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.
#
- Saw a report on the news that Facebook is evil because they enhance pictures on Instagram. A really thin story because so many things other than Facebook damage people's self-perception based on ridiculous standards of appearance. #
- CNN does it, for sure in huge ways. The anchor reporting the story is a beautful woman, but probably not quite as beautiful has her makeup, hair and lighting people make her seem.#
- I wish they were required to have a constant critic in a window in the upper right corner of the screen, pointing out these hypocrisies.#
Brianna Keilar
#- PS: I will always admire Keilar for how she interviewed Michael Cohen, before he was famous. If you haven't seen it, you might love it. It's very different from the usual TV news fare. #
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.
#
- Chrome has done something insidious to break the web a little more. They do this so often, breaking the web seems to be Google's business model. #
- Here's what they changed. #
- If you type a domain name into the address bar of the browser, the protocol is hidden. This isn't new, or particularly bad, until they made the next change.#
- Now instead of automatically generating http as the protocol in the URL, they generate https. #
- So sites that are running fine appear to be broken. #
- It happened on a placeholder site to me just now. I was fooled, I immediately thought a server had gone down, and started looking for the outage. Then I was reminded of this trickery Google is doing. I was reminded of how much I hate what Google is doing to the web. They're fighting with me, and weakening the web in a way they have no right to. My site is a perfectly functional web site. It's just a placeholder. No one needs to worry about a "man in the middle" interference. There are no ads on this site. I don't know how else to say it. My choice of protocols is none of Google's business. #
- That's basically a protection racket. If mobsters were doing it. "Nice little website you have there, be a shame if people couldn't reach it because Google broke the web.#
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.
#
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.
#
- I was going through some notes and came across this piece I wrote on 5/19/2008 about how my mother uses computers. I guess I didn't publish it because she was a regular reader of my blog, and might be offended. But she won't read it now, and if she did I would tell her this is how I loved you, knowing all about the stubborness and willfull ignorance of how computers work. Which is odd because her children and husband made their careers making these damn things work, in some fashion. #
One of my standard disclaimers after I Am Not A Lawyer and Murphy-willing is My Mother Loves Me. I say this to let everyone know that no matter how much you dis me, no matter how much you hurt my feelings or make me feel worthless, I know that as a last resort my mother still thinks I'm great. (I hope she still feels that way after reading this.) And I love my mother, all this is said with the deepest admiration, with a bit of irony and tongue in cheek. #- All that said, my mother is one stubborn person. 😉#
- She's been using a Mac for 20 years -- 20 years! And she still doesn't know what a menu is or a window or the desktop or an icon, or a toolbar. But she does, somehow, know that if you press cmd-shift-4 you get a screen capture of the front window and it creates an icon on the desktop (what she calls this I have no idea). She showed me all her icons. I asked how she knew that, she said "I just know it."#
- It's as if kids born in Czechoslavakia in the 1930s were somehow taught this in grade school?#
- We have this clash every so often. I tell her she must go to the local community college or public library and take a class in basic computer usage. That she would get back a ton of time for doing this, and I'd be able to show her a lot more cool things she could do with her Mac. But she won't do it. It's as if one could drive a car without knowing which pedal was the brake and which the gas, or what the gear shift was, or the difference between the steering wheel and the volume control on the radio. If my mother drove her car like she drives her Mac the streets of NYC would not be a safe place to drive.#
- This came up over the weekend because I was trying to teach her to use WordPress, software that seems fairly straightforward and easy to use -- to me, but when viewed through my mother's eyes was unbelievalby difficult. It's not totally WordPress's fault. There are so many layers to the screen of a Macintosh. First there's the OS, it has menus, a desktop, windows, etc. All of which have controls and their own logic. Then there's the browser. It has an address bar, a search box (hers got stretched somehow so the address bar was tiny and it was huge (why is the search box even resizable?). It has a toolbar, Preferences, bookmarks (oy she totally doesn't get bookmarks). And then there's WordPress, and it has chrome too, just like the browser does! How can you tell the difference? I don't know.#
- For me this stuff is understandable because each piece came in one at a time. But when I saw how it looked to someone who not only didn't have that perspective, but didn't have the time or patience or spongelike learning brain of a child to grok all the layers of logic at play, it's just something to laugh about and shrug off. #
- Yet she understands the purpose of the web, viscerally. #
- All this made me think that now that we have a handful of activities identified, blogging, bookmarking, clicking, chat, email, etc. one could start from scratch and design a computer that just did these things without layers at all. #
- Or my mom could take a class at the local public library. 😉#
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.
#
- Jake Tapper thinks President Biden scolding unvaccinated Americans isn't very nice. Boo hoo. Never mind he might have saved their lives. And more important, mine. #
- I can just see it. Biden says "Come little MAGAs, let me give you a nice big hug and a mug of hot cocoa. Now let's talk about your vaccination. I would really like you to get one. It would make me feel good."#
Cute little MAGAs just love Cousin Joey.
#
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?
#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.
💥 #
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.
#
- The Netflix movie Worth got great reviews, and it stars Michael Keaton so I got out the popcorn and sat down to watch with great expectations and came away not liking the movie. That was almost a week ago, and I've had some time to reflect on why it was so bad. #
- Interestingly, the score on Metacritic for Worth has gone down by 20 points since I looked late last week. Now it gets a 66, "generally favorable" which is not great. But I left the first paragraph alone. #
- First, Keaton is a great actor, and this was an unusual role for him, playing a lawyer whose job it was to save the economy from being sued to oblivion by the families of victims of 9/11 by giving them money. #
- Now I'm going to spoil the plot, but it's kind of funny -- you might not even realize this was the plot, esp the second part, after you watched the whole movie, that's how poorly done it was. So here goes. #
- The families wanted their dead relatives' stories told, they cared less about how much money they got, although the money was important to some.#
- The families of rich people who died scammed the regular people and they took a lot more of the money from the settlement, and there was nothing Michael Keaton could do about it. #
- But the most important part of the plot was that Keaton started out as a stiff and heartless lawyer and came out the other end as a champion of the people. Only we never saw the process by which this transformation took place. #
- The conclusion I came to, after giving this enough time, was that it should have been a 6 to 10-part series. Netflix should have done for the families what they wanted Keaton's character to do. Tell their stories. That's where the juice was. If you want to make Keaton the central thread, that's a good way to do it. But we just got tiny little glimpses of the families here and there, and no understanding of who actually died in the 9/11 attack. And that's a shame, because it could be a good story. Maybe a bit like Six Feet Under. #
- Anyway as a movie it was imho a failure. Michael Keaton, as always, commands your attention in a good way, just to see someone who's a true artist at his craft. #
- Editor's note: This started as a thread on Twitter and turned into a ramble here on my blog...#
- I have to admit the only podcast I listen to these days is Brian Lehrer, and I don't listen to that very often. #
- If Heather Cox Richardson did one, I would listen. A weekly version of her newsletter. Yes. She's one of those people I never have an argument with, and always learn something from. #
- In contrast the Daily podcast (which used to be my main daily news fix a year or more ago) sucks so much now because the NYT reporters are either dumbing things down intolerably or (sorry but this is more likely) they're just too young and inexperienced to have a clue. About anything, even what they're supposed to be expert in. I know they hire kids with great degrees from great schools, but I wonder if they aren't all the pre-med-type students who just go for the grade and recommendation. #
- And then think about all the doctors they keep inviting on to CNN and MSNBC. The same ones all the time and they say the same things. You wouldn't need AI to do what they do! #
- Also I would listen to a Donald McNeil weekly podcast about what's new with Covid. I wouldn't mind if he also talked about cooking, or great trips he's taken that didn't get him fired from the NYT. I think he should be as popular as that asshole on Spotify who got Covid and is taking oxycloriquin or whatever. How about a rational outspoken person to balance the crazy outspoken people. McNeil with a good sidekick could do that. #
- They could do a clean sweep of MSNBC while you're at it. Again, clinging to a world that is gone. No patience for that. Get HCR and DM to begin. Offer Brian Lehrer a nightly spot. That's three hours right there. The people they have now are out of ideas. Need a rest, a change of venue. Put them out of their misery. #
- Who to blame for the Afghanistan debacle? #
- It's not nearly as complicated as journalism makes it sound.#
- The people who voted to re-elect Bush in 2004.#
- Blame yourself if you‘re one of them. We had a chance to listen to the world and use our dominance in so many areas other than blowing up Iraq.#
- Very limited imagination.#
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.
#
I spent about an hour today doing a factoring experiment, taking a promises-based API and transforming it into a callbacks-based API.#- Well no surprise they're isomorphic. When you do the translation, you end up with the same thing with different names. #
- The promises syntax is slightly more compact. A long distance to go and a lot of introduced complexity for very little gain. #
- It's like getting nice fat clothes instead of just losing the weight. #
- I have a philosophy in programming, one I thought was stolen from, but actually mis-attributed to Einstein, who ironically said as much in a lot more words.#
- "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."#
- This is a basic mathematics thing. They're always looking for a way to find one theorum that encapsulates and makes unnecessaray two or more. A more fundamental truth. The hope is ultimately to have one concise way of saying everything. A Rick and Morty kind of idea. But why do programmers always seem to do the opposite? Solving a problem of too much complexity by adding even more complexity. #
- I was a math major before I was a programmer, so I find this whole thing super frustrating.#
- At some point, instigated by Drummer perhaps, I hope we will have a great debate in the JavaScript community where our respected leaders explain to us why we need any of this stuff, and we can't have a language that behaves like all others, where asynchronous bits live underneath the interface that the langauge defines for the programmer.#
Covid is raging in Texas and the government responds by setting citizens against each other over abortion.
#
- Each of the two calls are implemented on a server, btw.#
- opml.getAtt ("tmp.opml", "name") + " is " + opml.getAtt ("tmp.opml", "age") + " years old."#
- Ask a friend who's a JavaScript dev why this is interesting. #
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.
#
- A query for Electron devs. #
- I have been developing Electron apps for five years at least.#
- I have an Electron version of Drummer for the Mac (to start) almost ready to go, but there are problems with the File dialogs. It feels like a versioning thing? These routines worked fine in earlier software. So I figure what I need to do is get this app building using the latest versions of Electron and the latest build tools. If I recall correctly they change a lot. And it's been a while since I figured out how to do it. When I read their docs for building stuff I feel as lost as I felt when I was just starting out. #
- Okay, so here's how I build the app currently:#
sudo electron-packager . "Electric Drummer" --platform=darwin --arch=all --overwrite --icon=drummer.icns --electron-version=7.1.10 #- What should I change to get my build process up to date? #
- It works, it builds the app, and I've been using it, it's just not the current Electron release and their are quirks with the file dialogs. #
- Ideally I'd like to not have to learn too much about the Electron release process or versions -- just give me something that works and I can get back to my sprawling codebase. #
- Here's a thread for comments. Thanks in advance. 😄#
I've written about JSON Feed a few times. Summary: it was a bad idea. I don't know why devs want to come up with new names for well-established concepts. It makes all our lives more complicated if the format catches on, and if it doesn't, it just makes a mess.#- If you absolutely had to have a JSON feed format, which no one does, it's easy to encapsulate anything you don't like about a format behind a simplifying API, and anything you can represent in RSS can be represented in JSON and vice versa, the best thing to do was a JSONified RSS. But they didn't do that either. #
- Okay, so four years later this thread appears in the support repo. #
- I might have been vaguely aware that Apple has a new format, obviously its own reinvention of RSS, also a totally bad idea, and another developer thinks JSON Feed should adopt its features. He is correct. That is the right move. Or even better, just leave JSON Feed behind and support both Apple's new incompatible format and RSS 2.0. Given that they're rooted in the Apple world, probably both. But the sparsely supported format they put out there was a bad idea and today it's an even worse idea, and it's only going to get more so. #
- People keep doing this, thinking that starting over is the thing to do. Apple will have trouble with their format because publishers will see it as the trap that it obviously is and probably will forever tell Apple it would be better if they didn't go off and blaze a new trail when there already is a well-worn path. No one wants to get locked in the trunk, they want to ride up front with you. And in publishing, thankfully, Apple still is not dominant. And hopefully it stays that way. And the rest of us have to circle the wagons and reduce the number of formats we have to deal with, not add to them.#
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.
#
- If I were in health care, working in a place where they have to care for Covid patients who are very sick, I'd feel very inclined to quit. #
- Given that 99 percent of the people who are very sick with Covid chose not vaccinate. And the transmissibility of the virus unlike other illnesses, makes them responsible not only for their own illness but other people'.#
- I'd seriously consider quitting. #
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.
#
- Last night I saw Amy Klobuchar interviewed on CNN and the reporter pressed her to say that Breyer should resign while there's a Dem president, was wondering why no one wishes RBG had resigned when Obama was president, but of course there was Merrick Garland.#
- On the other hand, in hindsight, we should have had the fight over the Supreme Court when Garland was nominated and McConnell refused to confirm. Obama could have taken that as an affirmation, and seated Garland. It would have been a better time to fight.#
- I said it at the time. If McConnell won't vote, then after a decent amount of time, Garland takes the seat. Set a new precedent, if the Senate abdicates its responsibility, we go forward without them.#
- The good guys have been scared of a fight, and the Repubs have been walking all over the Constitution. You can't be nice always, sometimes you have to hit back. We've been delaying and delaying. And btw, where are the indictments of Trump, Mr Attorney General?#
- On Twitter Kai Ryssdal asks: "What happens now? I mean, courts/procedure-wise."#
- I am not a lawyer...#
- The Supreme Court declined to put a stay order on the law, so Texas can and will presumably enforce it.#
- But the lawsuits can proceed, as if the SC did nothing.#
- Here's another question even more ominous imho.#
- Now that Texas found a way around the Constitution, what other rights can they infringe on this way?#
- Pick an amendment, it's easy to construct an analog.#
- Pass a law saying immigrants can't ride on public transportation. If one is caught doing it, you just have to document it and, you (or more likely your employer) can sue the bus driver, the bus company, the city, other passengers. #
Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, 48 years ago. I was 18 that year. I was on the edge of awareness for what it meant. I don't remember a time when abortion was not legal, not in a way that could have affected me. We're all going to learn about it now.
#
BTW, for people who are into news cycles, the Repubs changing the subject from Afghanistan to abortion, well that's kind of a gift to Biden. If you look at the world that way, that is.
#Are we going to leave Texas before we rescue all Americans there who want to evacuate?
#
On Facebook, when you reply to a post you disagree with, your followers will then see it in their timeline. This puts people who follow you in an awkward position. I want to unfollow you because I don't want my timeline polluted with nonsense about how great the former president is (for example), and the only way I can do that is by unfollowing you. So your momentary feeling of righteousness has a hidden potential cost you should be aware of. 1. You help a cause you disagree with and 2. You alienate your friends.
#BTW,
Drummer runs on Linux, in case that wasn't clear. And Windows and Mac. I use a Mac mostly, but I'd love to convert to Linux. Only one app is keeping me on the Mac, the OPML Editor, and only for its ability to manage my development work. But Drummer is getting pretty close to being able to do that. When it's fully up to speed I will be able to run everything in Linux, and believe me -- I will relax. I'm skating on thin ice on the Mac and know it.
#Yesterday I put out a call for new
Drummer testers, asking for people with blogging and/or scripting experience. I should have also asked for people who have used
outliners, such as LogSeq, Roam, Obsidian, Org-mode, my own MORE, ThinkTank and Ready, or others.
Drummer is all about outlining, as I said yesterday -- unabashedly so. We used to be reserved about software centered on outlining, but no more. Send an email or Twitter DM if you're interested in being in the test group.
#
The press is full of
reports that President Biden screwed up the pullout from Afghanistan. But none of the people saying he did it wrong say what he should have done instead.
#The usual monthly ritual is complete. Archived the
August posts, and started my outline with a fresh slate for September. Trying to imagine what wonders and atrocities await us!
💥#
- My use of tagging has been going for a while now, and i'm still doing it, which in my experience is a total success for a categorization system. Even better, some of the tags are getting enough references to be useful, for example Drummer.#
- What seems to come next is to hook all of this up with a Wiki, so the landing page for a tag can have more than just links to articles. In other words all of this amounted to integrating an outliner with a Wiki, which was one of my goals after hanging out with Ward Cunningham for a couple of days a few years back. #
- Software development sometimes is like painting. You do something over and over iteratively, from a lot of angles, and arrive somewhere, but that itself is probably just on the road to what's next after that. #
Drummer testing is going well, still more features in development, but it is pretty stable. So I'm looking for more people to join the test group. I'm looking for people with either blogging experience or scripting experience, best if you have both, and even better if you've done development in Frontier. Think of
Drummer as the continuation of the blogging work we were doing at
UserLand before we took the turn toward
Manila and
Radio. Drummer is unabashedly about the
outliner. It's the most fluid way to write, and I want to hook it up to as many rendering engines as possible, using open protocols, as possible. I see outlines as the center of the writer's universe, but you already knew that if you read my blog. Send an email or DM on Twitter if you're interested. Not guaranteeing access, and not saying when. We're still a ways from opening up to the public.
#I'm reading
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel. I probably read it before, but didn't remember. It's a slog unlike later Vonnegut novels. This was Vonnegut before he was Vonnegut. His writing is very relaxed, American, and irreverent. And very much his. If he wants to go to some weird place in his story-telling he just goes there. I think the peak of this was Breakfast of Champions which was about a character he invented (of course all fiction is) but he writes about
how he invented him, and why. It's hard to explain. But in Player Piano, he's sticking to the basics of novel-writing. Only hints of a Vonnegutisms to come in later writing. It's dull and my mind wanders while reading it. I guess that's the thing about later Vonnegut writing. He gets your full attention while you're reading. More than other writers.
#
As a lifetime
Mets fan, I'm glad the
players pointed out that other fans are being assholes. I'm glad because I want to let the players know that I used to mow Mets' players lawns in the 60s. I went to games with my parents, uncle, grandfather, brother. We had a slogan "Shea Stadium Rules" which meant that even if we had our differences underneath it all we're still rooting for the Mets. So-called "fans" who dis the team when they lose really are Yankees fans and they should just go to the Bronx and shut the fuck up. The
Mets philosophy stands, the
Mets are the Mets, win or lose or whatever.
#
- When I listen to a Daily podcast I often want to say "no it doesn't work the way you say it does." #
- For example, they said today that the age of American solving problems by going to war is over.#
- Oh really? Yeah, we thought that too after Vietnam. Lotsa luck.#
- The interviewer asked the reporter what we would do if there was a future terrorism attack inside Afghanistan.#
- Reporter began "Sadly..."#
- Oh really? Their new government is, as far as we know, a terrorist organization itself. So it seems a terrorist attack against them is something we'd support, not want to prevent. It certainly isn't our job to save them from terrorism. #
- And btw, all the time the reporters are fussing about Afghanistan, and they are doing a lot of that these days after years of completely ignoring it, Haiti is in a world of hurt. Maybe we should save some of our sympathy and good deeds for them?#
The war in Afghanistan is now over.
#This
man is an incredible communicator.
#The Biden government speaks to us as adults, journalism translates it into Trump talk.
#Debuggers aren't only for debugging, they're also programmer's way of looking inside the body of the software. We can stop the heart beat and look anywhere we want. We can put our attention in any organ we want. Or more than one at a time. It's how you can watch the organism doing its work, if you forget how it works because you wrote it a long time ago, or if someone else wrote it. If you aren't using a debugger in all aspects of your programming work you're limiting the amount of complexity you can deal with in your code.
#
- Yesterday I posted an item that about collaboration in the news industry to help disseminate critical information. #
- An idea for the news industry to collaborate on. Sometimes a news org takes down the paywall on a story because it's important that everyone see it. Make an RSS feed that combines all such stories across all pubs. Make spreading the news even more efficient.#
- A simple idea, really -- not much tech, and news orgs are already doing it. The post got a lot of traction on Twitter, and favorable notice from a fair number of people inside news orgs, people who would be critical to making this idea a reality.#
- So what's needed, technically, beyond what's already there? Probably just this -- a way to tell, in an RSS feed, that an item is outside the paywall. #
- How to do that? Create a namespace, anyone can do that. Call it (say) the urgentNews namespace. You could have its url point to this post if you like.#
- To begin with the namespace has one element, isOutsidePaywall.#
- This is what an item might look like for such a news item.#
- <item>#
- <title>Sed do eiusmod tempor</title>#
- <description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam.</description>#
- <link>https://anytownnews.com/2021/923883.html</link>#
- <urgentNews:isOutsidePaywall>true</urgentNews:isOutsidePaywall>#
- </item>#
An idea for the news industry to collaborate on. Sometimes a news org takes down the paywall on a story because it's important that everyone see it. Make an RSS feed that combines all such stories across all pubs. Make spreading the news even more efficient.
#
Local file-chooser dialog in HTML and JavaScript. This app opens a text file on the local computer and displays the file text in the JavaScript console. I couldn't find a package that did what I needed, so when I wrote it -- I put it out there for anyone to find, and use.
#
As I wrote
yesterday, I really liked
The Chair, but there was something in the story I wish they had explored. Spoilers follow. One of the faculty, a young white male superstar, is accused of being a Nazi by students. They have demonstrations. Make demands. The faculty freezes. He tries to respond, his colleagues tell him this never works, when men try to defend themselves, it only makes it worse. He's seen as not contrite. We see the issue only from the faculty standpoint, all we hear from students are slogans and soundbites. We do hear from one student who will be hurt by the takedown. We understand from the start that the professor is not a Nazi. As I watched the confrontation, I wondered if the individual students knew they're wrong. Why was this not explored? Do any of the students argue that they should help the professor instead of attacking? (He's a sympathetic character, his wife died recently.) I know this is TV and they're subject to the same dishonesty they're portraying (Netflix defends Nazis). As I said yesterday, the acting is great, the characters are appealing, it's a page-turner of a binge-watch. But with one small exception, the students are portrayed as flat angry unreasonable monsters. They can't be that single-minded, unconflicted, thoughtless. It left me feeling dissatisfied. Now that I've written it up, I can move on.
💥#I like people who look like people.
#
Poll: If you're vaccinated, did you do it mostly to protect self, family or for the greater good.
#
Over the past couple of days I binged season 1 of
The Chair on
Netflix. I liked it. It's quick, only about three hours. It's a Sorkin-like show, like
The West Wing or
The Newsroom, fast dialog. Fun and really pulls on the heartstrings. There's cute smart little girl, and a timely plot of a second-tier Ivy League school that reminded me that campuses can be interesting places to hang out. I gave it a 4 of 5
on BingeWorthy.
#With all the political spam I get, why didn't I get one email in advance of
this event so I could help spread the world, and participate. Communication. It can't just be about raising money.
#
Still the most annoying thing is when you switch into Twitter you get about 1/2 second to scan what's there, enough time for pictures to register, and boom it refreshes with new content. #- This also has another painful side-effect, if you're watching a video, it'll just refresh in the middle of it. I was intently listening to the chairman of the Fed the other day, and then part of a Grateful Dead concert, when Twitter decided enough! #
#- No soup for you! #
- I thought -- I bet this works, so I typed it into a Drummer outline and pressed Cmd-/ and yes it did work.#
#- It's a nice feeling when:#
- It works the first time.#
- It does something simply that previously would have been complicated.#
- It's as simple as possible.#
- It can't be simplified further. #
There's a CNN commercial where a white guy in a suit, probably an actor, is talking to the camera. He says (paraphrasing): "The NRA is not going away. Every American should have a gun." I wanted to ask if he felt that every Black man should have a gun, or just Whites. What about religion? Should Jews and Muslims have guns too? Should only rich people have guns, or should poor people have them too? If a Black man came to your all-White neighborhood would you like to see him with a gun? Would you call the cops if a Black man came into a convenience store with a gun? I suspect he was thinking, when he said every American should have a gun, of Americans like himself.
#
- I keep beating this drum, because it's important. #
- This morning Thejesh posted a link to Buttondown's API. I like it -- it's really simple. But it could be even simpler! 😄#
- First a summary of why this is important. I want to use my own editor to write a newsletter and publish it through a commercial newsletter service. I don't want to use their editor. Why? Because as a writer, I have the best editor for me. And I don't like being a copy-paste-bot. My writing has too many ways to get out to make it possible to do that for all of them. And I want someone to go first, to make it easy to publish without forcing me to be creative in their world, with their inadequate (for me) editor.#
- So to further the discussion -- here's how I would do the API .#
- The user, through the app's user interface, enters the URL of an RSS feed. That interaction is of course authenticated.#
- When a new item appears in the feed, publish it.#
- For extra credit, accept a simple unauthenticed ping message with the username, which tells your server to check the feed. That way your server doesn't have to check as often.#
- Voila, super simple API.#
What is something that isn’t taught in school but should?
#
Journalism tries to understand
Facebook as if it were a news org about the size of one of them. It's a poor fit. So much more goes on there. Think about how much is going on in a city like New York right now. Facebook is
338 times the size of NYC.
#Here's the thing about the Taliban and ISIS -- they're competing for the same soldiers, and as long as ISIS is attacking and hurting the US, they're going to recruit more soldiers, primarily from the Taliban. So the Taliban "controls" Afghanistan in a temporary way. They're going to be fighting other radicals for a long time to come.
#Sometimes your “liberty” isn’t the most important thing.
#
The way we’re responding to Covid is exactly like the way we respond to climate change. Only it’s happening much more quickly.
#I wanted to try
Holly+ so I recorded a song but got "error" and
did another, and also got an error. Disappointed. I thought it was a good idea. Maybe my songs weren't good enough. Oh la.
#I saw somewhere the
Biden's approval numbers are down because the virus is booming. This is wrong. He's doing the job we hired him to do. Our mistake is we give up our power and responsibility and look to a parent figure to take care of us. But that's not how America works. The president isn't all-powerful, isn't a god, or even god-like. The president is a human being. We should judge the president on their honor and intelligence, and ability to listen, and we should take responsibility for
our power.
#
A "Tree Chart" in
MORE, circa 1987.
#
- Organize the data in the outliner, flip a switch, see the graphic. #
- Today you wouldn't have to do flip a switch, there's enough CPU power to automatically update the graphic view from the outline editor view as you made editing changes. #
- I'd love to hook up Drummer to someone else's Tree Chart renderer. It would accept OPML as input, of course. #
- I remember a couple of years ago people were confidently saying that by now the streets would be full of autonomous cars. #
- They snickered when people like me who have spent a life programming thought that was a pretty shitty idea. Who would even want to go out for a walk with driverless cars all over the place, subject to programmers' mistakes, or the callous deprecations of platform vendors. #
- I imagined a car plowing into a crowd and killing twenty innocent people because some idiot at Apple decided to change the order the params of an API because they felt like it, and the car software dev missed the notice and didn't update the car's OS. #
- Oh sure I want software doing all the driving after less than two years of a burn in. Yeah that makes all the sense in the world. (Sorry for the sarcasm.)#
Here I am, in 1976, holding a college diploma. My parents, grandmother and brother came down to New Orleans for the occasion. They were happy because no one expected me to get a college degree. This came from my father's photo scrapbook.
#
Am I passionate about the idea of a
modular newsletter system so writers can use the best editor, the one that fits them best, the one they've been using for decades? Yes, I am. I'll keep beating the drum. I won't stop. That's how I am until I get what I want.
😄#When will someone launch a newsletter service that lets you use whatever editor you like. I predict that I will support that product in the new editor I'm working on. I don't want to do a newsletter service myself. Let's get something fun started.
#What makes a bug report good? It makes it easy for the dev to reproduce the problem. I have to see it myself to understand what the problem is. Your theory on what the problem is, or judgment on whether you followed the instructions is secondary.
#Unfortunately journalists don't stand for re-election. They are not term-limited. There is no journalism for journalism. Our opinions are not sought. But if we ever do get a chance to vote one of them out in some significant way, I bet a lot of people will line up to do it. I know I will. And I'm not talking about the people on Fox.
#
I don't know if these ads are for real.
#- A couple of others:#
- Shut the fuck up.#
- I don't care about your fucking feelings.#
- When I was a teenager in NYC many years ago, I would've done something like this.#
- Have a nice day! 😄#
I'd say
BingeWorthy didn't work.
Nice software, but the goal was to keep an easy to find
public list of shows I recommend, and those that my friends recommend. A couple of weeks ago I discovered, entirely on my own,
Rick and Morty. I loved it from the first scene in the first epsiode. I started telling everyone I know how great it is, and with few exceptions they said "old news Dave." They loved the show since it started in
2013. Why did I struggle for years to find something great to watch when Rick and Morty was out there. I'm sure there are a dozen other delicious shows I don't know about, and it's only getting worse. What is the answer? It seems like a simple problem to solve, yet it evades an answer.
#They've had the same tired old guests on the cable news shows for years. They always say the same things. How is it that people don't just change channels and tune into 30-year-old Law & Order reruns instead. I've been enjoying watching the reruns for the 15th time. Compared to the news they seem fresh and strangely relevant.
#When you check into Twitter after being gone for a while, you see, for an instant, some posts, not sure when they're from, but they might be appealing, but too bad, they disappear just after your mind registers that they're there. Happens regularly.
#The remains of
Tropical Storm Henri has been parked overhead for about 24 hours. Pouring rain, hour after hour. Not much wind. I couldn't go riding yesterday, and probably won't be able to today either. Tomorrow should be hot and humid, good swimming weather.
😄#Remember how
Reagan said government is the problem. He was wrong, it's actually journalism.
#
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.#
