MORE II refcard from the late 80s. We used to include these in our products, a quick summary of all the keystrokes the software responds to. I'm glad to have this online now., #
I updated the copy on the Is RSS Dead page. I still really dislike the concept of pairing RSS with that word. But this site gives me a chance to say concisely what RSS is. Things like RSS are useful forever. Live or die isn't even a question, it's a standard, an agreed-to way to make things that are compatible. It's gives users maximum power. It's kind of a miracle that it exists. I question the motives of anyone who promotes the idea that it doesn't. #NYPD is political, kind of a terrorist organization. Even NYC mayors are terrorized by them sometimes. Not kidding about this.#
- I have a test account for Scroll so I can figure out what it is.#
- Scroll is interesting because it comes from Tony Haile. He's a real product guy, having created Chartbeat. For the last few years, as I understand, he's been going to various future-of-news conferences. I met him at the Newsgeist show a couple of years ago. He's been talking about collaborating with news orgs on a new distribution system, and that's Scroll. There's a page for Scroll on Crunchbase and they have a Twitter account. #
- Once you're logged on you see a list of partners, and a section called reading activity. I wasn't paying attention the first few times I went there, but I assume they gave me a cookie, so that when I show up at their partner sites, it knows it's me, and they share the fact that I read that article with Scroll. I assume then that they give the publisher a micropayment from the monthly fee I pay them. The reading activity section shows me the partner stories I read. #
- I guess the theory goes like this. Paywalls are a pain in the butt. Users hate them. But you can go to these sites, without subscribing, without caring about the paywall. Read the story, and the fee is deducted from your Scroll balance. #
- This page has a list of their partners, not sure if you can read this without paying. #
- If every pub adopted it, I could cancel my subscriptions to the Washington Post, NY Times and The Athletic. And I would be able to read as many articles on currently paywalled sites like New York, New Yorker, The Atlantic and a few others that I usually run out of free reads on before the end of a month. I would no longer have to ration my clicks, and I would feel free to share links to all sites, as I did before there were paywalls. #
- So that's the trick. Tony has to get the paywalled sites that are in demand, the ones which people are on the edge of subscribing to but don't. He already has the sites without paywalls. But I don't see the ones I miss there. And until they are there, while I like Tony and expect great things from him, honestly, there's no reason for me to use Scroll.#
There's another Democratic debate this week. Expect the usual questions, Medicare for All, climate change, electability, etc. The candidates have well-rehearsed answers for these, including zingers and comebacks. But I keep thinking of questions I'd like to ask a would-be Democratic president, based on the world as it likely will be in 2021 when they take office. One where health care and climate change are not the biggest most immediate issues. #- You've been elected president. It's Inauguration Day in 2021. The rule of law is broken. Congress is impotent. There are soldiers in the streets of DC. You're president now, and you can do anything you want. Your predecessor broke the Constitution, the Department of Justice runs a police state. We're in deep trouble. New wars, North Korea testing missiles over Japan. There's a rampant virus on the loose in world now, not just China, Trump supporters are threatening to revolt, there's talk of secession, not just in deep red states, but blue states too. So here's the question. Is your first priority to re-establish the rule of law or can that come later, after you put out all the big fires?#
- Again, you're the new president and a member of the Supreme Court resigns, say RBG or Clarence Thomas. Suppose the Senate is still Republican, and McConnell is still the leader. First question: Who do you nominate? A liberal or a moderate? Does it depend on whose place they're taking? Second question: McConnell refuses to hold hearings, as he did with Merrick Garland. He's going to wait until a Republican is in the White House or there's a Democratic majority in the Senate. What do you do?#
- Note that these don't have to be debate questions, they could be part of a written test or a job interview. I don't need them to think on their feet. They can consult with advisors. I want to know what they will do, what kind of president they'll be. And if they don't have an answer, that'll be apparent too.#
I've been chatting about breakage with Dave Gandy, the founder of Font Awesome. I recorded a 15-minute voicemailcast to Dave, with a very small slice of my experience with breakage in tech. Dave is now a member of the No Breakage Club. Up until now I thought I was the only one. They learned the hard way by shipping a version of their product that basically broke everyone. It broke me. Squared the complexity of using FA, which ideally would require zero thought, it should "just work" as it did when I first adopted it in 2013. Now they're putting the pieces back together, and I'm guessing it will work. It doesn't always, sometimes you're stuck forever supporting both versions. At least if you care about your users. Not sure where this will go, but it's nice to have a friend on the frontier. In the cast I talk about Python's breakage, it came with v3.0. #BTW, as I mention in the cast, the new Concord, the one I just released, includes the latest version of Font Awesome. Since they're now a member of No Breakage Club, he's a friend, and it's worth helping him get the very latest stuff out there. #
A couple of LO2 user tips. 1. Keep your tab list neat. Close files. They're easy to re-open and 2. Change the title of files to make the tab display more esthetic and usable. #
Yesterday I released a new version of Concord, the outliner core of LO2. This broke the then-current release, v1.8.6. After a report by Andy Sylvester, I quickly released v1.8.7, which works with the new Concord. The problem was that the name of the CSS file changed. The result is that the outlines looked pretty horrible. To get the latest version reload the page. If that doesn't get you 1.8.7, here are tips for getting the browser to do a full reload.#
In this election there are two sides. One side believes in the rule of law, the other doesn't. Everything else, to be settled later, once the rule-of-law is re-established.#
It's great that Bloomberg is spending huge money on good advertising that correctly positions the Dems vs Trump. But it's only half the job. The other half is organizing the electorate so we are always mobilized and ready for action#- My guess is they don't want to mobilize us because it isn't really about "us" -- it's about their power. An electorate that was organized could overthrow whoever it was that organized us.#
- I don't blame them btw. I experienced this myself. In the early days of the net, I started an open mail list with my customers on it. So they could help each other, and ask questions of us. One of my competitors got the idea that they could join the list and market to our customers. Then they got the idea they could blow up the community by throwing huge flaming turds into the list. Since then I've struggled with how to create collaborative communities that don't have this vulnerability.#
- But the fact that Obama didn't keep the organization going after he got elected meant that the Repubs could stonewall him, and he had no effective way to appeal to the electorate to stand by him, even though a lot of us would have done so happily. His humiliation was ours.#
I just released a new version of Concord, the first since 2013. This is the core outliner of LO2. Native file format is OPML. #
When Jon Stewart went on CNN to plead that they give a shit. It's hard to watch because it was 2004, and it's gotten so much worse since then. Makes you realize that we wouldn't be in this mess if we had journalism instead of this garbage. Also fascinating that everyone thought he was joking, but everything he said was serious. The "news" was and is an emotional release.#
It's great that Bloomberg is spending huge money on good advertising that correctly positions the Dems vs Trump. But it's only half the job. The other half is organizing the electorate so we are always mobilized and ready for action.#
Questions for all Democratic candidates, esp Bloomberg. Do you feel the president is above the law? If you are elected, will you use the new powers Trump has taken for himself? What will you do if Trump refuses to leave?#
I don’t miss Obama. When I see Obama I think of how we lost the war and he didn’t put up a fight. I think of how he let McConnell terrorize us without trying to organize us. I think history will judge him a failure. PS: This is btw why Biden has no chance.#
Something I learned a long time ago. Telling a nasty asshole bully troll what you really think of them might be satisfying, for a moment, but you end up with all the nasty shit in your heart and it doesn't go away. It's hard to hold back, but you must.#
- Since writing the piece yesterday about Bloomberg's campaign I've done some more thinking and reading. The best piece I came across was this one in New York by Eric Levitz. It's a long piece, totally worth reading all the way through, but this was the paragraph that made me stop and think. #
- "The same personal fortune that would free the Democratic Party from cash constraints this fall would also liberate a President Bloomberg from partisan constraints once in office. If the plutocratic president decides to find common ground with a Republican Senate on Social Security cuts, what leverage will the Democratic Party have over 'their' White House?"#
- That's a really good question. #
- I came up with a couple of solutions and a couple of conclusions.#
- Insist that Bloomberg burn his bridges with the Republican Party. Go to Kentucky and campaign against Mitch McConnell, who is up for re-election this year. Campaign with Amy McGrath, his Democratic opponent. Help her with advertising and donate to her campaign. Do the same for all congressional Republicans, with an emphasis on the ones with the most tenure and visibility. #
- Even better, Bloomberg steps back in favor of one of the current Democratic candidates. In other words fulfill the promise he made about funding the Democratic campaign against Trump even if he's not the nominee -- now. Take Bloomberg out of it. I think Klobuchar would be the best choice (more on that later). Now we can be sure the president will be a pure Democrat. #
- The first conclusion -- who cares. The choice in 2020 is about the end of American rule of law. Who knows what the implications are of that. We've never had a lunatic autocrat or monarch with the economic and military power of the United States. In that context, who cares if it's the end of anything as long as we can vote him out of office in four years. (Also since he contributed to Democrats, he's going to have to work with a Democratic Congress, which as we know can be a good check on a legal presidency.)#
- Another conclusion -- imagine a happy ending, and write the history of it, from 20-30 years out. Here's what I would write. 2020 was a pivotal election. The Democratic Party and the remnants of the Republican Party that still believed in the Constitution formed a bond, and elected a transitional president, Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican, technocrat, oligarch. This marginalized the extreme part of the Republican Party that was loyal to Trump. The Democrats won the presidency and Congress with huge margins, enough to codify the norms that Trump violated. After the election, the two groups went their own ways, forming two new parties, one liberal and one conservative, and the country evolved out of the insane partisanship of the 90s, 00s and 10s. #
There was a moment when I, not a member of the Dean campaign, could post directly to their home page on Iowa Caucus night in 2004. Not by hacking, but permission. It was quite a moment. #
- Joan Walsh who I admire for being a listener, a rare thing among pundits, wants Bloomberg on the debate stage. She imagines that his opponents would tear him apart over things he said about racial profiling and red zoning in past decades. So many things to say about that.#
I heard former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, a contemporary of Bloomberg's as mayor of NYC, on NPR yesterday. He's black. They were trying to get him to say Bloomberg was wrong and bad or whatever, but he wouldn't. He said plainly that the violence problem in his city was with black and Hispanic young men, and it was probably the same in NYC. They were the ones walking around with guns. The cities were desperate to get those guns out of their hands. #- Joy Reid, on MSNBC on Tuesday night, who is also black, said that blacks have only ever felt passionately about one candidate, Obama. Otherwise they make pragmatic choices. They want to get rid of Trump. They'll choose Bloomberg if they think he's the best way to do that. That's how I vote too, I try to do it always, pick the candidates who would best do what should or must be done. #
- OK so Bloomberg is on the debate stage. Each candidate, except perhaps Sanders, is thinking, if I'm the nominee, I'm going to need his support. They aren't likely to go for the jugular. Think of Bloomberg not just as a candidate, but also as a Democratic Koch or Adelson. If he isn't the nominee the Bloomberg PAC is going to play a big role in Democratic politics. #
- If Bloomberg were just throwing money at this it wouldn't work. But it is working. He thinks creatively, is willing to risk not just his money but his reputation and legacy. He's doing the marketing that the Democrats have failed to do for generations. He is so smart, most billionaires want to hold on to their money, which is ridiculous, given how short life is and how old they are. He's using his money for good, now -- and that imho overshadows every past sin he has been accused of and is likely to be accused of. It doesn't eliminate them, but they have to be considered against the good he is doing, which imho is enormous. He's a gift horse and go ahead and look if you must, but he should keep going in the meantime. #
- A creative idea. Bloomberg could offer say $50 million to any still-running candidate, to be used for advertising to position against Trump, now, no strings attached. #
- Bloomberg is not just a candidate. He's doing the marketing, actually just starting to, that the Democrats have failed to do, ever. All the while the Republicans have mastered it. The Democrats are so unaware of this, they don't even see it. So when they look at Bloomberg they only see what they know to look for. A horse in a race. But he's a developer, working on defining media and politics for the world of 2020. He's going to test every assumption we have about how campaigns work, and that itself will be incredibly valuable. Let's pay close attention. #
- He's also working in advance of Trump, who hasn't yet managed to shut off political advertising of his opponents. This door should be shoved wide open in the most captivating way possible so when and if he shuts it down, people will miss it. #
- When Steve Jobs came along he looked at computers differently from the way IBM did. He looked for assumptions that could be broken and the result was the Apple II. When we got blogging and podcasting going, again we looked for assumptions of print journalism and radio that could be broken and it worked. We haven't yet done that for politics. Not just money-raising, that was solved in 2004 by Howard Dean and Joe Trippi. Actually doing politics effectively without being controlled by trolls using the networking technology of today. Bloomberg, a master of tech and media, is probably the best person in the world to try to do this right now. That's what journalism is, predictably, missing. #
- There was Bartlet for America, which begat Dean for America, now we need to be more specific -- politics for the rest of us. ;-)#
- Update: President Bloomberg, really a Democrat?#
We can remember Obama the way we remember FDR or JFK, he was dreamy, and he did the ACA, and dug us out of a depression, but in the end the US lost under Obama. We now know that for sure. Whoever leads us next, if we're lucky enough to have that be in 2021, that has to be someone who accepts the US as it is, not as it was. #Even if Biden were 30 years younger, even if he were a great candidate who inspired love and trust, the fact that he came from the Obama presidency means he could not get elected. #
35.3% said Klobuchar would finish third in New Hampshire. Not bad. The number one answer was fourth or lower, at 45.4%.#
Braintrust query: I have a JavaScript app running in the browser. I want it to quit when another copy of the same app is opened in another tab. I used to do this with a localStorage value. Set it to a random string of 25 characters. Periodically compare the string in localStorage with the one I set at startup. If it's different I know another copy of the app is running, and I (used to) exit via window.close. This no longer works. There's an error from the browser, "Scripts may close only the windows that were opened by it." So is there no way for an app to quit on its own without a user interaction?#
- It may be time to disengage from the daily news a la Maddow et al. #
- I think they're plucking the strings when they're ready to, not when the news is happening.#
- I don't think it's malice, but there are certainly things happening we can't see that they don't talk about publicly.#
- I find I wish I could ask my grandparents what they did when their societies were going through this kind of transition. Stalin, Hitler, etc. #
- Yup this is depressing, but while this is going on, it's still the same planet and climate, more or less, as it was last year this time. And I'm feeling good so that's something. #
- Life is a challenge. It ain't over till it's over. Namaste y'all.#
- I've read that former NYC mayor Bloomberg killed NYC's soul. As a son of New York, born and raised there, and who recently spent nine years living there, this is a perennial story, told many times every generation, and so far, it has never been true. #
- They said it when my family came to the city in the 1940s. Refugees from Europe will destroy the soul of the city. I don't think so. We were just added to the melting pot. Before that it was the Irish, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, every race, religion, you name it, they've all been accused of destroying the city.#
- Now they're replacing the great delis, diners and bodegas with ATM farms, the soul of the city is being destroyed they say, I agree, but read on.#
- I assume that Bloomberg did incentivize the obscene construction of residential skyscrapers in Manhattan, esp on the southern edge of Central Park, blocking out sunlight, to provide excellent views to Russian oligarchs and Saudi oil princes who are never there. But at the same time, Queens, the borough that raised me, that was a sleepy boring white bread place when I was growing up, has become the melting pot Manhattan used to be. People actually go to Flushing to eat the best Asian food in the city. If you had told me that when I was growing up there, I would have said it'll never happen. Flushing is an embarassment. It has a creek that smells like a sewer. And for crying out loud it's named Flushing. Geez. #
- The city is complex, huge, impossible to control. It's possible that some things Bloomberg did to the city may have lasting negative consequences, but he also made some things better. My favorite Bloomberg accomplishment were the bike lanes. I must have ridden five thousand miles in the city in the last decade. It's an excellent city for biking, but who would have thought that? Not me. #
- What's going on with the DoJ is serious, the news has captured that, but the reporting misses a few important things.#
- Why we don't want justice to be partisan. The reports assume people understand, but I think a lot of people may not put two and two together. If justice is applied not based on evidence but on whether you're in favor with the president, the inverse will happen too, people are prosecuted because they're enemies of the president. Expect Comey to be arrested soon, and perhaps Schiff, Pelosi, Romney and others who have crossed Trump in more powerful ways that poor Colonel Vindman. You may say, oh well, the president is just one person, how much damage can he do, but he is the top person, and people below will look for signals and will inevitably try please him. You end up with justice being bought and paid for in favors to the top guy and his capos. A government not of laws, but of organized crime. However cynical you may be about justice in the US, the system we've lived with has rules that limit abuse, but those rules appear to be slipping away now. #
- This isn't the first time "crony justice" has happened in the last few months, or even the biggest travesty. Recall that the DoJ refused to investigate the accusations of the Ukraine whistleblower that led to Trump's impeachment. So the House had to do its own investigating. The congressional Republicans made an issue of how the Democrats did the investigating, but the press for the most part overlooked that they shouldn't have had to do the investigating in the first place. That's why we have a DoJ. When the government is properly functioning it would have been routine, but Barr is acting as the president's attorney, not the US's attorney, therefore of course he didn't investigate.#
- The various departments may report to the president but they work for Congress as much as they do the president. No longer true. That's why the second article of impeachment, the one Romney didn't vote for, was so important. #
- Also while it's honorable for a DoJ lawyer to resign a case, or resign from the department, and something we should applaud (as opposed to standing by and accepting the malpractice), also note that it serves Barr's purposes to get rid of the ethical people who remain, and once gone they can no longer sound the alarm. #
This is weird. If you do a Google search for What makes a weblog a weblog? it links to a page on blogs.harvard.edu that's a Miley Cyrus fan blog. It was last updated in 2008. Anyway, the original piece, intended to last for a long time, is still present, even though Google doesn't know about it. Written in 2003, by yours truly, it was an attempt to put a marker down. This is what we were doing way back when. To the future, you know how it turned out. We had no idea.#
New site: IsRSSDead.com. I saw a similar site for Ruby on Rails, and immediately wanted one for RSS. The first text on the page was rude because I think it's a rude question. The next answer was sarcastic. And now there is a polite answer. It's given me a lot of ideas. I think I might put a reverse chronologic list of news sites that have updated recently. The list of news orgs that support RSS is impressive. Any news syndication standard would be happy with such support. And maybe list some of the software devs who have invested in RSS, and who continue to do so. Standards aren't alive or dead, but as long as people persist in blaming RSS for their problems, we should probably accept the challenge. And thanks to the Rails folks for the idea. 💥 #When I see the Nets won without the services of Kyrie or KD, I think of how depressed Knicks fans would be if they signed them.#
Charles Pierce, a columnist at Esquire, asks why suddenly James Carville is relevant (again). This my friends is exactly what's wrong with journalism and politics. Carville isn't any more or less relevant now. He did however do an interview on MSNBC where he said exactly what the Democrats are doing to lose the election, and correctly stated what the election is about and what the consequences would be of losing. It was a passionate wakeup call that apparently rippled out to Pierce's perch in the hierarchy of punditry, who hears it as the question he asks. Why is Carville relevant, he asks. Better question, why is Pierce such an idiot? It doesn't matter who sees the truth and yells it loud enough to pierce the fog of your self-importance, what matters is that it's the truth. We are, as Carville says, on our way to electing Trump to another term, when what we need to do is win so decisively that we have the power to undo the damage he did. We need to be very smart, focused and not worry about Pierce's pecking order. Yet our pundits and political leaders are mostly just worried about doing what they always do, being well paid and as Pierce puts it, relevant. #
Doc's latest podcast is about outlines. What they taught you about outlining in school was dishonest. We cheated, we wrote the outline after writing the paper. But it's not like that on the computer: reorganizing is easy. The text is on rails. Doc understands structure and outlining, as you can hear in this podcast. The one common thing about all outliner users -- they think about how they think. Once you do that, it makes sense to look for tools to augment that. I'm going to let Doc tell you the rest. Here's his outline. #There are two huge campaign organizations booting up now. One is Trump 2.0 and it’s a monster. The other is Bloomberg. He has more money than Trump, and he fights hard and smart. We’re lucky he’s doing it, none of the other Democratic candidates can do what he’s doing. #
Women Republicans of Utah stand with Senator Romney. And I stand with them. This is how we heal as a country.#
Someone should write a piece about how much worse it's going to be with Trump than the press is willing to admit. This time he is going to have his political opponents prosecuted and jailed. He's not just going to get dirt on them, he's going to take them off the field.#
I did a small overhaul of the nightly email code yesterday. Screwing with that code is inherently dangerous, make a mistake and the wrong email goes out to all the subscribers. Or it doesn't go out at all. This kind of code is notoriously hard to test. Anyway it worked. Whew. And one of the side-effects is that the emails go out at 12:00 PM, not 12:02 PM. I know just a two-minute difference, but I'm a perfectionist, and the two minutes really bothered me. Also it's more reliable, which is the real reason I did the work. #
I want a cloud DVR. I remember how great TiVO was a very long time ago. Do I have to use Google TV to get one? I use Roku on Spectrum.#
Doc asked in passing what it means when a section of the outline has chevrons in place of the wedges. In this screen shot the red arrow points to a comment. It means the text is commented. You toggle the feature with Cmd-\. Like everything in an outline, it's hierarchic, so when you comment a headline, it and all its subs are commented. Okay so now what does it mean to be commented? It depends on who processes the outline. The idea originated in programming, when you want to explain a bit of code, you'd tell the code interpreter the writing by "commenting it out." Comments are like speaker notes for code. That was the long answer. The short one is that, for what you're doing now, it probably doesn't matter if some text is commented or not. It'll happen if you press Cmd-\ by accident. #
I turned off the Likes feature on Scripting News. Most people are reading the stuff through email and RSS. Likes predates the email distribution. The server is a bit of a hog. But the most important thing was that it wasn't being used. If it had gained traction I would have been ready to do the work to get it smoothed out. The code is still there, the server is still running, so I could turn it back on any time. #
Fixed a bunch of bugs in LO2 over the last few days. Still have a lot more to work on. It's great having people use it. It was hard to focus on it when I wasn't getting any feedback. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for me to have a connection with smart enthusiastic users. #
BTW, LO2 is just another name for Little Outliner. There was a previous version that was quite different. So when the second version was on the way, I called it LO2. Also because typing LITTLE OUTLINER was more work than LO2. Sorry for the confusion.#
It's a two voicemailcast Friday. The first one is from me, to kick it off, and a response from Doc will follow in the next item. I have an outline, but they were the notes I took before doing the podcast, I didn't clean them up, so you're seeing D2D (Dave-to-Dave) communication. I recorded this on Wednesday. And some of the items in the outline didn't make it into the cast. Still diggin. #
As I say in my podcast, this series is a rambling disorganized and repetitive conversation between Doc and myself. I'm getting huge value out of it. We're not going to hire a writer to do transcripts, because after that we'd need an editor to make sense of it. Maybe someday, could be a book or something, but right now it's just a conversation between two old friends. And it's giving me amazing information for my software development work.#
Braintrust query: Here's an interesting piece of data. I said Hey Doc, create an AWS account. I didn't tell him how to do it. I wanted to see what happened. He didn't succeed. OK so this means to me that we need a piece of software. A rough idea of how it would work. The user signs on to their Amazon account, the one they use to buy socks, and then authorizes you to act on its behalf with AWS. Ideally that would feel, to the user, like giving access to an app to use their Twitter identity. From there, you create a pair of S3 buckets, one private and one public. Then you allow my software to access his bucket. I don't know what all these steps are. But it should draw on a user's ability to create accounts on other popular services. I imagine it's what Amazon itself would create if they wanted to provide a service to non-developers. I imagine at this time they consider it a "developer opportunity." I need this functionality as a go-between my users and my software. I don't want to store their stuff long-term, because I dont have a long-term. #
Trolling 101: "The press, he likely knew, wouldn’t be able to resist criticizing him. To criticize him, they would have to talk about him."#
I did a search on Google yesterday trying to find a US government website. The top hit took me to a site that looked like the site I was looking for. I started filling in my information, then I noticed the URL wasn't on a .gov domain. Looked closer and realized it was a hack. I don't want to publicize the search; just to say there's another attack vector I hadn't considered and should have. I assumed a hack wouldn't be a top hit for a government site on Google.#
Candidates who aren't likable aren't usually elected. Like Mike Dukakis. The Repubs mocked him. On paper he was a better candidate than Bush. Bush won. Bush said cute shit like Big Mo. And ran racist ads about Willie Horton. The picture of Dukakis in the tank. He lost the election when asked would he favor the death penalty if someone murdered his wife Kitty. He gave a totally rational response. They said he was cold. It stuck. #This video explains how the Repubs tore Michael Dukakis apart in 1988. Remember that when choosing a candidate to run against Trump, who is the great-great-grandchild heir to this slash-and-burn style of campaign. The Democratic Party in its current shape will not be able to help the nominee. That's why, even if you don't like oligarchs, it's so important that Bloomberg is building a campaign attack machine as fast as he can. #
She is so talented. I can't believe we didn't use this talent more effectively in the past. Watching this, I think Bernie and Warren should sit down and let Pelosi lead the revolution.#I want a network that works for organizing.#
Iolaire McFadden has created a sort of mutual fund for donations to all the Democratic candidates for Senate in the 2020 election. Your donations are divided between them. I just gave $100. It's a good idea, good for the country.#
Tony Haile, the founder of Scroll and Chartbeat, had a really good idea. When the Senate votes on something consequential, such as whether to remove the president, let's have a readout that shows the number of people the Yes votes represent, by state, and the number of people the No votes represent. It would measure how far our government is from being a democracy. I would love to see this as a website.#
Randall Neff did an Excel spreadsheet for the impeachment trial. It wasn't as lopsided as I imagined. Roughly 52% to convict, 48% to acquit. The reps of a majority of Americans thought he was guilty, but not nearly enough to convict him. Here's the spreadsheet in PDF.#
When I first reviewed Chartbeat it was called Firefly. I may have been the first user outside of Betaworks. I loved it, it was one of those "You can't really do this can you?" ideas. #
Why is Trump's approval rating going up? This question came up on Brian Lehrer's fantastic WNYC radio show this morning. Here's my theory. During the trial, Trump wasn't controlling the public conversation. So we didn't always hear about Trump's latest outrage every minute of every day. If he were to tone it down permanently, only spoke when a president would normally speak, he might be more popular. #
Amy Klobuchar still meets my requirements for a good Democratic candidate for the plan I outlined yesterday. My only concern was her confidence, but she's really good in this interview. I would definitely vote and work for her, without reservations. #
It's been a while since we had an Occam's News report. Here's the latest. In the impeachment trial, if the jury could have been sure there would be no retribution for a vote of guilty, a lot more would have voted that way. A bunch of them would have voted to acquit even if there would be no retribution, because they think the US is going to privatize massive parts of the government, and they want to be in position to get some of that. Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz.#
This is a test of xref node types in Old School. Following the example from 7/13/2018, this node has an xref attribute whose value is this. When you expand this item you should see the contents of the post. It's a type of inclusion. Today I'm moving the folder on the server where the linkages exist as static objects. This post let me test to see if the move worked, when I did it. #
A new cast from Doc. There is an outline. I took notes, will share them when I post my response. Lots of good stuff! #
I saw James Carville on MSNBC last night. He speaks for me. The goal of this election is to get power. To do that we need to run a smart campaign as in 2018. He says the party needs a new chairman, who should it be -- he says Ask Nancy Pelosi. Beat the drum with talking points that rarely stray off health care, climate, education. Over and over. Take power and get the Repubs out of the way and then do what needs to be done. Pick a presidential candidate that fits this plan. Nothing more complex. We're not electing god, we're electing someone who can lead us out of the nightmare of a morass we are now in. Wake the fuck up people who think the election is about the candidates. It is not. Once we have a plan, the candidate will follow the plan. That's all. Think like someone in a smoke filled room. We wanted that power, now learn to use it. That's what Carville said last night. Really passionate and smart. #The only criteria for a candidate: I want someone who, when a Republican who believes in the rule of law sees them, they think -- I could vote for them. Even better, I want to vote for them. In this election there are two sides, one side believes in the rule of law, the other doesn't. It isn't about any issue other than that. #
Yesterday I signed up for the Bloomberg campaign. I take him at his word, if he isn't the nominee, he will back the actual candidate with his money and organization. I hope he starts a political social network, the one I thought Obama was building, not to make money (eg FB, Twitter), rather to allow us to organize politically without interference from trolls. Someone has to do this, I hope Bloomberg will.#
Say what the voters say the way they say it. Over and over. #
I'm not a Cubs fan but I've always enjoyed their tradition of rejecting opposing teams' hits by throwing them back on the field. #
Clarification. LO2 is not a blogging tool. But you can write a blog post in it. That's what I meant in the top item of yesterday's edition.#
- I saw a tweet by Joe Biden just now where he asks if the government he was part of was a failure. When you ask the question like that, the answer is somewhat startling. Yes. The Obama government was a failure. In the same way the French government of 1940 was a failure. Sure, they passed some good laws, and the people of France were happy, but when the Germans marched into Paris in 1940, you would have to say that the existing government of France failed. #
- We were attacked in 2016, and we lost. How do I know we lost? We're not mounting a defense. We didn't counter-attack. If we had, and we had won, Putin would be gone, and Russia would be establishing an American style government. Instead, Putin is fine, and we're installing, gradually, a Russian-style government. That's the only explanation for what's happening in the Senate this afternoon at 4PM Eastern.#
- Biden, if he has any honor, will withdraw from the race. We lost. He was VP when we lost. We cannot under any circumstances go back to that approach. That would be certainly a loser. If there's any hope for us, we need a very radical departure from the previous path, and I do not mean Bernie Sanders. People who think that are as much in denial as Joe Biden was before he asked the question. Now that he has, if he has guts like he says he does, it's time to step aside. #
- PS: Is there a reason Nancy Pelosi can't be the next president? If there is I don't know what it is. In fact, she is our leader. And a very good one at that.#
A 21-minute voicemailcast to Doc. The speech maker I was trying to think of was Ann Richards. One of the best political speeches of all time. Mr Schiff Goes to Washington. Three requests of LO2 fans. 1. Write a blog post in LO2, send me a link. 2. If you don't have an AWS account, please set one up. 3. Use the outliner as a file system. #
One thing people don't get about Bloomberg is that he is a tech entrepreneur and a media mogul in one package. As if Steve Jobs, instead of making Macs and iPhones, made magazines and terminals. Different characters, similar thought process.#
I don't know why people take the shortcut of saying other people are tone deaf. Obviously the person who they're saying it to doesn't agree. Do they really want to argue about that? What's the point. It's like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Donald Sutherland is screaming and pointing at someone who is not yet possessed. Look I found a human, the accuser seems to be saying. It's not a good look.#
This is the story that should have been on MSNBC last night. They spent three years getting ready for it. And instead they tried to show a feel-good family hour of Americana. And it fell apart. It's a Heidi moment. #
The big lesson of all our lives is that we have to learn to work together or it doesn't work.#
- Lots of takeaways from last night's meltdown of the vote-counting system in Iowa. #
- Do not depend on your online systems. You must have a backup system that's tested as well as the primary system.#
- There was another probably more important story last night, where real news had been made during the day. The obsession of the previous week -- impeachment. Since you didn't have anything going on in Iowa, why not provide coverage of what happened in Congress during the day when no one was watching. Might have had a positive impact for the country. #
On MSNBC there was a party atmosphere. As if finally we don't have to talk about doom and gloom, for a few minutes we can go back to the naivete of the 2016 election when we could laugh about Trump. Or who knows what they thought was so funny. The news, which ostensibly is their business, is as funny as a heart attack during a nuclear holocaust. Having a party on TV now would be like laughing as the world was mourning Kobe Bryant. Look, CNN and MSNBC should be news rooms. If you don't know what that means, either get out of the way, or learn. Your job is to always be asking yourself Is This Actually News? Last night they had nothing. And they acted like idiots. #- At one point Chris Hayes commented you know it's fun to actually not view voters in the aggregate. Yes Chris, we think, we have ideas, we see things you'll never see, and you could stop and figure out what's important about your new realization. That there are way more of us than you, and we're the real power in the country, not the politicians you fawn over, and the other journalists of course.#
- I've said this many times. If you want to help yourselves and the country, move your newsroom to the midwest. Maybe you'll have to do all your interviews over the net. It's getting pretty good. But at least the moderators' perspective will be altered somewhat, will get out of that fetid putrid bubble you all live in. Important stuff is happening, and you're blowing it. It's time to shake things up in journalism. #
- It's good that Iowa melted down. It'll wake everyone up. Even if the caucus is a total loss, it's a small price to pay to get people to pay attention to the way we're using online systems in politics and journalism. Especially in 2020 where our systems are undefended against terrorism, it's a certainty we will be replaying this, on a much larger scale, at some time during the process.#
- Why is this process so freaking long! The horserace provides good TV, I guess, if what you want to do is play video games during the broadcast (that's what I do), but we've got other more pressing business than the minutia that people think of as news in this period. It's in the boredom of the interminably long election that Hillary's Emails were invented. We would never have had time for Hunter Biden and Burisma. The length of the process is something the Repubs have mastered for their mischief. Let's not give them such a tempting target. First primary is in July, say, and it's five huge swing states. Then the rest. That's it. Then a convention and Election Day. #
If you get a chance, please listen to Adam Schiff's closing speech in the impeachment trial. I have a feeling a lot of people didn't hear this historic, passionate plea for America. The Repubs in Congress aren't listening, but we imho must. It's really right up there with JFK's inauguration speech in 1961. Thanks to Schiff and the House Democrats for standing up for America.#
Complaining that Bloomberg is an oligarch in the age of Citizens United is like (I was trying to think of an analogy and failed) ridiculous. Of course he's an oligarch. And his ads are good Democratic values ads. He knows how to market. Kick back and thank god someone does. (This was the beginning of a long rant on Twitter. Enjoy!)#
I used to call for presidential candidates to try to work with Repubs, but that's changed since Friday's vote re evidence for impeachment. They are complicit, as corrupt as the president. There is no working with any Republican who is in Congress at this time. #
Over on Facebook Terry Heaton posted a screed in support of Jennifer Lopez in last night's SuperBowl halftime show. To me it was a big meh. I find those kinds of shows unimpressive, the music not interesting. I came to watch football, not dance. I'm not kidding. Even Prince, the Stones, Bruce, etc didn't get me off. I was in the kitchen during the wardrobe malfunction. But -- Terry's post is noteworthy because he ends it with this line: "America is facing the destruction of our democracy, and we're worried about this?" We should make a button out of that. Tatoo it on our forehead so we see it in the mirror. We need to be good to each other, find ways to combine our power, not minimize it. Let's go Mets! and thanks for listening. #It turns out the source of the problem that a user was experiencing with the new version of Little Outliner was Privacy Badger from EFF. I gather it's something that a user can disable, so if you have LO2 and you're running Privacy Badger, you should disable their distrust of scripting.com and then LO2 should work as it should. #
What's really sad is that the user doesn't get an error message that they can pass on to support so we can avoid having the user go to the JavaScript console (an unnatural act for most of our users) to find the error that's causing the app not to load. #
I have to say EFF has been a constant bummer and pain in the ass. For an organization that I should be able to support (and have, see below), they are always doing shit like this. When they sued the guy who claimed to have invented podcasting, they didn't respond to my emails or blog posts begging them not to take the approach they took. I felt it's important to get on the record how media types like podcasting come about. They didn't care. So much for being on the electronic frontier. It seems to me we should be on the same side in everything, and when we're not we should listen to each other. I gave the EFF $5K, which was then and is now a lot of money for me, when they were founded by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmor and John Perry Barlow, in 1990. I believe in the mission, but often do not believe in the implementation. Thanks for listening.#The only football team I've ever been a fan of, the San Francisco 49ers, is in tonight's SuperBowl. I'm angry and frustrated that the NFL won't hire former Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick. I also remember the intellect, wisdom, character, professionalism, talent and luck of the Niners of the 80s and 90s. So just for tonight, I'll be a football fan again. Go Niners! 🏈#BTW, to tech-savvy users who are regulars here. Please pitch in and help test the new release of LO2. As you can see from the thread on GitHub, the problems tend to be technical, though the typical user of the outliner is not. If you've looked for a way to pitch in, this is where I need the most help. Keep an outline on LO2. When there's a new release try editing it. Do the changes stick when you reload the page? Try creating a new outline. Open an existing one. Log off and log on. Go through the menus and try all the commands. We're looking for breakage, something that used to work but because of changes doesn't work now. A lot of stuff changed in this release. But most of it isn't visible to users. Help me out. This is foundational work. I need LO2 to work for people, smoothly. Thanks.#
Trump is picking a fight with Michael Bloomberg, re his height. Gina Smith points out that Bloomberg is an inch taller than Putin. Heh. And then I read that Bloomberg's spokesperson, Julie Wood (a woman, this is important) said this: "The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan." You know, this is the first time in four years Trump has been in presidential politics, talking about people's bodies and demeanor, that someone has come back at him with this line of attack, which is totally valid. When you're being bullied by someone so obviously vulnerable, give it back to him. It's even Bloomberg's campaign manager has a killer idea in this podcast starting at around 8:30. Here's the spoiler. The first Democratic primaries should be in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. What an advantage that would be in November#
Lamar Alexander's story doesn't add up. If it's up to the voters, can we have the information we need to make a decision. Bolton's testimony is vital. As is the documentary evidence. I've served on a jury all the way to verdict, so I know how this works.#
I asked Alexa what time the Superbowl starts. 6:30PM kickoff.#
To Amazon. I'd like to be able to say "Alexa record a podcast." When I'm done I say "Alexa stop." She mails a link to the MP3 to me. Bing.#
Quick thoughts on the finale of Bojack. Spoilers follow. I think they planned the second-to-last episode as the actual final episode. Had they done that I would have said who ever thought a comedy like Bojack Horseman would try something so ambitious, and even better, pull it off. But they added one more plot twist, it's really hard to parse, and the rest of the final episode is weird and repetitive, and at the end punts the ending. Still a groundbreaking show that's often LOL funny. I wish all my friends would watch it so we can talk about it. Now I'll take some time and read the reviews.#
LO2 v1.8.5 is released. Here are the update notes for this version. Cmd-return and Cmd-backspace to split one item in two, and join adjacent paragraphs. New icon toggles HTML code between visible and invisible. Post any bug reports in this thread.#
I'm reviewing docs and little issues re the LO2 release. Looking for an example of a status center, I found Dave's Dev Status. Forgot I had set this up. You can create one with LO2. #
I am gradually switching off Dropbox, and wrote a piece of software called Public Folder to sync with Amazon S3. Despite its name it works for private stuff too. I use it for all my this.how docs and a few other projects. Works great. #
When I read an article about online "bernie bros" -- I wonder if the author remembers not to trust the intent of people who tweet at them. We learned this in 2016. Trolls try to divide us, they enflame both sides. I would never trust a "bernie bro" to be an actual person. #
Wow people really like the Dress Rehearsals for Election Day idea. Proves that there's a right time for an idea. I've been beating this drum for a long time!#
Voters support candidates who say the things they say the way they say them.#
- I was wondering how the courts will incorporate the Senate's decision into their interpretation of the Constitution. #
- Will they judge the executive as if the president is a monarch now?#
- They can't overrule the Senate, that seems clear from the Constitution.#
- Another question. What will the Repubs in the Senate do if/when Trump pushes the boundaries. For example, suppose he has a journalist killed. Lots of witnesses. He admits it. Assuming the House impeaches him, what does the Senate do? #
- A less radical hypothetical. What if he arrests Hillary Clinton for interfering with his re-election. Seems likely that will go to court. Say the Supreme Court rules this is illegal or unconstitutional. Will Trump respect that even though the Senate appears to have said it's OK.#
- I imagine the scholars and judges are thinking about this now. This has been a precedent-setting trial. If they actually do acquit him when no one contests the truth, it appears the only part of the government that objects is the House. It seems the question will be raised in the courts as well. It'll appear on Roberts' desk before too long. Is the president really a king?#
Something kinda cool. Every Republican in the Senate cast the deciding vote on whether evidence and testimony would be permitted. Oh the ads will be very tasty. Assuming elections go ahead as planned. #
- It looks like the impeachment trial will be over tonight. I've been trying to come to grips with how the Repubs, confronted with such clear evidence of the corruption of the president, could go along with it. #
- I figured it had to be blackmail or a threat of force. We now have a Russian-style government, and this is a rite of passage. Like the confirmation or bar mitzvah of the new autocracy. #
- In Russia, the parliament has no power. That seems to be the message bouncing around the twittersphere. Congress isn't going to do anything about this. What comes next? It's new territory for Americans, really for everyone, because the last time a great power went down this path was before the internet. #
- I've been reading the epitaphs of the thinkers I respect most on Twitter, and there do seem to be some conclusions. One tweet in particular makes a tremendous amount of sense, a perspective that I had not considered. The terror isn't coming from the state or oligarchs, it's coming from the net. #
- Sadly, I think he just wants to go home to TN and retire and not be harassed and doxed by Trump followers. Profile in courage? Obviously not, but Alexander has always seemed like a basically decent guy. He’s just out of his depth in Trump’s America#
- He got some pushback over "basically decent guy." It was deserved. We shouldn't judge people as if we're god. We don't know if he's decent. But the first part sounds right, it has to be the reason they didn't go forward with the trial. #
- First, Alexander went out of his way to say that the Dems made their case. He doesn't want anyone to blame them, though they will certainly get doxed or worse. The Dems most definitely did make their case, because they were thorough and courageous, and because the president made little effort to cover his tracks. Only some of the people who work for him did. Turns out they didn't need to. Unlike with the Nixon White House, they won't be going on trial or to jail. #
- If you were writing this as a Game of Thrones type novel, you'd be able tie up the loose-ends by saying that it was technology that did in the US. It wasn't nuclear weapons, or star wars, robots or chemical or biological weapons or even better encryption. No, it was the fact that everyone has the power to publish now, and we have these incredible machines for sharing private information, and we're just beginning to learn how to use them, and we have no idea how to contain them. #
- This is just the beginning of the first chapter of what comes after America. #
- FWIW, I'm drinking some great coffee today. #
- What I did differently, I looked carefully at the lines on the carafe. I had been underfilling it. This time I went to the line, exactly.#
- Also used fresh ground Peet's Italian Roast. #
- The water was straight out of the tap, no filters#
- Braintrust query: It appears that Electron changed how the core dialog routines work. Breakage galore, or so it seems. #
- I was reviewing my blog for November 2016, to see how we dealt with the shock of Trump's election and I came across a video of the unbelievably fantastic DNC 2012 speech of Jennifer Granholm. We need more of this. #
- Here's the piece I wrote on election night in 2016. #
- This is one of those days I've written four posts without publishing. They'll all go out at once, in various states of completion. But it's a day of ideas. I am depressed, in the same way I was the day after the 2016 election. But I had a good night's sleep, and the coffee is good. It's cold outside, but warm inside. I have all my material needs taken care of, and I have a powerful publishing platform, and the best tools, so I'm on-balance doing ok I guess. 💥 #
- Old habits die hard. I'm using an outliner that has cmd-return implemented. Yet I just split a paragraph using the old select-copy-return-paste ritual. I didn't even have to think about it. It's programmed into my subconscious at the base of my spine. It takes no conscious effort to do the keys. #
2017: "There's no question that Trump thinks he's a dictator. The question is how will that be resolved."#
Dershowitz just put into words what the acquittal of Trump means. Even if he hadn't spoken, Trump would still be free to do whatever he wants and not fear removal. He could pay people to vote for him using money from the US Treasury. He could arrest Joe Biden and anyone else who runs against him, making Lock Her Up a reality. #A question someone can ask the president's lawyers today. "Could the president arrest Mitch McConnell if he says something he deems not in the interest of the country?" Think of this as the press conference Trump refuses to have.#
Knicks fans have had it with the owner. At last night's game the fans chanted Sell The Team, the owner walked out in disgrace. The management even had a plan, they played music so loudly you couldn't hear the chant. What a night. #
A bit of advice to Joe Biden, trying to satisfy the press with pushback against Trump slurs. "Remember folks, Trump is the Birther dude." Come back at Trump with the truth, take the spotlight off you. Give the press all they need to stop dragging your family through the dirt. #
Today is the first of two Q&A days in The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Here's the question I'd ask of the president's defenders. Trump did something bad. If we don't remove him, assume he'll do more of that. And so will future presidents. We could throw out the Constitution. The presidency would be a for-profit enterprise, with the president selling favors to foreign leaders in return for favors and money. Could he do similar deals with the head of the FBI and DOJ? Why not? Would you pay taxes to such a government? Why? The Constitution would no longer have any force. Congress no longer serves as an oversight on the executive, you could all go home, or maybe you would blackmail local officials, of course kicking up a taste to President Trump (or whoever). You say we should acquit Trump. So this new form of government is okay with you? And if it's not (we hope) what should we do? #I hit a snag implementing cmd-return in LO2. It worked fine as long as there was no HTML markup in the text. I explain in this video, to the best of my ability, why that seems like it should be utterly simple, but isn't. (This feature isn't released yet.) #
Lots of great TV coming up. The last episodes of the great Bojack Horseman on Netflix on Friday. Meanwhile the best episodes of The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump are on today and tomorrow. And the Super Bowl and its commercials air on Sunday. Go Niners!#
Ben Smith, current editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed News is a good choice to be the new media columnist at the NYT. He has more of a bloggers perspective imho. I like that when he got his hands on the famous Steele dossier he shared it with the world. He got in hot water with other professional news people, but why would a reporter feel compelled to keep such a hot news item private? Isn't their job to make important information public? I came to like him listening to this podcast with David Remnick of the New Yorker. #
Braintrust query: Is there an icon like this: 
in the current version of Font-Awesome? I'd like to upgrade to the latest, but without this or something very close to it, I can't. #
in the current version of Font-Awesome? I'd like to upgrade to the latest, but without this or something very close to it, I can't. #
In a recent version of Electron, they grabbed the Cmd-` keystroke to do something in the system. I was using it in an app that I depend on, use all day every day, I'm using it right now as I write this. Now Cmd-` doesn't work. The command is still in a menu, but it's way more work. Every time I have to do that work I project evil thoughts at the person who did this. I understand there's supposed to be a way around it, a way to grab the keystroke back from Electron, but I spent a half-day not getting it to work. I don't have that many half-days to throw away. Now I'm seeing the same thing happen in Chrome. Cmd-` -- they must think there are no SPAs that use it, or they don't care. Now I wonder what the groundrules are. Are all my keystrokes up for grabs by the system vendor? I so vastly preferred the web when the bigco's didn't throw their weight around. When they were trying to coalesce to a standard (which they did) instead of shatter the platform into bits (which seems to be happening now). #
The silver lining from all this michegas is that millions more Americans will have a realistic appreciation for how our government works. I know I'm learning at an incredible clip. And don't overlook that many more millions around the world will too.#
An example of for-the-record writing that shouldn't be on a private network with no commitment to host. What Susan Collins says at this point is something that must be available to historians. She's a government official, responsible to the citizens of Maine. #
Last night with so much news breaking in the impeachment, with the trial resuming the next day, I wanted to hook into the flow produced by MSNBC and CNN, and through them senators making decisions about the trial, probably in real time. Some of that might be visible. We spend so much time in stasis, with the story never changing, when things are finally in motion, that's the time to focus. I had no doubt the reporters were in their studios, working on various stories, but there was no way for them to connect with people like me, because Kobe Bryant died. The two things aren't very related. #- I am a basketball fan. I've spent countless hours watching him play, a couple of times in person. I could have understood playing greatest hits of Kobe, he was an incredible player, but that isn't what they were doing. They were in an endless loop of people (imho) faking expressions of grief. Their stories left out all that was really interesting about the guy. He wasn't a nice person. Nothing wrong wtih that in sports. Now he's a saint? Really? It's a ritual that for some weird reason freezes the news media into a loop of wholly irrelevant and dishonest pseudo-news. Over and over again and again. Nothing new is happening. None of the people being interviewed are really incapacitated with grief. #
- I don't mind if there's programming for people who want to do this, but in 2020, the networking tech between my house and their studio is broad enough that we could do both. That's my point. It's time to fix TV with the features of the net. All this stuff is going over TCP these days. When I'm watching TV on my 65-inch screen, the video comes through the Spectrum app on my Roku desktop. There's lots of room for more apps. Let's go with this. Time to move. #
Video demo of a new LO2 feature Doc asked for. Put the cursor in the middle of a paragraph. Press cmd-return to split the paragraph at the cursor position, creating two headlines. Simple, I do this manually all the time, with copy-paste which is more tedious and error-prone. Also going to do the inverse, cmd-backspace to merge two headlines.#
Continue to be impressed with Brian Lehrer's Impeachment podcast. Highly recommend this episode with Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. I was going to ask Lehrer to do a show on what the US will be like after a Trump acquittal. This episode is a good start. Before watching another hour of CNN or MSNBC, listen to this. You'll learn a lot more. #
Amy Klobuchar is like a homemade chicken pot pie on a cold winter's day. I think after all the rock and roll the flyover folk would like a little peace and quiet. That's what I want. Not to have to worry about the US govt blowing the world up. #
Journalism is partisan now. Can’t help it. Just being ethical and educated is now a partisan position. We weren’t raised to believe that, but it’s the new reality.#
The credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump: "Donald Trump's the smart one, y'all elitists are dummmmb." There's more. This is the new mode for CNN. Laugh at the credulous boomer snowflakes that are wrecking the world. #
Andy Sylvester asked yesterday what can he do to help. Here's one thing that really holds back progress. When I ship a new version of a piece of software, test it. If you don't know how to do software testing, learn. This is a real problem.#- I'm going to release a new version of LO2 soon, maybe today or tomorrow. I will have verified it works on my machine, for what I use it for. But there may be deal stoppers for others.#
- These days, even experienced developers write ridiculous bug reports. One guy sent me an email saying he couldn't unsub from the nightly email. No clue as to what he did, or what happened. He just said it didn't work and asked if I knew what the problem was. There's nothing I can do for him.#
- 20-plus years ago we had a community that tested the new stuff, and gave us good bug reports. Then we could get some work done. One of them, Terry Teague, was a one-man QA department. He worked for Apple doing testing, but volunteered for community projects like ours, in his spare time, out of the goodness of his heart.#
- When I release the new version of LO2, I will write up the changes, here, on the blog, and provide a thread on GitHub for problem reports. I will be listening. #
- See also: Professional users.#
Republican senators should watch this scene from Game of Thrones. You see that guy Joffrey, the guy talking about "putting a son" in the attractive woman -- he's a lot like your leader (except he has nice hair). Wait for the punchline. You're going to love it!#
The Dems should embrace the Repubs-with-heads-on-spike meme. They would be doing the Repubs a favor actually because even if they deny it, we know that some of their heads will be on spikes before long. Let's debate that on CNN.#
Here's what my day's been like so far. Woke up at 9:30AM. Made some breakfast, turned on WNYC on my Alexa. Listened to their summary of the previous days' impeachment speeches, no mention of Pikes and how angry Republican senators were (thanks for that), then at 10AM they started broadcasting the speech by the White House counsel (who, I thought was supposed to represent the office of the president, not the president in person, but what of it) and he started into the lying and deception. I couldn't handle it. Told Alexa to stop. Finished my orange juice and skipped the coffee and went upstairs and back to bed. Woke up at about 1PM. Guess I needed the sleep. Would you believe it's raining in January. I moved my car out of the carport and into the rain, it could use a wash, totally mud-covered. I feel depressed. I think we're over the edge again, about to free-fall into another worst thing in the world. God please help America. Your devoted servant, Admiral Davey.#My mother was a beauty. Always I had the most beautiful mother in school. The other kids said that. I was proud. She married a man, my father, who was not beautiful. I found myself wishing the other day that she had married a beautiful man, then I would be as beautiful as she was. But then I thought, then, I would not be me. Or would I? I have no idea. I'm going to try to get some work done now. #
- Andy Sylvester, a longtime user of my stuff, recorded a voicemailcast. He did an outline too. My comments follow.#
- Andy, thanks for the voicemailcast. We've only met once face to face that I know of, and that was in a noisy place (in Portland), and there were a lot of other people there. #
- This voicemailcast multiplied my understanding of who you are. #
- Anyway, it is hard to collaborate with me on the actual code, because of the way I work, and that's not likely to change any time soon. Also coding has not been the limiting factor for a long time. It's how to attract writers and thinkers in all fields. I have a massive body of working code. As I said in the podcast, from this point it's about selecting bits to integrate into the current writing environment. With LO2, people will be using the same blogging environment I use. So we can evolve together. #
- BTW, I used 1999.io for a few years, it's what I switched from in 2017 when I decided to go back to the way I blogged before Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc.#
- Also if Wordpress works for you, that's great. It just isn't fluid enough for me. And btw, Doc has shown me how to make the outliner even more fluid. I haven't implemented his request yet, but now I see how much it would help. More on that later. #
- There are ways to collaborate. For example, Andrew Shell has been developing and managing the rssCloud server functionality. Perfect because we have a well-defined API for how our software interacts. He tells me he's doing a new release. So helping him might be an option, if he needs help. #
- But here's my number one request of the world -- what I want most that other people could create, is a Linux version of Frontier. I am in a precarious place on the Mac. The version of Frontier that I use as a code-writing and devops tool does not run on the latest Mac OS. We knew this was coming. I bought a super hot iMac Pro just before their OS switch, so I'm good as long as this machine continues to run, and the backup machines I have which are older continue to run. But I'm three hardware failures away from having no way forward. That's not good. #
- And Linux is great. All my servers run Ubuntu now, all my server code is in Node.js. Imagine how smooth it would be to have my development environment run there too. Lots of synergies, and safety. Ted Howard is the main guy on that stuff. Without his work I would have lost use of Frontier a long time ago. BTW this is a project I personally would put money into. You talk about the economics of software, there is a new bit of info on the economics. #
- Also next time you do a voicemailcast please send me a link via email. I almost didn't see this, and that would have been a shame. 😄 #
My least favorite thing is people explaining why they unsub from your feed. I don't care. I have a motto. "Don't slam the door on the way out." That way you know you really are going in peace, vs the passive-aggressive control freakery you're actually practicing. Now suppose for the sake of argument, I try to make you happy and dump every political idea I have. Great. You're happy. You feel powerful. But then someone else wants me to stop writing about tech ideas that come to me, because it makes them feel inferior because last week I posted one they didn't understand. Keep going, eventually there's nothing left here. So, I've been doing this for over 25 years. By now I've heard from every control freak on the planet. Heh probably not, but it feels that way. #Here's a great Bloomberg ad about Trump and the military. If the Dems had run ads like this in 2016, Trump would be a Fox News analyst today, like Sarah Palin. #
I got a couple of reports from people who use the Mail app on iPhones to read the nightly email. The contents of the mail only fills a portion of the window horizontally. I am able to reproduce the problem here. Apparently previously it filled the space. I've started a thread to gather info about this. I don't know how to debug this, but I will try. #
Yesterday, I included the video of Dale Bumpers' speech at the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, but it wasn't displayed by some of the email clients. Here's a link to the video on C-SPAN. #
- We, as a world, should build one great venue for summer olympics and one for winter. Why? Mostly symbolic. To say to the world, to ourselves, decisively, that we can work together, and compromise, for the benefit of humanity and the planet. #
- Think about it this way, we don't build a new United Nations every four years.#
- Further, no more spectacular displays of carbon consumption. Those made sense 127 years ago, at the dawn of electricity tech. Now it's rubbing salt in the wound. And it makes clear that we can and will sacrifice for our survival.#
- Specifically, no more Christmas trees. And turn down the lights in Times Square. You can't air condition the outdoors. (In NYC amazingly, there are places that do.) #
- Symbolism first, change the way people think, shock people out of their sense of normalcy, then rebuild our civilization around the new low-carbon-emission ethos. You can tell your children and grandchildren that you remember a day when we built a new temporary city every two years for a two week athletic competition, and never used it again.#