Blogging from me (Ken) will be light this week. So I’ll just offer a few quick notes. I’m apologetic.

It’s nice to know that I’m allowed to write about politics if I want. Of course, I’m also allowed to have a root canal without anesthetics.

Bobby Crosby has been very solid on defense, but shaky at the plate. I had expected the opposite. He seems patient early in the count, but if you get two strikes on him, he swings at anything. Kinda reminds me of a young Matt Williams. If Crosby can have a career resembling Williams’, you’ll have some happy fans of the Athletics.

Et maintenant: I have seen Khalil Greene. Wow. He looks spiffy both in the field and at the plate. Suddenly, Rey Ordonez’s character is a lot more sympathetic.

This architectural review of Petco Park is good. I especially like the phrase, “The quality that makes SBC Park so lastingly seductive is that its virtues are born of necessity. [snip] But at Petco Park, and at many of the other 15 major-league ball fields that have opened since 1991, quirks were designed by committee.” Exactly. There’s a difference between real beauty and cosmetics.

Every personality test I take says I’m an architectural type: I am driven to understand and design systems. I love to see a simple system of ideas result in complex functionality. I get jazzed about the simple idea of a logic gate making computers possible. I’m fascinated that the difference between two kinds of human memory can result in aesthetics.

So this explanation of Google’s architecture really excites me. Oh, the possibilities! But I find that my enthusiasm for an architectural vision is usually hard to share. People don’t get it until they can see and touch the final output. I always end up feeling like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy. Here’s my great idea:

For kids…see? And I think I’m brilliant, and everyone else looks at me like I’m pathetic.

I don’t share Jason Kottke’s enthusiasm that this architecture will make Google the most important company in the world in 5-8 years. I once helped found for a company that was a calculated bet on the Netscape/Java web architecture. I thought that one of two things would happen: (a) Microsoft would change, or (b) we’d be on the winning side. Wrong, bozo. Microsoft found a third path: (c) use your monopoly power to crush the competition. When Microsoft is an obstacle, I learned the hard way not to be optimistically prophetic.

That’s all the time I have, so now I’ll stop waxing poetic.