An Enclave of New Age E-Movers

Posted on August 29, 2003

I’m pretty sure that I used to work for these people at one point….

Please Discontinue Your Bloviating Post-Haste

Posted on August 29, 2003

Slate is running a funny article looking at the many, many people, groups, movements, organizations, sexual orientations, and religious affiliations against whom professional blowhard Bill O’Reilly has deployed his favorite all-purpose retort — “shut up“.

To Snark or Not To Snark

Posted on August 28, 2003

Neal Pollack, the Greatest Living American Writer (just ask him), is engaging in an edifying discourse on the etymology of the highly technical literary term “snark”:

The word snark is derived from the ancient Greek word, “snarkos,” meaning, “a review written by a jealous competitor of Homer who is more worried about hipster cache and masthead climbing than actually literary quality.” The word makes its first modern appearance in Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza says to his master, “those who would criticize you for tilting at windmills, sire, are merely engaging in snark.”

It’s very enlightening. Highly recommended.

Where Adultery is a Capital Crime

Posted on August 28, 2003

Over on her blog, Jen Klyse is doing an excellent job covering the case of Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman who is trying to appeal a sentence of death given her by a Sharia court for the heinous crime of adultery. Sharia is religious law that is often based on a very strict interpretation of the Koran; hence the definition of adultery as a crime worthy of the death penalty. Americans should be paying more attention to the “justice” handed out by these courts, so kudos to Jen for keeping it on the radar.

What I Want

Posted on August 27, 2003

I want
to dance like a fool on the head of a pin
to be ready to shoot dice with death
and win
to sing stupid songs
to jump from a plane
to see you in the room
and feel
no
pain

I want
to awe the whole room with my rapier wit
to be a square peg in a round hole
and fit
to bask in the sun
to play in the snow
to be somewhere with you
and not have
to
go

I want
to chisel these words on a vast slab of stone
to lift that immense monument
on my own
to carry it up
to the Earth’s snowy crown
to be atop the whole world
and never
come
down

I want
to do all of these things before my race is run
to punch my way out of the webs that
I’ve spun
if I manage to do that
before my time is through
please remind me:
the reason I started
was
you.

Fair and Balanced: The Play

Posted on August 27, 2003

Wow, that was quick!

Brian Flemming, the playwright behind the Off-Broadway hit Bat Boy: The Musical, has responded to the whole Fox News/Al Franken flap by writing a new one-act, Fair and Balanced:

Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which “Fair” and “Balanced” are characters — they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named “Bill O’Reilly” comes down into the dungeon to torture them.
But tonight is a special night. Tonight Bill O’Reilly makes a mistake, and Fair and Balanced turn the tables on him. Now that their tormenter is at their mercy, the former prisoners force him to stand trial. But will Fair and Balanced do to Bill O’Reilly what he has done to them?

You can get a copy of the script in PDF format for only $5… shame this didn’t come out a couple of months ago when I was looking for a script to submit to the Montgomery Playhouse One-Acts Festival!

Dean Surging in NH

Posted on August 27, 2003

Polling firm Zogby International is reporting that Howard Dean is dominating the Democratic field in New Hampshire, with a startling 21-point lead over the nearest challenger, Sen. John Kerry.

Here’s the tale of the tape for the period from August 23-26:

• Gov. Howard Dean: 38%
• Sen. John Kerry: 17%
• Sen. Joseph Lieberman: 6%
• Richard Gephardt: 6%
• Sen. John Edwards: 4%
• Gen. Wesley Clark (undeclared): 2%

… with several other candidates (Sen. Bob Graham, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun) pulling 1% or less, and 23% undecided.

It’s early in the season, of course, so those numbers are likely to tighten up, but that’s a dramatic lead for Dean any way you slice it. What’s also interesting is the appearance of Wesley Clark on the list — he’s been playing Hamlet over whether or not to jump into this race for months. If he did announce, that could put him up in the Lieberman-Gephardt-Edwards category at minimum.

These numbers make me wonder if anyone other than Dean, Kerry, Lieberman, and Clark (assuming he jumps in) will stay in the race after the votes are counted in New Hampshire. If they want to, they’ve clearly got a lot of work to do between now and then.

Democracy In Action

Posted on August 27, 2003

It’s official — the California recall election has now officially gone beyond parody. It is now more ludicrous than any joke that you or I could think up about it.

Enjoy, CA!

Why Everyone Should Have A Lawyer

Posted on August 26, 2003

Why? So you don’t get stuck with the sort of public defender who thinks that this document is a compelling legal defense.

Inspiration

Posted on August 26, 2003

Anybody got any? I could use some at the moment.

Get In The Crowd

Posted on August 25, 2003

This is cool — a fellow named George H. Thomas has posted a panoramic shot of the crowd at Howard Dean’s Seattle rally, where an amazing 15,000 people showed up to hear Dean speak. You’ll need QuickTime to view it. It gives a good sense of how big a crowd of 15,000 people really is!

Who Let the Geek Out?

Posted on August 25, 2003

Oh, my…

Looks like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was pretty darned enthralled to be seated next to Anna Kournikova when they appeared at the NASDAQ exchange to promote the launch of a new line of Kournikova-branded sports bras to be sold through Amazon.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being look more like a Warner Brothers cartoon… way to go, Jeff!!! 🙂

Someone Still Uses POP?

Posted on August 25, 2003

Over on his blog, Mitch Kapor has posted an interesting dissertation on why he prefers POP over IMAP for retrieving e-mail.

Interestingly, my impressions are almost 180 degrees from his. He likes POP because it transfers all mail to the local PC, and you work with the local copies. That’s exactly why I prefer IMAP — because I don’t want all my mail dumped to my PC, I want it on the server so I can get to it from my work computer, my home computer, a laptop, or anywhere else there’s an IMAP client available. With POP, once the mail is transferred it’s essentially unavailable to me from any other machine. (If I used a laptop as my primary PC — in other words, if I had a single PC that traveled with me, rather than traveling between a series of desktop computers — I might feel differently. But I don’t, so I don’t.)

To each his own, I suppose…

When Was The Last Time You Heard a Politician Say Something Insightful?

Posted on August 23, 2003

It happened to me today. A politician with insight… who’da thunk it?

I just got back from the big Howard Dean rally in Falls Church, Virginia, kicking off his “Sleepless Summer” campaign swing. It was the first time I’d ever seen Dean in person, and I was lucky enough to snag a place only a couple rows back from the podium, so I got to watch him up close and personal.

It was impressive! Dean is a forceful speaker, and he’s not afraid to take Bush and the administration head-on. Anyone out there who thinks that he’s going to be easy to tag as a nutty liberal is dead wrong — much of his speech was on the need to balance the budget, and he spoke strongly and passionately about his support for the first Gulf War and the intervention in Afghanistan. Don’t let his opposition to the war in Iraq fool you into thinking that Howard Dean is some kind of dove.

What he said that really struck me, though, came when he was discussing national security and how to keep America strong and safe. He spoke for a while about the Cold War, and he made the contention that a strong military, while necessary for victory in that conflict, wasn’t what really won it for us. What won it was that the people who suffered under Soviet rule wanted to be like us. They looked to America as an example of how the world could be — and, when enough of them had come to that conclusion, they rose up and freed themselves in a remarkably bloodless revolution. What put us over the top, Dean argued, was that we had a moral mission that the world respected, and that undermined the authority of the Soviets so much that their empire crumbled from within.

Dean then contrasted those days with our current situation. How many people in the Arab world, he asked, see America as a hopeful example? How many of those people see us as wielding any kind of moral authority? The answer, of course, is not many — and Dean argues that until that fact changes, until the people of the region see us striving to better their condition instead of just using them as geopolitical pawns, we’ll never get the kind of support we’ll need to drain the poison out of that troubled place.

That, I thought, was an interesting analysis, and one I hadn’t heard put forward before. The Republicans are fond of crediting the victory in the Cold War to Ronald Reagan’s military buildup, arguing that we spent so much on defense that the Russians bankrupted themselves trying to keep up. That may be true, but it doesn’t explain why the people of Eastern Europe were so ready to rally behind leaders like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, leaders who promised to bring them out of the East and into the West. Dean’s hypothesis explains this neatly — and also explains the reticence of Iraqis and Afghans to support U.S. action in their country (even when that action frees them from tyrannical dictatorship).

As I left the rally, I thought that this is what I want a politician to do — make me think, put forward ideas, challenge my prejudices. Dean did all those things in his speech. I think he’s a remarkable candidate who could make a credible Democratic nominee, and maybe a good President to boot.

I came home, went to my computer, and donated $50 to the Dean campaign. Can you say the same? If you’re not supporting Dean, that’s fine — but who are you supporting?

We live in challenging times. Americans are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. The economy continues to slide down the drain. President Bush is hiding crucial information from us on who was behind 9/11, and he continues to be unable to verify his claims of imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, while North Korea flaunts its atomic weapons program and threatens to become an exporter of nuclear weapons to anyone with hard currency to pay for them (like, say, millionaire Saudi terrorists). Civil liberties and basic freedoms are daily ignored and compromised, with no end in sight.

If this state of affairs bothers you — if you want America to be someplace you’re proud to be from again — then what are you doing to make that happen? Apathy and non-involvement won’t change anything. Howard Dean’s message is that each of us has to act if we’re going to make that happen. I’m willing to step up and meet that challenge. Are you?

OpenOffice for OS X Delayed

Posted on August 22, 2003

This is frustrating… apparently the OpenOffice.org team is pushing back their estimate of when a native version of the OpenOffice suite will be available for Mac OS X. They had been projecting mid-2004, but now they’re saying it will have to wait till after the release of OpenOffice 2.0 in 2005 — which means Mac users likely won’t have a native port of the suite until 2006!

OpenOffice is one of those projects that’s been “almost there” for a looong time. Version 1.1 is a pretty solid product and deserves a big push to help it gain mindshare. A Mac version would help accomplish that, especially in a world where Apple is more and more willing to challenge Microsoft directly. I should think that gaining users for a new office suite should be easier in the Mac world than in the Windows world (since, after all, most Windows PCs come preloaded with Office, while for Macs it’s a costly add-on).

Hey Steve, you might want to contribute a couple developers to the OpenOffice team…

Fighting Words

Posted on August 21, 2003

One of the things that bothers me about the general drift of our culture is the way that language has become devalued. We’ve essentially decoupled words from real-world meanings; we rarely even pretend to think that words can have consequences. That may be the natural outgrowth of a culture that’s been steeping for fifteen years now in irony and faux hipness — by definition, if someone can get you riled up by saying something that pushes your buttons, you’re hardly “cool” — but it’s sad nonetheless.

Up until just recently in our history, there were such things as “fighting words” — words that, if somebody applied them to you, were so offensive that the only honorable recourse was to confront the speaker and have it out. Up until the late nineteenth century, fighting words were often resolved with an actual fight to the death — the ritual duel. Duelling died out (and rightly so), but there was still a lingering sense that honor demanded a confrontation in these cases, even if the confrontation was only verbal. There was a line over which civilized people did not cross lightly in their conversations with each other.

Today, that line is shot to hell. As I write this, the #4 book on the New York Times’ bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction has a simple, one-word title:

“TREASON”.

Author Ann Coulter’s argument is anything but subtle. You see, there are Evil Liberals out there who have been opposing the righteous foreign policy of the United States since the 1940s. Since these policies were the official positions of the United States, opposing them means these Evil Liberals were (and are) against America. And an American citizen who is against America is guilty of TREASON.

Taking a step back from Bizarro World, let’s have a look at how the Constitution defines treason in Article III, Section 3 (it is, in fact, the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution):

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Now, I’m sure that Coulter would argue that the Evil Liberals are guilty of treason because they were “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” when they opposed the repugnant Iran-Contra deal, or called for an end to the pointless continuation of the Vietnam War. But here’s the thing: regardless of whether she’s right or not, calling “treason” is a serious allegation — probably the most serious allegation you can make against someone under our system. Note how the Founders took pains to point out that, to rise to the level of treason, an act must be equivalent to picking up a rifle and going to war against the United States. And even if you do exactly that — even if you take to the field, gun in hand, and spend years masterminding the deaths of American soldiers — even then, you may not be guilty of treason — just ask Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was indicted for treason but never tried on the grounds that the country’s interest lay more in putting the Civil War to rest peacefully than in stringing up one of the most deadly opponents the Union ever had.

Let me say that again. Robert E. Lee actively made war against the United States for four years, and led an army that inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on the armed forces of the United States — and even that was not enough to justify branding him with the label “treason”, which Coulter so casually slings around.

This is what I mean by the degrading of the language. I tend to be a pretty moderate guy, but I suppose that if you had to draw the world into two camps, Virtuous Conservatives and Evil Liberals, I’d probably end up in the Evil Liberal camp. And I take offense at being tarred with the brush of treason, simply for the crime of disagreeing with the political positions of Ann Coulter. I take offense at the suggestion that I love my country any less than she does. I take offense at the suggestion that any deviation from the One True Way of the GOP makes me the moral equal of the fewer than 30 people in the history of the Republic who have ever been convicted of treason.

In other words, to me, calling “treason” is invoking a fighting word. It’s a charge that crosses the line; a charge that takes the discussion into a whole new realm. You had damn well better have a good case if you’re going to throw it onto the table. But Coulter uses it as just another handy cudgel to use to bash her political opponents, just another tool in the arsenal of the political operative. It’s a sorry spectacle that illustrates just how degraded the language has become.

A Random Thought

Posted on August 21, 2003

Lefkowitz’s Law of Leadership:

If you call yourself a leader, and you’re not leading from the front — you’re following.

Two words

Posted on August 20, 2003

Double ouch.

(Today’s a rough day for those of us of the male persuasion, apparently… do these sorts of things happen in threes? I hope not! I should give a shout-out to Dave Barry’s blog for this as well as the previous item.)

One Word

Posted on August 20, 2003

Ouch.

The Minutes After

Posted on August 19, 2003

This is pretty amazing. You’ve probably already heard by now about the truck bomb that was detonated today at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing at least 20 people and injuring scores more. What you may not have seen is that CBS News had a cameraman at that building filming a routine press conference when the bomb went off. He actually kept his camera rolling, capturing the shock and horror of being at the scene of such a nightmarish attack.

CBS News has the raw, unedited footage of the blast and the aftermath up as streaming video on their site:

Raw Footage: Iraq Blast (requires RealPlayer)

When they say “graphic content”, they mean it, folks — it’s pretty terrible stuff. Watch at your own discretion.

Looking for Web Hosting That Doesn’t Suck

Posted on August 18, 2003

Let’s see… from at least 9 AM to 8:30 PM today, both my Web sites, all my domain names, and all my e-mail accounts were completely offline. I was unable to find out a reason why, and e-mails to tech support went unanswered. So that’s almost 12 complete hours of downtime without even so much as an “oops”. When I shell into the box where my stuff lives, the only explanation given is “8/18: Massive screwup with startup scripts. Hosting services unavailable for a few hours.”

Thanks, csoft.net!

Seriously, that’s unacceptable. 12 hours downtime is not a minor “oops” issue, it’s a major fuck-up. This is the second time in three months that they’ve knocked me offline for 4+ hours without an explanation, too. If I was running an online business through csoft and they just shrugged their shoulders at that I’d be tempted to burn their office down.

If anyone can recommend a good virtual hosting service that supports the following:

• Multiple domains (preferably unlimited)
• Multiple MySQL databases
• IMAP mail access
• Perl
• PHP
• mod_rewrite

… for a reasonable price, drop me a line, I’m very interested.

An Apologia for Push

Posted on August 15, 2003

I’ve been on the Web for almost ten years now — almost as long as the Web has been around. When I think back to the early days, the days of Mosaic and Netscape 0.9 and frantic scrambles to figure out what the shape of this new tool would be, one thing that stands out clearly is the intellectual impact of a single publication on me and the people I worked with.

That publication was Wired Magazine.

In those days, Wired was a really amazing piece of work. They published a book early on whose title, “Mind Grenades”, aptly summed up its impact — each month the mag would hit you with a dozen new ideas. Some were good; most were bullshit; but it made you think about the shape of the coming world in a way that no other publication did. Eventually it burned out, of course, and today it’s just a catalog of geek toys, but for a while it was probably the most influential opinion-maker in America among the people who were making things happen on the Web.

Now, if you have to come up with that many ideas every month, the odds are that some of them are going to be colossally bad; and that was certainly true with Wired. One story in particular stood out for me as an example of this. In March 1997, Wired gave over practically the entire magazine to a piece entitled “Push! The Radical Future of Media Beyond the Web“. The premise of the article was that the Web was about to disappear, killed off forever by new products that would stream information directly to your desktop. According to the article, this would launch a technological media revolution that would make the Web explosion look like small potatoes. The article was almost strident in its insistence — here comes Push! Get used to it, dammit!

The thing is — I remember reading that article, back in March of 1997, and saying out loud “This is bullshit!” when I finished it. It just didn’t make any sense. The potential of the Web had barely been tapped, and these guys are pushing it into its grave for a technology that nobody was even selling yet? It didn’t make sense to me.

As it turned out, I was right and Wired was wrong. “Push” technology turned out to be a bust — nobody wanted to give over their desktop to some random company so that they could spew advertising and infotainment at you. Push threw away everything good about the Web and replaced it with everything bad about TV. The only thing that Push ended up being notable for is how many venture capital dollars it managed to burn up before it mercifully died.

So now we’re six years on from that story, push is long gone and forgotten, and Wired has become a shadow of its former self. So why am I writing this? It’s because of something really remarkable: one of the authors of that “Push!” story, Gary Wolf, has written up on his blog how in his opinion that story — which, remember, he helped write — is “the worst story Wired ever published“. He goes into great detail on how Wired worked, back in those days, dissecting exactly how such smart people could come to believe and evangelize something that even a wet-behind-the-ears 22-year-old Web developer could tell was bullshit on wheels. It’s a fascinating look into the mindset of the people who, for better or worse, made Wired what it was.

Can You Get More Disrespectful Than This?

Posted on August 15, 2003

The story of what’s been happening to Ted Williams’ body since he died is beyond belief. I can’t imagine any justification for not letting the man rest peacefully like we all will, especially not on the hope that some bizarro sci-fi technology will someday revive him. It’s pretty clear that the day when that’s possible is a long way off:

The silver can containing Williams’ head resembles a lobster pot and is marked in black with Williams’ patient I.D. number, A-1949, according to the SI story. Williams’ head has been shaved and drilled with holes. Verducci also reports that, before the head was placed in its present location, it was accidentally cracked as many as 10 times due to fluctuating storage temperatures.

Yeah, that’s a technique that’s ready for prime time. Everyone involved in this desecration should be ashamed of themselves.

It’s All In “The Restaurant”

Posted on August 13, 2003

Dear God, I never thought I’d be saying this, but…

there’s a reality TV show that you really should be watching!

It’s called “The Restaurant“, and it runs on NBC Sunday nights at 10. And you should be watching it because it’s like an ongoing illustration of everything I’ve been writing about leadership in this section.

(more…)

What’s In A Name?

Posted on August 12, 2003

If you care at all about issues of syndicating content across the Net, you are probably familiar with the Pie/Echo/Atom project. It’s an attempt to define an open syndication format to supplant the reigning king of syndication, RSS. RSS is great technology — I do more than half my browsing these days inside an RSS newsreader, and more and more people are doing the same — but unfortunately its history has been riven with political conflicts between developers with conflicting visions of where it should go next. The result has been a soup of formats, all using the acronym “RSS” but which do not have a clean, consistent path from one version to the next. Pie/Echo/Atom is trying to escape this problem by starting from scratch and defining a new format that nobody owns, so nobody can set themselves up as the benevolent dictator of the format.

Unsurprisingly, the technical work on the format has progressed very rapidly, and there are already working syndication feeds out there using it. Also unsurprisingly, on the non-technical front — the marketing front, essentially, though nobody wants to call it that — it’s chaos on roller skates. The reason it’s called “Pie/Echo/Atom” in the first place is because those were the first proposed names for the project; the last two were actually proposed, enthusiastically adopted, and then dropped when it was discovered that they conflicted with trademarks held by someone else. (“Pie” was the early working name for the project, and the one to which everyone grumpily returns whenever a new name is shot down in flames.)

I’m a supporter of the ideals of the project, but I just don’t have the kind of guru-level XML expertise to be able to contribute much to the design of the format. I did want to give something back, though, so I thought hard and made a proposal for what to call the darn thing. My suggestion is that it be named “GoBright” (full proposal document is on the official Pie wiki).

Why GoBright? I chose the name to honor an early pioneer in American journalism, Lawrence A. Gobright. Gobright was the first Washington correspondent for what became the Associated Press, the first “wire service” to syndicate news by telegraph to newspapers across the country.

Though his career spanned more than 30 years, Gobright was known primarily for two events that happened near the start of his career, during the American Civil War. Early in that conflict, Gobright came to the attention of Congress because he was consistently able to get big stories from the front to the public, even as military censors tried to clamp down hard on even the least consequential news. He was called to testify to Congress, and in his testimony he made a statement that became one of the most well-known descriptions of the work of an objective journalist:

My business is merely to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate. My despatches are sent to papers of all manner of politics, and the editors say that they are able to make their own comments about the facts which are sent to them. I therefore confine myself to what I consider legitimate news. I do not act as a politician belonging to any school, but try to be truthful and impartial. I do not act as a politician belonging to any school, but try to be truthful and impartial. My despatches are merely dry matters of fact and detail.

Of course, the primary providers of online syndication feeds today are bloggers, whose opinionated journalism would have startled the “just the facts” Gobright. But the nascent network that Gobright belonged to, the Associated Press, really provided the spiritual ancestor of the current syndication concept — the AP was the first to provide, to any newspaper that cared to subscribe to the wire service, a steady flow of “microcontent” that local papers could then use either as filler or as a starting point for their own reports. The parallels to the way ideas percolate through the blogosphere, picking up steam as authors take them up, tweak them, and then syndicate them out again, are striking.

Gobright’s second brush with history was more dramatic than providing testimony to a Congressional committee — he was actually the first reporter to break the story of President Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre. Gobright’s wire report, leading off with “The President was shot in a theater to-night, and is perhaps mortally wounded,” is still cited as an example of how to tell a gripping story in a few well-chosen words.

(A tangential note: after the end of the war, Gobright pioneered another form of writing that is today quite commonplace but was then quite novel: the journalistic memoir. His 1869 reminiscence Recollection of Men and Things at Washington, During the Third of a Century can be read in its entirety online, thanks to the rapidly disappearing glory of the public domain.)

So, when people talk about syndicated news, they have to talk about Lawrence Gobright — which seems to me like reason enough to have our new syndication format pay tribute to his memory. There are other good reasons for this name as well, however:

• “GoBright” sounds like the answer to a question — “Want to syndicate smart? GoBright!”
• The use of “bright” gives the name a sunny, pleasant feeling, as opposed to the kind of techie eye-glazing that three-letter acronyms can provoke.
• People searching for information on the GoBright format would find it easily, since few other products or services use the name. A Google search for “Gobright” brings up almost exclusively information about the man, and details of a GoBright format would be unlikely to be confused with his biographical information.

So, I urge you to go to the official GoBright proposal page on the Pie/Atom/Echo wiki and leave your thoughts, either on the name “GoBright” or on any of the other suggested names proposed by others. Together, we can come up with a great name and put this Pie/Atom/Echo jumble behind us once and for all; and I’d like to think that, in doing so, we can give a nod back to the history of publishing, even as we define its next great leap into the future.