile.

Read "New Modes of Interaction: Some Implications of Microsoft Natal and Google Wave".

This morning Socialtext is announcing that they are releasing SocialCalc (integrated into their enterprise-level wiki) in a wider beta, basically available for test to all of their paying customers. This release includes many advances since their last, much more limited beta release. It includes: Multi-level multi-sheet rollup (the old one only went one level down and didn't recalc that sheet), a much more polished user interface, faster save and load, better integration of advanced wikitext functionality, and all of the other advances in the latest SocialCalc (such as Ctrl-C/V system clipboard support for quick exchange of data with Excel and other applications). Socialtext developers and I have been working a long time to get to this. (While this uses the same basic spreadsheet engine as the OLPC version, it has lots of special Socialtext-specific UI code and makes use of SocialCalc's intersheet reference capabilities as well as Socialtext's online storage, collaboration, and access control functionality.)

[Screenshot of SocialCalc spreadsheet page in Socialtext in original post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

For me, this is really a major moment. I finally can do the demo I've been wanting to do for years: A complete budget example with a rollup of 50 states into a country total, with each of the 50 states' pages dependent upon other pages with country-wide values (such as price lists and model factors), and each with a link to a wiki discussion page.

[Diagram showing rollup]

You can change a master model factor (such as default growth or default product mix) or a particular state's values (such as sales growth override value) and then load the USA or regional page and see them all recalculated to provide the latest totals. We are showing that demo at the Enterprise 2.0 conference starting later this morning. I've made a 5-minute Camtasia screencast of the demo that you can look at here. For more information from Socialtext, go to their web site, www.socialtext.com.