Better Late Than Never

Posted on April 29, 2005

Longtime readers know that I’m not what you’d call a “fan” of my Congressman, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA). So I wasn’t surprised when he started waffling in the face of President Bush’s drive to unhinge Social Security.

Now, though, he seems to have finally discovered his backbone:

Raw Story’s John Byrne: What did you think about the Social Security plan President Bush proposed last night?
Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA): I don’t think there’s much reason to get upset or excited about this plan. The problem with President Bush’s overall plan is that he still wants to create private accounts and in doing so takes about a trillion dollars out of the trust fund over the first ten years and five trillion over 20 years. I’m not sure how the indexing of benefits helps the situation — that may restore some of the cost; to some extent he’s trying to solve a problem he’s created…
Raw Story: Do you really think the president is sheltered from those he’s pitching his plan to?
Moran: The only actual news that he reads is the sports section. All the national news, all the opinions that he gets have been filtered, and it goes to his daily briefing that has already been pre-screened to give him what he wants to read. He doesn’t read any books, and he doesn’t talk with people that don’t already agree with him. He’s surrounded himself with ideological sycophants. And the biggest ass-kisser of all is Dick Cheney.

Would have been nice for this to happen a few months ago, but better late than never, I suppose. Here’s hoping we don’t see him back at the Waffle House anytime soon.

Safari First Past the Post on Acid2

Posted on April 28, 2005

Developer Dave Hyatt has announced that Apple’s browser Safari now passes the Acid2 test for standards compliance. (Here’s more info on Acid2.) That makes Safari the first to reach this benchmark — Mozilla still has several open bugs to fix before they can claim the same.

Because Safari is based on the KHTML engine and Hyatt has included patches in his blog post that allow anyone to add his changes to their version of KHTML, that means all other KHTML-based browsers should be able to benefit from his work and get Acid2 compliance for free soon.

Congratulations to Hyatt and the Safari team!

UPDATE (4/29/2005): Whoops, looks like I spoke too soon about those benefits to KHTML…

Yahoo’s APIs

Posted on April 27, 2005

Did you realize how many APIs Yahoo offers for developers? I didn’t.

Need spelling check in your web app? Use Yahoo’s.

Want to extract key words and phrases from a long passage of text? Here you go.

There’s even an API for their new MyWeb service. I don’t know what that even does but it’s cool that they have hooks available for it, in case you’ve figured it out.

Meanwhile, the Google API hasn’t changed since August 2002! C’mon guys, get with the program.

MyPyramid

Posted on April 26, 2005

ThisIsBroken rips the FDA’s new food pyramid a new one.

I hereby christen an observation I made last year, and which is relevant here too, Lefkowitz’s Law: If you need a wizard to explain something, it’s too complicated.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

Posted on April 26, 2005

Wow, who knew kids were this dumb?

East Valley parents will not have to snoop around this prom season to read about the event in their children’s diaries. Students who used to lock their diaries in their bedrooms now post their daily confessions, rantings and exploits for the world to see on Web logs — or blogs…
A LiveJournal search this week for Scottsdale children between 14 and 18 produced more than 1,000 matches. Among that group, six teens listed drama as an interest, 14 listed band and 27 listed sex.
“I think you need to be concerned as a parent, and then become informed,” [Mesa Unified School District webmaster Loyal] Clarke said.
A good way to start, he said, would be for parents to read their children’s
blogs.
“It’s perfectly ethical to do that,” he said. “The kids are making it public to the world, and parents are part of that world.”
But Corona del Sol freshman Sarah Hayden, 14, disagreed.
“It would be just as if they were sneaking into our room and looking through a diary,” she said, “because they would be doing it when they know that we don’t want them to.”

Um, no, Sarah. See, it’s different than sneaking into your room and reading your diary, because you didn’t keep your diary locked in your room — you put your diary on the Internet!

Nobody loves blogs more than I do, but come on, if you don’t want people reading something, don’t put it on a public network. Not that hard to figure out, I would think, and apparently I would be wrong. (sigh)

Darwinia

Posted on April 24, 2005

Introversion Software, a small game development shop in England, have done it again with their latest release, Darwinia.

Click image for full-size screenshot

I was a fan of their first game, Uplink, which was a fun and creative adventure in a William Gibson-esque cyberpunk world. As good as it was, though, Uplink wasn’t perfect; the biggest problem most people had with it was its 2D, menu-driven presentation, which in this age of 3D extravaganzas probably limited its audience. Too bad, y’all missed out.

Anyway, now Introversion is back and Darwinia leaps over the presentation hurdle with grace and style. It’s a fully 3D strategy game set in a trippy computerized landscape, over which the camera pans and swoops effortlessly.

The gameplay itself might best be summarized as “Lemmings meets Tron“. Like the classic Lemmings, your mission is to herd around a flock of defenseless creatures — the Darwinians — from one objective to the next. Like Tron, though, you do this in a stylized cyber-world pulsing with energy and life.

As you move the Darwinians around, you quickly find that you are not alone in this system; virus infections snap at their heels and must be beaten back with Squad programs, digital soldiers you command in real-time-strategy style. As your Squads beat back the hostiles, you can harvest the Souls of the dead programs to be converted into new Darwinians, swelling your army — and the number of little digital people you have to fretfully look after. It’s remarkably addictive.

Because it’s from Introversion, there are a couple other nice points about Darwinia as well:

• It’s cheap: Introversion prices their games to move and Darwinia is no exception: it’s only $29.99 (the UK price is £19.99, so it’d likely be even cheaper if the dollar weren’t so weak against the pound at the moment).
• It’s for everyone: Introversion makes its software available for all major platforms; Darwinia is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and even Linux. I tried the demo on my Ubuntu partition and it set up and ran flawlessly. If they follow the same practice as they did with Uplink, if you buy the CD you’ll get versions for all platforms for the one price, too.

So check out the Darwinia demo if you’re looking for a new addiction — it’s free, it runs on your system (unless you’re one of those strange people still using your Amiga), and it’s great fun!

What Happens When You Ignore the Moral Dimension of Conflict

Posted on April 22, 2005

From The Cunning Realist: What We’ve Really Lost.

It takes a lot to make me fall off my chair in amazement these days, but this just about did it. And a quick glance at several other pro-war sites — from the usually rational to the confirmed lunatic fringe — shows similar “outrage” at this barbarism and lack of respect for the Geneva Convention.
I’d like to be the first to congratulate the outrage camp. They’ve stumbled — unwittingly I am sure — onto why Iraq is a perfect example of how a battle can be won but a war can be lost.

One of John Boyd’s key insights was that war (and victory in war) has a moral dimension every bit as important as the physical and the mental ones. This is a prime example of what happens when you fail to contest the enemy in that dimension.

The Irrelevancy of Treo

Posted on April 21, 2005

Russ Beattie gives PalmOne a well-deserved smack today over sales of the Treo line:

PalmOne’s sold a million Treos (isn’t that quaint?) and to “celebrate” they’re giving away a free Treo every five minutes [yesterday]… It’d be great to have a Treo… so I could pull it out and mock it at meetings and other gatherings of mobile professionals. You see, the Treo 600 was launched in September 2003, so it’s taken them roughly 20 months to sell a million units, which works out to about 50,000 Treos sold a month. That’s pretty pathetic. Keep in mind there were roughly 675 million mobile phones sold last year worldwide, including 14.38 million Symbian phones (and 6.67m in 2003). Palm’s numbers aren’t just anemic compared to this, they’re statistically nonexistant.
It’s official: Palm (One/Source) is completely irrelevant in the mobile market.

Yup. I’ve written before on my problems with Palm’s strategy, and this is another example: keeping the Treo priced at the “executive toy” level kept it from ever developing any real market share. Classic Apple-circa-1988 thinking. Way to go fellas.

UPDATE (04/27/2005): Russ highlights some new numbers that point to slightly better performance from PalmOne than he originally anticipated. I still stand by my points, though; Palm is increasingly marginal as a platform.

Archos Does It Again: PMA400

Posted on April 19, 2005

I want I want I want I want…

What is the Archos PMA400 Pocket Media Assistant?

It’s:

• a Linux-based PDA (running QTopia)
• a portable MP3 player
• a portable video player that you can plug into your cable/satellite box to rip programs directly onto
• a mass storage device for anything that plugs into a USB port — digital cameras, etc. (the magic of USB Host)
• a 30GB portable hard drive
• a mobile Internet client — it has built in WiFi, Opera browser, and IMAP mail client
• and anything else you want, since you can write your own apps for it

How freaking cool is that? The only thing missing is Bluetooth, to sync with the addressbook on your mobile phone (and maybe you could add that with a Bluetooth USB adapter… hmmm…)

Put aside the geek factor for a moment and think about how neat it would be to just plug in and grab the last ep of Deadwood or something to watch on the Metro to work… yum! (You’d need to have headphones, though — the fucks-per-minute might offend your fellow commuters…)

PC Magazine likes it, as does CNet. And the price ($650-$700 street) isn’t too high when you add up the cost of all the various devices this thing subsumes (basically everything except your cell phone and camera).

I want I want I want I want…. 🙂

Sounds Right to Me

Posted on April 18, 2005

From Jay Reding, developer of BloGTK:

I believe that when Asimov postulated that a significantly advanced technology would look like magic, he was referring to regular expressions.

UPDATE: Sandy Smith correctly points out in the comments that the original quotation should be attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, not Isaac Asimov. So, yeah! Fuck you, Asimov.

Fun With Spam: OK, You’ve Got My Attention Edition

Posted on April 14, 2005

Another actual spam found while I was cleaning out my (Hotmail) spam filter:

I’ve never seen a message that was just a long block of seemingly random text before. But it was the first sentence that made me laugh:

It was pretty ineffectual when it came to watch me dance (3.5M) again tonight in the eyes as her breasts came in contact with my stated greater goals.

“As her breasts came in contact with my stated greater goals”. Indeed! An infrequent enough occurrence, but definitely worth e-mailing strangers about when it happens…

H&R Blockhead (Continued)

Posted on April 14, 2005

As if I needed another reason to be pissed off at H&R Block, along comes this…

[I]f you’re one of the millions who this year have used the electronic services of Intuit’s TurboTax or H&R Block, you may not know that a stealthy technology commonly known as Web bugs was used to track your comings and goings on the Internet.
Both Intuit and Block, which offer electronic filing for free through the IRS’ Free File program, use hidden Web bugs throughout the tax-preparation process to monitor taxpayers’ online behavior.
Web bugs, also known as Web beacons, are virtually ubiquitous among sites belonging to large companies (including The Chronicle).
The technology connects a company’s site with that of an affiliated marketing firm, which collects and analyzes data on Web usage. Intuit and Block say Web bugs are employed only to maintain the quality of their respective offerings.

Let me explain this in English: they are using technology that reports back how you move through the tax application to a marketing partner.

Of course, they deny that they’re actually releasing any of the collected data.

GRRR!!! HULK SMASH!!!

Here’s the thing. I don’t necessarily have a problem with them using cookies, sessions, etc. to follow me through the app. It’s useful for them to know where people get stuck, for example, so they can make those parts easier to use.

But anything in something as financially sensitive as my taxes gets routed through a third party, I should be asked to agree to first.

That means either Block learns how to track its own sessions, or they put up a notice at the start of the tax interview saying “We partner with Omniture, Inc. to monitor usage of this application. Data gathered through this process is private and will never be released to parties other than H&R Block, Omniture, Inc., and the individual user.” or something similar, and ask “Is this OK? Yes/No”.

Of course, right now they do nothing of the sort. Thanks Blockheads!

Sometimes I Don’t Know What the Hell You People Are Thinking

Posted on April 12, 2005

Actual entries from the list of most popular search terms that brought people to this Web site yesterday:

• “ugly people” (5 hits)
• “yiddish sayings about airplanes” (2 hits)
• “hunter s thompson -literary genius” (1 hit) (Apparently someone with a pretty low opinion of HST!)
• “beam me out of this deathtrap” (1 hit)

The “ugly people” thing is apparently quite a popular one — I got 300+ hits last month from people running that through search engines.

So the only question is, where on the Web have I been cited as a canonical example of an ugly person? (sigh)

UPDATE: Aha! Figured it out — the answer is on the second page of Google results for “ugly people”. My site shows up there because I have a category of posts entitled “Politics: Show Business for Ugly People“. So thankfully I’m not as universally repulsive as a glance at the stats might originally suggest 🙂

H & R Blockhead

Posted on April 12, 2005

It’s tax time again!

Yay.

I’ve been using H&R Block’s TaxCut software to prepare my taxes since 1999 — it’s easy, accurate, and inexpensive, and has never flirted with copy-protection like Intuit’s TurboTax product.

This year, though, I was intrigued to hear about the IRS’s Free-File initiative. Basically, the idea is to encourage people to e-file by letting you do it for free through a variety of Web-based tax prep services. In theory, everybody wins — taxpayers get easier filing for less money, the IRS gets more e-filers (which cuts down on processing costs), and the tax prep services get a chance to introduce you to their service.

Of course, the IRS being the IRS, there’s a catch. The catch is that you’re only a Free-Filer if you click through to the participating tax prep service of your choice from the IRS’s Free-File page. If you go to the service directly — say, because you read a newspaper article saying that the service was offering free e-filing in conjunction with the IRS — you’d be charged the standard fee.

Now, I know they probably did this as a concession to the tax-prep companies so they could make a buck off dumb people — but it just seems dumb. Come on, if you’re gonna call it “Free-File” let’s make it free, people.

Anyway, I was perusing the list of services participating in Free-File and saw that one of them was H&R Block. Interesting, thinks I, since I’m a satisfied Block tax-prep customer — I can get the nice service I’ve been paying $60/year to get software for, for approximately a third of that by using the Web service (Free-File is only for Federal taxes, you still have to pay to file your state return). So I click through to Block’s online tax prep service and get started.

At first, everything is ducky. It imports my return from TaxCut 2003, so I don’t have to re-key all my personal information. It asks me a few questions about W-2s, other forms, etc. Everything’s clicking along seamlessly.

And then things start to get… weird.

I hit a question that I don’t really understand, so I click the “Help” button. Nothing happens. I click it again. Same result. Then I notice that actually, something did happen — a tiny white box popped up on the screen when I clicked Help, so tiny I couldn’t tell if it had any text in it or not! I clicked on the box and dragged it — you could move it around the screen…

Was this the Help window?

Intrigued, I clicked in the tiny box and hit Ctrl-A (“Select All”), then Ctrl-C (“Copy”), then opened Notepad and hit Paste. Voila! Reams of help text appear.

So, I think, the Help system is borked. Annoying but not critical. But it gets worse.

I start seeing error messages in bold red text as I click through the interviews, informing me about bad “object references”. I have no idea what this means, and the error messages aren’t helping. I start to get some idea it might be serious, though, when I get to the point where it calculates my deductions and starts printing things like this:

“Would you like to take your standard deduction, or would you prefer to itemize and take a deduction in the amount of ?”

That’s right — it couldn’t calculate totals based on my answers. (See, there should have been a number between “of” and the question mark.) This was bad. I mean, what the fuck else does tax software do?

Then I had a thought. I had been going through the whole process in Firefox. I checked the supported browsers list. “Internet Explorer, Netscape 7”. Hmmm, should be fine then, Netscape 7 is substantially the same as Firefox… but, just to see what would happen, I logged out and logged back in using IE.

Wow! Now I could see what the problem was. As I had been going through the interview in Firefox, the service hadn’t been saving many of my answers! So when the time came to calculate my deductions, etc., it was trying to pull values that simply didn’t exist (which probably explained the “bad object” griping).

I re-did the interview from the beginning using IE and everything worked like a champ. Only took a few minutes, calculations worked fine, Help windows popped up perfectly (and you could read all the text!) — it was a pleasure to use, just like the TaxCut software had always been.

But here’s the thing. What the fuck happened with their site and Firefox?

Let’s look at this objectively for a second. Their site is basically a big app that presents forms and stuffs the results in a database. Why is any of that client-dependent? What on Earth is it doing on the client end that could possible get borked up so badly outside IE?

Not to mention that they list Netscape 7 as a supported browser. Did they even test the damn thing in Gecko? Once?

So, short story long — if you’re planning on using Block’s Web service to file this year, use IE or find another service. And thanks for nothing, Block, for taking a nice service and futzing it up so royally for the 10% of us who don’t use IE, and not even being nice enough to warn us that you don’t want our business…

UPDATE: And wait! There’s more!

Linux For Real People: Ubuntu

Posted on April 10, 2005

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately about the new-ish Ubuntu Linux project, so this weekend I decided to blow away my Fedora Core partition and take Ubuntu for a spin. Why not? Worst case, I have to reinstall Fedora, which isn’t hard to do.

However, after tinkering with Ubuntu a little, I don’t think I’ll be reinstalling FC anytime soon.

Ubuntu’s stated mission is to build a Linux distribution that “Just Works”, and they’ve come impressively close to doing that.

I checked out the latest version of Ubuntu — Ubuntu 5.04, aka “Hoary Hedgehog”. (The funny-sounding names come from Ubuntu’s South African roots; it’s a project of Mark Shuttleworth, the maverick South African gazillionaire who bought himself a ride on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2002.)

The install was quick and easy; unlike Fedora, Ubuntu’s installer is completely text-based, but it’s easy to use and understand nonetheless. You see right from the start one way Ubuntu is different from most Linux distros — there’s only one CD-ROM, where most ship with three or four (or a DVD-ROM).

That’s because Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux, which means it inherits Debian’s enviable software updating system, “apt”. This lets Ubuntu take a disciplined approach to building their distro: they ship a core set of applications with the OS that they believe are best of breed (OpenOffice, Firefox, Ximian Evolution, etc.). All other applications are omitted, which lets them get the whole shebang on one CD. If you want other apps, though — say, if you prefer Thunderbird to Evolution for e-mail — you can install it directly from apt, rather than having to have it on the CD.

Taking this a step further, Ubuntu has the Synaptic front-end for apt included and nicely integrated with the system, so adding and updating apps is dead simple. Contrast this to the process of using Synaptic on Fedora, which is a bit of a pain. Since Fedora is an RPM-based distro, you need to get apt for RPM, then get Synaptic, then hunt down community apt-for-RPM repositories, and then you can get your software. Ubuntu, on the other hand, comes with apt and Synaptic, and already has several repositories configured:

• main: Free software that is supported by Ubuntu
• restricted: Non-Free software that is commonly enough used to be supported by Ubuntu
• universe: Open-source and Free applications other than those supported by Ubuntu
• multiverse: Non-Free applications not supported by Ubuntu

When you first log in, only main and restricted are activated; if you want to pull from universe or multiverse, you need to go into Synaptic’s repository manager and turn them on. This gives newbies the “shopping mall in the sky” feeling of apt/Synaptic without leading them into downloading unsupported apps unless they know what they’re doing.

The graphical look and feel of Ubuntu is very nice too. It’s based on the GNOME desktop environment, and it feels quite clean and responsive. (If you prefer KDE, you can grab it from universe without problems, or simply choose Kubuntu, a derivative project that takes Ubuntu and swaps KDE for GNOME). Fedora’s look and feel are fine, but there are places where it feels rough as they try to merge KDE and GNOME together in an effort to be agnostic. Ubuntu’s “pick and stick” approach seems the better way to go (even if it means I lose access to KDE-only apps — since most have an analogue in the GNOME world anyway, and all the big boys are fine with GNOME).

So yeah, first impression: Ubuntu is pretty damn well put together. It’s solid, focused, and well-designed. I’m sure I’ll find things to be annoyed with eventually, but none have sprung up yet.

Linux for Mom? Maybe not quite yet. But we’re getting there…

Another Case Study of The Great Evolution We’re Living Through

Posted on April 8, 2005

Britt Blaser: “The new CEOs are going to look a lot like Mark Schifter, and there’ll be a case study on him at HBS this decade. You heard it here.”

Wave That Flag!

Posted on April 7, 2005

God bless America!

Exciting New Magazine Concept

Posted on April 4, 2005

Seen at the checkout counter this evening while I was doing my grocery shopping (like I was supposed to be doing on Sunday):

Should Jessica Leave Him??? It’s Getting NASTY!!! Oh, the drama!

When I saw this, I had a great idea for a new magazine: It’s None of Your Damn Business Weekly. Each week it would focus on all the exciting stories like this one that are, frankly, none of your damn business.

Should Jessica Simpson divorce her husband? It’s None Of Your Damn Business™!

Is Britney Spears pregnant? It’s None Of Your Damn Business™!

Why do people buy these things? It’s None Of Your Damn Business™!

Subscribe today and get a free tote bag with “What’s in this bag? It’s None of Your Damn Business™!” on it. Operators are standing by…

Attack on Abu Ghraib

Posted on April 4, 2005

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this story didn’t get more play in the press, since now that they’ve had their elections the Iraq story is over… (sigh)

Insurgents Attack Abu Ghraib Prison Complex

By all indications this was a significant assault involving at least 50 insurgents and including multiple RPG teams and at least one suicide car bomb. While the attack was eventually repulsed, over 40 U.S. soldiers were wounded in the fighting (thankfully, none appear to have been killed).

It’s also significant because the insurgent cell led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who joined his group up with al-Qaeda last year, has claimed credit for it. John Robb summarizes succinctly: “A calling card. Al Qaeda is now officially in Iraq.”

And yet, most stories I’ve seen about this so far in the US press note it only in passing while talking mostly about developments in the ongoing struggle to form an Iraqi government. (You did know that they still haven’t come to an agreement on what form the government should take, two months after the election, right? Right?) A consequence of reporters fearing to leave Baghdad, perhaps?

UPDATE: Robb elaborates: What the Attack on Abu Ghraib Means.

UPDATE (4/5/2005): Page A1 of today’s Washington Post: Zarqawi Said to Be Behind Iraq Raid.

“It was one of the more concerted attacks that we’ve seen,” said Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman.
Asked if there had been any other insurgent attack that surpassed it, Boylan said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

So I guess your choice is to read this blog and understand events as they happen, or read The Post and understand them two days later 🙂

In seriousness, this highlights one of my major problems with mainstream media reporting — the tendency to just pass along each side of a story, rather than give readers any context. The first stories that came out were probably just retyped CENTCOM press releases, so it’s no wonder they played down the significance of the attack. Then the insurgents come forward and claim Zarqawi was behind it, and the reporters announce the attack was more significant than previously thought. Never mind that the shift in tactics itself was significant enough to tip off even a yutz like me that this was a story, even before the insurgents said a word.

If The Post was doing its job, it wouldn’t need the insurgents to lead it by the nose to the story — it’d be on top of it from the get go. Are the insurgents always going to be polite enough to call the press and explain what they’re up to? Why should we be relying on them to do so?

Slow Sunday

Posted on April 3, 2005

I have absolutely no energy today. No motivation to get moving and do anything. I was supposed to go do the grocery shopping today but I think I have managed to talk myself even out of that, which must represent some kind of landmark in the annals of lethargy.

I’m sure by the end of the day I’ll feel terribly guilty for not having accomplished anything productive today, too, so it’s kind of a two-fer in the “poorly adjusted” category.

Oh well, at least I have enough energy to post this kind of random grumbling to my blog so that you can all share in the excitement of my Sunday afternoon…

RIP: Mitch Hedberg

Posted on March 31, 2005

Dammit.

Dammit dammit DAMMIT!!!

One of the most talented young comedians out there, Mitch Hedberg, is apparently dead today at age 37. Unconfirmed cause of death is a heroin overdose (the web site of his friend and fellow comic Josh Sneed cites “drugs”). USA Today confirms Hedberg’s death.

I had the privilege of seeing Hedberg live, and he was every bit as good as these stories say he was. He was like the second coming of Steven Wright. Here’s some of his bits so you can see for yourself (though much of the humor came from his delivery).

Dammit. First Hunter Thompson, now this. 2005 is really starting to suck.

People Are God Damned Idiots

Posted on March 30, 2005

Remember when Paris Hilton’s Sidekick got hacked and all her personal data — phone numbers, notes, pictures, everything — ended up on the Web for the world to see? Betcha thought something like that would hurt Sidekick sales, didn’t you?

Wroooong!

T-Mobile Latest News about T-Mobile stores in New York are selling out of Sidekicks (a handheld device that stores information online) despite or, more likely, because of that fact that celebrity phone numbers and naughty pictures were stolen off one belonging to bad-girl heiress Paris Hilton.
“We had an unusually high demand this week,” said one Manhattan store employee.

Wow. How dumb do you have to be to buy a phone specifically because you’ve heard how easy it is for hackers to pull your data off of it?

“Paris Hilton has one!”

“Yeah. And because of that every yokel in the country got to see her private pictures.”

“But Paris Hilton has one!”

Jesus.

I Was So Much Older Then, I’m Younger Than That Now…

Posted on March 29, 2005

Paolo Valdemarin: Blog Birthday.

I always find amazing to look back at what we were doing back in spring 2002. I was involved in much more conversations than I am today, there was a lot of enthusiasm about stuff like OPML, instantOutliners, RSS, espresso cups, blogging, intranets, Radio tools…

I know how he feels. This blog is actually about the same age as his (JWM turned three in January), and I’ve been going through the same things: finding myself more “diplomatic” in what I write, and lacking the inspiration to post anything over at my companion blog on social software, Ant’s Eye View, for more than 3 months now.

I don’t think this is a permanent state, though; rather it’s just that the world has spent the last 3 years digesting the stuff that we were all so excited about back in 2002. Back then, when I enthused to people about the potential of blogging and social software, they tended to look at me funny if they didn’t laugh out loud; now even those who laughed loudest have their own blogs. Tiny outfits like Ben & Mena Trott’s Six Apart and Ev Williams’ Blogger have become VC darlings and buyout targets of Silicon Valley giants.

In short, the revolution we were tasting in the air in 2002 has come and gone. And now its battlefields are busily being turned into tidy office parks and strip malls, which bores the shit out of those who are temperamentally inclined to revolution.

But, such is the way of all revolutions. And the revolutionaries like Paolo, being restless creative types, will eventually renew themselves and find new outlets — and we’ll start to detect the smell of gunpowder in the air again…

A Note to The Esteemed United States Congress on the Case of Terri Schiavo

Posted on March 23, 2005

Can’t you CORPSE-FUCKERS just leave this poor woman alone to die already? Without trying to squeeze your own jollies out of her before she goes?

Firefox: Extension Manager Improvements

Posted on March 23, 2005

Ben Goodger talks about some improvements to the Firefox Extension Manager he’s whipped up, including a method for drag & drop installation of XPIs and shared extensions hosted on a network drive (so, say, corporate deployments could all have a common plugin set without having to push out plugin updates to a zillion desktops). Good stuff!