I foresee a day when we'll have writing collectives on the web. Small groups of people striving for excellence in thought and expression, as a collection. I already know two people I'd like to write with. #
When the Democrats debate tonight, I hope they remember there are people listening. Try to make us see how things would be different and better if you were president. I really don't care if you can show one of your rivals to be wrong. #
Braintrust query: Have you used managed databases on Digital Ocean? If so, are you pleased with the results?#
Little Outliner is an easy to learn, entry-level outliner that runs in a web browser. It's written in JavaScript.#
Francis Ford Coppola on Ari Melber last night. I'd love to hear FFC talk for hours about whatever he wants to talk about. #
- A reader asks how to find posts from previous months. I explained.#
I figured out why the Breaking Bad movie is so unsatisfying. I watched it, I liked it, but it didn't get me excited and interested like the series did. I decided to re-watch the last season to see what the difference was. There are many great things about the show. The use of music, the weird camera shots that are integrated with the plot. It's artistically ecelectic in so many ways. But it's also slow. Things develop very very slowly. But there's no space in a 2-hour single-episode show to develop the puzzling intrigue of the series. No time to spread out, relax, take your time, go slow. So not much happens, and then it's over. It's not really Breaking Bad, it's a 2-hour movie with the characters of Breaking Bad. That was the same problem with the Deadwood movie. The only thing that could work is another 10-episode season, played out over 10 weeks. #And Succession. It had one of the all-time great season finales last night. No spoilers here, except to point to a video that HBO produced that summarizes the deliciousness of the end, do not watch it if you haven't seen the whole season. It really would spoil it. #
- I've been emailing with my old friend Dave Carlick about customized searching. I've also been writing about it here. I'm not sure I've made my point, but now I have an excellent example that might shed some light. Dave, take note.#
- I just searched Google for Old School.#
- It came back with pointers to a 2003 movie. A Facebook group. A dictionary definition. The urban dictionary version. And on and on.#
- But I have a product named Old School. I've written about it on my blog a bunch of times. If Google knew I was the author of this blog, it would also know that when I search for Old School, I want to see my product first, because in all likelihood that's what I'm looking for. #
- That's what I mean about associating the searcher with the searcher's blog. Think of it as SEO for a person. #
- PS: Here's another one. I just searched for Dave Carlick. Google asks if I meant Dave Carlock. That's crazy. I've been friends with Dave Carlick for 30-plus years. If it read my blog it would know that. It's so wrong. In fact, if I type Carlock it should know I meant Carlick. #
- PPS: Google is so crazy that when I restict the search to my site, it still asks if I meant Carlock, even though there are references to Carlick on the site I'm searching going back to the 1990s. And the only refs to Carlock are this post. That is just plain wrong. #
Over the weekend I tried out an idea. It's a little Node app that runs on the same server as the CMS that builds this blog. Every minute it looks at today's posts, for those that have titles (like the post your'e reading now), it checks if it changed, and if so it renders it as Markdown and uploads it to GitHub in a calendar-based structure, along-side all the other parts of the blog I maintain automatically on GitHub. I like using GitHub this way, I have a feeling it'd make a good shared object database.#- I've been hand-generating links to the GitHub version to get you all thinking about this idea, like this. #
- I did this based on an assumption that I would be able to figure out a way to make it possible for any of my posts to become a sub-project on GitHub. I'm not saying any of them would become projects, only now it would be possible. I thought this might work well with the new email distribution system which has stimulated so much discussion. #
- I'm not sure how this is going to work, or if it will work, I'm just trying an idea out. 🚀#
Pro tip for podcasters. In your RSS feed, each <item> should set the <link> element to point at the landing page for the episode. Otherwise the only way to share your podcast is with a link to the MP3 which isn't good for you or them. You can see dozens of these items in my podc account on Twitter. #
A lot of other people, including Republicans, have picked up on Elizabeth Warren's unfortunate putdown of people who think that marriage is between one woman and one man. We have to have a serious talk about this, because it reveals a side of Warren that is divisive and unacceptable. I'm sick of electing presidents who divide us into evil and not-evil. It's the sickness of our country. Honestly I don't care about marriage, anyone's marriage. I think marriage is an awful institution. It wrecked the family I grew up in. So no one has the high ground here as far as I'm concerned. And while I think Warren is the best candidate we have now, I think she needs to do some soul searching on this. If she is elected, it would be tragic if she does the same kind of BS that the Republicans do, and tries to make some Americans outcasts. After all, the question she was asked was about other people's beliefs, not their actions. And as president, her job would be to safeguard their rights, along with those of people she agrees with. As faculty at Harvard Law School I would think she would be steeped in that understanding, that it would run in her blood. The Constitution isn't just for people we agree with. #A perfect example of what's wrong with everything public. A senator feels a constituent who asks obvious questions is being rude. So he asked the questions again in a full page ad which was published on Twitter. We have the tools to create the political system we want. #
I saw a casual comment somewhere (sorry I forgot where) that creating and editing a template in Wordpress still requires PHP skills. I wondered if this was true. Editing a site template should be a matter of editing HTML only. It can and should be easy. (Update: Apparently it is still that hard.)#
You know how we worried what would happen when Trump's incompetence resulted in an international disaster. I think we've arrived at that point with the Turks and the Kurds.#
I had a dream last night I was forming a new tech startup with Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. At one point I explained to a government clerk that Schmidt is a billionaire so it seems likely we’ll get funded. She was saying maybe we should recruit a better CEO and CTO.#
If I put the name of a company in a tweet with a problem with their product, in 2019 there's a pretty good chance a support rep will respond and try to help. The quality of the help varies, but they do try.#- But in all the years I've been blogging, or tweeting, or whatever, the only response I've gotten from a political campaign was to add me to their donor list.#
- It happened with Obama, Hillary Clinton. It was really humiliating because in both cases, I passionately wanted them to win, but not just the way Obama did, rather in a way that would lead to effective permanent organization of the electorate using networks. Every emailed request for money reminded me of what they thought of me. Give us money. Give us money. And give us money. #
- So far Warren has just ignored what I've said, even though imho it's been good advice. I think today's piece, especially, is make-or-break for her campaign. To be doing so well up to this point and have the problem show up this early, is scary. I'm not sure that even if she wins, it'll be any better than Trump. That's how serious it is. #
- Politics is like public radio. They say they're doing it for the people but in the end what they want is donations. At some point we'll have a campaign that embraces the people, and learns how to use networks to organize us. But it hasn't happened yet. #
- As an experiment this story is archived on GitHub.#
News reports everything as Democrats vs Republicans. This makes me angry, because some things, like the president ignoring the Constitution, are not partisan issues. Yes, the Democrats are on the right side of this one, but so are honorable Republicans. #- I used to call for tech boot camps for reporters, to help them get the basic facts right, and avoiding But Her Emails type tragedies. It seems they need legal boot camps too, so they can understand (and report) better on how our constitutional government works. #
- As an experiment this story is archived on GitHub. #
I didn’t like Elizabeth Warren's bit about marriage, even though I agree with the idea behind it, I don’t think presidents can put down people like that and not have it blow back on them, and us. Remember Obama’s roast of Trump. I felt the same way about that. It was both funny and infuriating. And the blowback has been epic. #
- Not only can Barr and Pompeo be impeached, they can also be indicted, tried, convicted and imprisoned. It has happened before to Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell.#
- It's worth noting this because they know it too. #
- Both are doubling-down on the obstruction. #
- And they have a lot of power. #
- However the SDNY investigation of Giuliani says Barr isn't in complete control of DoJ yet. #
- And people from State are giving public testimony.#
- For an application I'm developing I need to run it in the background, yet easily stop and relaunch it. So this is what I do. #
- At the command line type nohup node app.js & and press Return. #
- You can see the output of the app by pressing Ctl-C then tail -f nohup.out. It creates this file in the directory the app was run from. #
- To kill the node process and any other node processes it might have launched, enter killall -i node. The -i flag means that it will confirm before killing each process. #
- I put these notes in my blog so I can find them again, easily, and don't have to figure it out ever time. Also so people who know more than I do about this topic can tell me better ways to do this. :orange:#
- As an experiment, I'm mirroring this post over on GitHub.#
Of course I watched El Camino, the new Breaking Bad movie on Netflix. It wasn't really a movie or an episode of Breaking Bad. It was more like a few scenes from a Breaking Bad episode with brief appearances by many of the characters from the series, looking much older than they did at the end of the last episode (which aired six years ago). #- It was a lot like the Deadwood movie, a series that was cut short and should have been allowed to finish. The real town of Deadwood had a climax that was never part of the TV series. The movie was basically plotless, it was a series of cameos by the stars of the original series, the actors looking much older, in some cases not recognizable, saying a few things, not to be seen again. For a show that had such gravitas, was so daring and unprecedented, it was a kind of humiliation. Yet it got good reviews. I don't understand why.#
- Spoiler alert -- yes there are spoilers below. #
- Nothing much happens in El Camino. As we know from the end of the series, the protagonist, Jesse Pinkman, survives and escapes. He hooks up with his old friends, remembers some scenes from the past, has to solve a problem, kills a few people and rides off into the sunset. #
- Okay it was fun to watch, but I hoped for much more. If you loved Breaking Bad as I did, you should watch it. But all this show does, imho, is set the stage for yet another pointless encore. There's a lot to be said for an edgy show like Breaking Bad leaving you at the edge without telling you what happens next. #
We're righteously upset about the Chinese government interfering with the NBA and speech in the US. But what about the NFL? They're here at home, and are punishing Colin Kaepernick, and his fans, for speech. Football is a luxury, it's optional. Would you give up a week of NFL games to support Kaepernick?#
I was excited to get the Fire Cube, but after a short installation and exploration, I realized it was nowhere near as good as it has to be to earn a place in my living room. I'm going to return it and instead buy a current Apple TV. I'll report on that later. #- Re the Cube, it has to compete with the Roku user interface that's baked into my TCL screen. It clearly has this ambition, when it sets itself up, it remarkably figures out how to turn on and off the TV and my Onkyo receiver. I think this is a combination of better standards and testing. Impressive. #
- But when their desktop appears, it's a confusing mess, and in every way assumes what you want is Amazon Prime Video, even though it has Netflix and other apps. They clearly are biased. Understandable, but not functional. I come to them from a world where they don't control me, so it's a turnoff. I'm just as likely to watch something on HBO Go or Netflix as on Prime. Their desktop should be more agnostic. It's okay to put your app first in the list, but really that's as far as it should go.#
- I wanted to see if the Spectrum app for Fire worked better than the Roku one, but I couldn't figure out through their app store interface how to search for an app by name. That's ridiculous. They understand the importance of search in other places, but not here? I couldn't figure out which class of app a cable provider would fall under. #
- Then I tried the Alexa functionality. It's weird that it must have talked to the other two Alexas in my house to figure out how to connect over my wifi. I never had to enter a password. This spooked me. This Alexa works differently and it's hard of hearing! I couldn't figure out how to get it to stop without unplugging it. #
- I think they must have special problems with an environment where other speakers are present, but they weren't making any sound when I was trying to communicate with it. And the Alexa in the kitchen sometimes heard and responded to my queries, so it's pretty clear that having two Alexas in adjacent rooms isn't going to work. #
- I then went back to Roku's desktop and breathed a sigh of relief, and decided the Fire Cube sucks. I don't want it. #
- I've had a long-term problem with comments on Scripting News. If I have open comments then I have to moderate them. It helps to have clearly published guidelines, which I do, that eliminates most of the emotional reactions, but some still get through, and people can hold grudges for a long time. I don't like editing other people. I already do more of this kind of work than I want to. My goal is to get rid of all of it. #
When I first started out I had a pretty optimal system. The posts went out via email to small groups of subscribers. You could respond, and I would see your response and so would the others in your group. Sometimes interesting discussions would take place. For some reason very little flaming. I lurked. When someone wrote a piece I thought should get on the record, I'd forward it to an email address that was monitored by a script I wrote, which would then add it to the current mail page. It wouldn't publish until I had a chance to hand-edit the text. It was work, and I remember not liking it, but there were some real classics among the mail page posts, so I did the work, for a couple of years. #- I could re-implement the Mail Pages, but it's not something I want to do, and it would be harder today, given the way email worked then and now. It's gotten more complex. I also had a scriptable email app, Eurdora, so I was able to write the whole thing in Frontier which was really good at driving scriptable Mac apps. #
- Okay so now here we are in 2019, and I have an excellent use-case. I wrote a short piece about Medicare, asking for input, and have gotten back some wonderful responses. One in particular was beautifully written, long, detailed and obviously based on a lot of experience. As I read such an email I ache a little. "This should be on the web," I think to myself. Finally when I get to the end I respond with praise, and a request that they post it to their blog. I put it that way because 1. maybe they have a blog or 2. maybe this will get them to start one. But the most likely response is a story about how they have a blog, but haven't posted to it in a long time and they feel guilty, so presumably they don't want to go there for some reason? I don't really get it, because I know what a blog is, behind the scenes. It isn't a place. It's just a few files on a server, very small files, and a few database entries perhaps. The reason companies like Automattic and Google host blogs for free is that's how much it costs to host one a blog. It really is of no consequence.#
- You imagine that your blog is lonely and angry that you're not visiting, but that's purely a figment of your imagination. The blog doesn't exist in any corporeal sense. It has no thoughts or feelings. I doesn't give a shit if you live or die, because it doesn't have an ego, it doesn't care about anything. #
- Think of creating a blog as you would think of writing on a page in a notepad. Or scribbling on the back of an envelope and handing it to someone. It takes two minutes at most to create a blog at wordpress.com. And from then on, you have a "place" to post emails you that are post-worthy (I will tell you if they are). Then you can send me a link and I can put it on my linkblog page, and send it to my Twitter followers, and people who read me on RSS, and in the nightly email. It might be more flow than you'd get from posting it on Medium, for example. And if I asked you to post it, that's almost a guarantee that I will circulate the link.#
- I have created lots of one-off blogs and I'd do it again in a heartbeat, esp if it meant we could make the world a better place, or at least more informed. #
Should we think of Twitter as part of the open web for the purpose of linking? I ask because I found that something I pointed to, and embedded in my blog, that I felt was historic, was on an account that Twitter suspended. The tweet was no longer available. I understand why Twitter needs to suspend accounts, but do they have to get rid of all the previous posts? Does Twitter care about the web? Do they want to be part of it?#I never liked the term "pioneer" because it doesn't imply an ongoing contribution. I've settled on "founder," the term we use for people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. It's a term of greater respect, imho. I'm not finished contributing, that's why I care. 💥 #
Former White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster said it’s not appropriate for Trump to solicit foreign election interference, but that it’s up to the American people to decide whether he did so with Ukraine. That seems fair to me. I vote yes, he did. #
I had to do a lot of driving today and listened to two Daily podcasts back to back, which should be listened to together, imho. The first was a profile of the Republican strategist who managed the Kavanaugh confirmation and who is now leading the impeachment defense for Repubs. It was infuriating, esp the way the Times reported it. In the second podcast they followed one of the pivotal Democratic reps, from Michigan, as she met with constituents at two town halls. The hot topic was impeachment. What was so fascinating is that you can hear, quite clearly, the result of the propoganda from the subject of the first podcast that is NPR did it again. They repeated Trump's claim that the Kurds didn't help in World War II as if it were news, but it's not true.#
I'm learning a lot about Medicare, and I'm beginning to realize that like everything that's a product of the US government, it's a corrupt ratfucking motherfucking fucker. 💩#
When the Repubs say that impeachment is just a way to undo the 2016 election, they overlook the 2018 election, which was most definitely an attempt, by the voters, to undo the mistake of 2016. The only reason the House can contemplate impeaching Trump is that there is a Democratic majority. That happened in 2018. #Maybe old Lindsey Graham was playing a funny game, becoming Trump's little buddy, visibly, so when the time came to kick Trump under the bus he could play the Barry Goldwater role. #
I just re-read George Orwell's Animal Farm. I had read it when I was in grade school. It's worth reading again in the age of Trump, because he's using the propoganda techniques of Animal Farm.#
I hadn't thought about the implications of the Brooklyn Nets being owned by a co-founder of Alibaba who has to get along with the Chinese government more than most NBA owners. I wonder how KD and Kyrie will feel about that. #
If you love Succession and are all caught up, I highly recommend going back and watching season 1 again. So much of what happens and what's said went over my head the first time. And there are forward references you couldn't have caught the first time through. Watch it with captioning on, that helps too. Also it's a comedy with the skeleton of a tragedy. I found myself laughing out loud at times as if it were Monty Python. 😆 #- I wonder if anyone has Wikipedia as their default search page. It just occurred to me, with Google searches getting more cluttered with garbage all the time, if Wikipedia might not be a better choice. #
- For example, here's a Google search for Brooklyn Nets, and here's the Wikipedia page. Which gets you a better set of links to topics related to the team? I guess the problem is there are no news, video or images options on Wikipedia.#
- I probably should just start using DuckDuckGo. It's very similar to Google, but not as insane, and they claim to not share your search habits with any other companies. #
You know what would really get me to switch? Customization. If I could tell it where my blog is, so it will default to showing me what I had written about a topic at the top of the search, or offer a tab that allowed me to quickly review my own writing. I could see that changing the nature of everything I do on the web, it would also be an incentive to people to leave the silos. #- I'd also like a pref that lets me ask it to always show me the Wikipedia page first. Other people might prefer a Twitter account first, or news about the topic. Google makes all these choices for you. But I'm a sentient user, I was using computers for decades before Google even existed. I know how to program, and yet, I can't use that skill on the most extensive information source ever produced by humans -- the web. #
Welcome to the 26th year of Scripting News. #
I ordered a new Amazon Fire Cube. I have a relatively old Apple TV, and was looking to upgrade because of a problem I'm having with the Roku version of the Spectrum app. I'm 99% sure the problem is with Spectrum, whose support people point the finger at Roku, which I think is BS. I considered buying a new Apple TV, but I've been using Alexa more and more, and I find I miss it on my TV-watching system in the living room. This tells you something about how Amazon is moving to dominate TV. People think Trump is the new boss, but I'm pretty sure it's Bezos. Imagine if they bought Roku, which is the OS of my TCL television. Imagine if the OS goes down another level and takes Spectrum out of the software-development business (and I assume Verizon et al) which would be a blessing. They really don't do this very well. The wild card, the one company that could redefine news is Twitter, as I wrote yesterday. I wonder if anyone in the future-of-news world has comments? #A long thread on Hacker News about yesterday's anniversary. One commenter said "I feel bad for Dave. He was so early to the table on so many occasions yet he was left behind and never really made it big monetarily. He is the definition of missing the boat." I replied "Please don't feel bad. I was never trying to make a lot of money from the web. I had lots of opportunities to sell out. I did that once, in the 80s, and that has funded my creative work ever since. Money isn't that useful, I learned, pretty early-on. Here's a piece I wrote about that recently." I'd add that I was disappointed that when the VCs started RSS companies and then podcast companies, they did it with other people, with imho predictably bad results. That was disappointing, but what the hell, no one made any money from those things, and I get to enjoy the podcasts and feeds as much as anyone. And for that I'm grateful. I also wish people like Zuckerberg cared more about the ecosystem, but he and I look at the world differently. #
I started Scripting News in 1994, which I'm sure if you read this blog, you now know and wish I'd stop mentioning. Heh. One more time. I was 39 years old then, an age that to me now seems impossibly young, but to me at the time, felt really really old. I'm 25 years older now, 64, and in the US a lot of shit happens at 65, most important to me, Medicare. Apparently at that point, the cost of my health insurance will go down dramatically, and the coverage will go up dramatically. Not that I feel I'm wanting any medical care now that I can't get, and I can certainly afford the payments. Anyway this an awkard moment because I have no idea what the fuck Medicare actually is. I go to the websites and they tell me how much I have to learn, but they don't teach it. I am highly motivated to learn, but I'd love to have a user interface that was like GEICO's website for buying auto insurance, or the Digital Ocean page for sizing your applet. I'd like to just check off some boxes, and see the numbers change. If I want to spend $500 per month I could have this coverage, or that, or something else. It seems enough people go through this that it's worth a little investment?#Fascinating video overlays a fastball and curveball. You can clearly see why it's so hard to hit a major league pitch.#
If I ever get it together to write a book, I think this piece will be the preface. Maybe its title will be the title of the book? #
I started blogging 25 years ago today. I write every day and publish it myself. Today I've done the same. And hopefully encouraged more people to speak for themselves.#Here's the countdown page where we keep track of how long it has been since this blog was started. If you keep this page open you can say you were here at the moment it had been running for 25 years! If you think it's just a number (and there's good reason to believe that) you can continue with your life. 🍎#
On the Brian Lehrer Show this morning the question came up of why Trump released the "transcript" of his talk with the Ukranian president. I have a theory about that which I tweeted to the show. It goes like this. Trump approved of its release without reading the transcript, or listening to his advisors. They wanted it released because it prevents Trump from throwing them under the bus. It's the new reality of a president who has the attention span of a gnat. Sometimes that works against him more than it works against us. #
Theory why Repubs don't stand up to Trump. After the 2016 election, the Russian active measures campaign turned to building kompromat on every Republican member of Congress. It didn't take long to get each one of them in a position where they had to listen to Russia and Trump. This is one of those Occam's News things. Like black holes in space, you can't see them, but you can infer their presence by the way bodies behave around them#
Repubs want no politics when it suits them, but will make Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts, debt-limit lunacy, war, immigration, Obama's birth certificate, ie anything they want, political.#
Jack Dorsey subscribes to the email version of this blog, so I've started writing directly to him in an open format. I'd do the same for the CEOs of any other tech firm whose products I use. Free consulting. :-)#- Anyway, I find myself hooking into videos on Twitter more and more. Like this ridiculous annoying exasperating interview with a Bush-era Republican, shilling for Trump while trying to sound reasonable. #
- More and more, news orgs are posting short bits of video to Twitter. It's growing, and that's imho good. Further, Twitter has a good API and it's relatively stable and liberal. I've thought for a long time that their API is their big advantage. As a developer I'd like to see them do more with it.#
- Twitter is a new kind of TV news looking for the right user interface. I don't think Moments is the answer. I think Checkbox News is. #
- Here's the idea of Checkbox News in an image. #
- I did this around the time Boris Yeltsin died and the Virginia Tech massacre. I want to watch the news while I work, or tweet while I watch the news, basically news isn't the only thing I'm doing. I want a bit of control over what flows through the video window. I got it, Yeltsin died. All the reports are starting to sound the same, so I uncheck it. No more news of Yeltsin. #
- As media has progressed, we've learned that sometimes it's best to turn things on, and in other contexts that's too much work, I want others to do it for me, and then I need the ability to turn things off. TV news is most definitely in the latter category.#
- With the flow that Twitter already has, if trusted news sources (a super important concept that should also be developed, not by Twitter) would add keywords to their video uploads, we could have Checkbox News running pretty quickly, maybe as early as next year. #
- I just posted this to the private Woodstockers Say Anything group on Facebook. I've been living here since March, but mostly have been posting pictures and questions about what's going on here. This is the first time I've talked about what I do. I thought this was a good day to do it.#
- I haven't really introduced myself to the Woodstock group, today is a good day to do that.#
- I am a software developer and one of the very first bloggers, starting back in 1994, on October 7.#
- 25 years ago today.#
- These days I'm writing at my house in Woodstock.#
- I am lucky that the work I do can be done anywhere there's a net connection. So I've moved around quite a bit in the last 25 years. I started writing on the web in Silicon Valley in 1994. In 2003 I moved to Cambridge, MA, then tried Seattle and the beach in northeast Florida (I had family there). I spent a few years in Berkeley, and then when my father died in 2009, I moved back to NYC (where I was born and raised) to be near my rapidly shrinking family. When my mom passed away in 2018, I started looking for the next place, and this is where I landed.#
- I've always felt that my software development was an artistic endeavor. My materials are unusual, they're almost all virtual. But I've built quite a castle out of all that imagination. :-)#
- The next software product I ship will come from Woodstock. And I'm celebrating 25 years of blogging right here in the woods, with the sound of rain and the smell of nature all around me.#
- One of my mottos of blogging is this --#
- Still diggin! ;-)#
- PS: My blog is at http://scripting.com/.#
How to win with a troll, 2016: "Imagine if he never got any self-generated press ever again? That would be the end of Trump. You can report on polls. You can report on FBI investigations of him. Or his trial with Trump U. Or that HRC calls for him not to get security briefings, all that's fair. But you can't report any Trump-generated news. If it came from him, it's trolling. If it's news about him that he didn't control, it's fair game." That's why the whistleblowers, witnesses and congressional committees are helping us win the battle with Trump. For the first time in a long time, Trump has lost control. We're in new territory. #Ginger Baker, drummer for Cream, one of rock's seminal bands, died at 80. Here's one of their hits, Sunshine of Your Love. #
As one of the founders of podcasting, I couldn't agree more. Podcasting is all about the voice of the individual. #
What would you do if the power went out in the city you live in, and you were pretty sure it wasn't coming back any time soon?#
This is the graph we were looking at on this day in 2016. It says that HRC had a 75% chance of winning. The black line at the right is Election Day. Most people didn't understand enough about probability to understand what that meant, so presumably weren't motivated to vote. This is a lesson you don't hear reported on much in the press. The election wasn't decided by anti-abortion gun-rights advocates. It was decided by the people who didn't vote. #- I wrote this in a 2014 email to one of my former programming partners, Jake Savin, about how I develop today. I use the same tools five years later. It was a good design. #
- I program in the OPML Editor. I have a suite that makes it one button to deploy all the changed objects in my outline to public spaces on S3, ready to run. It's amazingly fast.#
- I have debugging on the client but not the server. But I am radical about pushing functionality to the edge, and using the server just to make up for deficiencies in other APIs that prevent them from being called from the client. So it hasn't been that much of a problem.#
- This environment is so primitive compared to Frontier, but everyone can use it, so that's why I work here. People think I've been incredibly productive, the truth is I've done all this stuff before, so it goes quickly the third or fourth time.#
Trump throws Rick Perry under the bus. What if Perry's popularity goes up as a result? Think about it.#
Why are we impeaching the president, big picture. Our system has gone off the rails, we've got a monarch in the White House. This impeachment is the second American Revolution and has the same goal as the first, to depose a king. And again, we have to change the rules so it won't happen again.#
An idea. If Trump refuses to leave the White House, change its name to Federal Penitentiary #248, place guards at all doors, no one goes in or out. No Internet access, no food. The constitutional president governs from Blair House. Trump comes out or dies there. Either way, eventually the White House is torn down, as a symbol of the imperial presidency. From now on the president strictly follows the Constitution, no more undeclared wars, Congress appropriates the money. Impeachment hearings start immediately after the Inauguration, and at the first sign of the breach of the Constitution, the president is impeached and removed. It's not going to be a glamorous job in the future. We're getting rid of our second king, and we must make sure no usurper like Trump can turn the office of President into an authoritarian pulpit. Burning the White House to the ground serves as a symbol of that transition. #My mother taught me that when people resort to name-calling that means they're wrong and they know it. #
Trump isn’t playing multidimensional chess, and neither is Putin. His goal was to reduce the US to chaos. Our elections are now meaningless. Mass killings by people with automatic weapons. No sense of normalcy. The news people are focused on impeachment, but since just after the 2016 election have buried the big story. The US has been defeated. We're occupied. We live in Vichy America. The president is a Russian asset. It's all out in the open, but until the whistleblower, no one, not Mueller, not the Repubs in Congress, not the Dems in Congress, nor the Dems running for president, have had the guts to say the truth out loud. We all hope someone else will take the risk. We have to fight to get out of this. It's going to be bloody. But the longer we wait the worse it'll be.#This is the moment Trump should have been impeached. It was obvious at that point who Trump was/is. #
RBG says historians will view today's political climate as an aberration. My two cents. This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.#
There should be a user interface standard for this object. There are minor differences in layout, but all have the same info.#
Kamala Harris, presidential candidate, wants Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's Twitter account. My two cents. This is what’s wrong with today’s net, that it’s up to one unelected unaccountable tech exec to decide if the elected president has a voice. Twitter has too much power. They endow people they like with millions of followers, and delete accounts for friends. No one has to listen to Trump. I’ve had him blocked for years.#
There's no excuse for congresspeople to use Medium. Here's a press release from Speaker Pelosi. Look at the URL. It looks way better than anything on Medium, and it has the advantage that it will remain on the web even if Medium shuts down. #For people who get the nightly email, if you have a comment, just reply to the email. For now what you say is just between us. I'm thinking about ways to re-open the blog to interaction, but have it be as convenient as possible for the reader/contributors. I have powerful content management tools and I want to use them. #
Circular firing squad time in Trump mob family.#
The reporting on Ukraine misses an important point. Not only was Trump putting the squeeze on Ukraine to become part of his mob, he was also selling them out. A small relatively powerless country that depended on our protection, Trump was stepping back and letting Russia roll over them. #
Michael Moore was a guest on MSNBC last night. It was really refreshing. He provides the perspective of a person. He thinks Biden should be leading the fight against Trump. I agreed with everything he said. Clear thinking. Totally worth watching.#
WIth Big 25 coming up, it's great to hear from people who were reading in the early years. For example, David Boroditsky checked in yesterday on Twitter. He sent a link to an email he sent me, which I posted to the blog, in Oct 1996, two years after the start. He talks about the non-web features of Frontier. Sometimes I forget that Frontier and the blog were two sides of the same coin in the early days. All the early blogging and RSS software ran in Frontier. #Because Barr is in such a precarious position, and he's smart, he must have factored in the risk before going out on the limb. He's betting that he and Trump et al will be able to toss the Constitution in a trash can, and govern any way they want, without oversight and inconvenient co-equal branches of government. We're at much at risk as he is.#
Trump is breaking the Constitution. Openly, and it'll never be repaired if he isn't cancelled. We should have fought this "civil war" a long time ago, but all the time we delay the chances of our form of govt surviving goes down.#
20-minute podcast about the origins of Scripting News. The original idea, 25 years ago, was letting go of product ideas that I wouldn't be able to commercialize. It, in turn, generated ideas that would define a huge industry. The big idea of blogging would turn out to be Sources Go Direct. #In less than a week my blog will be 25 years old. If it were a person it would be able to rent a car. #
In the almost-25 years of blogging on scripting.com, I did take a few weeks off here and there. In the 90s, mostly to take week-long massage classes, at places where there was no internet access, which was common back then, believe it or not.#
My two cents on changing Facebook to keep its power manageable. 1. Its social graph should be a public resource. Spin it out. The APIs should be open like the web APIs are. 2. Facebook should peer with the open web, so it isn't a silo.#
Why is it that the future-of-news conversation is exclusive to people who have a vested interest in the way things are. If we've learned anything about the future -- of everything -- is that it's disruptive to the way things are. #
Occam's Talking Points: A Trump surrogate says the whole Ukranian thing is based on hearsay. You respond. "The president confessed. Both in writing and verbally. Next question." Someone says go ahead impeach Trump, we'll have Pence, he's even worse, this is what you say. "He couldn't win re-election as governor of Indiana, what makes you think he'd do so well in the 2020 election, assuming the Repubs even nominate him." #I'd like to have a Metacritic for Twitter users.#
I didn't know Heidi Hall who died of cancer at age 49 and wrote her own obituary. She tells a fantastic story, starting with the very first paragraph. "My mother would be surprised that I did not die alone." Her story resonates with me. Families have all kinds of awful reasons for kicking members out. In her case it was that she didn't follow the family religion. Thanks to Terry Teachout for the link. #
Last night's Succession was awesome (a word I chose deliberately). It has become the latest HBO megahit, following The Sopranos, The Wire and Game of Thrones. Everyone is watching it. And just as "winter is coming" became a standard greeting when GoT ruled, we now say Fuck Off with the flair of Logan Roy. We got a taste last night of how well the kids learned from their father, and how they can work together when they are offended in the same way. I suspect they will all, together, be the successor that the show is titled for. But that's not a spoiler, because like you, I have no idea who the winner will be. Now fuck off. 💥#
Also watched the first episode of season 5 of The Affair. I didn't expect it to be good, but someone I met at a Woodstock party recently told me it's the best season yet, so I checked it out, and wow, it is great. I'm going to try to savor this season, slowly, which should be easy given all the great political theater in the real world. #
- By coincidence today is (somehow) the official Podcast Day and I am ready to announce the refurbished original Twitter-based podcatcher, started in 2007. #
- It's here: @podc. #
- Podcasting keeps growing and giving and I'm proud of what we, and many others, accomplished. ;-)#
I watched the last Mets game of the 2019 season yesterday. I guess alot of people did, we wanted to see the rarest of things -- a Mets home run hitter. No Met had ever had the most home runs in MLB in a season, but Pete Alonso, a rookie pulled it off. He also set the record for most home runs in a season by a rookie. And he has a flair for public relations and is a natural born leader.#- The game went into extra innings, and it looked for sure that the Mets would lose it after unbelievably bad relief pitching, which for the 2019 Mets is saying a lot. But in the bottom of the 11th, a miracle. With runners on first and second, Dom Smith, who had been injured and hadn't come to the plate since July, hit a three-run home run for a dramatic and hugely spirited walk-off win. It's fitting that the Mets didn't make the playoffs this year, and also fitting that this lovely young team went out with such a flourish after it appeared the season would end in utter disappointment. #
- I've loved the Mets since 1962. It's a family tradition among the Winers and Kieslers. There's a new crew, rookies, a Cy Young winner and the certain Rookie of the Year. And an awkward but fun and loving group of misfits who somehow reach into your heart and give you a glimpse of their coming greatness. This is the cycle of the Mets. Can't wait for opening day in 2020. #
- I'm proud that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, subscribes to my blog via email. I may start a regular column here entitled Dear Jack. Somehow I don't think he would mind. #
- The first one would recount a meeting I had with him, when Twitter was a small juggernaut, at a coffee place in downtown San Francisco. He told me of a plan he had for Twitter which, ever since, I was greedily anticipating. He wanted Twitter to be a general purpose storage system for user data. That was a long time ago, and Twitter is now a huge international resource without peer. I doubt if today's Twitter could contemplate such a feature, but how different today's world would be if the Twitter of the 00s could have pulled it off. #
Dropbox has a huge lead as the personal and corporate network storage system. Building on that is no mystery, we have 50+ years experience. The problem is they’re doing it all internally. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Thread on Twitter.#
I read in a profile on Twitter (sorry can't find now) that American == white. Everyone else is hyphenated. That's true. I am a first-generation American, my parents were from Europe. Refugees. But I am not hyphenated. No one asks where I'm from.#
Today's the day that all MLB games start at the same time, no matter where they're played. This was a good design call, imho -- in case there were still undetermined races, they can't be decided before your team's game starts. #
My friend who loves the new release of Abbey Road, which I have bought, insists that I'd for sure hear the difference if I listen on headphones. Which I am doing right now. Sounds lovely. The songs are all so great, and form the musical sound track of my whole life all the way back to elementary school! As I said yesterday, and it bears repeating, that all the Beatles albums are deeply ingrained in who I am. All my early life experiences connected with every other period of my life. I started listening to the Beatles early in life and never stopped. But I only hear the Beatles, I only hear Abbey Road on the new mixes. It doesn't sound any different from other mixes. I wish it did, because I'd love to have more Beatles revelations at my age, which also has significance in Beatles terms. Heh. But it sounds the same as it always did, full of wonder, like Abbey Road, like the music of my life. #Watch out for the NYT and Washington Post for the reprise to the But Her Emails crapola. They are the same people who complain that the rise of fascism puts reporters lives in danger. Democracy dies in darkness, and it also dies in their hypocrisy.#
I watched the Mets game last night, it was on Fox Sports, so the usual Mets telecasters were sidelined in favor of some total idiots whose names I don't want to know. They didn't bother with the play by play unless Pete Alonso was up. At other times they interviewed Mets and Braves players from the dugout. They talked about how nice everyone is, at length. How Alonso must feel now, after hitting the home run, in great detail without any input from Pete, who was on the field at first base, crying. I wondered who likes this style of baseball. I saw him hit the 53rd home run, I was happy for him. But the actual news is that the Mets season is over. And the bad news is that these idiots will be doing the broadcasts for much of the postseason baseball which starts next week. I know this isn't what's wrong with America, but it's a symptom of what's wrong. You're there to call the game, so STFU and do your job.#So many people saying now that they knew what Trump was doing but no one listened. Anyone who was paying attention knew. The problem wasn't that no one listened, it was that no one wanted to do anything about it. We all wanted to get out of it with someone else taking the risk. Mueller was supposed to be our savior, but he didn't want to risk it either. BTW, the thing that changed this time is the whistleblower, god bless them. Someone was willing to stick their neck out for all of us.#
Lizzie Vann is the new owner of Bearsville Center in Woodstock. Here's an interview on WDST where she explains what's going on. #
I heard someone say that Joe Biden is the Democratic equivalent of Jeb Bush for 2019. Now I can't get that idea out of my head.#
Someone should open a hosting service like Digital Ocean where an instance comes with a great VNC server pre-installed, and a Mac client that just needs to know the domain name of the server, you're in GUI-land and of course can access the server via Terminal.#
On the advice of a friend I got the new remastering of Abbey Road. I have been listening. Here's my reaction -- it sounds just like Abbey Road, which is so deeply ingrained in my being it might as well be part of my DNA. In other words I can't hear any difference. I hope whoever got the money ($10 for MP3s) does something good with it. ;-)#The NRA being controlled by Russia is something to contemplate. Every mass killing with automatic weapons is an attack on US by Russia. It’s a shooting war, not with Russian soldiers, or drones even, with human American proxies.#
Why no team can sign Carmelo Anthony. Think about what kind of criticism the team would be open to if they did and the season went badly. The management and coaching would take a hit with fans beause they wasted their attention on giving an old player a stage to perform his last season. Kind of makes each game an exhibition, not a serious contest. Might sell a few more tickets, but maybe it'd have the opposite effect, the embarrassment of being Melo rubs off on the team. Even worse, what if they came close, and there's another forward they could have gotten that critics think might have made the difference. Meanwhile Melo was trading jersies with stars on other teams for photo ops. I feel for Melo. I wouldn't want to be where he is. He's more like a mascot than a player. He has a smell on him, and it's not a good one. I wish it weren't so.#I can't understand is why more people haven't watched Bojack Horseman? It's on Netflix so it's pretty easy for a lot of people to get. I hear that people don't like animations. But it's one of the best shows ever, and stars some of the best actors, and lots of cameos with real Hollywood stars. And many of the people who write and design the show go on to do other shows you probably love. It's very influential. I started spreading the gospel of Bojack in 2015. There's a new 1/2 season coming at the end of October. I can't wait. #
The idea of left and right is nuts, because Trump ran on a pretty far-left plan if you took his words at face value. I suspect the idea of left vs right is something that mostly makes sense to people who view politics as sport, like Mets vs Yankees.#
- The @nbariver Twitter feed is flowing again. #
- I'm also getting the @podc Twitter feed going too. It started in 2007, when podcasting and Twitter were both pretty new. #
- Rivers are like Twitter timelines except made out of RSS feeds, which are distributed all over the internet, not just on Twitter. So there's "nbariver.com" and @nbariver. They carry the same information, in the same order (newest first) -- one on my server, and the other on Twitter. Similarly, there's Podcatch.com and @podc.#
- I know this might be confusing, but it's worth understanding imho.#
I'm returning my old Apple Watch for a $100 credit after getting a new 5th generation watch (I will write it up later). I've done this before and remember the process was easy because they designed the docs well, and took out all the unnecessary steps (something designers call factoring). But this time, instead of writing the instructions in a language I understand they use pictures with links to web pages. A couple of problems there. First, they use a very light color to print the URLs and they're too small for me to read, even with my glasses. I used my iPhone's flashlight, but the paper is glossy. I ended up taking a picture of the doc, and blowing it up. Second, couldn't they use a URL shortener? Didn't someone at Apple suggest that? I can't imagine it would cost that much. The whole thing, which I remember as being impressively easy last time is a pain in the ass this time. I think maybe the difference is that Steve is gone and most people who work at Apple started after he left. #- The instructions also don't seem to say who you call or email to come pick up the watch. A phone number would be nice. It must be here, but for the life of me I can't see it. #
- Also there's this weird red paper thing they included. I have no idea what it's for. It might be a piece of tape, but it isn't. There's no peel-off strip on the back. Mysterious.#
What I love about the whistleblower is that it says that the US govt is still in there, it hasn't been dominated yet by the Nazis. Now that one whistleblower has emerged, hopefully there will be many more. A publication dedicated just to whistleblower coverage might be good.#I assume Trump is deep in debt and scrambling to make loan payments every month, and the people he owes money to aren't the kind who understand.#
If I could talk to Trump and he was really listening I'd day this. Trump you idiot, we all knew what you were doing, but we didn't have solid proof, like a tape or a transcript. You fucking moron, not only did you create the transcript, you released it to the public. #
I was pissed that Schiff went ahead with the hearing, but then I wonder if his real audience is the dozen or so would-be whistleblowers who are dealing with a government that insists everything is privileged. He's saying to them, that's what they say about everything, you have to resist that. If necessary come to me, directly and we'll help. #
Here's what's weird. The Trump/Barr team has been obstructing everything. It's all been privileged. Tax returns. McGahn testimony, etc. Today they gave up. They could have said the whistleblower report was privileged. Would have been consistent. They didn't. #
I wish there was a text version of the report so I could use a dark color and amp up the size. There should be a whistleblower's CSS file I can edit. Make this stuff easy on the eyes. #
I don't see why the Dems went ahead with the public hearing today, given that the whistleblower report came out before the hearing. The hearing only made sense if the report was being withheld. We're not impeaching the acting DNI. This hearing only made sense of they were stonewalling. They're doing to the whistleblower what Barr did to the Muller Report. They need a showrunner, someone with an outsider's perspective. Schiff, Nadler, Pelosi are lost in the weeds. (Though unlike some, I thought Schiff's intro was brilliant.)#
It's funny how my subconscious gets in the loop on my programming which is probably almost totally a higher-brain function. When I figure something out, here's what comes out of my mouth -- bang. That's a new one. It used to be bing and then ptahhh. Also thank you. Sometimes perfect. Then there was bingo bongo bingo. And now -- bang. Sometimes it's bang bang bang. There's no conscious thought behind these words. It's spontaneous. They just happen. It's as if my subconscious is watching, not entirely sure what's going on, like a black lab hanging out at my feet. He senses something has happened that's momentous and wants to participate. Verbally. #Le tweet du jour: Some of the stupidest criminals in the world are working right here in America. I've always been proud of that. #
Now the conversation has turned to what Trump should be impeached for. I don't know the public opinion answer, or the legal answer, or the right answer for Nancy Pelosi, but here's the Occam's News answer. He's running a corrupt enterprise from the White House. He's turned it into the Trump Organization, using all the powers of the presidency to cover up his crimes and fill his pockets. Organized crime. To live the life he was living before he was elected but on a much grander scale. This violates everything in the Constitution, because it was the founders intent, in every instance, to have the United States be self-governing, not a monarchy. #I wish reporters would ignore what Trump just released, based on our experience with the Mueller Report.#
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if one day I found I didn't have anything to write about. Heh. Like that's ever going to happen. Hello my name is Dave and I'm a NBB.#
Yesterday I hit a pothole on a dirt road and I rolled over the handlebars. My instincts were good, I protected my head and neck, took the brunt on my ribcage and knee. It was a private place and a private experience. I laid there in the dirt for I have no idea how long, looked up at the sky through the trees, breathed, and was thankful it wasn't worse. Eventually I got myself up, dizzy, sat back down, breathed some more, righted myself and walked home. The bike wasn't rideable. I've rolled over handlebars once before, in Manhattan, in 2010, avoiding a collision with a car that was running a stop sign. That time I was in bed for days, this time it's not that bad. I'm already up and about. I love my bike, but today I feel betrayed. Not sure if it was really a hole in the road or a bike failure. I haven't had the will to look at the bike yet. I'm going to spend a day eating ibuprofen and being thankful. #I started watching Unbelievable on Netflix. Almost at the end of episode 2. So far it makes me unbelievably angry. #
BTW, it's totally okay for you to forward the nightly emails to anyone you like. They can't unsub on your behalf because we send a confirming email to your account to unsub. If you don't confirm, your subscription remains. So if you want to share something you read here, please do. #
Yesterday I wrote briefly about new social graphs. Here's the background. For a long time, years, to get engagement with smart people on my writing, I had to cross-post to Twitter or Facebook, and at times Medium. This never worked well, there were limits to their APIs or format (character limits on Twitter, for example). Following the Cambridge Analytica mess, Facebook shut down their API so cross-posting was no longer possible. But now, I’m getting engagement, like I did in the early years, on my blog, without going through a silo. This conversation, the one we’re having right now, is part of a new social graph. Nothing long-term about it, it’s already here. Now the question is what's the next step. The email connection works. (To people who are only following in the RSS feed, I recommend trying the nightly email. It feels different. For example, if you reply, I will see it. That doesn't happen in RSS.)#Michael Calore: "I'm reading your words every day again, just like 15 years ago. Email is the new RSS.#
After learning about Yacht Rock, I've been listening to the Doobie Brothers, reading up on their history. This morning I was listening to What a Fool Believes, following along in the lyrics, and saw that it was written by Aretha Franklin! I couldn't imagine how she would sing the song. BTW, I've been exactly that kind of fool. #
How permalinks work on Scripting News. There's a simple feature in my blog that makes it easy to point to a specific item. If you look at the end of any post you'll see four icons. The first, a "purple pound sign," is a link to the item. When you click it, the browser opens the page, with that post at the top. That's the best link to send to friends. #
I have a feeling Trump may have wanted a kickback -- you get the $250 million, then pay me 10% to put my name on a building in Kiev.#
The human species has been on a drive to growth from the beginning. The way to survive was to have lots of kids to insure that some would survive to reproduce, thereby continuing our own DNA and insuring the survival of the species. Until the advent of medicine and mass production of fossil fuel, and other forms of civilization, we were in balance with nature. But some time in the last hundred years the balance flipped, growth skyrocketed, and processes were set in motion that got us to today's climate crisis. Problem is that we, as a species, haven't evolved, our evolution-driven goals haven't changed, we still think having more children is a virtue, and that it's our right, even obligation, to consume more. Reversing that is not a simple matter (that's generous, in my heart I don't think it's even possible), and the problem was not created by one or two generations, as some of the young folk believe. The problem is with the nature of our species, the traits that evolution reinforced are the ones that are leading us off the climate cliff. So when I listen to Greta's speech, she isn't speaking just for her generation, she's speaking for mine too, and for my parents, who are gone. My mother, who died in 2018, was passionate about consuming less. Greta would have liked her, I think. Yes we knew we were going off a cliff, even people who say they aren't sure, they knew too. But turning the ship around isn't something you decide to do. We each can do it ourselves, but that won't make a difference. I don't have the answers, but I know for certain that blaming today's adults for the future that today's children face is wrong. Making other people the symbol of our grief for our species is typically human, and pointless.#We froze our social graph too soon, imho. My goal is to get the kind of discourse that happens on Twitter and Facebook to happen outside the silos, so a new generation of "coders" can try out a billion new ideas about how humans can ideate and organize in a global network environment.#
Pelosi's choice: 1. Get behind impeachment, now, fully, no conditions. 2. Step aside and let the new Speaker do it. (Update: There's a third choice -- Delegate all matters related to impeachment to a special prosecutor, a member of the House. I think Adam Schiff would be ideal. Pelosi can handle everything but impeachment. Refer all questions to the prosecutor.)#
Mythical headline from 1972. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel raises troubling questions about just what it is that the Democrats are hiding there.#
Sometimes you have to make a choice with no clue how things are going to turn out. That's been my experience in life. I can cite numerous examples. So now it gets real for all of us at the same time. And I'd say it's just been an illusion that it never was not thus.#
Finally MSNBC gets to the real question. How the hell are we going to vote Trump out. We've only seen 1/10th (maybe) of one whistleblower leak. He must be making the offer demand he made to the Ukranian president to every despot in the world. #
Journalism needed a re-think for the 2020 election, and it didn't happen. We're in a bad place. Trump's corruption is "priced-in" so you can say Trump did something even more horrible than ever before and people go yeah, that's nice, but what are we going to do about it. If the past is any indication, nothing. And Trump can dirty-up Biden's name and create a nice false equivalence for the journos to relax into. We're all comfortable in doing what we do. We had a series of marches in 2017, and then settled back into complacency and complicity in the rise of authoritarianism in the US. If we want to stop it, protest won't do it. Resistance won't, or civil disobedience. We need a revolution now, and luckily our founders thought it might come to that, after all they had just fought one. In the Constitution are the tools to overturn the government, immediately. But we also need a revolution in journalism, an awakening, creating authority in expertise. What we used to call Sources Go Direct. People we trust who know something about what they're talking about. It's time to rise to JFK's challenge. My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. #The nightly email thing has been a big eye-opener. Real engagement has returned. On the web, not in a silo. I can't believe we found a way to crack the nut. Now I want to open up engagement in new ways. I have the benefit of all the paths we went down starting in 1994. And I have lots of developed software running in JavaScript here that can be applied to new experiments. Exciting times. #
As usual journalism is cutting Trump too much slack. Here's what actually happened, via Occam's News, between Trump and the Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. First, Trump doesn't care if there's an actual investigation. He wants Zelensky to say there was, and Biden & Biden are being charged with something heinous that carries the death penalty in Ukraine. That's the first round of hype. Then Ukraine files for extradition of the Bidens. Trump goes through a whole drama, trying to decide whether or not to allow Biden & Biden to be deported to Ukraine, or try them in the US, for interfering with an election in a foreign country, usurping the perogative of the US govt. The press reports on Trump's Decision, Day 1, Day 2 and so on. Reporters camp out in front of the White House all night waiting for a decision. Finally Trump emerges with AG Barr, he decides try them here, showing surprising mercy for the Bidens, it is reported almost everywhere. After all that Ukraine quietly receives the $250 million, of course with a taste for Trump. My guess is that all this will still happen even though it's been exposed. And Pelosi still will not allow impeachment. #DHH wants something like the Scripting News nightly email for people he follows on Twitter. It's doable, the Twitter API has what's needed, but I'm not sure most tweets would look good in email. Think of the hacks people use to tell stories on Twitter. It would be easier the other way around, to take essays and turn them into a series of Tweets. Of course I have an app for that -- Little Pork Chop. There's also Happy Friends, a web app I wrote in 2014. It still works, but I don't use it myself anymore. Not sure why. #
Want a protest? Here’s a plan that would get things to change. A permanent occupation of DC by 100K people demanding impeachment. Leave when your replacement arrives.#
I had never heard of Yacht Rock before listening to the third episode of the 1619 podcast, which might be the best single episode of any podcast ever. If you love American music, you can, in a few minutes, find out what it is and where it came from. If you say "Alexa play Yacht Rock" you get a virtual radio station of the good stuff. #
Want to have marches that scare Moscow Mitch and Nancy Pelosi? All over the country we pretend it's Election Day. Dress rehearsal. March to your local polling place and have a have a street fair with booths for the candidates, for causes and political parties. Let the candidates treat you to entertainment, food and drink. We should make Election Day as much anticipated as any holiday. Or even better, usurp an existing holiday like Halloween. 💥 #It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.#
I finished Undone last night. Spoilers follow, so be warned. In the story, a teacher urges a student to be the sky (paraphrasing), observe your feelings the way the sky might observe the flow of a river. This is something I've learned, it comes with age and experience, self-knowledge. I think you can learn it at a young age, if you're taught and you practice. Once you can observe your feelings, fully feel them, but not let them become you, that's when you come into your power. Some reviewers say the series is about mental illness, but that's only one theory of the show, and not the one we're left with, waiting for season 2. I'm probably going to watch it again, it's such rich story and so beautifully told. #
Scott Love, via email: "I want to star or rate your best gems!" I always listen to Scott. He was hired as a product marketing manager at Living Videotext in the mid-80s, but he was so much more. We went to dinner probably two or three nights a week, and mostly about where to go with our outliner products, and what the competition in the Valley was doing. I would try ideas out on Scott, give him limited background, to see where his mind would go. Very creative and hard-working mind. Scott reads this blog via the nightly email. It's a lot like the old days at Chef Chu's in Los Altos. So Scott, there are features in the web version of Scripting News that aren't in the email version, for security reasons. They also aren't in the RSS version. You can Like any item on the blog, but only in the web browser version. 💥#Lots of catching up to do betw Scott and myself. For example, here's a 2009 piece, Narrate Your Work, I'm pretty sure Scott will like. #
A feature I've been thinking about. When I mention someone who's a long-time personal friend, they might have a blue checkmark after their name like this: Bull Mancuso
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. #The key to politics and media of today is giving the people a role beyond couch potato, social media sharer and marcher. You want people to be involved in your mission? Then involve the people. #
Farhad Manjoo and Ezra Klein are both wrong about Obama’s biggest mistake, which was thinking “President” and “community organizer” are different jobs. He should have moved his excellent campaign into the White House instead of disbanding it. #
Another mistake Obama made that history will probably judge him on is that he underestimated Trump and Putin, openly. Don't motivate your enemies. Never slam the door on the way out. #
Fascinating op-ed in the NYT by two political science authors about why the Repubs play dirty. They illustrate more generally that political parties play dirty when they realize they can't stay in power any other way. But -- consider this sentence -- "The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse." As a programmer, which teaches me to challenge my assumptions, it's a critical part of design and debugging, I see that it's not the only way out. Political parties aren't like baseball teams. As long as there's baseball, your favorite team will continue, though they could move or change their name. For example, the Washington Nationals are the former Montreal Expos. But the same must not be true of political parties. The Repubs had a good run, but they went down a path that didn't work. So they lose elections. What of it. There's no way the Democrats will rule the whole country unopposed for any amount of time -- a new party will form. In all likelihood two new parties will form. There aren't enough white Christians in the US to rule, and many of them, esp the young ones, see themselves as part of a diverse America. Eventually the Repubs will disappear, the question is how much damage will they do on their way out.#BTW, the radical adjustments in the US political system are an obvious response to big changes in the Soviet Union in the 80s and 90s. People thought at the time there would be a peace dividend, and that it signalled the end of history. I didn't believe it at the time, I saw both ideas as tempting fate, the same way you brag that your candidate can't lose. God hears you and as my dear departed uncle would say goofs on you. #