Just had a (rare) power outage, just as I was digging into code.
When this happens, one realizes just how one is dependent on the tiny electron.
No computers.
No TV.
No radio.
No wireless phones (cellphones – if charged, of course – are fine).
Power be back! Das is gutte…
Yeah, it’s that exciting…
Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog. First post, May 17, 2001.
Not quite sure what this means or if anyone should care (correx: No, no one should care).
But this is a long time in the blogosphere, and I’m proud of that. Added features, updated the GUI, yet didn’t post as much as I would have liked.
Bring on the next five years!
Do you remember the movie The President’s Analyst, where James Colburn – in this role, a shrink (analyst) – became increasingly unhinged after continuous sessions with the U.S. President?
And his parinoia became real because – as his (unfilmed) sessions with the Prez indicated – there was a Big Brother – but it turned out to be the PHONE COMPANY!!!! How funny! How unrealistic!! How unexpected!!
That was (?) fiction.
Today, it is non-fiction: NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls.
So, all my calls (and this is how it should be read – as in “all YOUR calls”) have been accounted for. Not listened to, but who I/you called when and for how long.
To:
The doctor.
The AIDs clinic.
The shrink.
The escort service.
The abortion clinc.
The grocery store.
The mistress.
The hardware store.
The airline.
The professor of Middle-Eastern studies.
The “Have you ever had that not-so-fresh feeling” hotline.
The “any banal call” you’ve made.
The “any potentially embarrassing call” you’ve made.
ALL captured.
Your phone (and Internet, but that’s sorta a given, to a degree that I don’t agree with) calls are on “record,” and there is no “pause” button.
Paging Geoge Orwell….
At least for now, the “xxx” top-level domain is dead.
This is no surprise – almost everyone thought this was a bad idea, and I’m talking about a whole bunch of folks who you normally don’t see agreeing on things. The federal government, porn producers, anti-porn activists and so on.
All for different reasons, but all against. Weird.
Let’s see if someone tries to raise this issue again in a few years…probably…
Filled up the tank of my car today; it was almost empty.
Damn, I’ll miss that kidney…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. motorists finally got some relief at the pump as the national retail gasoline price fell for the first time in six weeks, dipping a penny over the last week to $2.91 a gallon, the government said Monday.
OK, according to CNN, the 10+ gallons I tossed in my Ford “Babe Catcher” Escort is now – as a total – a dime cheaper than last week. Whoo-hoo!
OK, Steve Jobs has shown that he is NOT to be messed with:
Update 5/8/2005: Jobs Beats the Beatles. Certain to be appealed, but still…The (Zen) Man is racking up an impressive legal record recently…
I hate the buzzphrase “Web 2.0” – it’s meaningless, yet it means different things to different folks. Odd.
I title this entry Web 2.0 simply because two events are happening on the Web today that mark a breakthrough of sorts: The runaway success of myspace.com and youtube.com.
Why do these sites amass obscene levels of traffic? Well, Paul Boutin outlines it nicely in his Slate article.
Bottom line? – Simple for the masses. Nothing to install; nothing really new to learn.
This is what I was begging for in my recent What’s Wrong With RSS entry. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
MySpace and YouTube have done this, and they are getting the PR and traffic.
If Ebay – with its still clunky interface and non-intuitive searches and so on – launched today, it’d probably die a quick death. Now, it’s so ingrained in the masses that it works, but only because it’s already learned. And people hate to learn, so that’s a lesson worth learning.
Build it – and KISS – and they will come.
This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensistive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Satre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create, 1975
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
— Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Twain, “Puddd’nhead Wilson’s New calander, Chp. 12”
So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each one of ’em is afraid, see. And then keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.
— Sam Shepard, True West
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”
One of the strongest (I thought) arguments I presented to anyone who would listen in favor of getting a domain was simple: Your e-mail address is portable and pretty permanent.
Buy domain mydomain.com, and set up a me@mydomain.com address.
As long as you keep paying the registration fees for the domain (which keep dropping) and hosting fees (dropping with more features as time goes by), your e-mail never changes.
It’s like cell-phone number portability: You can move from Sprint to Verizon and keep the same number. Yeah, you’re paying someone else and there’s a different feature set, but this is all transparent to people who call you. All they care about it not having to remember/reprogram your number every year or two. That’s annoying…
With the rise of more powerful – and increasingly free – online e-mail systems (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and so on), the argument for a domain so you have a permanent e-mail address is a little less compelling today than it was about 10 years ago, but the get-the-domain-for-email-alone argument still holds some water, for the following three reasons:
But I’m spozed to be talking about bloggers, right?
OK, same arguments apply, for the most part. Get an address and keep if forever, even if you shift your hosting every year. This is terribly important if you want to be a top drawer blogger.
The best anti-example I can think of in this respect is Dan Gillmor, one of the best tech journalists out there. Formerly with the San Jose Mercury paper, he left to do what he terms citizen journalism.
OK.
Now, I try to read him whenever I can, but it’s tough to keep up with him – and imagine what the search engines have to deal with. Lots of Gillmor deadends in the indices.
Here’s what I can recall of where his blog was (and this just in the last couple years):
This ‘taint conducive to keeping readers.
I understand some of the reasons – integration with other sites, both look and content, corporate rules and so on – but it’s a shame. It’s hard to follow him; I have to keep changing my blogroll to reflect his new location (not changed to latest location yet…); Google results will show a lot of redirects and so on.
If he was always “dangillmor.com,” well, that’d work better.
Another one I still can’t understand is Robert Scoble, the evangelist from Microsoft. He was on some Manilla system that he outgrew, so he moved to WordPress – but HAS NO domain. He’s just scobleizer.wordpress.com.
Why not just get “scobleizer.com” (if available) and use WordPress to publish to hosted domain? Yes, some functionality is lost – another argument for non-domain publishing – but, still.
Pick an address/domain. Keep doing whatever you want to the backend/hosting; keep the front end – i.e. how to find you – simple for your readers/users/friends.
Both of them.
(off the soapbox…)
I pulled this part of a screenshot fron BoingBoing today (4/26/2006); I mean them no harm, BB’s was just the first example of what I mean by:
What’s Wrong With RSS – Caveat: I’m not talking about the politics between RSS (0.92/1.0/2.0) and Atom; rather, I’m using RSS as a collective noun for the whole syndication mess. It’s a mess in several ways, but I’m thinking about the non-nerd user.
In other words, make RSS = KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and you’ve got a winner.
And think of the screen real estate – and coding – is saved.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the downside to this proposal.