July 2003 Archives

Pet Peeves: Yeah, Baby!

July 31, 2003 5:07 PM

Watching The Amazing Race tonight, I realized that I had moved from dislike to sheer hatred of the phrase "Yeah, baby!" It came on the scene a year or two before Austin Powers completely ruined its novelty. If you say this (and you know who you are because you probably say a lot of these cliché verbal crutches), please consider coming up with something new or, perhaps, ditch the crutches and banter on your own.

If you think about it, its affirmatory power is neither a solid "Yes" and is tempered by the indiscriminate "Baby," normally reserved for infants or loved ones. If I have to use something like it, I'll go with a good ol' "Yes indeedy!" or "You bet your sweet bippy!"—which has the added benefit of being inscrutable to everyone under the age of 30 and nostalgic to those over.


Google's AdSense

July 31, 2003 4:37 PM

Google AdSense is a program whereby Google supplies personal Web sites with text ads relevant to the pages content. I'm thinking about doing this.

What do you think? Yes or no? Please express your opinion in the comments. I don't want to alienate anyone and I'm not hurting for money by any means, but I sure wouldn't mind getting some Google revenue—my Amazon affiliate has never generated a sale (I still like the information they provide so I'll keep it up).


Excellent Tutorial

July 31, 2003 4:23 PM

Here's an excellent advanced tutorial on Colonel Angus. If you're a guy with a partner you love, you owe it to yourself (and your partner) to read through this. It's very well-written, descriptive enough to be useful, and thorough. There are illustrative pictures along the sides that are definitely not work safe, but don't let that stop you. Turn off images or resize to obscure them.

Note: I've avoided the obvious descriptor words so that I don't get pervs for all eternity visiting my site. Also, I didn't stumble across this tutorial through any similarly perverted means: it came across the What's New on Yahoo! pages this Tuesday.


Tech Work is Grueling

July 31, 2003 9:33 AM

Tech work can be very grueling. Many people completely change their careers after the experience. The former boss of my department became a dog groomer. Others might go on to deliver books to the Nepalese via yaks. Whatever floats your boat, eh?


Giddiness Redux

July 31, 2003 7:08 AM

The waiting game is over: I just got word that the proposal was pretty good, requiring only a few changes. Unfortunately, the agent wants a sample chapter to include. Phew! Luckily, he'll wait a little longer for that, but the revised proposal has to be to him by Monday.

I've got a feeling that this book is going to keep me very, very busy.


Sony's House of the Future

July 31, 2003 3:25 AM

I feel sorry for my cousin Jake, who has to live in a state-of-the-art apartment with no bathroom.


Idea Futures

July 30, 2003 11:55 PM

I stayed away from the idea of the idea futures market that's generated a lot of controversy lately. (Quick aside: You've got to love the title of Pravda's article: "Pentagon Gives Up Terrorist Totalizator") I understood the idea, but I wasn't sure whether I bought its efficacy. This editorial by one of my favorite Reason authors, Ronald Bailey, convinced me that I understood it well enough to assail its efficacy.

Futures markets in general are as close to national legalized gambling as you can get. When you buy pork belly futures for a certain price, you're betting that the price will match or exceed the price you paid. How can you know that? There's not really any special insight or intuition that futures traders have in this regard. I'm sure they've studied the pork belly market and, if they're successful, they've been doing it for years, but the future isn't known and anything can happen. What's more, there's a whole bunch of data available and the variables are largely predictable, though not completely.

A futures market for ideas and events struck me as ludicrous. Not only was I skeptical that anyone outside the intelligence services would be participating, I didn't see how anyone would be willing to bet on such an unpredictable and uncertain outcome. To bet on the likelihood that the Syrian prime minister will be assassinated doesn't seem macabre to me, but it does sound foolish. When do close the bets? When he dies? At some predetermined point in time? If the terrorists were aware of the bets and that they suggested some course of action, wouldn't that encourage them to stop planning in that direction and do something that wasn't being bet on? I think so.

That's the rub as far as I'm concerned. Betting on future events and then using that information to guide policy and action strikes me as outlandish. "Ooo, futures trading in our invading North Korea is through the roof! They must know something we don't know. Prepare the B-52s (no, not them, Colonel, the big bombers)." Obviously, that's a simplification—and a funny one at that—but the real problem is that it seeks knowledge secondhand. They must know something we don't already know. Instead of focusing on gathering the most useful, accurate intelligence, we look to the market for insight. What's worse, we don't really know if we're right until the event actually takes place and the winner is determined. Only then, the predictive value of the market is zero.

It's an interesting idea, but I think it should be kept as an idea. (Another aside: Bailey cites several different futures markets offered by TradeSports.com. Crazy stuff!)


Thinking Outside the Sink

July 30, 2003 2:08 PM

Kohler's got a new line of interesting bathroom fixtures called the Purist Suite. The most interesting one to me is the Purist Wet Surface Lavatory, which is a flat surface with a surrounding moat. The sink is thus liberated from the tyranny of the basin. Sure, this will never replace the kitchen sink but it does transform the handwashing experience into something novel and fresh.

One of my favorite things is a fresh approach, a novel take on a mundane activity that enhances the experience aesthetically or practically. You don't get them very often, but they're something to treasure when you do. [from Justin Hall]

[UPDATE (7/31/03): I've added a list category entitled "Thinking Outside the Box" that will serve to feature just this sort of innovative design and approach. If you've got something to include, please include it in the comments or email me.]


Inscrutable Weirdness

July 30, 2003 10:12 AM

From BoingBoing comes the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. I love the caption for the first image: "From a Dell computer box. I believe the caption should read 'If you drop this box on a dog, don't trip over its tail'."

It reminds me of oh-so-many The Simpsons episodes.


eBay Hilarity

July 30, 2003 6:07 AM

A co-worker sent me a link to a feedback page on eBay that is hilarious because it mocks the inane comments typically left after an auction is successfully concluded.

The user audaciously (and sometimes spectacularly) derides the spelling and enthusiasm of the feedback provider in responses—a feature I wasn't aware existed on eBay. Funny stuff!


Copyright != Theft

July 30, 2003 5:56 AM

I'm a big fan of copyright and property rights in general. I had long equated software piracy and file sharing with shoplifting those same items, but this article and some further thought reveal that they're not equivalent. Theft is related to the actual property whereas copyright infringement does not deprive the copyrightholder of actual property, just the value of that property. I understood the principle in the positive (especially as it relates to selling used software, music, or books—i.e., you own the actual program, CD, or book and you can sell that tangible item as you please but you don't own the right to produce it), but I guess I hadn't followed through in the negative sense.

In the area of morality, I don't think there's a bit of difference between the two because you're still depriving the rightful owner of his due either way. The infringement doesn't cost him anything out of pocket like the theft does, but it's still lost revenue. In fact, sharing is even worse because you can't share the stolen item with more than one person without stepping into the infringement arena. In other words, this new revelation for me doesn't change my attitude towards the situation except in a strictly legalistic way.


Giddiness Ensues!

July 30, 2003 5:33 AM

My review entitled "A Tale of Two Java Books" was accepted by Slashdot for publication. Okay, so it's not the New York Times Review of Books—and I generally think that's a good thing—but it's something. The review, which hasn't been posted yet, compares and contrasts two introductory Java texts I've read recently: Beginning Java Objects (Web site: ObjectStart) and Head First Java (Web site: Head First Java).

I'll put the book review in the reviews section once I get a chance. I didn't want to pre-empt Slashdot and I may just incorporate the inevitable criticisms that will occur in the discussion.

The one thing that I can say off the bat about my review is that it's a little more negative towards Head First Java than I really think. There's nothing explicit, but there's an subtle slighting of HFJ in it. I think that it's an excellent book and might be sufficient for many people, but Beginning Java Objects is more systematic and that's my personal learning style. While I enjoyed HFJ immensely, I couldn't have read it first or solely.

Once it gets posted to the public site, I'll link up to it here.

[UPDATE (7/31/03): Looks like they're taking their sweet time in publishing my vaunted review. Since my credibility may be called into question, here's a snippet of a screenshot showing Slashdot's acceptance:]
Slashdot accepted my review


[UPDATE (8/6/03): Okay, they've published my review. Predictably, page views are through the roof: approximately 2,200 as of 6:20 p.m. compared to an average of about 300-450!]


PHP5

July 30, 2003 4:19 AM

If you're even marginally interested in PHP, you need to check out Harry Fuecks' 19-page introduction to PHP5. It's excellent and comprehensive. Since my interest in PHP is of the marginal variety, I skimmed several sections but it seems like PHP is advancing into the big leagues of ASP.NET, CFMX, and JSP—which is very, very cool.


Go big or go home!

July 29, 2003 9:37 AM

I've used Kevin Maney's columns in USA Today to illustrate points twice before, but his recent one about Louis Borders is of a different piece. He always writes with a morale at the end of the column, but this one seems a bit more sensitive.

Louis Borders was one of the Borders brothers that started the book chain of the same name that was eventually bought by Kmart and made nearly ubiquitous. What you may not remember was his next venture. Well, you'll remember it because it was such a spectacular and ominous failure, but you probably don't know of his involvement in it. I'm speaking of WebVan, for those of you who didn't immediately click to Maney's column.

WebVan is frequently cited as the quintessential Internet start-up of the late nineties, but it's flame-out wasn't really for extravagance (except maybe of concept) but more of a capital-intensive operation whose profit potential was enormous but long-term. It was much like Amazon, but didn't get into the game as early as Amazon did. His original conception of the company was even more ambitious than what the venture capitalists funded.

The man thinks big. I like that. As the lead venture capitalist for WebVan said (and was quoted by Maney), "Go big or go home." Unfortunately, it's led me to go home more often than it's made be "go big" but it's a good credo.


Neat0 Product

July 29, 2003 3:53 AM

James Duncan Davidson linked to this Kensington WiFi Detector in his blog and it looks really handy. It's range is kind of limited and it doesn't talk about instantly it indicates a signal, so maybe warwalking is more likely than wardriving.

[UPDATE: Looking at the product's Amazon page—interesting that they've teamed up with Circuit City to offer in-store pickup—I see that it has a button that checks for signal strength. That limits the utility of the device, but probably saves on power consumption. Also, you may be able to rapidly click it or even hold it down—it's not obvious or explicit whether you can.]

[UPDATE (8/1/03): This review paints a less-than-appealing picture of the WiFi Finder's utility. If it can't detect the AP beacon signal, then it's practically useless. Thanks, BoingBoing.]

[UPDATE (9/4/03): Here's the product done right.]


Umm, huh?

July 29, 2003 2:13 AM

Which is stranger: hosting a RealVideo of Bea Arthur doing the Urkel dance, Bea Arthur doing the Urkel dance, or creating a page dedicated to Bea Arthur doing the Urkel dance? I sure don't know.


Right and Left Hands

July 29, 2003 2:07 AM

Funny situation: Ask Yahoo! answers a question about the Volkswagen Thing and provides some helpful links and information about the Jeep-like car whose actual name is Thing.

One of the sites the answer links to is VW 181 Facts and Figures, a page about the military precursor to the Thing that is hosted on GeoCities (a Yahoo property). Clicking on the link shows an error message stating that the Web site has "exceeded its allocated data transfer." You'd think that Yahoo would have some means to ease restrictions when it sends a lot of traffic that way.


Sony's Gone in the Crapper

July 28, 2003 3:12 AM

Yahoo! News reports that beleaguered computer maker Sony's second quarter profits are down 98% from last year's quarter. Better enjoy those TVs while you can, for who knows how long they'll be available.

(For the irony-challenged, this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to industry pundits seizure of any slippage in Apple's fortunes as an indication of its impending demise. By the way, if you're irony challenged, you should probably go somewhere else because I revel in irony 'round these parts.)


X-Plane and Obsession

July 26, 2003 1:55 PM

I read an article about Austin Meyer's and his beloved flight simulator X-Plane in this month's Popular Science (also discussed over at Slashdot) yesterday. At first, I was amazed and delighted about the story of the underdog versus the colossal Microsoft.

However, I quickly realized that Meyer's passion had become an obsession.

I had a lengthy, interesting essay ready to post about the perils of obsession using examples like oyster shucking and dog shows. I got to the point where I had integrated the data points and was drawing a conclusion when I went to quit OmniDictionary—I was looking up "dissemble" to verify its meaning—and quit OmniWeb instead. Barnacles!

The point I was trying to make is that obsession leads to neglect of important areas of your life. It can be as simple as feeling some compunction to post a daily message in your blog and as destructive as needing to work constantly. It's easy to get lost in an obsession and it is hard to shake once identified.

Where does interest end and obsession begin? That's a question I wrestle with frequently. I check my logs several times throughout the day. I like to see what sort of referrers I'm getting, what my page requests for the day are, how this month stacks up to previous months. Is this obsession? I don't know. I think about it frequently though I'm not anxious if I go a day or two without doing it. If it is obsession, what is to be done? It doesn't seem to be harmful and I've gotten it down to a simple FTP session followed by a quick running of a shell script for processing.

Reviewing my life, I see many other computer-related obsessions. The checking of email dozens of times a day, the visiting of the same sites every day, the keeping up with RSS subscriptions numbering nearly 150. Much of it seems to mask as procrastination, but the length of time I've been doing it and the fact that I keep up the routine even when nothing is impending suggests that the little-o might be at work here.

On the other hand, reviewing some of the details of obsession suggests that I may be in error in my evaluation since I don't feel out of control and it doesn't appear to be a defense mechanism.

I don't know. Maybe I should try to limit these activities by sheer force of will to see if I can do it successfully without anxiety. Wouldn't that prove that it wasn't obsession?

[UPDATE (7/28/03): This post was actually composed at nearly midnight on Sunday. It's probably much more revealing than I would prefer, so take from it what you will. The lost version was much less personal.]

[UPDATE (4/14/05): Found an interesting post about the wonders of X-Plane.]


Etc.

July 26, 2003 1:49 PM

Good interview/article about venture capital for small businesses. Also, here's some guerilla marketing suggestions.

Just some links I've accumulated about two subjects I love.


One of these days

July 25, 2003 4:17 PM

One of these days I'm going to replace the badges in the left navigation with some of these cute little buttons. The funny ones are, well, funny. If you like the font on these little guys, you can get it from Jason Kottke, creator, and it's called Silkscreen.


Prank Phone Calls

July 25, 2003 4:09 PM

As a child, I used to make a lot of prank phone calls. I don't know how I ever pulled off most of them because I had a very youthful voice. Unfortunately, time has erased most of my memories of the specific details but I remember having a good time.

Kids today have it easy with the advent of soundboards, convenient Flash executables with canned phrases from celebrities. You can keep someone going for quite a long time with those babies. Like many things stemming from the Internet, you just have to be quick on your toes.


Top Secret

July 25, 2003 6:50 AM

The book proposal is done and submitted. Now we play the waiting game.

Forget the waiting game, let's play Hungry, Hungry Hippo!


When in Rome

July 25, 2003 2:22 AM

For Sandi, who teaches a bit about the Roman Empire: Roman coins and Guide to Ancient Rome. Anyone else interested is welcome to visit them as well—the Guide is incredibly detailed and broad.


Bush Leagues

July 24, 2003 2:15 PM

Hate Bush and his presidency? Too Stupid To Be President.com is the site for you. The lists are pretty funny and so are the Flash movies.


Iraq is Peachy

July 24, 2003 1:53 PM

Intriguing article in the New York Post available through Front Page Magazine—whatever that is—that discusses what's really happening in Iraq. It's conclusion is that the distress in Iraq felt by everyday people is both overreported and overhyped. I told you it was interesting!
Elsewhere, the coalition presence is either accepted as a fact of life or welcomed. On the 4th of July some shops and private homes in various parts of Iraq, including the Kurdish areas and cities in the Shiite heartland, put up the star-spangled flag as a show of gratitude to the United States.

One wonders why facts such as this weren't reported more widely. This article is a refreshing look at post-war Iraq that comports with what I expected to happen, but thought hadn't: gratitude and hope for the future.

[UPDATE (7/25/03): The London Times has an exclusive interview with Uday Hussein's personal bodyguard. It reveals the movements of Saddam Hussein and his sons during and after the war. It amazes me when dictators stay in their capital city as their nations crumble around them. Hitler had the same delusion as Saddam did in the final days: that they could personally turn the course of the war in their favor. It's a bizarre conceit. If I were in their shoes, I would get in a submarine (in Hitler's case) or in a small car and hightail it with all the cash and valuables I could muster to a safe country like Argentina or Syria.]


FOAFY

July 24, 2003 9:36 AM

Joi Ito's recent entry sparked my interest in FOAF—I missed the meme the first time around (well, I saw it but I just didn't care at the time). Quite coincidentally, I stumbled across this Webmonkey article covering metadata this morning as well. I'll keep looking into this. If you have any important evaluations about this technology, please leave a message in the comments. I don't get the value in this since it seems like XML blogrolling.


New Meaning to Typesafe

July 24, 2003 6:52 AM

Bizarre typeface game done in Flash in which you smash Arial characters with Helvetica ones. I'm pretty sure that there's a message here, but the developers don't go into much detail. I personally find Arial abhorrent, but people in general use it way too much. It's a complete bastardization of Helvetica, but Helvetica isn't bundled with Windows. Thanks again, Apple!


Programmer Song

July 24, 2003 3:57 AM

An Apple engineer has written and performed a song entitled "Model, View, Controller" that is both educational and funny. If you're not clear on the benefits of MVC, listen to this. It's probably the only song that will ever be created with a line like "Model view - mad props to the Smalltalk crew." Hopefully.


Leggo My Logo

July 24, 2003 3:10 AM

Top 250 logos as rated by readers over at goodlogo!com. This is interesting to me because my employer just settled on a new logo. I'm not sure how much I like the new one (which I can't unveil just yet) but it's a far sight better than the current one. (The site also pointed out the arrow in the FedEx logo that I had never seen before: it's in the negative space created by the "E" and the "x" below the baseline. Way cool!)


Back in Heathenville

July 24, 2003 12:29 AM

So I got back from the land of Brigham Young safely. Contrary to some people's belief, we were never in any mortal danger on the ride back. We kept the cruise control at 85 mph, though there were countless instances of dropping down to 65 mph or less.

It was a nice trip overall. Salt Lake City was hotter than it's ever been, which is very nice for a Phoenician trying to escape the sweltering urban heat island that is my hometown. We went to the Hogle Zoo and saw poor animals desperately trying to stay cool in temperatures that they never signed up for—the polar bear kept only his head out of the (hopefully) cool pool in his enclosure. My grandmother fed Sandi and I as if we were trying to get on disability; she even commented on how I'd lost weight, but acted as if that were some sort of travesty that required her wholesale commitment to rectify.

We also saw all of the Mormon holy sites, like Temple Square and This is the place. The tour through Temple Square was excruciating to say the least. I was expecting some history since the whole Mormon settlement thing was also a pioneer trek across the west, but instead got lessons about how the architecture reflected Mormon beliefs and would I like to know more about those lessons because we've got nice people who'd be happy to tell you all about them. When the "tour" (read: walking proselytization) was over, we got to watch a video about Christ's adventures in Jerusalem and America and fill in a comment card that immediately triggered a home visit if you put anything remotely identifying.

The Mormon quest to convert me into a source of revenue did get me interested in the Mormon religion, but not in the way that they were hoping. I've been an explicit atheist since I was 5, but I am woefully ignorant of Christianity and religion in general. To me, the Mormons are no less crazy in their beliefs than the Catholics. Upon further investigation, they are in fact significantly crazier. Their rituals make Catholic masses seem like reasonable exercises. Their history seems ludicrous on its face—I suppose that's why the faithful don't investigate it beyond the platitudes of "some sea gulls saved the pioneers' crops." It's amazing to read some of the stories of ex-Mormons about the trials and tribulations of not only being in the church but trying to leave—I guess the church doesn't want to let go of 10% of your income so easily.

At any rate, I'm glad to be back in the land of the heathen—where there's no official religion save suntanning and driving.


No posting today

July 23, 2003 12:14 AM

I shan't be posting today. I know I said earlier that blogging would be sporadic and then I blogged quite a bit, but today is all driving and tonight is all sleeping. Regular posting will resume tomorrow. Maybe, for a change of pace, you can review some of my values or some of my reviews?


Age Limits?

July 21, 2003 7:10 AM

My personal goal is to live to be 200…for starters.


Move Over, NetNewsWire!

July 21, 2003 6:55 AM

NetNewsWire is great and definitely a pioneer in the Mac OS X aggregator field, but I think Shrook is poised to kick it to the curb. Granted, it's about $19.95 more than NNW Lite but it's got some great features already and the planned features look even better.

What I Like:
  • Date view of feeds
  • The idea of distributed feed checking: I think this and the ability to support gzip could end the bandwidth-sucking outcry about RSS
  • RSS View and Web View
  • Individual feed preferences
  • Timestamps
  • The ability to open an RSS view and have the Web view load behind it
  • Quick and easy NetNewsWire subscriptions import

What I Don't Like:
  • That icon, bleh!
  • Channel Guide on the right side, make it a preference
  • UI can get a little cluttered
  • Plenty of spinning beach balls, which I think will go away over time

I'm going to evaluate this some more and see if I like it. If I do, then I'm buying. At the very least, this will serve as a wake-up call to Brent Simmons: there's some competition, they've got WebKit, and they don't care about enabling blog editing from the app.


Robb is Back!

July 21, 2003 6:27 AM

Throw away your milk cartons, John Robb is back. The erstwhile CEO of UserLand still isn't talking about the strange circumstances of his displacement, but I imagine that there's enough bad blood there that he'll get to it eventually.


Community Watch - Internet Style

July 21, 2003 2:32 AM

Awhile back, Steve Wozniak was said to have founded a new company—Wizards of Zeus—that was developing a product that would use GPS. No further details were released and the company went into what venture capitalists call "stealth mode" (though I've always thought "whisper mode" would be better, a quiet nod to one of the first geek movies, Blue Thunder). Well, that details embargo has been lifted. And in a big way with an article in the paper of record.

It's still too soon to tell how widespread this will be or how it's going to work beyond the technical aspects, but it sounds like a real winner. The feature that intrigued me the most was the ability to daisy-chain base stations so as to create a neighborhood-wide tracking zone. If the interface were right, I could picture a web server in every base station that could superimpose the things-to-be-tracked on to a map of the neighborhood with legends that differentiated among things. At a glance, you could see that you children are over at Jenny's house playing in the backyard. If the API is exposed so that people can create their own tracking applications, you could even create an alert that would immediately page you if your child got into a car on the street—perhaps indicated by lack of movement in the street area followed by rapid and consistent acceleration in a more or less straight line.

At any rate, if these devices could also track RFID-tagged items as well, then I could see an amazing synergy created that would also subvert any privacy objections to widespread rollout of RFID. You could immediately see what's in the refrigerator (or a smart refrigerator could list its contents on a display in the front), how many cans of corn are in the pantry, or whether it's time to buy more milk. Or you could tag valuables in an embedded way so that you could write a program (or purchase one) that alerted you whenever something wasn't there any more.

This new venture of Woz's looks very promising. I can't wait for next year when it's unveiled.

[UPDATE: Slashdot discussion ensues.]

[UPDATE 2: AppleLinks has a nice rant on the matter. Their objection to the WozNet is that it bespeaks a lack of trust and appeals to the control freaks. I guess that it could, but I can see this as a safety net for otherwise careful parents. Or as a neighborhood safety net.]


Insipid Security

July 21, 2003 1:59 AM

Ever since September 11th, I've been rankled by stupid security policies that couldn't possibly catch terrorists but introduce inconvenience to whatever area they touch. Each time a terrorist does something new, suddenly all security attention is focused on that particular activity. If I were a terrorist, I don't think I'm going to keep doing the same thing over and over. To my mind, the more varied the terrorism the more diffuse the threat and the more widespread the fear. Instead, our government (and many private companies) act as if the terrorists (of whatever stripe) are going to commandeer an airplane and slam it into a skyscraper.

Back to ineffective security policies, Bruce Schneier wrote in a recent Counterpane newsletter about his experiences with them and summed it up as "pick your battles." His is a reasonable rant and deepens my respect. His advice extends to inane marketing ploys—Babies 'R' Us asks for your phone number every time you make a purchase—as well. Being asked to provide your driver's license when you're flying within the United States is a pain and seems stupid in the face of false IDs that are readily available, but refusing it is just making a martyr of yourself.

Speaking of Gilmore, this email from him describing his experiences on a British Airways flight disgusts me. He made his utterly symbolic point in the confrontation with the stewardess. His implacable refusal to remove the button which led to a significant delay in the flight as he was removed from the plane is folly in the extreme and possibly the most inconsiderate act I've ever heard of. If I had been on that flight, I would have asked the stewardess if we could just open the cabin door and toss him on to the tarmac. The right of free speech doesn't apply to corporations and the captain had every right to require him to remove it. Of course, it was a completely harmless act and ejecting him from the plane was exactly the wrong thing to do since it fed his ego an all-you-can-eat buffet meal. If I were the captain, I would have said that he was an idiot and told him to be quiet for the entire flight.


Change

July 20, 2003 1:03 AM

It's very strange. I haven't been to my grandparents' house since I was probably eleven or twelve. I'm 28 now. The house hasn't changed much since then—though, of course, it seems much smaller than I remember.

It makes you wonder. I'm pretty dynamic right now. Our house is in a flux and is constantly changing. We're having kids and things will change more. I'm sure that my grandparents went through the exact same things. Is there some point at which I'll become more static? Will my house acquire that timeless quality that they have and my other grandparents had even more?

I'd like to think that that won't happen, but I can't really be sure. Will I fight it? Or will I just give in resignedly?


Salt Lake City

July 20, 2003 12:51 AM

I'm in my grandparents' basement in their Salt Lake City abode writing this. We made it in to SLC yesterday at about 4:30ish after leaving at 6:30ish that morning. In other words, we made really good time. I probably averaged 70 mph the entire trip; it would've been higher except that I got stuck behind some yahoos in the Navajo reservation and there's a long stretch with virtually no passing lanes.

One of the things I noticed in driving up Highway 89 is that there's an incredible number of small towns just past the Arizona border. Each one co-opts the highway and calls the stretch of it that bifurcates their town Main Street. Of course, you can't have a Main Street with a speed limit of 75 mph so they chop it in more than half to 35 mph. I'm sure that, aside from getting some face time with drivers, it's also a lucrative source of revenue. It's very difficult to decelerate quick enough to not warrant a speeding ticket.

But did I get one? No way, baby! No tickets for me. My ticketless streak is unbroken. It's been about three years since the last one, which is impressive for me because I've been getting one (or two) every two years and going to traffic school for it since I was sixteen. Do the math and that works out to about six tickets—yep, that's right.

The other thing I noticed is that the Mormon religion is much more entrenched here than I realized. Okay, that's not a profound statement but there's nothing more visual than seeing two Mormon temples next to a mall in Provo. Or state road signs indicating important Mormon sites. Or religious billboards everywhere. Or the LDS bumper stickers. Or...well, the trip is young.

To Mapquest: I forgive you about the horrible directions to my grandparents' house once we were in Salt Lake because you got us off the Highway 89 speed trap and on to I-15. Thank you.


Sycophants

July 18, 2003 8:39 AM

If there's one personality type that I hate most, it's sycophants. These people are constantly trying to ingratiate themselves with you through flattery, praise, and recognition. I've encountered quite a few of them in my own life since I've been a student club president, a trainer, and a web developer of some skill. These people heaped praise on me in a way that seemed to beg for acknowledgment and acceptance of them.

It was pathetic and was about the only time in my life that I actually felt pity. How demeaning to supplicate yourself to another person—it's almost inhuman! One gentleman even asked me to become his life mentor in a final, desperate plea to get me to acknowledge him in a way that might bring him into some sort of peer status. Unfortunately, he (and most sycophants I've met) don't seem to understand that peer status isn't something that you can beg for: it must be earned through your own effort. Moreover, that effort shouldn't be expended towards the goal of equality but should arise from self-motivation and self-direction.

Sycophancy is much different than respect. I've known plenty of people who respect me and offer praise or flattery as appropriate. How do you spot the difference? The self-assured person offers praise as recognition in a one-way transaction, expecting nothing in return. The sycophant offers praise and expects something back, usually reciprocal praise or some other form of display of equality. When someone I respect recognizes an achievement of mine, I feel pride and appreciation. When someone obsequiously flatters, I feel revulsion.

Interestingly, sycophancy is a pernicious attendant of genius. Clingers-on seek reflected glory and believe that some self-worth will transfer in a process of osmosis. Paul Johnson's Intellectuals chronicles several instances, but reading the biographies of such luminaries as Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises will illustrate the same phenomenon.

Geniuses sometimes fall in with their hangers-on and start believing the stuff they're selling. I've heard of many geniuses who flame out because they start believing in their own self-importance and focus on the fact that they're geniuses instead of their work. Many geniuses use the Web to highlight their achievements since the Web represents a fantastic new medium of communication, one that transfers messages and achievements far and wide.

It also seems to breed sycophants. Your words are spread across a much more diffuse area and the currency of the Web is the link. Google bumps your PageRank based on them, Technorati expands your link cosmos because of them, and your site's traffic grows through referrers. If you're a high-traffic blog, you attract groupies who rise and fall based on your recognition. They'll snivel, carp, and whine about the things you hate and praise and sing the praises of things you like. Their attempts to curry favor can be met with indifference or recognition. If you're indifferent, they'll move on to the next blogger to try to obtain the validation that they need. If you recognize them with a link, they've got an objective assessment of their worth and you'll never shake them.

You can either shruggingly accept your groupies or you can make use of them. Some on the Web take the latter approach and use their public soapbox to start email campaigns among their entourages directed at people that offend them. Or they can use their online solicitations for recognition to their advantage as a sort of public self-serving display of agreement. Worse still is when they start believing that this unrepresentative sample reflects the general mood.

It's sad when you see a genius taken in by this vicious circle. There will always be yes-men surrounding anyone great. It's the tough duty of every genius to step away from this inner circle and really evaluate themselves objectively, instead of looking in the vanity mirror of sycophancy.

[NOTE: I am not arguing that I am a genius and I am not arguing that the sycophants cited above are through-and-through sycophants. They may be perfectly achievement-oriented in the rest of their lives. In this one instance, however, they seem to be acting like link whores. And some are definitely worse than others.]

[UPDATE: The list of examples above is by no means exhaustive. They are just a few that I had handy at the moment. Also, I said previously that this was the last entry on Dave Winer. This entry on sycophancy is only peripherally about Dave. I promise that Dave will only rarely appear in this blog—and by rarely I mean practically never, but I reserve the right to use his very public pronouncements in the future. This blog will now resume its normal programming.]


"Weird" Al on VH1

July 18, 2003 7:31 AM

I'm watching "Weird" Al Yankovic on VH1. That's right, Al-TV—Al's spoof MTV-like network compressed into hour-long shows—is back. I hadn't seen it for a couple of years. Al is a wordsmith and comedian of first rank. He was just "interviewing" Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake by splicing together cuts from different interviews, but he was doing it quite masterfully. I've seen the idea done before, but his execution was perfect and clever.

I had forgotten that he was still doing this sort of show and I guess it's time to sic TiVo on it.


Important Notice

July 18, 2003 3:02 AM

Blogging will be sporadic until July 24th. We're going on a mini-vacation to glorious Salt Lake City to visit my grandparents in their native habitat. I'll have dial-up access through Qwest like normal, but I'm not planning on doing much surfing while there. And where there's not much surfing, there's not much blogging.

Today, I'm going to be going to an ultrasound for our adopted baby, getting the ol' Durango tuned up for the road trip, and working on a secret project called Operation Book Proposal (I think I probably should have chosen a less descriptive name). I may get a chance to blog a bit, but don't count on it.


Cool PDF Tip for Mac OS X

July 17, 2003 2:02 PM

Peter Merholz has a great tip on how to set up your Page Setup in Safari (or any browser) so that you can get web pages as one continuous page instead of being paginated.

[UPDATE (7/21/03): Speaking of PDFs, James Spahr has just posted a list of reasons why he loves the PDF format despite its famous detractors.]

[UPDATE 2 (7/25/03): A business analyst at Adobe has rebutted Nielsen's poorly conceived article over at Planet PDF.]


Dish Network Sucks Ass

July 17, 2003 8:05 AM

Okay, I'm nearing the finale of my months-long struggle to end my relationship with Dish Network. I just got off the phone with an assistant to the executive vice president (possibly my third or fourth call to this individual) and he says that one of his nitwit colleagues credited my account for the returned DishPVR but forgot to refund the money. Apparently, Dish Network's customer service system is so stupid that it can credit a long-closed account without triggering a refund and their people don't know about this oversight.

If you've got Dish Network, enjoy it and don't ever try to cancel. They'll make you jump through every hoop they've got—you'd think there was a subsidiary of EchoStar that made them. This saga started on April 30, 2003 and still is not resolved.


Saddam's Uranium Deal with Nigeria

July 17, 2003 5:02 AM

I've been sent proof that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium. Bush wasn't lying.

[UPDATE (7/21/03): Someone else picked up my idea and did me one better.]


Bush's Presidency

July 17, 2003 3:29 AM

I'm not a fan of George Bush by any stretch (I voted for him because I could not vote for Al Gore ever) and the caliber of our federal representation continually saddens me, but Thousand Reasons Not to Re-Elect George Bush deepens that disdain. Many of the things that the site upbraids Bush for aren't really the province of government action (or shouldn't be), but a lot of it is spot on. He represents so-called crony capitalism, one that does not prize efficiency or innovation.

How does a radical for capitalism vote in this sort of situation?


New Commercial for Apple's G5

July 17, 2003 2:51 AM

Apple just posted the commercial for their new PowerMac G5 and I have to agree with As the Apple Turns's humorous take on this one. It seems like a weird commercial. I get the "blown away" reference, but why was it necessary to make the guy through four or five walls and then thud against a tree.

It harkens back to the Memorex commercial (or was it RCA?) of yore where a man is listening to his stereo on a comfy chair, his hair, tie, and expression suggesting that he was in a wind tunnel. That was an effective commercial without all the violence.

[UPDATE (7/29/03): Bill Palmer, essayist and educator, obviously understood the subtleties of this particular ad way better than I did. Interesting take on the subject—I'm sure the pacing of the ad was intentional.]


Review: Pugzie's

July 16, 2003 4:25 PM

Today, I ate at Pugzie's Sandwich Shoppe, which is owned by someone who's got celiac disease. I was expecting quite a selection of food for us celiacers, but the menu presented consisted of four or five items. Two of them were things that would've been on the normal menu—a salad and a bowl of fruit—and they were all more expensive than their normal-menu counterparts. I was disappointed to say the least, but I was still happy to have options.

I ordered the tuna sandwich on a roll. If you're not a celiac, you probably don't know what wheat-free bread tastes like. Consider yourself lucky: I've tried a number of different varieties and they're all horrible. The taste ranges from cardboard (tapioca-based bread) to mushy (rice-based bread). I ache for the taste of plain white bread with its softness; I miss the feel of compressing a piece of white bread between my tongue and palate, soaking in the mayonnaise, and then eating it. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the tuna sandwich. The bread was made of rice and was served really cold (that's the other thing about non-wheat breads: if you don't keep them cold then they turn crumbly and go bad very quickly). It got mushy pretty quickly. I could only eat half of the sandwich with the bread: the other half I ate by wrapping the leaf of lettuce around the tuna.

The ambiance is pretty cheesy. It's got a huge seating area and they provide a rack of magazines for you to read. There's an outdoors patio—like I'd go out there in this heat—that would probably be glorious in the spring. Across from the restaurant, there's an antique barbershop museum owned by the same people. It's stupendously weird. There's no historical context provided by signs or anything. It's just a barbershop with all of the accouterments and a small fenced off viewing area.

I don't mean to give the wrong impression. The gluten-free menu sucked, but it was far better than anything else out there. I would have liked to have seen other selections on there; if they can put tuna on the horrid bread, I'm sure they could put any of their other meats or cheeses. It was a little pricy for lunch fare, but I'm going to give it another chance.


For Larry: The Oyez Project

July 16, 2003 3:36 PM

For Larry: The Oyez Project has just opened. It's a site dedicated to the Supreme Court, offering up mp3 recordings of Supreme Court arguments.


Jackass

July 16, 2003 3:31 PM

I'm watching Jackass and I can't believe my eyes. I'm no prude about these sorts of things—I am, after all, actually watching this stuff—but this stunt seems downright stupid.

The guys are swimming in the ocean looking to ride a hammerhead shark. Yes, really. They hold on to the hammerhead's tail and try to stay on as long as possible. Okay, then they get the bright idea to chain some cut up fish to one of the guys to see if the hammerheads will attack him. He's not in a cage. He's not got on chain mail. He's just swimming around with fish chained to his belt. How much would they have to pay you for you to do that? I wouldn't do it for any amount. Bizarre!

[Note: Why do I like shows like this and Trigger Happy TV? The same reason why I like flash mobs—these things add a sense of whimsy and the ludicrous to life. People are so uptight and serious, but life is better with some levity.]


Ants-Eye Views

July 16, 2003 3:24 PM

This documentary sounds incredible. I've long imagined what the world must look like to an insect crawling through a grass forest. The closest this filmmaker got is on a tarantula, but that's close enough.


I Snooze, I Lose

July 16, 2003 6:14 AM

157 pages into Head First Java with the full intention of reviewing it for Slashdot and some guy beats me to it. PISSER! Why couldn't I speed through it for the review instead of methodically reading it!

I'll definitely post a review here when I'm done. For now, let me just say that it seems like a great Java introduction.


Celiac

July 16, 2003 4:35 AM

As noted in my bio, I've got celiac and have a generally rough time eating out. In listing ingredients, menus are imprecise at best and lousy at worst. Asking the waiters and waitresses is often no better than reading the menu and guessing at food content. Outback Steakhouse is the only chain that I know of that has a gluten-free menu available, but they're a little expensive and I'm not a big fan of steaks.

Even if you find a menu item that doesn't appear to have any gluten and the waiter swears doesn't as well, there's always the danger of cross-contamination where your gluten-free food is cooked on the same surface, with the same tools, or near enough to some glutenous foods that you get a little surprise. To be sure, you don't die from it, but let's just say that you suddenly start doing that "gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now" dance.

Recently, a local channel did a special, hard-hitting report on celiac featuring the local celiac support group and a local restauranteur with the disease. I will finally dine somewhere that not only understands about celiac but will put forth the effort to prevent cross-contamination. Glorious! I'm going there for lunch today. I'll update with a general report (in case anyone cares).


Dancing Purple Hippo Sighting

July 15, 2003 8:38 AM

Watch the oddly-hypnotic Kozo get her groove-thing on. [from MemePool]


Firebird's Value Revealed

July 15, 2003 5:18 AM

I recommended Firebird awhile back and I've just discovered a page that tells me my recommendation is sound. There's a lot of really cool stuff there.

I especially like the extensibility. There's a browser that will both dynamically incorporate CSS changes as well as play Tetris and Solitaire. What's best, this isn't feature bloat: it's a well-designed plugin architecture and scripting language. Bravo Mozilla!


Kids and Science

July 15, 2003 2:45 AM

I found out yesterday that Bertrand Brinley wrote a novel about the Mad Scientists Club called The Big Kerplop that has been out of print for quite some time. Slashdot had a review of it yesterday that really whetted my appetite and left me nostalgic for those book series that I voraciously devoured—series like The Three Investigators, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys, and Einstein Anderson. Each of these books had a common thread: kids using their minds to solve problems that baffle adults. This really resonated with me and I probably read every book in those series; no small task considering that there must've been 400 Hardy Boys books.

On a related note, I will definitely have to remember SciToys in the future. I want my girls to grow up intellectually curious and exposed to the wonders of science through the miracle of a film can cannon.


Guerrilla Marketing

July 14, 2003 6:18 PM

Guerrilla marketing was one of the few things I really enjoyed about my former pottery studio business—the other being the Web site itself, duh. We did some pretty innovative things to get noticed and we had practically zero budget.

For example, I set up the administrator app for our calendar to email all of the local newspapers, television shows, and web sites with information about the event. We did it through a customized email or a form post. It was really cool and we were the only studio in town that consistently got in the paper.

We also bought a number of Google AdWords. We probably spent a total of $100 over the course of a year and a half, but we got emails from around the world for our studio and first-page placement for those keywords. We got people from far away in the Valley pass a dozen pottery studios because they heard about us from Google or people planning visits to the Valley came to our studio for that same reason.

We made door hangers, flyers, and other throwaways for distribution and we put them on brightly-colored paper for added visibility. We picked neighborhoods that fit our demographic and we absolutely plastered them to good effect. We'd go up to people working in their yards and personally deliver a spiel about our family-owned studio.

We even got on a local news program. Take all of this with a grain of salt, though, because my business failed after two and a half years. It mostly had to do with location, but we also were way too generous with our specials. We, in effect, trained our customers to come only during the specials. If you've got any questions about marketing from someone who was responsible for low-budget marketing for two and a half years, leave a comment and I'll respond.


Review: Down with Love

July 14, 2003 3:50 PM

Down with Love is the second movie from the director Peyton Reed, the first being the fascinating cheerleader comedy Bring It On. Down with Love falls into the same romantic comedy category, but the two are quite different. What Women Want is more of Down with Love's intellectual ancestor than Bring It On.

The story is pretty simple. Barbara Novak (played by Renée Zellweger) is an aspiring author from Maine who has written a book for the feminist generation to be—the story is set in 1962—and her publishers—all men except for the woman editor who accepted the proposal—are not particularly interested in seeing it become successful. They agree to publish it, but not to promote it.

Luckily for Novak, her editor is a real career gal who doesn't want her chauvinistic colleagues to win again. She exerts herself trying to get the book promoted, primarily through a successful men's magazine and its star columnist Catcher Block (played by Ewan McGregor). Block stands Novak up repeatedly for a cover interview in order to seduce various women that pass in and out of his life—exactly the kind of man Novak wrote the book to combat. Finally, Novak gets her book highlighted on the Ed Sullivan Show and sales take off.

Block realizes that he's letting the story of the year—not to mention a beautiful woman—get away and he pursues. Novak, however, wants nothing to do with him and his womanizing ways. Block decides that he'll get revenge on Novak by writing an exposé that will show the world that Novak is really just after love and marriage. So he pretends to be a down-to-earth astronaut and gradually wins her affections.

I won't reveal the rest because it's rather elaborate and best watched firsthand. Suffice it to say, it's not as cliché as it's sounded up to this point. Block's boss and friend Peter (played by David Hyde Pierce) displays excellent comedic timing and participates in a subplot involving the Novak's editor and his contra-Block tendencies. Tony Randall has a bit part as Novak's publisher and he, like Bob Newhart in Legally Blonde 2, reminds me how much I miss some of the old sitcoms.

Every review in the world mentions Down with Love's homage to the Doris Day-Rock Hudson fluff films of the 60s. I've never seen them so I can't comment. The movie definitely evokes a sense of the 60s and Zellweger seems to be having a blast with her character. Director Reed has successfully recreated the proper mood and the subtle sexual undertone present in 60s movies. The set design and costumery are excellent; I wish our era was as elegant and demure as that one was.

Down with Love doesn't have any weighty issues to deal with. It could have examined the feminist revolution more closely, but I think that that ship has sailed and no one questions seriously the rightness of women having a role in the economy, society, and politics anymore. The movie thus revels in its lightness—probably capturing well the spirit of the Day-Hudson flicks that I've never seen and would probably be an important source of context at this point. I enjoyed myself, but I doubt that I would buy the movie when it comes out on DVD. It's definitely worth renting or seeing in a discount theater, though.

[NOTE: I saw Down with Love at one of those discount movie theaters, one that I've been going to for many years. It was purchased a few years back by some sort of chain called Silver Cinemas and it has steadily deteriorated ever since. It was once a happening place with cheap movies and cheap popcorn, full of neon and flash. It was schlocky but consciously so. Now, they don't even staff the box office and they ran out of tickets. The popcorn and other concessions have skyrocketed to normal movie theater prices and the discount is only to $2.50. The toilets hardly flush, the hand dryer hardly works, and the neon is largely off. In short, it's decrepit and it's taken the entire plaza that buzzed with it along for the ride. I relate this because it affects the movie experience and really detracted from my enjoyment of the movie.]


Yahoo is buying Overture!?!

July 14, 2003 3:12 AM

The Register reports that Yahoo is buying Overture for $1.63 billion.

Aside from the obvious Yahoo already uses Google for its search engine, this move is also interesting because Overture had previously purchased AltaVista and FAST while Yahoo had recently purchased Inktomi. That means that Yahoo's now got three owned search engines, one contractual search engine, and two additional portals. Integrating (and even sorting them out) is going to be a pain in the butt. However, they're now in a much firmer position vis-à-vis Google than they ever have been since FAST is a good search engine—I was never very impressed with Inktomi except in the beginning—and Overture makes Google's ad revenue look like a pittance.

A Slashdot story about this matter has just appeared. I'm sure there'll be some interesting discussion therein.


Segway

July 13, 2003 6:47 PM

I was just visiting Amazon and I noticed the Segway HT icon at the top left corner—I know it's been there forever, but I just saw it again. I decided to click on it since I don't recall ever doing so.

Strangely, none of the normal Amazon items like customer reviews or ratings are available. You don't think normally-quite-open Amazon is afraid of bad reviews about this thing that made Bezos giggle, do you?


The Little IDE That Could

July 13, 2003 6:33 PM

I just got done reading a JavaWorld review of jEdit, a open-source, Java-based IDE. I've been using it for a long time now and I swear by it. Why? First, it's free. Second, it is amazing in the breadth of its features. Third, I can use the same version set up exactly the same way on both Mac OS X and Windows. Fourth, it has the best source code editor I have ever come across. Finally, it is being actively developed.

I used to use ColdFusion Studio—link goes to Macromedia HomeSite's product page because Macromedia end-of-lifed CF Studio and because the two programs share a common base—but it was always so slow, static, and Windows-only. After reading The Pragmatic Programmer's admonition to find an editor you like and learn everything there is to know about it, I decided that all of the switching between Windows and Macintosh and using different editors had to change. Then and there I started looking for an editor that suited my needs, had a bright outlook, and worked on both platforms.

I quickly whittled my options down to jEdit and emacs. It really wasn't a difficult decision in the end because jEdit looks and feels like ColdFusion Studio—the environment I programmatically grew up in. That was good ol' jEdit 3.2 and jEdit's currently in the beta stage for 4.2. It's come a very long way. Reviewing the feature set gives but a glimpse of the editor's power.

For the record, I've tried Eclipse but it doesn't really work for me since I'm not a Java guy yet. I primarily edit HTML and ColdFusion files with a smattering of Java files while I'm learning the language. HTML and ColdFusion files don't really follow a project-based idiom and so I didn't feel comfortable in that environment. Once I get my Java legs, then I'll definitely re-evaluate Eclipse since I've read a ton of people who think it's manna.

Also, the JavaWorld review offers up some good reasons why jEdit is better than Eclipse or NetBeans, illustrates some ways to use jEdit to support extreme programming, and explains jEdit's plugin architecture. It's a pretty good review, but it doesn't begin to describe its text editing features. You'll have to try those out for yourself.

[UPDATE (7/21/03): Interesting review of Eclipse in Action over at Slashdot.]


Spider-Man on MTV?

July 12, 2003 7:20 PM

I'm watching a new animated version of Spider-Man on MTV. Very strange: I've heard absolutely nothing of it, but it's visually impressive. I came into the episode midstream, so I can't comment on the writing as a whole. But it sounds pretty good so far and the line-up is impressive: Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker, Lisa Loeb—I've got all of her CDs—as Mary Jane, and Ian Ziering as Parker's friend.

[UPDATE: I've now watched two additional episodes and I have to say that I am totally sold. I think I've found something more for TiVo's voracious appetite. Also, this episode I'm watching now has James Woods voicing the villain.]


Final Entry on Dave Winer

July 12, 2003 6:59 PM

In a comment on Andrew Grumet's blog, Dave Winer announces that he's going to build a new RSS validator that will be open source and outside the control of Mark Pilgrim. That's a pretty significant thing to announce in a comment on someone else's blog.

Oh, and Dave also decided that I'm a real person. Apparently, someone must have thought that I was an elaborate alter ego of Mark's—elaborate because he went to the trouble of creating a huge backstory, nearly a year of bblog archives, and almost a decade of writings. Seriously, I'm not making this up.

[UPDATE: This will be my final blog entry about the Mark Pilgrim v. Dave Winer fracas. I'm sure this subject is of interest to maybe one regular reader. It's helped my traffic see a small spike, but it was nothing compared to the time I got that story posted on Slashdot.]

[UPDATE 2: It's funny. Just a few days prior to this whole brouhaha I decided to start following the blogosphere more closely through NetNewsWire—expanding my subscriptions from 96 to 127—and I get embroiled in this whole thing. Quite the coincidence.]

[UPDATE 3 (7/15/03): After completely melting down, Dave prevailed. Mark has shuttered his Winer Watcher app and taken away a very useful utility—as was his right, of course. The controversy is not forgotten, though, and I think Dave's credibility is pretty much shot through.]

[UPDATE 4 (7/18/03): Mark has unveiled a revision system on his own blog. Very cool and proves that he's willing to stand up to scrutiny. Also, Dave's formed an "independent" advisory board consisting of him, a former UserLand employee who makes NetNewsWire, and a columnist who highlights Dave's achievements at every opportunity. Uh huh.]


Harry Potter

July 12, 2003 6:11 PM

I've only read the first Harry Potter book and I considered it quite derivative. It wasn't anything particularly special, but I have pretty high standards when it comes to fiction.

I read A.S. Byatt's review in The New York Times and it left a pretty bad impression. Freudian analysis has always, naturally, left me cold. Then I read Dianne Durante's review and it was the complete opposite. The worldviews of the two couldn't be more different and more patent—some philosophic detection should easily uncover the antipodes.


Blog Census

July 12, 2003 8:43 AM

The stuff over at BlogCensus.net is pretty neat. They've made available their raw data files for anyone's data mining. They also expose their tool's data through a Web services API.

I don't know that I'll do anything with it, but I'm glad to know that I could. I can't imagine the bandwidth they must have to be able to offer up a 2.9GB file to all comers.


Flaming

July 11, 2003 10:27 PM

Does this seem like I'm flaming Don? I'm starting to think so.

If so, then I declare this my first ever Web-based flame! (NOTE: I've flamed a lot when I was a kid on BBSs, but never on the Web or Usenet.) Hmm, I'm not sure I like it so much. On the other hand, this is nothing that I wouldn't say in public to his face. It's an old-fashioned slippery slope argument, possibly even satire—I can't decide which.


Back from Bingo

July 11, 2003 9:42 PM

Just got back from a midnight bingo session. Yes, it really is this late. I'll use this entry to reflect on what bingo means to me. Umm, absolutely nothing!

The wife loves it, so I—being a good husband—go ahead and play the mindless game with her. I will grant that it's cheaper than slots, lasts a lot longer, and provides a fixed amount that you'll lose—all features that I like in any gambling I do. However, it's still gambling and I don't like gambling because the odds are so heavily stacked against you.

Stacked odds are no big thing. We opened a pottery studio with the odds stacked against us. I got married at 18 and clawed my way up my particular corporate ladder against substantial obstacles. I'm not one to shy away from a challenge.

But bingo and the gambling games like it are designed for most players to lose consistently and they provide no real way to change the odds. You get a fixed card and the only skill required is to keep up with the caller. Slot machines take your money, spin some dials, and you win or lose based on where those dials stop. Can you pull the lever differently to affect the outcome? Nope, it's all chance. Those are the sorts of games I can't stand. Poker and blackjack at least allow you to use strategy to plan your moves and actions. Not that I'd ever play either because you can also lose really big.

So I play it reluctantly, only for the experience of being with my wife and watching her enjoy herself. Oh, and I like to crack jokes while I'm there. Oh, and there's free soda. I try to drink back my losses, but I'm afraid that I'm still not breaking even on that front.


Funny Joke

July 11, 2003 3:38 PM

Funny math joke at Uncertain Principles, found via Brad DeLong.


NADD: Nothing to do with those, BTW.

July 11, 2003 9:35 AM

Rands in Repose published an exposé of that little known or understood syndrome known as NADD that I found via Steve.

As a content-fire-hose drinker myself, I have to say that I see a lot of me in this post. I should probably send it over to Sandi so that she can better understand me. The thing I'd have to correct is that the N in NADD necessarily implies computers and technology. Surely, the groundbreaking work that is Revenge of the Nerds demonstrated that nerds come in all stripes and flavors. In other words, there are physics nerds, history nerds, biology nerds, fashion nerds, etc. Heck, some cross nerdly boundaries: I myself am a computer nerd, a history nerd, and an economics nerd (among other nerdly pursuits).


NED: Okily-dokily!

July 11, 2003 5:25 AM

I read Kevin Maney's column in USA Today—remember when USA Today was a junior upstart reviled by the established newspapers? You've come a long way, baby!—about Motorola's new technology dubbed NED yesterday and I am excited!

Just the thought of today's flatscreen TVs at slimmer proportions for the price of today's 32-inch CRTs has me positively salivating. I've got two 27" televisions in my house and we've had them for well over six years. I just can't see myself spending the money on the new TVs at today's prices, but justifying these NEDs to myself is a piece of cake.


New Blog

July 11, 2003 5:19 AM

There's a new blog called Crooked Timber that just struck my fancy—it's aggregator-worthy—run by a group of academics. It's probably going to become a lot of academic bullpucky, but even that can be valuable sometimes. You've got to know your opponents to probably counter them. Didn't you want to be an academic someday? Yes, but.


More on Dave and Mark

July 11, 2003 3:45 AM

The blogging world's two biggest opponents are scraping it up again in the comments section of Don Park's post on the Winer Watcher. I'm participating more than I usually do.

An interesting thing about this just happened: Dave was responding to my response to his response—sorry no permalinks in the comments section—and then launched off into a diatribe directed towards Mark that suggested a willful designing of his RSS validator to undermine Dave's authority on the RSS spec. It was lengthy and accusatory. He essentially said that Mark's flaming of Dave was a cover for his duplicity on the RSS validator.

I replied to a couple of the points he made in his reply, hit post, and then that part of Dave's response was gone. Deleted. Vanished. Where'd it go? It's odd to me because Don Park probably wouldn't edit comments left on his site unless they were way off the wall. Dave's comment was not off the wall. How then could Dave's comment disappear? Well, I think that the answer lies with the fact that Don's comments are hosted on UserLand's servers. Interesting! Dave's penchant for editing apparently extends to other people's blogs and comments that he makes in haste. This is strong bad stuff!

[UPDATE: Winer Watcher—I liked Winer Watch better, though I guess Watcher conveys more of an active and automatic stance—has been updated with a disclaimer affirming its fair use nature in quite convincing terms. I think Mark's put it on sufficiently strong foundations to shield him from whatever Dave can throw his way. Kudos!]

[UPDATE 2: Holy crap! The discussions expanded to several additional sites. Dave himself has commented on the matter, trying to bait Mark into 'splaining himself. It's kind of funny: each time Dave posts a link to someone's site that agrees with editing your entries throughout the day, the same people go over to that site and start up the same conversation that they had on the last site. I like to think that I've added a little something each time, but I leave that to your judgement (whoever you might be).]


Drudge Interview

July 10, 2003 7:21 AM

Matt Drudge has been off my radar for some time now. I think sometime during the Clinton era was the last time I read his Report with any consistency. I found him to be a simple portal to other conservatives. His original content was usually baseless and amounted to little more than rumormongering. I've also encountered him on Fox News and I couldn't stand him there. The only thing I ever liked about him was his fedora.

Begin parenthetical aside: Oh, how I wish it were socially acceptable again to wear those things! I watch movies from the forties and television shows from the fifties and all of the men are wearing glorious fedoras. I've come very close to purchasing one several times over my adult life, but decided against it because I've never seen another living human wear one in public. Except Matt Drudge. I'm not one that usually cares about what other's think, but it's akin to me to wearing a mohawk; I also don't like a lot of attention and wearing a fedora out and about nowadays would certainly elicit that and a bunch of comment. End aside.

What brought him back onto my radar? Punnily, an interview with him in the current issue of Radar magazine conducted by Camille Paglia, who wouldn't be a blip on my radar if it hadn't been for an interview with her in Reason back in 1995.

Interesting quote:
I just post the things I find interesting. I can't remember the last time I actually read a full-blown article, you know. Usually I just scan the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs. I've had to become a speed-reader simply to feed this great big hole. I've got five computer screens lined up, and thousands of news stories to go through on any given day. It comes down to an editorial decision that I make every second that I'm sitting in front of the monitors. If you're not careful you can fill up people's minds with stories that go nowhere.

Does this remind anyone else of that sequence in Metropolis with the clock-like machine and the main protagonist? It's also interesting that he doesn't read the whole articles, instead just scanning the beginning and the end: that's exactly how were taught in graduate school to read books and I always hated the practice because you miss so much context.

Final interesting quote about headlines: "They make life seem fun and dramatic and hysterical in the extreme. There is just a drama to every second on earth. There are never any down moments for me."

[Note to Radar editors: Get rid of the hyphenation in the columns. They don't correspond to actual column ends. This suggests that the Web version is an afterthought and adjunct to the print magazine. Maybe some day they'll be able to get a CMS.]

[UPDATE (9/1/03): Drudge has provided some details about his business. More lucrative than I thought.]


Reality TV Channel

July 10, 2003 7:05 AM

A Wired interview examines the inception of a new cable channel set to debut this summer called Reality Central.

I should pitch them my own reality show concept entitled "Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure." Costs should be pretty minimal, since it's just repackaged COPS episodes and Jerry Springer clips.

I think these two questions and answers are telling:

How will you cultivate new fans?
We'll expand the base by making it more accessible, and foreign shows will be a big part of that. Some are much racier.

How far will you go?
Full-frontal nudity. As a basic cable network, nudity is OK but full-on sex isn't. We may explore racier content as pay-per-view specials.


I think they know quite well what will draw viewers, eh?


Winer Whines

July 10, 2003 2:37 AM

Dave Winer crows about Mark Pilgrim's Winer Watch page that hits Dave's site every five minutes. The Winer Watch basically compares some baseline entry pulled from Dave's RSS feed with future edits and revisions, displaying those edits for everyone.

I can understand Dave's point about copyright (his bandwidth issue is pretty spurious since I'm sure Mark's pulling is a blip compared to the larger RSS downloads), but Mark's really not adding any comment to the page and offers prodigious links back to his site. I, myself, have contemplated just such an effort because Dave edits his blog like crazy but I never know what has been edited. The only things I can tell is when he's added to and even then, I'm not completely sure of what's new.

As an aside, this highlights the power of RSS and I wish the news aggregators would take advantage of this. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame has said that he's going to differentiate between new and updated posts, but he doesn't show what's been edited. It would be awesome if aggregators would demarcate what's been changed by things like strikeouts and colored text. I can see the problems to overcome since bloggers often use strikeouts themselves, but with a combination of coloration and font weight I think it could be done.

[UPDATE: Mark's implemented the exact system that I suggested. I don't know if he read my entry, but I'm glad he tuned up his Winer Watcher (interesting, it was called Winer Watch this morning). He did it with his usual designer aplomb, using a legend and background colors to make the edits visually distinct. Much better implementation than what I suggested.

I'm also having a conversation with Steve Ivy about the subject. He thinks Mark's app falls under fair use. He says that this is akin to Radio UserLand's built-in feature that allows you to easily consume other Radio user's blog entries. I guess he's right: I remember when Dave introduced that feature and was widely derided for it. Steve called the current use of RSS "text-tv" and reminded me that the last S in RSS is all about syndication.

I think Dave should just make an acceptable use policy of his feed like Slashdot's and say in it that hitting the feed more than once every 20 minutes is verboten, banning any IP address that does more than that. Or he should just live with it, but Dave's never been good about criticism (more context).]


Hmm,

July 10, 2003 1:34 AM

Just got the following email:
Gud day to you! I saw your cooking on lifestyle channel and it really is great!!! My mum opened a small coffee shop in our province (Bontoc, Mountain Province, Philippines) and she's making pancakes for the early birds unfortunately she can't get the right mixture. I was thinking if your good self could send me the recipe that you i saw on lifestyle channel. I tried to get it from their web site but i can't find it. I really would appreciate it so much if you can help me with this. Thanks a lot and more power to you!!!!

Hmm, what do you do with this? I thought about replying that I'll be in the Phillipines next week and that I'd be happy to prepare my special pancakes for both of them, but I decided that was a little mean. So I just disabused her of the notion that I'm some high-falutin' cooking show host—I have no idea where she got that one—and wished her well on her pancake quest.


The Science of Cooking

July 9, 2003 8:04 AM

I want to learn how to cook. So, in my usual geeky way, I've been delving into the science behind cooking and watching every bit of Alton Brown I can. (Thanks, TiVo!)

My exploration of the science of cooking has been greatly aided by Harold McGee's wonderful tomes On Food and Cooking and The Curious Cook. Both of these mammoth books cover food science, history, and culture in a very accessible way. I'd recommend them as a useful adjunct to Good Eats.

However, they're tightly packed—684 and 352 pages, respectively—and that means that not that many people are willing to trudge through them. With that in mind, shows like Alton's and museum's like the Exploratorium distill them into more edible chunks—pun intended.

The museum's Science of Cooking exhibit does a good job at the task. Since I've read the McGee's chapter on eggs, I can comment on their egg page. My evaluation: good coverage, lacks some depth that McGee's 40+ page chapter explored. What did I expect? I mean, come on!


Beautiful Layout

July 9, 2003 3:07 AM

Keri's wedding site is visually stunning. Having been married when the Web was just branching off of Gopher, we never got to do anything like this. Maybe I'll make something like this for our daughters births. Her site is at once simple and refined—in a word, it's designed.

Note: the markup is typical Dreamweaver bloatcode. That's why my layout never looks pixelly-perfect: I hate using tables for anything but the simplest layout. I've tried to use divs and spans, but it usually doesn't look good in a browser that I know someone is using. To put it bluntly, I'm not a designer. And that's okay, because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me. I'm just going to do the best Bill Brown Information Center I can.

[UPDATE: I just realized that she was married in Disneyland. That's wild, wacky stuff.]


Why Blog Part II

July 9, 2003 2:48 AM

Chris Locke has a new blog entry along the lines of my earlier entry about why I blog. Well, the point of the entry is along the lines of mine, but the execution is more consonant with Real Men Don't Eat Quiche.

The things he lists as characteristic of bloggers (versus some other category of people he labels "narcissists"—a very odd dichotomy to be sure) certainly don't apply to me. Bloggers trade in ad hominem attacks? Huh? I can only think of a couple that do that. Irritated? Not particularly. I guess what really bothers me about RageBoy's post is that it glories in self-importance and self-aggrandizement. These are not the reasons why I blog.


Talk Sex with Sue

July 8, 2003 6:12 AM

Sandi and I have been watching Talk Sex with Sue Johanson lately. No, we're not looking to get into any perversions. It's just a call-in show about sexuality hosted by an old lady who could be anyone's grandmother. I know Dr. Ruth was old and all, but she didn't look that old and I don't recall her discussing some of the things that Sue talks about.

There's just something fascinating about watching an old lady discuss the best in butt plugs and vibrators. I mean that in the least kinky way you can imagine. Old people are definitely not sexy—though my views on the subject will certain change when I become old.


Nigerian Scams

July 8, 2003 5:52 AM

Hate Nigerian scams? Many have taken to baiting these con artists to see what happens.

This guy has taken it to another level. He takes the character of porn stars to bait the scammers, among other personas.

On a related note, there's still time to sign up for the 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference.

[UPDATE (8/7/03): Lads of Lagos is another funny site. Be sure to check out the story of Tobi Williams.]


Ask and Ye Shall Receive

July 8, 2003 3:43 AM

Awhile back, I recommended an application called Library 1.0 for book cataloging. I said that paying my shareware fee of $10 would help with future development and that said development would hopefully fill out the features it lacked. I even sent the developer an email suggesting the features that I would like to see.

Today, ArcaneWare released Library 1.1. The new 310k download offers everything I wanted and more! It's like the developer fulfilled all of my feature requests. I don't suppose he did because he never responded to my email, but I don't care all the same. The batch ISBN entry and text file import are worth the $10 fee alone. The HTML export is clean and simple—it's not XHTML by any stretch of the imagination, but hopefully it's customizable.

In related news, I'm up to 106 books cataloged. Admittedly, I haven't been putting a lot of energy into it.


Another Business Article

July 8, 2003 2:07 AM

Along the lines of yesterday's entry about Sam Walton is a brand new article from the Harvard Business School about successful management practices. The authors studied 160 companies to look for successes—I don't know how they came up with 160; perhaps 150 was just too low for them and 170 would've taken too long.

The article is really an excerpt from a larger articles (presumably one that lists the 160 companies chosen) and follows the Aristotelian premise of finding the good by survey. The authors, of course, have boiled down the secret to these companies success to what they call the 4+2 formula. First, focus on the four fundamentals of business—strategy, execution, culture, and structure—and then pick two from the secondary fundamentals lists—talent, innovation, leadership, and mergers/partnerships. Voilà, you've got success!

Nevermind that most companies have a hard time focusing on one or two of them. Forget that most of the fundamentals and secondaries are derived from leadership and innovation. Don't worry that Sam's 10 rules say the same stuff in a more direct, useful manner. This is science, baby, and they spent years studying this stuff. That stuff from that Arkansas retailer is just one man's opinion (just because he built an small-town retail store into the largest company in the world don't mean a thing).

If this sounds like disdain for academia, you're pretty close. I believe that, generally, academics enjoy a standing that is undeserved. Sure they've toughed out years of grueling graduate school and written hundreds of articles on topics that most people would never rub two brain cells together contemplating, but does that mean that they're more insightful or enlightened than you or I? Definitely not. Sometimes they're much less so because they're sheltered from the real world by university administrators. Sure, they face funding issues and have to apply for grants to get to do interesting things but these pressures aren't nearly the same as those faced by businessmen or engineers.

I say these things as an academic. I've fulfilled about half the course requirements for a master's in history and plan to go on to my doctorate in the future. I want to be an academic, but not because I want to escape the rat race of the real world. I think we need more experienced people in academia; people who have gone through the trials and tribulations of the outside world, not ones who have lived their entire adult lives within the confines of ivory towers and hallowed halls.

The point of all this is that you can read academic treatises on how to succeed in business till you're spouting their gobbledy-gook too, but a study of great, successful businesses will be much more fruitful. You'll learn what those businesses did that got them from small beginnings to towering heights, but most importantly, you'll get a glimpse into the mindset that took them there. You won't be able to unthinkingly duplicate Wal-Mart's success, but by understanding how Sam Walton thought about things and applying that same sort of thinking to your own business problems, you are laying the groundwork of success.

I think Sam Walton would agree with me on these points. I think anybody who's taken a class where the professor isn't making any sense and seems to be doing so deliberately would agree with me.


Wal-Mart Rules

July 7, 2003 8:59 AM

Stumbled across Sam's Rules for Building a Business over at Wal-Mart.com today. It's a distillation of the wisdom offered up in Sam Walton's Made in America, which I haven't read or purchased though I will. I love Wal-Mart as a business, though I rarely shop there myself.

The ten rules laid down by Sam are a mix of your commonsensical, homespun aphorisms to amazing insights that take on new meaning in today's environment. Relevant to today's earlier posting about corporate blogs, Sam suggests Rule #7:
Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines—the ones who actually talk to the customer—are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know.

There's also a healthy mix of customer service and TCB suggestions. This just bumped his book up in the queue.


Stock Photography

July 7, 2003 7:26 AM

For future reference: stock.xchng. This site offers over 19,000 royalty-free free photos. Cruising through a couple of categories, I was amazed at the number of images here. Granted, it's no Corbis but it's right in my price range. [from BrainFuel]


Pull Quotes

July 7, 2003 7:11 AM

For future reference: Pull Quotes and the Web. These would really spice up my essays. Hmm, how to make them database-driven... [from Zeldman]


Ann Coulter

July 7, 2003 5:47 AM

Ann Coulter's done it again! The conservative columnist has just come out with a new book entitled Treason, that's a sort of follow-up to her bestselling Slander!

This book, which I haven't bought, seeks to rehabilitate the character of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who tried to nail suspected Communists to the wall in the fifties. McCarthyism has long carried a negative connotation of shrill, strident witch-hunting. McCarthy paraded hundreds of witnesses before his congressional committee to answer for their political beliefs. He lobbed grenades casually into the witnesses' lives without any thought as to the consequences.

If this sounds like Ann Coulter to you, then I'd say you're on to her. Shrillness sells. It's practically a feature of the American psyche: come up with something shocking and people will throw money at you like crazy. Look at the popularity of reality shows, for the quickest example. The newest Big Brother season is going to have a house comprised of some people and their ex-boyfriends and girlfriends. Why would they do that unless they were trying to foment conflict? I'm sure there's plenty of people who are, at this very moment, eagerly awaiting the new season.

Ann Coulter epitomizes this. She says shocking and stupid things. Liberals bristle and flame her, conservatives get to see liberals frothing up, and the American public attributes substance to her "constitutional lawyer"-hood. Liberals and conservatives have her as guests on their shows because the ratings spike whenever she's on and the cycle gets more vicious.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has an illuminating editorial on the "Maureen Dowd of conservatives." Reason's Sarah Rimensnyder comments on the "bitch goddess" and her previous book. Salon demonstrates the typical liberal reaction to her stridency, thus playing right into her hand.

[UPDATE: Wow! Andrew Sullivan tears Coulter a new one in a post he calls "Coulter Kampf"—what a great title! Calling her the inverse of Michael Moore, he skewers her intellectual fraud and cites countless examples of her shrill rhetoric. Excellent post.]

[UPDATE 2 (7/10/03): Matt Gaylor on IP offers up the idiot comment of the week from Coulter: "No serious person thinks that we are in the middle of a civil-liberties crisis." Time, 7/14/2003, pg. 8]


Blogs in the Workplace

July 7, 2003 3:14 AM

From Dave Winer: The New York Times examines "Blogs in the Workplace". I have to agree with the article's sentiments—I could see the value in my company of employees having weblogs. I think every employee should have it, but I know that that'd never fly in my organization. At a minimum, those with regular announcements or content of interest should have them.

It becomes especially interesting when these corporate blogs are coupled with RSS aggregators. Doing so eliminates the hassle of having a ton of employees contributing content across the enterprise. Individuals within the company can subscribe to other employee's feeds and ignore the other multitude of voices. People get to choose whether to pay attention or not. Email lists frequently don't include people who should be included or include people whose responsibilities no longer require their inclusion. With blogs, these people can subscribe or unsubscribe at will.

The problem I see right now is with the software. MovableType's commercial license is bizarre and unnecessarily restrictive. I'm not sure what the license fee is ($150? Maybe.) and I'm not sure what restrictions it suggests for an intranet network of blogs. Google's Blogger is a product with which I'm intimately familiar, but there doesn't seem to be a way to use it in the enterprise unless you're Google. Then there's Radio UserLand and Frontier: nope, I don't think so.

In my younger days, I would have said this was a job for Bill the Coder to fill the space. Enh. Not anymore.


Hacking Away

July 5, 2003 7:01 PM

Phew! I've been hacking away at this site's code off and on all day. Now I'm sitting here watching TV and hacking still more. What's coming up on this site?

Well, I'm developing an entire administrative section for the site that will allow me to update just about any section through a web interface instead of having to drop into jEdit and FTP everything up to the server. Making everything editable through the web browser will also have additional benefits: I'll be able to repurpose content left and right to make it more interesting and I'll be able to offer all of the content in multiple formats for easy consumption by anyone and anything. More importantly, though, it will make it easier to add content.

And around these parts, content is king.


Legally Blonde 3

July 4, 2003 3:51 AM

This should never see the light of day.

In related news, it's trilogy week at Greg's Previews née Upcoming Movies which means that he's got a bunch of updates about thirds in a series. Here's the list of unfortunates: Spider-Man III, Men in Black III, The Santa Clause III, Scooby Doo 3, Caddyshack III, X-Men 3, and Ocean's Twelve (okay, it's not a trilogy but I really liked Ocean's Eleven).


G5 Benchmarks from NASA

July 4, 2003 2:06 AM

An engineer at NASA has put up a page describing the tests he's conducted using a dual-2.0 GHz G5, a dual-1.0 GHz G4, a dual-1.25 GHz G4, a 2.0 GHz P4, and a 2.66 GHz P4. He ran benchmarks using the same NASA software on all five machines. The software was optimized for the AltiVec-engine of the G4, but not further optimized for the G5's 64-bitness.

To be fair, he even hobbled the dualies by running them the software on one CPU only. The results show that the G5 is quite competitive with the P4s ("within 1 MFLOP of the 2.66 GHz P4", "32% faster than the 2 GHz P4"), lays waste to the G4s ("97% faster than the 1.25 GHz G4", "142% faster than the 1 GHz G4"), and offers much better MFLOPs per MHz ratios (0.127 MFLOPS/MHz versus 0.096 MFLOPS/MHz for the P4s).

There's been a lot of crowing lately about Apple cooking the benchmarks. That may be—though I don't buy it entirely—but they also suggested that benchmarks aren't how one should compare computers. Instead they recommend—and I totally agree—that real-world applications that exist on both platforms should be used.

Here we have some evidence that high-end applications do quite well with the new G5s. In fact, when the second processor was brought online, MFLOPS soared up to 498 versus the 255 for the P4 in the scalar test (which doesn't let the AltiVec-engine offer its advantages) and 5177 MFLOPS in the vector test (which the P4 can't participate in because it doesn't do vector computation like the G4 and G5 do). It achieved all this while maintaining a MFLOPS/MHz ratio of 0.126 in scalar and 1.29 in vector—suggesting that dual processors roughly equal two independent processors.


Now if only I liked Hello Kitty!

July 3, 2003 7:03 AM

From Christian Cantrell, I see that Sanyo makes a Hello Kitty toaster. The best feature is that it toasts Hello Kitty onto every piece of toast you make. If only I liked Hello Kitty or could eat toast...I wonder if there's any other toast imprinting options out there.


OmniWeb Sneaky Peeks

July 3, 2003 3:45 AM

OmniWeb 4.5 has a new sneaky peek out today—finally!—that incorporates the latest WebCore changes. It doesn't use WebKit, unfortunately, so it's still of normal download size. I couldn't discern any other wow-features though, just a bunch of bugfixes.


Byte of the Apple Returns

July 3, 2003 3:06 AM

Charles Haddad's "Byte of the Apple" column for BusinessWeek returned yesterday with a theme along the lines of one of my previous entries. [Side note: Doesn't Haddad look like he's doing a "got milk?" spot?]

He predicts that Apple's iPod music player will grow to become its primary source of business, relegating the hardware to "perhaps even a giveaway someday to lure eager iPod buyers." Umm, perhaps not. I don't see the Macintosh platform fading into obscurity or Apple shifting its focus to the music player anytime soon. I'd say that the WWDC keynote announcements suggest that Apple's still got some confidence in Mac OS X and the hardware platform to support it.

He's been on a six-month hiatus from the column; I suppose we should give him a few columns to regain his sense of punditry. He's obviously still a little rusty and Dvorak-y.


Clever Advertising

July 3, 2003 2:51 AM

You've probably seen the commercials for Axe body spray—I think that means deodorant, but I'm not exactly sure—where use of the product results in random women accosting you. I thought that they were well targeted and moderately clever, but they've outdone themselves with the latest creation.

One of the guys at work brought in a copy of Axe's new guide entitled Coping With All the Ladies: The Axe Wearer's Handbook. It's a mock book along the lines of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook except that it features how-tos for men who suddenly find themselves overrun with women. I know that it made the rounds in my department and even brought a chuckle to a guy who's completely inured to advertising.

There's long been talk about how the future of commercials is making them more clever so people will want to watch them or embedding them into the shows themselves so people can't fast-forward through them, but I think that this sort of marketing tool is very effective. I don't know how commercials can get any better—the top commercials, obviously—without devolving into the Calvin-Klein, what-the-hell-is-this-commercial-even-for style.


Chernobyl. Wow.

July 3, 2003 12:10 AM

From RageBoy, I got a link to the Chernobyl disaster's Web site and especially the one about the sarcophagus currently encasing the Chernobyl site.

All you can say is wow. What a horrifying example of the institutional incompetence and arrogance of the former Soviet Union!

[UPDATE 7/9/03: Wired as an article about the site's new sarcophagus.]


Review: Legally Blonde 2

July 2, 2003 11:58 PM

I saw Legally Blonde 2 last night with my wife and a friend.

[UPDATE: I had a full review ready to post when OmniWeb 4.5b2 crashed. I tried everything to recover it, but couldn't. I don't have the inclination right now to go through that again, so you don't get the pleasure of my wit. I'll sum, though: Forgettable. Bob Newhart as deus ex machina makes me wish he was still making television shows. Sorry, maybe I'll feel like it sometime. It was a really good review. Then the computer just went *beep* *beep* *beep* and it was gone.]


Obligatory Shirky Post

July 2, 2003 6:25 AM

It's almost trite, but I've still got to do it. Clay Shirky—the social pundit with the funny name—has a new column out entitled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" that is over 10,000 words long. Umm, column? How about treatise? I'm on page six of a single-spaced, thirteen-page printout—I would have been further along, but I was in an all-staff meeting and I had to look like I was participating at times—but so far, it's a real page turner!

The subject of his paper is how groups distort online communities towards particular ends over and over again. It's a great elaboration of some basic research and hovers around the same topic that Derek Powazek's great book Design for Communities covered. Shirky's focus, though, is on social software, which he defines as "software that supports group interaction," instead of community Web sites. There's a lot of stuff there to ponder, and I'll probably write up my thoughts more completely once I've finished the paper.

If you get through this paper, I would highly recommend catching up on some of his other essays like "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" or "Half the World." If you like what you see, then subscribe to his NEC newsletter and get a regular Shirky fix.


Chautauquas

July 2, 2003 2:05 AM

Reviewing this book abstract, I'm struck by what we've lost. I know that the Web and cable television exposes us to far more lectures and information distillation than the most vigorous chautauqua, but those two media are so impersonal and distant.

I can just picture being in a small town and hearing that Warren Harding is coming to give a lecture or that Carl Sandburg is going to read some of his poetry. The costs were minimal, but the experience would have been invaluable because of the cultural loneliness of rural America. This is the kind of scene that the book probably expands upon; I've heard a similar refrain from one of my history professors.

I am generally of the opinion that the less people I interact with the better, but I'm thinking that these sorts of intellectual events are best shared. I know there's conferences and whatnot out there, but they're so damned expensive—especially once travel costs are factored in. Perhaps a salon of some fashion would be interesting, informative, and useful. Hmm...


Library 1.0

July 1, 2003 6:41 AM

In other software news, I purchased a license for ArcaneWare's Library 1.0 yesterday after a quick preview. I've considered options like ReaderWare and BookTracker, but they were either too powerful or too difficult to add books to respectively.

Library has an Amazon lookup by ISBN, bookmarking feature, and lending status indicator as well as general filtering and text export. It's not everything I want, but it could be with further development—something I want to encourage by paying the $10 registration fee.

If you want to keep track of a large library (mine's several thousand books strong and I've tediously entered only 57), but you don't want to pay $40 for ReaderWare or like Cocoa-styled, OS X-native apps you should really check this program out.


Photography

July 1, 2003 4:35 AM

Don Ellis is a photographer in Hong Kong; Kleptography is his showcase site of his digital photography. He has some galleries that focus on infrared shots, some of which are enthralling.


Interesting text editor

July 1, 2003 3:54 AM

Billing itself as "the text editor for writers," Blue:Tec's new Ulysses application looks promising. Running through the screenshots, it looks like no other text editor I've encountered and yet it looks inviting. I could see myself writing on this, but why don't they have a way to buy the damn thing in dollars?


Home Networking

July 1, 2003 3:40 AM

If you're at all contemplating a home network, you must read this article over at Tom's Hardware. It is dense and informative, worth printing or filing away for future reference.

[UPDATE: Slashdot discussion is mighty informative as well, though a little snarky towards Tom's Hardware.]


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