Placido Elsie Posts

Marcia Imbeau and Barbara Gartin offered numerous tips and strategies that classroom teachers can use to scaffold learning for special needs students. Instructional strategies such as RAFTs, tiered assignments, centers, and cubing can all be adjusted to provide appropriate challenges for students with special needs.The following are some of the elements of a classroom environment that ensures support for the learning needs of students with special needs:Promote acceptance and valuing of diversity in people and thoughts.Provide quiet places (e.g., study carrels, loner seats, reading corners, headphone area).Have well-established daily routines.Use multiple signals and cues to prepare students for changes in activity.Provide student assignments in a variety of ways (e.g., orally, posted on the board, written in assignment workbooks).Use physical proximity and touch to help a student refocus.Prevent difficulties by teaching appropriate behaviors.Unclutter classrooms to allow students easy movement around the room.How many of these elements do you incorporate in your classroom? Do you incorporate other elements to support students with special needs? Join the conversation.
Related ResourcesThe Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners
The Common Sense of Differentiation: Meeting Specific Learner Needs in the Regular Classroom (Video Series)
Instructional Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom (Video Tapes 5-7)
How to Scaffold Instruction for Student Success (Video)

Alan McGee is “winding down” Poptones because nobody was interested (”because he no longer believes in record labels”), he’s told The Independent. (Actually, he told the Independent back on May 11th, but nobody noticed until it was picked up by an Italian radio station today.) Bands nowadays, he’s spotted, don’t really need labels:
The story of how I met The Sessions is simple and, not surprisingly, it was online, through MySpace, after the front man, Taz Allie, messaged me. They caught my attention the first time I saw them and I couldn’t believe that they weren’t doing more, in terms of playing live and promoting themselves.

I started to put them on more and more at my London clubs, Death Disco, The Queen is Dead and Now We’re Off To Rehab. It was through my clubs that I became mates with them and now I DJ with Taz, too. That’s when the labels came knocking, offering them all these record deals.

It wasn’t long before I told them that they could do all these supposedly great things being offered to them themselves. When Taz worked out what he could do with a bank loan, I offered to advise him. I’m not their manager but once I got talking to Taz, he was so genuine and sincere I offered to help as a friend.

You have to respect them for taking out a loan and putting their balls on the line. They deserve every bit of good press they get. They’re all ordinary guys - the drummer is a window cleaner - and I like them because their expectation of the music business is zero. They have been on the go for three or four years, but I think that because they aren’t an obvious band they fell on deaf ears for a while and no one seemed to care. Since they have started playing at my clubs they’re becoming increasingly popular.

In terms of what’s happened with their single, “What Is This Feeling?”, I offered to try to get it into a couple of films in order to pay for it, as synchs are a good way to make money. They then took out the loan, made the video for a grand and went about pressing 500 singles, and it’s barely costing them anything. Following that, Cherrystones came in to remix the track as a favour and the end result is world class.

The Sessions’ version is great, being influenced by The Charlatans, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays (and they remind me of Curtis Mayfield doing Sweet Exorcist in 1974), but how Cherrystones have reworked it with Taz’s song writing is amazing. The media are going to be all over it. So with no major, and some balls, The Sessions are going to show everyone how it’s done.
We know it’s currently the done thing to suggest that getting on film or TV soundtracks is the perfect solution for new bands to flog a few tracks, make a few quid, add a few fans, but is McGee really suggesting that the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack is going to take up all the slack from the Big Four? As it becomes more and more obvious how helpful it can be to get a song playing in the background as actors stare at each other across studio-set operating theatres, won’t there be more and more people trying to get in on the act, forcing down prices and creating a market where a whole new slew of music industry intermediaries are going to pop up. It’s a fair bet that the production teams on films might be less keen to do deals when they’re getting thousands of CDs sent to them; and if there are 500 bands trying to soundtrack the prom for Veronica Mars, why would the TV company want to pay anything?

Indeed, if I ran a top-rated TV show, and kept reading in the paper how the music slots on my show are letting bands build an audience and secure sales, I might start to wonder if, perhaps, I should be auctioning off the slots instead of paying to fill them - especially if I’m already taking dropsy to determine what car the hero drives, or which brand of cola my talent is seen slurping on-screen.

Indeed, if I were NBC, and owned by a company which also owns Universal records, I might wonder how long it will be before my bosses are asking why the music that Abbie has crises to on ER comes from any label other than Universal’s fine roster of musicians.

The soundtrack slot, Alan, is not the way ahead. It’s a small bubble, and one which will burst incredibly soon.

Under pressure from the Utah Supreme Court, which in turn was responding to an anti-polygamy group made up largely of women, Judge Walter Steed, who has three wives and no less than 32 children, has resigned. Steed is a member of one of a number of Mormon sects that rejected the deal by which the mainstream Mormons abandoned polygamy (polygyny, really, because a woman cannot take more than one husband at a time) in exchange for statehood.

Notable is the Utah Supreme Court’s careful distinction between the constitutional questions, which are very much alive, and the issue on which it ruled, a judge’s obligation to follow the law even if he disagrees with it: “In the case of a sitting judge, it is of little or no consequence that the judge may believe a criminal statute is constitutionally defective,” the court said. “A judge ignores the clearly stated clearly stated criminal prohibitions of the law at his or her peril.” “Civil disobedience carries consequences for a judge that may not be applicable to other citizens,” the court said. When judicial officers violate or ignore laws, “the stability of our society is placed at undue risk.”

Judge Steed did not abandon his belief that the practice of polygamy is constitutionally protected: “I am hopeful that the court will eventually consider the issue of polygamy as an aspect of personal privacy, marital rights and religious freedom,” Steed said. “I am proud of my effort to bring the issue before the court and the people of Utah.”

This story is more than a bit of Utahn exoticism. Opponents of gay marriage have long argued that there is no principled basis for saying that gays have a privacy-based right to marry, while sincere polygamists do not. Sen. Rick Santorum was pilloried for making just this point, as Stanley Kurtz points out. If in fact the basis for claim the Constitution prohibits the states from forbidding gays to marry if it allows the same privilege to mixed couples, is the doctrine that the state may not interfere in the liberty interest that consenting adults have in ordering their sexual and marital lives without state restraint, it is hard to see why only gays can benefit from such privacy claims. Such claims are being asserted on behalf of at least three groups: Polygamists, such as the good judge,who based their practice on pre-Admission Mormon doctrine. In many foreign non-Muslim countries, the sharia-based claim to a right to polygamy is now at least on the agenda. The more New Age-y “polyamorists” who advocate not only polygamy, but various forms of group marriage.

Although there is a loud and influential gay community that has promoted gay marriage, perhaps accounting for its prominence as a public issue, there are at least as good constitutional arguments in favor of polygamy. Unilike gay marriage, it furthers a public policy interest in favor of reproduction. Moreover, it is supported by religious texts that are meaningful to the supporters of the practice, unlike gay marriage, which must depend either upon a rejection of the dominant monotheistic traditions, or upon a tortured reading of their texts.

The question of whether any of these practices should be sanctioned as a result of democratic debate and legislation is a different one that whether the fads and fashions of a couple of decades should be enshrined in constitutional law. By starting with a weak theoretical basis (”penumbras” from the Bill of Rights as applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment), the groundwork was laid for the justices to impose the fads of Cambridge and Manhattan’s élites on the country by fiat, and claiming a constitutional mandate for doing so. What follows from this tortured reasoning is a doctrine that contains no principled basis for imposing practices even more repugnant to the values of the majority. The gradual extrapolation from these doctrines, created for the nonce to justify a desired result, will lead us no one knows where. Let us be thankful that no one (yet) has found in the Constitution a basis for giving a rat the same civil rights as a boy as PETA’s famous slogan would seem to urge.

Rageh Omaar, presenter of the Al-Jazeera English program “Witness”, moderated this particular panel and the panelists included Martine Bell (A BBC reporter), Dahr Jamail(independent reporter from within Iraq), Samir Aita (editor of Arabic verison of Le Monde Diplomatique) and Abdul Wahab Al-Badrahan (Editor-elect of the Al-Jazeera Newspaper.

Rageh had begun to put the discussion into context by mentioning that the people in this region don’t only read and watch the news, they live here. Hence, we must not only provide the news of the region but also respect the context and give an understanding of the region and the societies we report from.

Martin Bell considers himself an “unrepentant parachutist” and said that most journalists find themselves reporting in countries different from their own. And with this experience, learn quickly to sympathise with the people in that region and distrusting the government and politicians. He also called for an end to the inauthenticity of journalism where we see certain journalists reporting “from the rooftops and not from among the people”.

Being a reporter for the BBC for decades, he did mention that today’s times are far more dangerous for reporters and journalists than they were in the 1940’s. Security is not guaranteed, Rules of engagement in war are not respected and do not provide any real protection for journalists; Al-Jazeera knows this better than other news organisations (referring to the amount of journalists for Al-Jazeera Killed, captured and jailed since it’s inception). Journalists have two allegiances only, one to their audience and the other to the Truth.

Lack of journalistic independence was tagged as a big problem in the Middle East and the panel did flag this as an obstacle to delivering the Truth and mentioned that for journalists reporting from this region, it would be a very big step, if they make a sustained effort to maintain neutrality.

Samir Aita highlighted two issues facing journalists: (1) Capturing the reality by making sure the geopolitical, sociological, socio-economic ,etc. aspects of the story they are reporting are covered adequately and fairly. (2) Reporting the reality, making sure to maintain objectivity and express it clearly and truthfully. He also said that apart from investigative journalists you also need researchers who “understand the realities and the goings-on on the ground.”

Abdul Wahab Al Badrahan said that parachute journalism is a product of regimes and governments and we see this with the US’s increased involvement in the Middle East. The United States is following the lead of Arab Governments and producing misleading information on the war and leaving out certain truths and facts, an exmaple is that of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay where we report on these places but do not realy know what is going on there. He highlighted the importance of Bloggers here, as they portray the reality of the situations from the ground.

Technorati Tags: Parachute Journalism, Al Jazeera, In-depth Journalism, Journalism, Media Forum, Media, Forum——————————
The Front Line.
The Thin Line Between Entertainment and War.

I’ve really been enjoying the 50th S.F. International Film Festival over the past few days. The filmgoing is fun of course, but at least as much of the fun has been found in meeting up and talking movies with discourse-hungry cinephiles, whether longtime friends I don’t see as often as I should, or with folks I’ve only just met. This evening at the Kabuki the festival publicity department hosted a gathering of bloggers and other web-centric writers, many of whom I’d only ever been introduced before to through their work online. I swapped stories with Cathleen Rountree, exchanged a few words with Kevin Lee, and more, all only a day after finally meeting Lincoln Specter of Bayflicks, a major inspiration for this site. I particularly enjoyed a brief conversation with Tony An because he too had seen Sounds of Sand and, though our reactions to the film were very different, I found I finally had an outlet in which I could respectfully dislodge all my opinions on the film, and get a thoughtful rebuttal to boot. I don’t feel I can really get into too many of the specifics, as the film is at “hold review” status, meaning I’m supposed to wait until it gets a commercial release before I say more than seventy-five words on it. But to put it briefly, I agree with others who have called the film “soulless”, “predictable” and “self-congratulatory”, though I must admit that because of a) its eye-popping landscape photography and b) the cross-cultural issues it brings forth through its very existence as a film shot in Africa by a European, an international film festival is perhaps the ideal environment for it to be seen and discussed in.

Another hold review film is Private Fears In Public Places, which I’d call a mediocre play, exquisitely directed. In other words, a real test to the limits of my auteurist predelections (not that I’m nearly as well-versed in the cinema of Alain Resnais as I’d like to be). My favorite new film seen at the festival so far has got to be the aptly-named Opera Jawa. (And no, it has nothing to do with cloaked scavengers other than the fact that back in the seventies a certain festival honoree took to appropriating names from the world’s cultures for his creature creations, including the word Indonesians use for their most populous island Java.) But this New Crowned Hope film is something I feel I need to sit with for a while before being able to say anything substantial about. It certainly was beautiful on the big Castro Theatre screen.

No, the films I feel I can most usefully talk about at this bleary-eyed stage of festival madness, are the ones I attended in my capacity as a silent film devotee. Well, near-devotee, I suppose. A full-fledged devotee would never have let himself miss Saturday afternoon’s Castro screening of the Iron Mask with Kevin Brownlow in attendance, even if he was scheduled to work and the film was screening with a sound-on-print score instead of a live musical accompaniment. I mean, I’m not the hugest fan of Carl Davis but he is the man the utterly tasteful Brownlow chose for the job of providing the music to the film he restored, and I’m sure the score has merit. Anyway, I wish I could have made it to that screening, which I hear was, of Brownlow’s three festival appearances this weekend in honor of his hugely justified receipt of the Mel Novikoff Award for “enhancing the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema,” the most delightfully anecdote-rich.

You probably already know what a legend in his own time Brownlow is. If he had only made his two so-called “amateur” masterpieces, It Happened Here! and Winstanley, his places in British and World Cinema History would be assured. But he has so generously recorded and popularized under-explored sections of cinema history through his unceasing efforts as a writer, interviewer, preservationist, and documentary filmmaker, that his impact is even more felt on the way we and future generations will be able to regard these histories. For my part, I can credit my borrowing of his “Cinema Europe: the Other Hollywood” miniseries from the local library, as much as anything else I can think of, for my interest in movies blossoming into a full-fledged cinephilia. I haven’t read all of his books or seen all his documentaries yet, but so far I’ve been transfixed by each I’ve encountered. And the idea of seeing his 2000 restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in a cinema, even if due to rights issues it has to be in another country, is one of my greatest cinephile dreams.

Seeing Brownlow speak in person, taking a rapt audience through a program of immaculately-projected, grandly-accompanied (by pianist Judith Rosenberg) short films and excerpts, at the Pacific Film Archive yesterday evening might have been another, had I the imagination to dream it. Some of the films and scenes he showed were great. Others were not terribly special beyond their status as relative rarities. But all were provided with fascinating context by Brownlow. Before showing the 1913 short Suspense, directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, he alerted us to take note of an early use of a three-way split-screen effect to acknowledge a telephone conversation and its subject (the splitting diagonals elegantly taking their angle from a lampshade in the center of the frame), but also ruled out the possibility of it being the earliest such use, as he’d seen an earlier Danish film employ a similar effect. He showed a film made in Frisco Bay’s backyard, Broncho Billy’s Adventure, filmed by the Essanay in a rather empty-looking San Rafael before the studio settled in at Niles in the East Bay. He showed a film promoting kit homes, made by the Ford Motor Company, that he suspected was a likely influence on Buster Keaton’s One Week, and then he showed both complete reels of Keaton’s comedy tour-de-force. Believe it or not, I had never before seen One Week, though it plays fairly often at Frisco Bay theatres, including a showing at last year’s SFIFF. Somehow I’d never made it to another local screening, and I had resisted successfully the lure of DVD and youtube presentations of the film. Now I know why: to save myself for the privilege of experiencing it for the first time with a terrific live score, a laughing audience, and in the glow of Brownlow’s marvelous enthusiasm and insight.

It wasn’t all laughter and delight, though. When introducing a clip from Raymond Bernard’s the Chess Player, Brownlow reminded the room full of silent film enthusiasts, with a healthy contingent of scholars and archivists, of a darker side to the history of film preservation. He told of how “we owe the existence of this film to the Gestapo,” as the Nazis, who I did not realize had created the first film archive, confiscated the Chess Player among other films when they arrested Bernard during the occupation. They released the director on the urging of his famous father Tristan Bernard, but kept the films safe from destruction during the war (except for reel one of the Chess Player, which disappeared). The clip made the film look like a tremendous epic, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to watch Bernard’s film without thinking of how bitter a victory it is when great objects of art are saved while so much else is lost.

After the screening, there was a very brief question-and-answer session in which Brownlow demonstrated his quick wit and ability to oh-so-gracefully deal with a question asked in more of a spirit of showing off in than requesting knowledge, but before the house was cleared I was thankful to get a chance to approach the man and ask a question in person. I felt I had to ask something about the documentary he’d directed, Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic, since he’d had to bow out of the q-and-a after that 9:15 PM Saturday screening due to jet lag. I probably should have asked about the doc’s absolutely breathtaking Elmer Bernstein underscore (according to imdb, it’s the legendary composer’s last credit), or about how his impression of DeMille had changed since making the “Autocrats” episode of his “Hollywood” miniseries in 1980. Or else just thanked him for the evening. But I couldn’t resist posing an entirely too-big question about DeMille’s sincerity, and he oh-so-gracefully gave an answer about how the director’s cynicism was far more evident in the sound era than the silent. Though I doubt Mr. Brownlow intended it as such, I’m trying to take it as a lesson against wordiness.

Which should be my cue to wrap this post up. But before I do, I just want to point out a few more silent film-related offerings that are of great interest to me. While the SFIFF is still in full force, there are two more such programs: Notes to a Toon Underground, a May 5th program of old and new silent animations backed by live music from local indie rockers, and Guy Maddin’s neo-silent Brand Upon the Brain with live music and Joan Chen as guest narrator on May 7th, both at the Castro.

This summer, the Niles Essanay Film Museum will show 35mm prints of Broncho Billy’s Adventure and 56 more Essanay films of all sorts in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the film company’s founding. It starts June 2nd when the 1915 Charlie Chaplin Essanay short His New Job plays in front of the first feature he directed, the Kid. Each subsequent Saturday evening will find Essanay films gracing the Edison Theatre screen, culminating in the tenth annual edition of the Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, June 29-July 1, which will include Essanay films featuring Max Linder, Gloria Swanson, Frances X. Bushman, Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson of course, and many many more. Niles is nestled in a remote enough corner of Frisco Bay for me to have only been there once, but I’d love to go again, and this series may just be the perfect excuse.

Then from July 13-15, it’s Frisco’s own Silent Film Festival, which has announced a sneak preview of four of the titles it’s bringing to this year’s edition: Beggars of Life by William Wellman, starring Louise Brooks as a cross-dressing railroad-hopper, the Cottage on Dartmoor, the final silent film directed by British director Anthony Asquith, the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, one of the Ernst Lubitsch silent films that had been absent from the retrospective held at the PFA earlier this year, and the Godless Girl, clips of which were featured prominently in Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic. It looks to me like a great lineup as usual, but I have to admit my bias: I was recently honored to become a volunteer member of this year’s film research committee, which means I’m charged with writing program notes for one of the films playing this July. Don’t bother trying to guess which, since I won’t tell, and it may not even be one of these four that have been announced so far. What I will say is this: the one I’m writing on is the only one I’ve seen as of yet, and as I’m learning more about the other researchers’ films I’m growing more and more impatient to see them all on the big Castro screen.

Filmmaker Highlight: Melina Leon of GIRL WITH A WALKMAN

CineVue had a quick chat with Melina Leon, a filmmaker pursuing a degree in film from Columbia University. Her short GIRL WITH A WALKMAN is a poignant consideration of self-worth and renewal.

CINEVUE: What is your occupation if not a full-time filmmaker, and where you are based?
ML: I am a full-time film student based in NY.

CINEVUE: What attracted you to filmmaking? What do you feel is so special about it?
ML: Films have the best potential to represent life: the mix of beauty and horror needs to be registered somehow before it’s over.

CINEVUE: How many films have you made?
ML: I’ve directed 5 short films.

CINEVUE: What is your current film? Could you please describe its main theme?
ML: My short film is is titled GIRL WITH A WALKMAN ; it is a reflective musing on suicide and resurrection.

CINEVUE: Who or what are your biggest influences, creatively?
ML: Musicians like Vivaldi, poets like José Watanabe, painters like Van Gogh and filmmakers like Kitano.

CINEVUE: What was one blessing and one curse during the production of your film?
ML: Dichotomy of a great crew vs no money.

CINEVUE: What is the one Asian or Asian American film figure that has had the most substantial impact on you?
ML: Takeshi Kitano has had a tremendous impact.

CINEVUE: What are you excited about for 07 AAIFF?
ML: Meeting artists.

Catch GIRL WITH A WALKMAN in the shorts program SHE’S YOUR QUEEN on Thursday July, 26th at Asia Society.

The Manchester Union Leader ran an embed piece earlier this week by Nathan S. Webster, a freelance photojournalist and creative writing instructor. Webster was embedded with the 82nd airborne, though a different brigade from the seven Sergeants who penned the recent op-ed for the Times. Webster’s style, and his reporting, is somewhat reminiscent of another aspiring creative writer, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, except there’s a sense of balance and honesty that was conspicuously absent from the work of TNR’s Baghdad Diarist. Webster writes,

Every soldier in Bayji doubtless had moments of doubt and fear, of bone-deep exhaustion, of hard breaths taken after a legitimate near-miss. It’s no different for a reporter - but I got to leave when I wanted. I learned a few things, about our soldiers at war and where they fight.

The desert heat is Biblical. Under the ceramic body armor plates, your chest feels like a faucet, ceaselessly dripping, absorbing, stinking.

Yes, a bit overwrought–certainly would make for an interesting semiotic analysis–but not bad. He goes on:

I learned the most cynical soldier would be the one most eager to pose for pictures with Iraqi children. The best squad leader and NCO will laugh about his long-past demotion, that being a Pfc. was much better the second time around.

They can be cruel. Some throw rocks at stray cats or are pointlessly mean to the Iraqis they work beside.

Almost nothing is off limits to their gallows humor. They laugh about a guy who was shot through both arms and got sent home, “but he’s totally okay, so it’s funny.” They take nothing seriously. Except for everything.

When they tell what it’s like to lose a friend, they speak with a quiet weariness entirely out of place in a 21-year-old.

I took hundreds of pictures. In the end, they all show the same thing.

Each picture’s subjects - U.S. and Iraqi - are patriots, heroes and men.

Petty cruelty juxtaposed with daily acts of courage and heroism, gallows humor that conceals a deeper concern for one’s comrades–it certainly passes the smell test.

A Military Transition can be very challenging.
What’s more challenging is finding information
on so many broad subjects.

Veterans In Motion is currently working on a
large project to assist with your military
transition. This project will be unveiled
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After the project is complete, it will continue
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Visit often, we will be announcing the project
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Have a great week and stay tuned for details.

Johnetta Matthews
Military Transition Coach
Veterans In Motion

I was inspired to blog this entry based on a comment posted by Danny Thorpe on my recent blog post I made about Shackleton’s adventure story in Antarctica, where he commented:

If you have a yen for travel, it’s possible to retrace Shackleton’s steps yourself.  Lindblad Expeditions runs an extended photography tour about once a year (see: http://tinyurl.com/9xadr) on the polar explorer ship “Endeavor” that usually includes stops at South Georgia Island and at Point Wild on Elephant Island.  In the few days at sea without landings, the Lindblad staff dig into the Shackleton story in amazing detail. There’s nothing quite like actually being there. http://tinyurl.com/loggf.I’ve heard about this  photography adventure trip to Antarctica. In fact, Susan Graham who I use to work with here at Microsoft (who worked at Fox Software and then Microsoft retired in the late 90s) actually went on that same trip to Antarctica in January 2004. She is a close friend to this day, and after her trip to Antarctica she showed me some photos when she returned. The photos were pretty amazing and she said the trip was far more spectacular than she had anticipated. She went on the trip with a friend, and the boat had about 200 people on board. The story goes that she was on deck during the boat ride out of Argentina heading for Antarctica when she heard a voice say “Susan, is that you?”. The person who recognized her was actually the former president of the company she use to work for years ago at Fox Software, Dr. Dave Fulton, who went on to become the head of database strategy at Microsoft in the early 90s after Microsoft bought Fox Software. What are the odds of meeting someone you know on a boat to Antarctica?? I guess we could say: Big continent, small world. Just before that trip, Susan had finished a project as executive producer of a documentary called 200 Cadillacs which details the generosity of Elvis Presley, including details of how he cars as gifts to people. I guess word got around on the boat about this documentary and they ended up playing the Elvis documentary one night for the travelers and crew on the boat. When we launched Visual FoxPro (VFP) version 9.0 at DevCon in late 2004, in the keynote session I showed a photo of Susan and Dr. Dave from that trip as well as a recent video interview Susan did with Dr. Dave talking about the past and present FoxPro days.

For a good quick summary of Dr. Dave Fulton’s role in the evolution of desktop databases on PCs, below is an abstract from a session given by Jeb Long at a Visual FoxPro conference in 2004:

dBASE and FoxPro from Jeb Long perspective

Where did VFP (Visual FoxPro) come from? Well, in this session, you will learn. It all began in 1973 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, USA, when a database management system was born called JPLDIS. In 1979, Wayne Ratliff working as a contractor at JPL, wrote a program to help him with football pools, called Vulcan. Vulcan was based on JPLDIS. Vulcan ran on an 8-bit 8080 microcomputer running under CP/M. George Tate started Ashton-Tate to market Vulcan (renamed dBASE II) for Wayne. Then Jeb Long (who created JPLDIS) converted dBASE II to run on the IBM PC under MSDOS and dBASE II became famous. Jeb and Wayne left JPL to join Ashton-Tate and developed dBASE III. Meanwhile Dr. David Fulton and some of his computer science students thought dBASE III was a terrific program so they cloned it resulting in FoxBase+. Ashton-Tate developed dBASE IV and sued Fox Software. Fox cloned dBASE IV and produced FoxPro 2.5. Ashton-Tate was bought by Borland. Borland dropped the lawsuit. Fox Software merged with Microsoft and the rest is history.
In the early 90s, I had successfully used FoxPro 2.0 DOS version as a touch screen front end in a public safety dispatch product used by various agencies including the California Highway Patrol communications center. It was rare to use FoxPro in a mission critical real-time application rather than a traditional accounting or inventory application back then. I had shown the FoxPro based application to Hal Pawluk who at the time was a key marketing guy at Fox Software. After FoxPro was bought by Microsoft in ‘92, word got around to a few people the details of the way I was using FoxPro in a mission-critical product. In 1992, one of the FoxPro product managers was Tod Neilsen, who invited me to a database summit meeting at Microsoft along with about 50 well known FoxPro industry experts and influencers. We got to meet the newly merged FoxPro team, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mike Maples, Dr. Dave Fulton, and others. At an evening dinner at Bill Gates’ old house, I happen to get in line for dessert just before Bill did and I ended up talking to him about the FoxPro application that I wrote for use by public safety dispatch systems. He was curious about it and asked to see a demo. The following month I ended up meeting Bill again and I spent about 15 minutes showing him a demo of demo of the FoxPro based application I had designed and developed. Dr. Dave Fulton was one of the people in the hotel suite for that meeting.

At the dinner at Bill’s house, I sat at the table with about 5 other people including Adam Green and Tom Rettig. It was the first time I had met Adam Green, who was then probably the most well known industry guru in the dBase community. Tom became a close friend of mine soon after that event, and I use to hang out at his place in Marina Del Rey fairly often and I would go to his various annual parties. Sometime in 1995, I was over at Tom’s apartment one evening. He and I had just come back from dinner at Benihana’s down the street, walking distance from his place. When suddenly there was a knock at his door, it was his next door neighbor who had locked himself out of his own place and needed to hop over to his balcony to get in. His next door neighbor was Roger Clinton, former president Bill Clinton’s half brother. Roger was a fun guy who was a musician, he would come to Tom’s parties, and you wouldn’t have guessed that his brother had just become president. I recall being the first geek on the block to have a handheld laser pointer, and when I let Roger try it out he ended up spending more time with it than I did shining it on boats going in and out of the harbor at night.

In 1993 I went to work as a contractor at JPL working on FoxPro based add-on productivity tools and OOP related efforts for teams developing various MIS solutions, While there I got to meet Jeb Long. In some ways, Jeb was the original developer who’s program lead to the first database applications on the personal computer. That year I wrote a utility called GenScrnX that extended the FoxPro 2.x GenScrn program. The first person I showed GenScrnX to was Y. Alan Griver (yag), then co-founder of Flash Creative Management. I joined Flash in 1993 after JPL reporting directly to yag working on add-ons that shipped in the box of Visual FoxPro 3.0 like the Class Browser. Eric Rudder was the group program manager and architect for VFP 3.0. Many of the great OO and data-centric features added to VFP 3.0 have continued to evolve in VFP as well as into Visual Studio as well as the VB and C# .NET programming languages. When the VFP 3.0 Xbase projects ended when VFP 3.0 was released, I left Flash and became a full-time contractor at Microsoft working on the VFP team. Flash ended up being bought by GoAmerica where yag became CIO, then yag joined Microsoft in early 2002 and soon after was the of the VS Data and VFP teams, and I reported to him directly (again). I also worked with lead program manager Randy Brown and lead developer Calvin Hsia working on VFP past the release of version VFP 9.0.

I was inspired to write my GenScrnX utility for FoxPro 2.x after I had seen a demo of an early preview of Borland’s dBase for Windows shown at a user group by then Xbase industry expert Adam Green. The next time I was to meet up with Adam Green was just a few weeks ago at the Mashup Camp event in Mountain View, Calif. I chatted with Adam at the Mashup Camp event for about 30 minutes. He showed me on his notebook computer that he still uses Visual FoxPro today to build his own desktop database applications - there were Fox icons all over his Windows desktop. Some of our chat included the past and other parts included why we were at the event - to learn more and discuss mashups and possible tangible outcomes of what is being called the Web 2.0. These days, Adam Green spends most of his independent business efforts in the Web 2.0 area, just as I do in my new role in the Windows Live Platform team. I discovered that Adam now has a great blog http://darwinianweb.com/. He also has an archived blog at http://adamgreen.org/ where he has some great MP3 podcast shows. For historical references on the topic of Xbase history, a great podcast Adam created is Software Stories #6 about the rise and fall of Ashton-Tate and the details of how the company was bought by Borland. This particular podcast is a interview is with Ron Dennis, Russell Freeland, Rick Chapman, and Hal Pawluk. Lots more Ashton-Tate history details on Wikipedia.

After Borland bought Ashton-Tate, Borland had some very well known developer tools industry experts including Anders Hejlsberg who created Turbo Pascal and started Delphi. Anders is now at Microsoft and is the lead architect of C#. Some additional irony here is that I recently spent nearly 5 years as the product manager for Visual FoxPro, the same job Tod Neilsen had over 12 years ago. Tod recently became the CEO of Borland. If I talked to Tod today, I would thank him for inviting me to the database summit at Microsoft in 1992. For some interesting history about Delphi, Danny Thorpe wrote an article on Borland’s web site Why the name “Delphi?”. In a quick photo image search on “Danny Thorpe” using live.com, I found a photo of Danny Thorpe in Antarctica taken in November 2003. This means Danny was probably on the boat trip to Antarctica just before the one that Susan Graham and Dr. Dave Fulton were on in January 2004.

In late February 2006, I moved from the developer division here at Microsoft and joined the Windows Live Platform team as a product planner on Scott Swanson’s team. Scott is a group product planner for Windows Live Platform and has a strong developer background. He was on the VB and VSCore team’s here at Microsoft and worked recently worked on the Messenger Activity SDK. Defining the ‘platform’ in the Windows Live Platform team, the platform is about working on unified API roadmap across all Windows Live services, to release great new content online such as SDKs and sample code, as well as new developer community activities. Some

Now back to how this all relates to Danny’s comment submitted on my post Endurance and leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton… Like some memorable movies endings like in the Sixth Sense and the original Twilight Zone TV show, this post as a bit a twist at the end.

Danny Thorpe, former Chief Scientist at Borland, left Borland 4 months ago and joined Google. This week (on April 10, 2006) Danny Thorpe joined Microsoft to work on the recently formed Windows Live Platform team. Danny is joining George Moore’s team, a rapidly growing team working on new developer focused projects for Windows Live services and APIs. Nearly all of my responsibilities as a product planner on the Windows Live Platform team involves working with George’s new team. Danny Thorpe’s created a new blog today at http://blogs.msdn.com/dthorpe/. While there might not be much going on in Antarctica, there is rolling thunder activity going on here at Microsoft in the Windows Live division.

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