Repubs are great at organizing. Dems just want money.#

Maybe it's time for someone to take over the Dems and get people organized. The rule-of-law people in the US still vastly outnumber the bombthrowers, at least that's what I hear from journalism.#

The basic problem (imho) is that we all have been raised to believe that getting ahead is the thing to do with our lives. It's deeply ingrained over many generations. We're still doing that, even though the three big crises we're going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives. demand a different impulse -- working together.#

I just got a link to "A wholistic RSS namespace for podcasting." I wasn't even aware that it existed. No one tells me anything. 😄 #

I like that they use my Rules for standards-makers as guidelines for the work. It was my hope that future developers wouldn't have to repeat all the pointless arguments about what matters. #

When I find myself replying to a reply on Twitter with "Are you really that stupid?" I just block them instead.#

The OPML package has a new end-point that reads an OPML file, and if it has an urlUpdateSocket head-level attribute, sets up a subscription, and calls back when the outline is modified. Captures all the complex code behind the interface, so an OPML-consuming app can have instant updates with no effort. It's wonderful to see this in action, hope to have a public demo soon. #

Pee Wee Herman is LOL funny. Really simple comedy. 😄#

We are backing off the Twitter feed feature I had developed for Drummer. #

To developers wishing to work in the tools for thought world, we can work together as equals, instead of platform vendor and third-party developer. There's a huge difference between the two models. In the first model we are free to compete, but never on the basis of user lock-in. In the latter, the platform vendor has all the power, you can only coexist with them on their terms, and they can change the terms at any time. This has always been true in my experience. The way we work as equals is we agree on an interchange format. I have committed to supporting OPML in all my products. So they can all be replaced. And so can yours, if you make it easy for users to migrate, and when you do that you also open the door for people to create products that plug into yours without having to replace yours. We compete as equals. We compete to please users. We are free to build on each others' work. That's the kind of discipline I like as a developer. #

Journalism did their part in screwing up the 2016 election. No contrition, they’ve never done an exposé, and they have the gall to be sarcastic. I’m no fan of Facebook, but journalism is actually making them sympathetic.#

The Dems should run ads saying how much the average retirement account will go down if the Repubs crash America's credit. Make it concrete. Estimate how the market will react. Now is the time to run those ads. If the campaigns didn't go to sleep between elections...#

As an experiment, I created a blog post out of a tweet stream, with no editing. Copy/paste. #

I remember what I was doing at 24 and it wasn't dying of a completely and easily preventable disease.#

Yesterday's Now & Then podcast, about the history of NYC, was the first episode that was disappointing. At one point Heather Cox Richardson said, almost proudly, that the only thing she knows about NYC is the line in the song New York, New York "If you can make it there you can make it anywhere." This is one of my big problems with podcasts, the thing that tunes me out, when people speak from a position of false expertise. They're having a grand time, while I (the listener) am deciding whether or not to cut them off, based on the probability that they'll ever say anything interesting before the end. Yesterday I cut them off and listened to music for the second half of my ride. It's the same reason I can't watch any MSNBC show for more than 3 minutes. They're filling the air, meantime I know there are things going on they should be informing me of, and add to things my mind can think about. Okay so N&T had a bad episode, not the end of the world, the other most recent episodes are totally worth listening to, I highly recommend them, and I will keep listening in the hope that the NYC episode was just a bad idea they followed through on instead of canning. #

We are now all complete newbies when it comes to understanding how networks can be used to spread misinformation. We might look back in a few years and realize that our first line of defense was Facebook, Inc. Maybe tearing them down is like the press tearing down HRC in 2016. I don't trust their judgement on this stuff, do you?#

The debt limit vote is filibusterable you say? Perfect time to nuke the filibuster.#

Have you tried Bose SleepBuds? What do you think?#

Om Malik: "In increments the civilization is built. In haste it is dismantled." A concise description of my experience in tech, I gather Om sees it that way too. We labor for years, often lifetimes, to build a community of software and users, and it's all gone in an instant, replaced by people who didn't take the time to understand what was learned, wanted to do it again, themselves. It's much more honorable, imho -- to use the best of what's already been done, as much as possible. That way you don't have to always start over. Another wise man once said be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept. #

1996: "How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."#

Twitter Pro probably seems like a weird idea. Could there be professional Twitter users? There are. It's a writer's platform. The name they chose makes such an idea uncomfortable, perhaps. But it's a for real idea. #

The next round of changes in Drummer will be about organizing tweets, using Twitter as a source for your writing work. Here's the use-case. You're out and about, and get an idea that belongs on the to-do list for your latest project. Open up Twitter, and post a note about it. When you get back to your desktop the note will already be in a Drummer outline, ready for you to act on it. It doesn't matter what kind of writer you are, whether you write for yourself, as a note-taker, if you write docs, research, news reporting, a blog, or a great novel. If you're a writer and and a steady user of Twitter, and interested in tools for thought and outliners, I'd like to add you to the Drummer test group in a few days because I want to groom the product to your use of it. Send me an email, let me know if this interests you and we'll get you on board soon. #

All kinds of "twitterpro" names are available, somewhat amazingly. I've learned to control my domain name buying fetish, somewhat. I bought drummer.land recently. I found myself using that term when writing docs. I had to have it. Anyway. My name is Dave and I'm a domain name buying addict. #

Omar Little is the most likeable character on The Wire. Marlo Stanfield is the coldest. For some reason I think of Marlo as Matt Mullenweg. I know that's weird. Matt is a very nice fellow. But I guess the parallel is that I am Avon Barksdale to his Marlo Stanfield? The Wire is good, but it's Season 1 that's great. The remaining four seasons kind of coast a little after the spectacular creative success of the first. #

One thing that makes The Wire so watchable is the huge number of fully developed characters interacting with each other. #

As summer winds down (tomorrow is the last day), I chose to listen to music instead of a podcasts on today's bike ride. I am loaded up with new ways of thinking from having gone through the archive of the Now & Then podcast. If you find your podcast fare is repetitive or shallow, dive into that podcast. It's a great college course in the history behind current affairs. Anyway, I've loaded up my iPhone SE, a very middle-class iPhone thank you, with lots of music history, and set it to shuffle the songs. The songs of my childhood. As this summer winds down, it feels like a metaphor for the summer of my own life winding down. The feelings from childhood that I re-experience with the music were the "other side" of the experiences of adulthood which is now passing just like summer. The dreams of a child were of the future, full of possibilities, are now balanced by the regrets of an old man. I'm doing my best to stay fit, but it gets harder every year. This fall, esp because the pandemic is now going into its third winter, has a grim feel to it. I know winter can be beautiful in the Hudson Valley. But this winter, unlike recent past winters, there's a sense of dread that hasn't been there before.#

I love to write. ❤️#

Lovely day. The kind of day that makes California living so nice, except this is the Hudson Valley. #

Programming lesson still being re-learned after 46 years of programming: If your program behaves like it has an infinite loop, consider the possibility that it actually has an infinite loop. #

Another programming lesson I haven't forgotten. It's amazing how many bugs that you spend hours not finding at the end of the day are found first thing the next day. #

I love house-shopping on Zillow, like a lot of people do. It's fun to dream about living in one place or another. This house in Great Barrington would be fantastic for a family, as a country home perhaps, or a place to live in the age of telecommuting. #

Added an item to yesterday's list of things Facebook is. "All the content -- video, images, posts, comments, live events, current and past." #

Frank Mitloehner: "It’s been two decades since British Petroleum and the marketing agency then named Ogilvy & Mather deceived lots and lots of unwitting Americans into believing the hands of fossil fuel companies are clean of contributing to climate change through imaginative messaging. To this day, their marketing campaign continues to be highly effective in getting the public to take on the weighty responsibility of halting climate change. We’ve cut back on meat, upped our recycling game and made the creative campaign’s key phrase – 'carbon footprint' – part of our vernacular. All in an attempt to make a positive difference – and yes, to clear our consciences.#

BTW, if you get Scripting News via email, you are welcome to forward copies to friends. There's a subscribe link at the bottom of every email. And don't worry they can't unsubscribe on your behalf. #

A bee flew into my mouth while I was riding my bike today. I quickly swatted it out of there, but I got stung anyway. That was 1/2 hour ago, and the swelling went down quickly. Whew good thing I didn't inhale the little fucker. #

Everything we think is a new low in American governance is far from it. We were taught a lot of crap in school. The people whose egos were being protected are all long-dead. Was it worth it? No, of course not. It would have been much better if they taught the unvarnished truth.#

I thought this would make an interesting screen shot. Each tab is an outline I have open in Drummer all the time. Every idea can be slotted into each of these. And sometimes they move from one to the other as they get more "done." Most but not all are calendar structured. People often ask how I use outliners, this is at one level, the answer. #

It seems to me if there aren’t enough hospital beds, unvaccinated Covid-19 patients should be the first denied service.#

Something to think about. While we're debating all kinds of things, so far 4.5 million have killed by Covid in the last two years. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. #

Frank X Shaw: "Stress dream last night that my old guitar required two factor authentication to use and the only way to turn it on was to accurately play six chords assigned by the app. I kept messing up."#

How long after your parents die should they still be in your dreams?#

Pet peeve: People who are too frazzled to read an email carefully enough to correctly determine its meaning, even though the words are simple and direct. I've done this myself. And when I realize I've done it, I feel like crap.#

Thinking about the extent that Boomers are held responsible for where we're at, I still think that's nuts, the more I learn about slavery and how the Civil War is still going on, that's what we are fighting about in the US, that's why we can't get our shit together. We haven't accepted a very large part of our population, people who are fully entitled American citizens. Then I wondered about all the post-boomer generations that blame us. I wonder if they voted in every election they were entitled to vote in. What are the percentages of participation in democracy among the generations. I don't know if the idea of the vote as a sacred right is a Boomer thing, or what. I know my parents had the participation bug. I got it from them, I'm sure. But if you didn't vote, I think it's hard to blame others. My friend NakedJen has a wonderful slogan for this. You can fake caring, but you can't fake showing up. ❤️#

One reason I want Twitter to get rid of the character limit is so I no longer have to say "I wrote a tweet." I have never liked the idea of writing tweets. Tweeting is weird and joke-like, self-deprecating, which I don't mind, but please not about writing. Writing is a religion, not something I joke about. 😄#

Today is one of those rare days where I have very little to say on the blog. I'm still working my way back through the Now & Then podcasts, and The Wire (still in season 1) and of course working every day on Drummer, with the help of the test group. #

Don't assume they wanted advice. #

I'm re-watching The Wire, after the death of Michael K Williams, the actor who played Omar. He was right about type-casting. His one great role was Omar. Once you get a part that good, and play it so well, and everyone else is that good, you just don't get to do that twice.#

The other night I was bored and noticed that The Wire was on HBO, so I watched one episode. Then another. And another. Later I started at Episode 1. I don't know how many times I've watched The Wire. I'm almost at a point where I can recite the lines along with the actors. I've yet to see a flaw in this show, there's nothing I don't follow with rapt attention. I can't believe there are people who haven't seen it. It's as I imagine Shakespeare was in his day.#

Public Folder is an app I put together after Dropbox stopped supporting a public folder. It's too important a feature to live without. #

Everyone but silo-builders wins if our products interop.#

Drummer has a feature called the glossary, it's been part of every outliner I have done since the mid-90s. It's a very simple idea. A table that associates terms with text. If I use one of the terms in my writing, when it's published, the term is replaced with the text. We use OPML to represent the glossaries. Here's my personal glossary. I wish every place I type text could be configured to use my glossary, so where ever I go I can use my terms. It would also be great to configure my searches to use these terms too, so Google for example would know what I am referring to when I type the name of one of my own products. #

Braintrust query: I want to understand the extended Markdown some outliners use. If you use one of them, you can help.#

I get Andrew Sullivan's email newsletter. Today's edition was a podcast interview with Michael Wolff, who I've met several times. Wolff is a great conversationalist, his writing is irreverent, and he's also very generous personally. The same people dismiss him who dismiss me. So I started listening and it's great. I did a search for "Andrew Sullivan podcast" on Google and there it is. Another podcast to check out. I'm going to give it a try.#

BTW, I agree with absolutely everything Michael Wolff says to Brian Stelter, about Stelter, CNN and journalism. Stelter asks what he should do differently, Wolff says "listen more" and of course Stelter just laughed at Wolff, pretty sure there wasn't any listening going on. They are in a deep increasingly irrelevant rut. We need a new news. #

Speaking of podcasts, the next Now & Then episode I listened to was great, it was about voting rights in American history. What's happening now is actually fairly typical. There's so much interesting stuff they left out in grade school history, which I used to love, my favorite subject after English. Now I'm wondering where I can take a remedial history class after I go through all the Now & Then episodes, which I'm clearly going to do. I also wonder who's going to do the history of tech with the rigor, curiosity and humor of Richardson and Freeman.#

This page, 20 years ago tomorrow. I was living on Manzanita Way in Woodside, CA. Woke up early as I always did in those days. If you scroll to the bottom, the day started out normally. A link to a friend's blog hosting service, a Wired story about Hollywood, a new book about Microsoft, then at 6:15AM, we get the news of the first plane. Then a reader finds a web cam on the Empire State Building pointing at the WTC. Then a second plane hits. And from there the story develops. There was a personal side to it, my father taught at Pace University, which is across from City Hall, very near ground zero. He was okay, but had to walk, like many thousands of others, from lower Manhattan to Queens. My mother saw the whole thing from a rooftop in Brooklyn.#

Thanks to everyone who pointed me to the Now & Then podcast with Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman. I listened to the most recent episode about the history of humans and climate in America. Wow. So much information and perspective, without any extra junk, and with depth that can only come from having spent a lifetime learning. It is exactly what I was looking for, at least so far. There are quite a few podcasts in the library, and they're exactly as long as my bike ride. They were finishing as I was pulling into the garage, literally. Also only one commercial and it was for a new podcast from the same network. Not overbearing. Thrilled. #

Fox News and Rupert Murdoch are to blame.#

I'm loving going through Rick and Morty for the second time. I've promoted it to my friends, but the comments I get back are a lot like the ones about Bojack Horseman. They're turned off by the fact that it's a cartoon. I don't mind it at all, myself, and it has the advantage that they can go places with their imaginations that human actors can't. That's esp important for a show like R&M. Also another thing I like is that there's no fourth wall at weird times. Rick talks like a game show host, about commercial breaks, and then talks about episodes, and seasons of R&M. I love it when writers are free to talk to us through the characters, quite literally, not through manipulation. I think it's a masterpiece, as I did with Bojack. Here's the thing, as kids we loved cartoons right? I know I did. I also loved movies. So now I like movies made for adults, why not cartoons for adults?#

2015: Why you must watch Bojack Horseman.#

Listen. There are plenty of famous delusional loudmouths. Why aren't there any sane loudmouths to balance them? I'll tell you why -- because being confident and outspoken is considered a sin among the sane. But! It's not a sin to communicate in a way more people understand.#

Liberty doesn't mean you can take a crap in the middle of the supermarket or burn down your own house. #

I wonder when someone in journalism is going to break the Republican lie that we're all independent of each other, that somehow we don't need the help of others to eat, stay warm, stay alive. We don't live on the prairie in the old times, before railroads and medicine. If your house catches fire, my house will too. Once we establish that foundation, that we depend on each other, we can solve problems, but not as long as our political life is mired in this argument about what liberty means. #

I am very happy with the way Drummer testing is going. There have been some surprising contributions, really good questions, and plenty of people actually using the software. Enough people to keep it moving. And I'm not in a rush. As far as I'm concerned this is the whole game. I have no development plans beyond Drummer and the scriptable apps I've lined up to hook into it. I'm not sure why this time is different, but I'm not arguing. 💥 #

Options for creativity are in the edge cases. #

When you recommend a podcast please say a little about what it is and why you recommended it. Typically to find out what a podcast actually is takes hours of listening. and usually they're disappointing or too boring, or have a 1/2 hour commercial at the start.#

I love one thing about Facebook. It gives the person who posted a piece absolute power over the existence of comments. On pieces I post, I don't limit myself to deleting abusive or personal comments, I delete ornery or challenging ones too. I hate online debates. I host a debate-free environment. If you want to debate, take your business elsewhere. #

All the nasty fascist crap that's surfacing now has always been there, handed down lovingly from generation to generation. Every family no matter how good or bad, depraved, sociopathic, narcissistic, everything -- they all think they're the best, smartest, luckiest and the worst treated and unluckiest. SItting around the kitchen table listening to mom and dad philosophize about the world, it rubs off. What makes families different is how they deal with those beliefs. March, write letters, watch Maddow or Hannity. Or join the Nazi party. I don't honestly think there's anything that can be done to break this, family is the strongest force for determining our view of the world. #

I just remembered that Apple basically merged with the music industry, so it's not surprising that it's difficult if not impossible to copy MP3s from my Mac to my iPhone so I can program my own music.#

A must-read piece on abortion. "The government cannot force you to save someone else’s life against your will." #

Winter is coming. Technically it's still summer, but I'm sitting here trying to warm up for a day of work, wearing a sweat shirt and shivering. Thinking about warm climates where I can spend the winter. #

I went on a boat yesterday with friends on the Hudson River between the Rhinecliff Bridge and Saugerties. I had been on the Hudson before, but only in a much larger boat, and way south, in NYC. This was a great experience. I drank too much. Hic.#

Covid is raging in Texas and the government responds by setting citizens against each other over abortion. #

New term: Inter-outline inclusions. 0 matches.#

I once designed a JSONified version of RSS. Wrote about it and even put up a demo. I was surprised that somewhere in my sprawling ecosystem is a piece of code, still running, that maintains my JSONified RSS feed. Geek pride. #

When someone says "X is part of the problem" that's wrong in so many ways. Useless. They're actually the problem, not part of it even. Working together is how we get ahead. Unite rather than divide. I don't care how you got to the party, I'm just glad you're here now.#

I saw a snarky thing in a friend's Facebook feed that said women don't need men telling them what to do with their bodies. A recent Gallup poll shows that 43 percent of American women are pro-life and 45 percent of men are pro-choice. I thnk everyone should be pro-choice, but it's wrong to blame men for the current situation. #

Most people in America don’t get how slavery is what we’re still fighting over. Colin Kaepernick is black, in America that means he’s a slave. Our country has yet to settle that question. Most of us have decided to grow out of it, but for a sizeable minority, they’re going keep fighting it. What Kaepernick is to them, a slave who forgot his place.#

If you want to make a long-term contribution to tech, make your users' data accessible through open file formats. Software comes and goes, lots of planned obsolescence, but users' files tend to stick around.#

I'm using Twitter to explore options for listening to my collection of MP3s without using Apple's official iOS music playing app.#

Every problem America has now, and they're huge problems, come from slavery. If we were to go through a transition like the one Afghanistan is going through now, we'd go back to the 1860s and slavery would be reinstated.#

Ryan Tate is an old school Scripting News reader, and now is an old school Drummer blogger. #

I wish Facebook would silence the spammy viral phishy poll messages that get thousands of shares, my friends fall for them, and they're certainly gathering all kinds of data that hurt people, they're easy to detect, it should be a big issue for journos, but for some reason it isn't.#

I saw a supposed expert on Wolf Blitzer's show on CNN last night saying there was nothing the Dems could do about Roe v Wade. This is what passes for expertise at CNN these days. People who look nice in a suit and learned how to speak in CNN style.#

Drummer user note: When you're creating something new in a chronologic structure, use the big + icon at the top of the icon bar. Don't do it by hand. The software that cares about chronologic notes ignores nodes that were created by hand. The + icon puts special attributes on the nodes that matter. You could if you wanted to do it yourself. But why would you? I'm saying this 20 different ways, here on Scripting News and everywhere else I can think to because I want Drummer users to get this right. It's important. 🚀#

I'm doing user support for the first time since Fargo days and am reminded of what sucks about it. In the groups I am part of, as a user,when I ask for help I have reproduced the problem on my machine several times. I have tried workarounds. I've thought about it. I don't immediately ask for help, because I know the other people are like me, doing it for love, it's not their job, they're helping because they like to help. For whatever reason the groups I assemble often don't do this. At the first sign of trouble they post something that's impossible to understand, and it's really clear they didn't try it again, or they would have spotted their mistake. Support is a dear resource. Use it when you need it, but be sure first that you do need it. #