Movies and Readings: Finally got a chance to see "October Sky". It was an excellent film. It made me a bit nostalgic about my own early ambitions to become part of the space program. John F. Kennedy's speech about landing a man on the moon had a very big impact on many of us young people at the time and, with the premiere of "Star Trek" in 1967, many young men and at least a few of us young women dreamed of a career in space. Actually, one woman just a little younger than me, Sally Ride, made that dream a reality. At least I did make it into cyberspace and I try to do my part for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the SETI-at-home project. I have the SETI program set up as my screen saver and my machine analyzes the signals from radio telescopes looking for a recurring artificial signal pattern whenever the processor is not busy with other tasks. Looking at the readout makes you feel a little like Jodie Foster's character in "Contact."

Also saw a very touching program called "A Conversation with Gregory Peck". I enjoyed his movies "Guns of Navarone", "Captain Horatio Hornblower", and particularly "The Boys From Brazil" (Peck makes a quintessential villain playing Dr. Josef Mengele who has cloned 94 Adolf Hitlers) although I favored the work of his contemporary colleague, Charlton Heston, a little more - mostly because Heston appeared in more science and historical fiction epics (my favorite genres) than Peck did. Both are exceptional actors. The reason I was particularly moved by this program was its candid look at the man himself. During the filming of the program, his daughter gave birth to a grandson and Mr. Peck was so openly thankful for a healthy grandson and the safe passage of his daughter through the ordeal. He was so overcome with these feelings that he could hardly speak and the love he has for his daughter was so quietly obvious. Although he no longer strides with the strength of Horatio Hornblower, his commanding voice is still clear and articulate.

Technology: My investigation of the Flyswat program continues. Some web designers on the Adobe GoLive discussion group expressed serious concerns that a program like Flyswat could redirect customers from a small e-commerce site by providing links to competing vendors. For example, a small antique dealer would use words to describe their products like "Queen Anne" or "Colonial" which may trigger a "flycon" that would include a list of related links including links to other vendors. So, I emailed Flyswat and asked how sites were selected for indexing by their program and was told they use a ranking service called Media Metrix. I explored this service and learned that it is sort of like the Nielsen ratings. It ranks sites based on the browsing habits of 40,000 selected web surfers supposedly chosen because they represent a typical population of internet users. I'm afraid I never had much use for the Nielsen ratings. Maybe I just don't fit the "average" demographic. I personally never watch mindless sitcoms which always seemed to be at the top of Nielsen's ratings list. I also wonder just how "typical" the ratings are when they measure network viewers but many satellite subscribers (like me) hardly ever watch network offerings. I wonder if Nielsen has taken that into account as the number of satellite system subscribers has skyrocketed? Anyway, I suggested to Flyswat that it would be more equitable to smaller e-commerce sites if they added a feature that let web designers turn off certain categories of reference links (like vendors). They replied that they were very much aware of the impact to smaller sites and were adding the capability for sites to add themselves to the Flyswat index.