I’ve been slowly finishing the 15 hours of Ken Burns’ “The War” on PBS. Reviewers have described it as elegiac, which seems right in style and substance. Among the many arresting images, I found the one above from the National Archives particularly striking. The photo is of of a soldier inside a bombed out Catholic church in Acerno, Italy during September of 1943.

How well the narrative in “The War” works rests on those they interviewed. To the show’s benefit there are several powerful storytellers including Sam Hynes, Paul Fussell, and Sen. Daniel Inouye. But perhaps the most haunting words come from Eugene Sledge who died in 2001 (although he was interviewed earlier by Studs Terkel). A passage from his book With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is read by Josh Lucas (and played at 16:30 in this interview):

“It was the darkest night I ever saw. The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in. I had the sentation of being in a great black hole and reaching out to touch the sides of the gunpit to orient myself.

Slowly, the reality of it all formed in my mind. We were expendable. It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness.”

Sledge’s book will be half of the source material for the upcoming “companion piece” to the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers entitled The Pacific.

The Boston Globe has an article covering Startup Weekend which took place last week at Axon Labs in Newton. During the 50-some hours Startup Weekend Boston built the first version of deskhappy.com, a service to remind desk jockeys to stretch and provide some healthy yoga-like instruction. This was the latest stop on the international circuit of Startup Weekends.

I only attended for Friday & Saturday, so my perspective is limited on the full experience. I went in viewing it as more of an experiment than a way to start a business. Perhaps that isn’t the right spirit, but I was curious and always like hacking on things. Friday night was a mix of icebreaking and chosing an idea to work on. There was around 50 people, and a much more diverse group than at typical Boston tech events — specifically, more women and non-hackers than usual. Also, a bunch of participants were from Boulder where the organizer Andrew is from. (Thankfully, it was before the Sox vs. Rockies World Series and there were no hostilities.) There were a lot of ideas put on the whiteboard and discussed until Deskhappy (then known as “laptop yoga”) won by a Florida-slim margin. (The runner-up was for a “mobile scavenger hunt”, an idea my friend and I had kicked around to create a location-based game that takes advantage of the fact that everyone has a mobile phone with SMS and a camera. No idea if there is a business model for it, but would be fun to build.)

Saturday felt like a microcosm of a typical development process. Even with an office full of smart people (and I was definitely impressed) it doesn’t simplify reaching a shared vision for what to build and how it should work. In fact, starting with that many people full of ideas might make it more difficult to nail it down. And part of the challenge is determining roles and patterns of effective communication within a group that just met.

By the end of Sunday, the team launched deskhappy. While it is still at an early stage, my congrats to those who hung in there and worked hard to make it live. Overall, I thought it was an interesting experiment designed around a very ambitious goal. Gwen Bell, who has attended several Startup Weekends, wrote a thoughtful post on what could make the experience better that elicited several good responses.

On the heels of the “hot news” that there will be an iPhone SDK in 2008, I feel compelled to put forth my requests for the next software update. If Apple fixes these, I swear I’ll even buy a few ring tones.

I bought an iPhone after the the $200 price cut — the Apple evil geniuses found my price point, after I swore I would wait for the 2nd generation. Prior to that, I’d been quite happy with a Motorola PEBL and wished Motorola made a true successor to their “less phone” PEBL. Alas, they didn’t, so now I have an iPhone and it is the best phone I’ve owned. Still, there are a few rough edges and blogs are where the lazy go to complain:

• Email - Gmail on the iPhone is very broken. Steve Jobs should be making an engineer cry over the user experience trying use a gmail account on the iPhone. Gmail doesn’t do IMAP (see update below), the iPhone doesn’t support J2ME and I’m left using the (recently improved) browser-based mobile Gmail while missing the Gmail mobile app.
• Calendar - The built-in calendar app just sits there taunting me, refusing to use its network connection and consume my Google Calendar iCal feed. Once again, Safari plus a good web UI to the (partial) rescue.
• SMS - I have 8GB of storage but I can’t save a draft of an SMS? Can’t I pa-leez save it, I swear I’ll only use a few kilobytes! And while they are fixing that, how about allowing sending an SMS to multiple people at one time. (Yeah, it might complicate threaded SMS conversations. I’ll deal with it.) For extra credit, they could lift one of the few features I found handy in the Motorola software, a list of insertable quick phrases like “I’ll be there in 10 minutes” or “I accidently killed your cat while you were away, but don’t worry I’ve replaced it with a nearly identical one.” No matter how effortless the typing (and it is pretty smooth), avoiding typing is a good thing.
• Bluetooth - If connected to a bluetooth headset and a call is answered using the phone’s controls, the default audio source switches to the iPhone, not the headset. It answers with the bluetooth if you answer the call by pushing the button on the headset, Lobot-style. I can see why they did this, but I’ve almost died a couple times switching audio sources while driving, and wish it would default to the bluetooth unless I change it.
• Destructibility - My greatest fear is that one day the phone will slip from my hand and shatter like an ice crystal into a thousand tiny shards. Or just crack like Kevin Rose’s did (although I prefer my cinematic, slow-motion imagination-version better, complete with exaggerated “Noooooo!!”) Maybe the good folks at Apple can devise a low-intensity force field to be engaged when the accelerometer detects free fall? Or maybe that is how the evil geniuses in Cupertino get me to buy a 2nd-gen iPhone?

10/24/07 Update: I (and many others) complain, Google listens! They just unveiled IMAP for Gmail and it is a big improvement for using from the iPhone. Tags map to folders, and there are special folders to correspond to “Starred” and “All Mail” folders. And with IMAP the local changes are synched back to Gmail servers.

I saw this humorous piece (via VW) about what if Google had to had to design their UI for Google, changing their clean interface into a busy, link-covered, SEO-seeking eyesore. It reminded me how I haven’t visited google.com in forever, preferring the Firefox built-in Google search. I’ve always been an about:blank homepage sorta guy and it can’t be more spartan than this — it is just a box:

The killer feature is the Google Suggest automatic suggestions, both from my search history and what others have searched for. After using it for a while, it makes every other search box seem fatally limited. Combined with the Google search features like on-the-fly spell checking and “define:” word definitions and it is my command line for the web.

The surprising benefit is how often I repeat a search from before, although it appears that perhaps 40% of all searches are repeats. Rather than remembering a URL or other snippet, it is simpler to store breadcrumbs in my search history (despite some people’s privacy concerns). Ctrl-K plus Google’s Experimental search results that are keyboard navigable is great for making the internet feel as though it exists to answer your every question. Like the classic Steven Wright joke, “I have the world’s largest sea shell collection. Maybe you’ve seen it. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world.”

We went on a short, Fall trip to Ipswich on the north shore of Massachusetts (photos). The two things I learned:

• There is a lot to explore in my own backyard, so to speak. When I’m in another city, I’m always looking to do something new, yet when I’m home I’m rarely in “tourist mode”. People travel here to see things I could anytime, but often don’t. For example, cider donuts — I should eat many more of them.
• I need to better learn how to shoot scenes with shadows and highlights — I blew out a lot of skies in photos I took. Next time I will turn on the histogram display when reviewing shots, which will even flash any overexposed regions.