Question. I just booted up an old Wii on my modern 4K video setup. It looks very rough. I also have a Switch that I'm going to set up. I love Wii Sports. I don't think they have anything like that for Switch. Plain simple bowling, golf, tennis, baseball, etc?#
Culinary tip. Peanut butter with honey is even more delicious than with jelly. Toast the bread, if possible use Bread Alone nine grain.#
A middle-of-the-night tweet when I heard that BJ was re-elected in the UK: "Brits are idiots. Congrats. We thought we Americans were the stupidest people on the planet, but you all had a chance to throw the asshole with the creative hair under the bus and you said nah give ‘im another chance mate."#
- If you think of the United States as a company, we've had a strategic partnership with Russia for the last three years, kind of like the one Microsoft had with IBM. Russia is analogous to Microsoft. They're about to roll over us in the 2020 election. Our last gasp is the impeachment. #
We should have had this confrontation sooner, we would have had a better chance of prevailing. Going back to the Electoral College vote in 2016. We could have briefed the electors on the misdeeds of the Trump campaign in collusion with Russia. We could have had nightly candlelight vigils in the state capitals where the electoral votes would be cast. We could have at least honored the passing of a political system that kind of worked and provided us with an incredible standard of living, and hosted the development of the Internet, won the space race, and Woodstock and the Mets! Saved my family. I wouldn't exist without the US and probably neither would you. We could have been serious about resisting right from that point, instead as with all the points at which we could have acted, we hoped somehow this would blow over without us having to disrupt our lives. We're a lazy, fat culture, Russia knows and is taking full advantage. #- Anyway back to the tech analogy. Impeachment is like IBM shipping OS/2 and the Micro Channel Architecture. Both were designed to rid IBM of Microsoft once and for all. But it didn't work. It was too little too late. Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0, and IBM became a global consulting company. The company that dominated the computer business left the computer business. With the US and Russia analogy substitute "computer business" with "democracy business."#
- Impeachment is the last gasp bet that the rule of law still works, even though the Supreme Court has been stuffed with Russian puppets, as has the Senate. The only places that are still following the rule of law is the House and parts of the Department of Justice. Think of it as a two party system about to become one party. The one that prevails in impeachment will have the right to anihilate the other, and must do it. There may still be a few courageous defectors to the Rule-of-Law Party, but unless there's a great awakening in the Senate, the courts, DoJ, the military and other branches of service, Putin has the power to put down impeachment, and from there, will complete the replication of the political system of Russia in the US, where political opponents are jailed or assassinated, as with uncooperative journalists. This is about to happen in the US, but journalism and discourse on the net has yet to catch up. #
- Putin could really fuck with us (but probably won't), and instruct McConnell to have a change of heart and the Senate votes to remove Trump. What an opportunity to screw up the US for a few generations, if not longer. From this point we're never going to know what's actually going on, we don't really know now (btw), but it's going to get a lot worse. #
- Wheeee! 💥#
I've had a chance to think more about Twitter's surprising proposal to come up with a web standard that turns Twitter into a protocol. I'm guessing the practical reason for this is so that Twitter can no longer be held responsible for abuse. They could ask Trump, for example, to host his own twitter, and people could subscribe to it anywhere, including Jack's twitter. It's basically a return to the open web after 13 years as silo that's been sucking the life out of the open web. I don't see why anyone but Twitter and its shareholders would go for this. I am still hoping Twitter, for the good of the web and the world, would expand to attach and display data from blogging software, as they attach and display video and images. That way writing beyond 280 chars with titles, links, simple styling can flourish. Same with podcasts. Twitter improves at a glacial pace, and they're hogging the fast lane of web media, of course along wtih the other silos. #Note: If Twitter really wanted to help they could make it unnecessary to paste images of blog posts in tweets (example). Such an obvious thing. What could possibly stand in the way of doing this, when they do it for images and videos?#
Follow-up: Now that (I think) I understand Twitter's goal, what they really want is a way to have a feed be hooked into a Twitter "location." So one could follow, for example: @whitehouse.gov:donaldtrump, and it would get updates from that server. RSS 2.0 would totally be able to do it. #
I wonder how many people know that Facebook turned off its most basic API after the 2016 election. Got no press, there's no developer memory of it. It's as if all the Hudson crossings to NYC were shut down permanently, only bigger because the population of Facebook is billions not millions. Twitter on the other hand shut down a portion of its APIs in 2012 and it put an indelible mark on the reputation of the company with developers. I personally forgave them because I anticipated it, I've been down this road many times, on both sides. #
I've re-done the PagePark website. Now it gets the docs from the GitHub repository. It gets the markdown text using GitHub's API, a new built-in feature in PagePark. I'm getting ready to work on the XML-RPC website, this is the way I want to do it. #It pisses me off when Repubs talk about the Dems trying to redo the election they lost. I forgot about the voter suppression, "her emails" and Comey's last minute surprise, and realized no, she won the election, you guys stole it. The gall of Trump to try to make a lie stick, that he was the victim of all that. #
Lots of stuff relating to the question Twitter asked yesterday. To people who are new to my world, this is a big deal. We'll probably be talking about it for years, assuming we make it (not so sure after watching the House hearings). But other stuff is going on, I'll put those links here, thinking of the email going out tonight, which more and more is the pulse of my blogging. If you're not subscribed imho you're missing something. ;-)#
So, what about Mastodon? It does everything, right? I'm sure, but Twitter is where the people are and that's what matters. This happens all the time in tech, people think the solution is to rebuild something from scratch with the feature we wish the default platform would have. It isn't about the feature as much as where the feature is. I have a blogging system that's way more fun that Twitter and has none of its limits. BFD, the people use Twitter.#- This is the mistake people who created Atom made, they thought what if we had invented RSS instead of the messy process by which RSS was created, we'll do it the right way and it'll be wonderful. Then they finished and no one knew what to do next. I'm sure they were very proud but unless they can get everyone who already supported RSS to go back and reimplement their support, we all still have to support RSS. And it's one of those things that no matter how much better it is, people will ask "Is everyone doing this" and if the answer is no, they do something else they have to do, putting out fires etc.#
- Another example, if I have to go to NYC I take the George Washington Bridge or the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels. I'd much rather take the Golden Gate Bridge, it's so much nicer, but it doesn't go where I want to go! #
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey outlines a plan to fund a small independent team to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media, a standard that Twitter would support. I advocate something different, Twitter already has the bugs and scaling issues solved for a global notification network. Let's add a few APIs and create a new universe. It'll happen a lot faster with much better results imho. Interestingly I recorded a podcast on just this topic, a week ago today. #
I've been down the road Jack proposes to take Twitter down, it's fraught with problems. Social media has been around a long time and there are plenty of competing standards for integrating platforms. Had they proposed such a standard when they were starting Twitter, no one would have cared, and it would have had a chance of working. Now it's a huge industry with lots at stake and lots of entities that would like to keep it from standardizing. Now maybe Jack knows this, and it's meant as a PR thing, and I'm sure the press will love it. Until they forget about it. It's time for a proprietary approach, one that is open to cloning. That can work because there's a single decision-making entity. If their goal really is to create a standard they can do it, much the way we created standards for content syndication when our product dominated. Waiting for an open development group to synthesize something that can be broadly supported, well I suppose it could happen, but it rarely does. #Suppose you're a retiring Republican congressperson and you're retiring because you don't like where we're going. Why not denounce Trump? You're not seeking re-election. Hard to escape what's obvious. There's more to the story we're not hearing about.#
Following up on yesterday's piece on restoring MailToTheFuture, I found the data on a backup from 2010, so I should be able to send the remaining emails at the appointed time, in the future. #
Cabbage soup: Boil 1/2 gallon of water in a big pot. Brown onions, garlic, cabbage, add to boiling water. Add carrots, chunks of white or red potatos. Brown some kind of meat, whatever you like, in stew-size chunks. I went with some chuck, not an expensive grade, this is for soup, all the toughness is going to be boiled out. Make sure it has sufficient fat to add richness to the soup. Add seasoning, I like basil, oregano, hot pepper. A can of chopped tomatoes. As much as a cup of wine vinegar, to taste. Cook for a few hours with low heat. Let it sit overnight, then cook another couple of hours. Reheat whenever you want a delicious bowl of hot soup. You don't have to add anything, it's got everything you need. I like a very cold glass of ice water with it. My father used to make this soup. #We have a two-party system in the US: the constitutional US govt and the Russian-dominated one. #
During the impeachment hearings it would be great if MSNBC or CNN had an hour every night that were just verbatim highlights from the day's hearings, no expert commentary. I can't afford to watch all day, but I do want to know what happens. One hour is about right. Even better, a podcast. #
PagePark is becoming a serious web server. Just wanted to say that. The docs make it sound like a one-off hack for easily hosting parked domains. It was that, at the start, about five years ago. Over time I've been adding features, and trying to keep the code readable and the docs up to date. #- Today's problem -- hidden files and folders.#
- The idea is to be able to put data, scripts, development notes for a site with the site itself. When you're managing as many domains as I am, economies like that may prevent things from getting lost, or having version mismatches. At the same time, I want control over what people will see. #
- My first plan was to use . as Apache and nginx do. I implemented it and started to set up a test case, and found immediately why this wouldn't work. Mac OS, which I use on my primary machine, uses a . at the beginning of a file name to hide a file or folder. I know I can create such files with a script or at the command line, but the point is to be able to hide stuff from web users that I can see myself. #
- Next I went with # as the special character. It's what we used in Frontier's website framework. But when I tried to test it the browser chops off everything after the # which is awkward. #
- Then Philip Borenstein said that Jekyll and other static site generators use underscore to indicate a hidden file or folder. I'm guessing that will work because they had to fit in with both browsers and operating systems, as PagePark does. I'm going to go with that for a bit and see if I'm happy with the way it goes. Respecting prior art is always a good idea. #
- All this started with a developer poll.#
"He was caught trying to steal the 2020 election." That's what I want the Articles of Impeachment to say. That sends the message through the ages that at least the Democrats thought this was a problem. If the republic survives, of course that's the end of the Republican Party. I don't see how the stakes, for the world (Ukraine isn't part of the US) could be larger. BTW, I highly recommend listening to the Fresh Air hour about the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Very interesting story told by an American reporter who has had access. One thing came out in the Fresh Air story -- in Ukraine, the Trump impeachment of isn't big news. Due to their location at the front between the constitutional US govt and the Russian-dominated one, they couldn't be more a part of the US if they were Hawaii.#One of life's lessons, if you've loved and lost, or taken risks in business or just had friends. If someone does something nasty and you think aw hell I'll just give them another chance, they'll do it again, and again, until you stop giving them the chance. #
One of the boxes I received the other day from Berkeley contains backups going back to Madison in 1979. All different kinds of media. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to find a CD drive that works with my Mac and (at least) reads the backups I took in the 90s. For the others I might have to visit the Computer History Museum, or possibly an equivalent setup in NYC or Boston.#
You know your heating system works when it's 9 degrees F when you wake up and the house is nice and warm. #
I got an email from a longtime reader who wanted to know what became of Mail To The Future. He said he sent an email to himself twenty years ago and would like to read it. #- I feel so irresponsible, when you create a site like that you're pretty much obligated to keep it running. But the contents of the database, if I was any good at backups, is on one of those CDs. I will put the time in at some point to try to restore the app. It should be relatively easy to port to Node. And I can easily export the data out of a root file. I still have Frontier running on my modern iMac. I use it all the time. ;-)#
- BTW, I still have the domain, and put a placeholder page there. And the source code. It's backed up, a little, on archive.org. What I haven't found yet is the all-important data. #
Trump happens to be right about toilets. I bought a house recently and plan to rip out the toilets and replace them with ones that can handle the load so to speak. But I get to think about this stuff because I'm not president of the United States.#
Something really weird. I watch MSNBC at least one hour every night. The first ads for a presidential candidate I’ve seen are in the last few days and they’re all from Bloomberg. Why didn’t any of the other candidates advertise to me? They advertise to me on the net, mostly to get me to give them money. A TV ad for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 is still a novelty and if the ad is good, it can do more than motivate donations. People want to be inspired. TV advertising done well can do that. Bloomberg's ads check all the boxes. They're winning ads. #
I can't stop watching this ad for Aviation Gin. Three hot and emotive women at a bar, facing the camera. There's a plot, character development, non-verbal communication, lots to watch. The music is kind of funny. Something happened before this meetup and something will happen after. But this moment is very lovely, and that's why I find it so hard to move on. #The XML-RPC spec looks really good, ported to GitHub and Markdown. A lot of people still use XML-RPC, even though REST was supposed to be so much better. With a JavaScript reference implementation and new debugging tools, we may find there's new life in the community. Or at the very least, it'll be ready for the next 21 years. 💥#
The next president has to be boring.#
If something truly goes without saying you don’t have to say it.#
Braintrust query: I'm writing docs that include an example of an HTTP request, in Markdown. Can't figure out to do it in MD.#
I'm doing a reboot of the XML-RPC website and readying a new JavaScript implementation. I was reminded that the original reference implementation, in 1998, was in UserLand Frontier. The docs are still there. 21 years. Not bad. #
Nancy Pelosi (not a boomer, she was born in 1940) was great yesterday, both in her press conference where she said what is sure to be a famous historic line: "Don't mess with me" all the way to the CNN town hall, which I watched, where she asked not to have to look at things through the prism of the White House, which as long as Trump is there is crazy town. She's the leader we didn't know we had. What I admire most about her is her clarity and her ability to think on her feet. Either that or she really prepared for this moment. No matter, she's just what we need right now. A strong woman to stand up to Trump. That's his Kryptonite. #McKinsey is a management consulting company. Hiring someone with experience there means they understand how that part of the world works. I don't think it means their soul is dark, as some people seem to assume.#
Important to note the role journalism was ready to play in the Trump plot to throw the 2020 election. Fareed Zakaria of CNN would interview Ukraine president Zelensky, where he would say they were investigating "The Bidens" for corruption. From there, Trump would ask repeatedly, as with Hillary's emails what's the deal, or they're under investigation or his favorite "I don't know but people are saying." That's all that would be needed to keep the "story" alive in American journalism. Biden's rep is already tainted. In software we'd consider this a serious vulnerability, and we'd close it asap before our servers were infected again, but journalism just lumbers along oblivious, happy to be used this way. Fake stories don't just enter through the web, Facebook and Twitter, sometimes they enter through the thought-to-be-pure methods of American journalism. #
BTW, Fareed Zakaria, born in 1964, is a boomer. Joe Biden born in 1942 is not. His son Hunter was born in 1970, not a boomer. #
Had a brief talk with Doc yesterday. He and I of course are boomers. So is Trump and Rudy G. They were both born a decade before me. Their experience and values are vastly different from mine. There aren't many things you can say about boomers that's true of all boomers except for the period in which we were born (1946-1964) and our parents had sex and a few months later we were born (just like you btw). We come in all sizes and shapes. Some have penises, others have vaginas. Some are black others are white, others are Native American, some are children of Holocaust survivors, and others are Nazis. So many things to say about this, but most importantly the only way we get out of this mess is if we work together. The rest of it is stuff your parents should have taught you. If they're boomers, go ahead and blame them, but don't blame me. I'm not your father. 💥#All of a sudden Alexa says Goodbye when I say "Alexa stop." I wish it wouldn't.#
Wouldn't it be cool if one of the candidates who have so much criticism for Facebook discovered that there is an open news distribution system, widely supported, ready to work for the people? None of the problems of FB. We're natural allies.#
My friend Yvonne was storing a bunch of boxes for me in Berkeley, and now that I have a house again, she shipped eleven boxes to me via Fedex (see below). I started going through them today and I'm so glad we did this. I had no idea what was in the boxes. I had a vague idea that it was junk, but it was not junk. First I found three quilts my mom made for me. Two of them in really good shape. The third had been chewed by my dog, Bon Bon, back when I lived in Woodside, CA in the early 90s. There were tons of pictures, the old kind, made with film cameras. Friends and relatives long gone, or now much older. Memories. Love and regrets, happy times and sadness, stored in boxes on paper. It all comes flooding back. And notebooks from when I was in grade school. Here's a page from one of them, in 1962, where I'm practicing the most basic writing. Funny thing I remember what this felt like as a seven year old. I loved learning then. We're programmed that way I guess. #I appreciate people pointing to me when quoting something from my blog, but I prefer you point to the blog and not my Twitter account. My home on the web is my blog, scripting.com, my Twitter account is a place to record random ideas before they appear on the blog.#
Every so often I get tagged in someone's lament about how no one uses RSS. It's not true. It's one of those things you can't use alone, because it depends on your news sources supporting it. I get most of my news via my rivers, which of course are just aggregations of RSS feeds. I imagine the rivers will survive me. At some point it may not be a fire hose, it may be the way the Colorado River flows into the ocean, but I think I will never see the day that RSS is gone. It does its work quietly, unlike Twitter or Facebook. It doesn't steal your personal info. Or support Russian hackers. It's quiet. That's okay with me. 💥#BTW before Russians hacked our meme ecosystem, Google was doing it, and before them Sun, Microsoft, Apple and IBM. Google always felt threatened by RSS. They encircled it and then cut it off. They quietly got their shills in the tech press to talk about its demise. To slam me personally. It's an insidious thing. They still do it. Usually through cutouts, journalists and consultants, and sometimes Google employees. Big tech companies hate open formats and protocols, because they evolve independently of them. They feel they must control everything. It's not smart, wise or even realisitic, but after decades of existing in the wake of bigco's I know it's as inevitable as the sunset and sunrise cycle. Eventually the lack of flexibility marginalizes the big company, but they don't die, they just keep polluting, they buy politicians and we have to live with the result. #
- “I think the President is a coward when it comes to helping our kids who are afraid of gun violence. I think he is cruel when he doesn’t deal with helping our dreamers of which we are very proud. I think he is in denial about the climate crisis.#
- However, that is about the election. Take it up in the election.#
- This is about Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the President’s violation of his oath of office.”#
As you know I've had trouble with UPS, so I figured when Fedex was set to do a big delivery to my house just after a 1.5 foot snow in the area, that they would never get one of their big delivery trucks down the road to my house, and I'd end up driving somewhere to pick up the packages. But yesterday afternoon there was a knock on the door, and there was the Fedex guy with my packages. Smiling. I couldn't believe it. #- The truck said Hertz, not Fedex. It was a small AWD vehicle. He said when they came to deliver the stuff a day before they realized their big truck wouldn't make it down the orad, so they rented a smaller truck and drove that to my house with my package. He said we like to go the extra mile. Yes, they surely do! Compared to UPS, which has basically the same policy, trust the driver, but the ethos of this driver compared to whoever made the call at UPS (basically the customer can fuck off) was night and day. #
- Hat's off to Fedex. You win this contest, hands down. #
I was driving while listening to the Judiciary Committee testimony. During a break the NPR commentators spoke. Endless Republican spin, even though most of what we had heard at that point was very favorable to impeachment. Eloquent and passionate. A real education. At that point Turley had barely spoken, but all they did was make his points over and over. No question at this point NPR is Republican. Disgusting to me because I am most definitely not Republican. I need another source of news. WNYC which is generally good should consider breaking off from NPR if that's possible.#This moment is the last gasp of the American Revolution. #
Something bothered me about Brave, and the direction Firefox is going in, and of course Google and Chrome. Finally figured it out. I don't like tech companies imposing rules on writers. I may hate what pubs do with their tracking code and paywalls, but I hate what the tech industry is doing to oppose that, more. Maybe if Brave came out of the University of Illinois I would like it better, but it came from Silicon Valley, from the former CEO of Mozilla. A club of high priests of tech and their bankers who see us as the little people, when we're not ignored, to be treated with disdain and disrespect. They know what's best for us. It's like that old Who song, meet the new boss same as the old boss. The web was about freedom, and that required a weak tech industry. I hope, if they control it as it appears they do, something wonderful and free rises to replace them. #Maybe if we pool our money and run ads of people laughing at Trump he'll get the clue and leave our country too.#
An open podcast to Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. It's way too long and rambles too much, but the idea is imho worth 16 minutes. #
Chrome keeps coming up with new things to complain about my sites. I ignore them. I wonder how many web devs pay attention to Google's complaints?#
I had a little health scare a few weeks ago. As you may know, I broke a rib in a bike accident in September. Mostly healed now. I had to go in for an X-ray and my doctor said there was a shadow that she didn't like. I should go for a CT-scan she said, let's find out what's going on. If it's lung cancer, that's good news, she said, we found it early and it's probably treatable. If we wait for symptoms then it's often not treatable. I smoked for 31 years, she reminded me, in case I was feeling sorry for myself. Heh. So I scheduled the test, had a couple of weeks to think about it. I was obsessed. Maybe she knows and isn't saying until she's absolutely sure. I was convinced that was it, and my life was about to change to the life of a cancer patient. I know a little about it because like pretty much everyone I know people who have cancer. My father died from it. Anyway, no cancer. Knock wood. But I had the benefit of thinking I had it. So I got that experience, without the awful chemo and radiation and possible dying. I feel very lucky. I decided to tell this story now to give you an idea why I don't care that Chrome hates my websites. I do what my doctor says, mostly -- I don't give a shit what Google wants me to do. As Logan Roy says, have a nice day. ;-)#You may not like Bloomberg, but his new ad is the perfect Democratic candidate ad for winning in a landslide.#
Interesting point. Brian Kelly thinks Scripting News should not remember the tab you were at from visit to visit.#
I encourage readers to see this blog as a piece of software. If you get an idea on how to improve it, I'm interested in knowing about it. I wrote all the code for it, so I can relatively easily add or tweak features. #
Vulture has a list of lists of best TV shows of 2019. I find some of their choices hard to fathom. Deadwood Movie was awful, imho -- and it wasn't a TV show, yet it's on a list. Anyway I'd love to have a list of all the shows so I could pick my own top 10. Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Showtime, Hulu and a few others. I'm sure I only watched about a dozen shows total, no more, so while the list of possible shows is huge, the actual top ten lists wouldn't be that hard to come up with. #
We had a good size winter storm at my country house in the last couple of days. It's the kind of storm that's mostly wet in NYC, where I lived previously, but up here it was first heavy snow, then it got lighter. So the first time I shoveled the walkway to the car it was heavy lifting and the second time, light and easy. Perhaps 1.5 feet of snow. I drove down the road before it was plowed, having an AWD is great, and noted that someone had been cross country skiing on my road, I was envious. I took note of where the tracks came from, and went. The air is cold and clear, it feels like one of those mornings in Utah, it's the best first moment of a day anywhere. Later we'll be on top of the mountain looking down at the village, and thinking man this is as good as it gets. I have to figure out how to either ski or ride my bike in this weather. Probably both. I live about 1/2 hour from a ski area. It isn't Utah, or the Alps, but it is mine. 🎿#
I've created commercial products, and no one ever said they named my product ThinkTank, Ready, MORE, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, even if they thought of the name before I did. Because people respect commercial development. #- The process for podcasting was no different, except we did it in the open and no one claimed ownership of the resulting product. This is the way new web standards were developed in the late 90s and early 00s. #
- Hammersley could have helped, but didn't. He made a lucky guess, and for that he deserves credit, but not for naming the product. It's possible that Dannie Gregoire, the person who does deserve the credit, got the idea from Hammersley, but I've never heard him say that. And he put in time and effort to help make podcasting real. So many people who poured their hearts into this work got little or no credit.#
- It has become established that Hammersley named our product, even though this is not true. That's the only reason I object. I think the truth matters. #
- Hopefully this makes it into the Wikipedia piece on the history of podcasting, if not, know that our system of fact checking and truth vetting is about as bad as can be. When people naively say that Facebook should be able to vet everything for truth, here's something that's easily shown to be false, has been contested for years, however the record never gets altered, and reputable reporters still cite the lie as fact. Probably will continue to for a long time, maybe always. #
Tooting my own horn a bit: John Naughton calls me a genius in this Guardian piece. I'll take it, to balance all the other things people have called me. 💥#
When did it become even thinkable that a president would publicly fake an orgasm to humiliate a woman who works at the FBI, for him. This is the moment for our Republican friends, if we have any left, to wake the fuck up and realize what you're endorsing.#
There comes a point where our minds are closed, we're not interested in considering there might be an innocence for people who stand by Trump. We're over that line now. You're dragging the rest of us to hell and we don't want to go there. Republicans this is on you.#
Suborning perjury is not just an issue for lawyers, Reporters have an obligation, if they know a subject is going to lie, to not put them on the air. #
I’d like to see a courageous journalist tackle this story. Why do Repub politicians sound like Russians? I’d like to know. Note I use the word courageous sarcastically. There's nothing courageous about investigating an obvious question. It's ridiculous that not one reporter has done this story. It's a scandal happening out in the open. But it doesn't fit a model that reporters know: it's not a horse race, and it's not a replay of Watergate.#
BTW there is precedent for turning off Repubs on CNN and MSNBC. They went through this in Ukraine. They thought they could be fair and balanced, that just let trolls keep an attack vector. Ultimately you have to close it. Journalism will do some growing up before that. #
When I was a kid I participated in several marches on Washington. We took buses from NYC. On one of them, I was part of the organizing committee, I was the political guy on the trip, even though I was just 16. One of the passengers, the mother of a high school friend, said I should get up and give a peptalk and lead a discussion on behalf of the organizers. I gave the talk, it wasn't very good, but I remembered the idea. Any good protest needs organizers. When I turn on MSNBC in the evening I keep hoping they'll cross the line, and start helping us, instead of being with us in desperation waiting for someone to help us. They have the pulput. Putin has Trump. Who does Putin's American opposition have? Someone with courage, a spine, and a sense that it is his or her destiny to lead us out of the wilderness.#Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."#
For crying out loud it’s what, December already? What the..#
There's no doubt we have crossed the tipping point in the climate crisis. Part of the equation is politics. We're not only not doing anything to halt the crisis, we're accelerating it.#
We need a channel for organizing more than we need horse race news and Watergate.#
Watched a bit of the Sunday news, and listened to NPR. Lots of Republican lies. Enough with the news that gives more than half the time to lies to keep less than half the population in line. We're deep in a hole, and need a landslide in next year's election to have any hope of turning things around. The press as usual has a bias toward keeping everything disorganized because that gives them the horse race, one of two stories they know how to cover. (The other is Watergate.)#
I have no interest in the current crop of superhero movies, but I would see a movie starring Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as superheroes with their money. They would have to wear outfits and have interesting names and powers. Bezos would be the guy who can get anything delivered to you when you want it. Not sure what Gates' superpower would be. It would be a lot like Idiocracy. This movie would anticipate the future of the species when the evolution we're currently going through has run its course. #- At a dinner last night with local friends, a question came up -- What is Digital Ocean? I mention them in my posts and the nightly email. #
- I realllly like that people read my blog even if they don't know what everything means. This is one of the big principles of the net -- ignore what you don't understand. But read it anyway, over time unfamiliar ideas do sink in. I was tired and too much under the influence of White Russians last night to attempt the answer. I'll try now. #
- Think of Digital Ocean as a giant warehouse of personal computers. You can rent one of the computers for about $20 a month, and put software on the computer, even stuff that I write myself. This is a big deal because the ability to run software "in the cloud" used to be something only employees of big companies could do. Now anyone can. #
- Unlike my house in the woods their computers are less likely to lose power or their net connection. Also their warehouse is in a place where your computers, and your phone, can access it. I don't want thousands of people connecting to the computers in my house. It's a security thing. #
- So I pay them money and they run the server for me. #
- Over the years, as you might imagine, the cost goes down and the power goes up. A lot. They have competition, so that helps keep the price down and performance up. I like Digital Ocean because their software and docs are good, and I just like the company. They are by far not the biggest company in this space, all the major tech companies compete, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM. #
- PS: This is not an ad. I pay full price for my Digital Ocean servers. #
A friend is someone who laughs at your jokes. #
I love this piece by John Naughton up to the point where he says Ben Hammersley coined the term podcasting. We have the archive, in pointers from this page, to show how the name was chosen. This is even better than contemporaneous notes, the decisions were made online, so the record is perfect, not subject to interpretation. (Unfortunately, Yahoo is taking the archive offline in December, but the Internet Archive has copies.) Hammersely's use of the term in a story is analogous to someone anticipating that Apple's phone would be called iPhone. It would not be correct to say that such a person gave the product its name. I normally don't comment on this, but Naughton is such a careful journalist, no doubt he took the info from the Wikipedia page on podcasting, which is incorrect. At the very least the Wikipedia page should note that their version is contested. #June 12: Journalists as public editors are like men deciding women’s health policy. Public editors must be of the public.#
- On Twitter, Anthony DeRosa requested my turkey soup recipe. #
- Boil the remains of turkey carcass. Add spices, basil, oregano, hot pepper, whatever you like. Let sit overnight. #
- Remove carcass, any bones, messy stuff. #
- Chop leftover turkey bits, add to broth.#
- Brown onions, garlic, mushrooms, add.#
- Chop celery, carrots, leftover green beans. #
- Simmer while drinking White Russians and watching HBO and Netflix.#
- After a few hours cook some rotini pasta, add to soup. Simmer for about an hour.#
- Eat. Enjoy. 💥#
- But it's an improvisation. If you're inspired to add something weird, go ahead. It's still going to be turkey soup no matter what you do to it. #
Sometime soon I want to get a GUI running on one of my Digital Ocean servers. Their docs tend to be pretty good, and I desperately want to be able to manage servers using a Mac and a Finder-like interface. #I had a thought that The Irishman might have been a better viewing and story-telling experience, and cheaper to make, if they had used the same technique as Undone. Here's the trailer to give you an idea. A stylized graphic rendering of real footage. It has an animated look, but it's actual actors' voices and faces. #
Updates on bingeing. Couldn't get into the last season of Man in High Castle. Might try again. Instead, I watched a few episodes of the first season of the Larry Sanders Show on HBO. I had heard it mentioned on Fresh Air a couple of weeks ago, and it was totally worth it. How great is a comedy show that actually both holds your interest and gets you to laugh out loud. Next up: The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.#
My favorite binges are multi-season dramas with great writing and acting, and a vision from the show runner. Few series are so great that they check all the boxes, but some do. The Wire was the best of all time. Mad Men had a very strong vision, but the quality of story-telling was spotty, as was Breaking Bad. Deadwood, what a great show, but it ended before it got to the punchline. I like intense political drama and crime stories that get you into the characters. So I'm considering re-watching a few HBO miniseries that got to me the first time: Olive Kitteridge, The Night Of, Mildred Pierce. #Also if you haven't seen the several seasons of Fargo, as a TV series, go for it. It's not a replay of the movie, which of course is wonderful, rather it is a series of stories told in FargoLand, with some overlap in plot and characters. #
- I am what you might think of as a white Russian. My grandparents on my father's side came from the eastern side of the Urals. But I was born in the US of A. Maybe that's why the favored drink for the night after Thanksgiving is a White Russian, which also happens to be the favorite drink of Jeff Lebowski.#
- So, while turkey soup is simmering...#
- A very easy drink to make, and love. #
- Sip.#
- Yum.#
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!#
I'm thankful that Melo got another chance. I'm so grateful that I've decided to let Kristaps off the hook.#
UPS is still saying they delivered packages they didn't deliver. They must be throwing them into a creek. So third world. You really miss a service when you come to depend on it, and someone in the chain of people is deliberately breaking the service. #
My mini Irishman review.#- Scorsese has a style, you can see it in the first scene of The Irishman, and you smile, not knowing what's coming next, but knowing it's going to be good. The camera snakes through a nursing home and finds our narrator, an ancient Robert De Niro, and the story begins.#
- They do some fancy CGI stuff to show the characters much younger than the actors are today, but it doesn't work. I was thinking about that all through the movie. How old they are now, the staples of a Scorsese gangland movie, De Niro (76), Pesci (76) and one who's not a staple but also ancient, Pacino (79). And how old are they supposed to be in the scene I'm watching now. It was never clear. And the young CGI version of De Niro looks really old and doesn't look like De Niro. #
- It could have been more emotional, gripping and surprising, as good as any of his films, if he had used new actors. The CGI tricks stole the show and not in a good way, imho. I think that's why The Departed really clicked. None of the usual Scorsese ensemble, the stars were Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin. They played characters their own age. The story and storytelling took over, I never once thought about the movie-making, was completely captivated by the story. #
- However, you must watch The Irishman. Even a not-so-great Scorsese movie is epic and historic, especially with this cast, and especially at this point in all their careers. #
This is decidedly not a Thanksgiving post. Maybe I should hold it for tomorrow, but that's not how I roll. #- I watched a game between the LA Clippers and the Dallas Mavericks yesterday. They're both really good teams doing well this year. Watching the Clippers specifically it's sad for me, a Knicks fan, to see that LA has two highly competitive NBA teams and New York has part of one. We did attract two stars to NYC in the off-season, but one of them is injured and won't play all year, and the other is an asshole whose attitude spoils any hope we might have for interesting basketball in NYC this year and into the future. #
- The asshole of course is Kyrie Irving. If he were a true leader, he'd come to NYC and say hey I'm from here too, and I think it sucks that the city has such shitty basketball. I'm going to do my part to help liven things up, and hopefully the Nets will have a good year (set expectations, show a bit of humility, it works) and maybe we can inspire something interesting to happen on the other side of the river (i.e. at the Knicks).#
- It's so sucky that the biggest market in the US doesn't have a decent team and Dallas, a very random place for basketball, has a good team. Houston also has a great team, and San Antonio, even though they're rebuilding, is ok. #
- I don't know how much longer the NBA will put up with a Knicks owner who has no clue about sports, about the city, for that matter, about people. The Knicks need an intervention. Knicks fans are patient, but the city deserves better from the NBA. #
- PS: This year's Knicks are actually, for the Knicks, pretty good. They're still however in last place in the East, and only 1/2 game better than the worst in the West, the Warriors, and that's another story I want to tell someday.#
I saw a thing on CNN how Trump is using Facebook ads to refute bad news on TV. You wouldn't know if you (like me) are not in his base. They showed a graph with the money spent by various Democrats on FB ads. In total it's small fraction of what Trump is spending. Now I think about Bloomberg's entry into the race in a whole new way. Not only is he rich, and can afford to spend a lot on ads, he also understands tech and media. That's how he made his billions. So when people count him out based on today's polling, they're getting caught in horse-race thinking and forgetting to look at the horse itself. He won't be afraid to use Facebook. He'll have some catching up to do, but he has a mind for tech media and lots of unique experience. Trump should be concerned. #Twitter clarifies its inactive account policy. My concern was linkrot. Twitter accounts are websites, we point to them and include them, as I point to the new Twitter policy above. Jack was around when the web was very young. The idea is that we're creating a record. It's not ephemeral. It should survive us. It shouldn't matter if a site is active. Now we know that users care about preserving the web. Twitter is part of that. #The new Martin Scorsese movie is out on Netflix. I'm watching it now. What can I say it's a Scorsese movie. Lovin it. #
For 3+ years reporters won't cross the line re Trump and Russia. Every story ends with the same puzzle. Why does Trump love Russia? We don't know. We just don't know. It's like the line in Harry Met Sally where Carrie Fisher says "He'll never leave her, I know, I know he'll never leave her." Everyone says it at some point. We can recite it along with them. "No one thinks he'll ever leave her," says Meg Ryan. At some point you hope she gets the clue. Everyone but the reporters knows why Trump loves Russia. At some point it would be useful if the reporters would just use it in their reporting. #32 million people are going to fly in the US this week. Want to help fight the climate crisis? Stay home. 💥#
Political ad seen on highway in Salt Lake City via NakedJen. What a great idea. Be sure to read the story. #
Everything is subject to humor. Yes there must be lines, don't joke about things people have no control over, as in body shaming. But if we can't laugh at ourselves and our foibles, well what's the point of living. We are really small and live infinitesimally short lives. That's the big joke connecting all the individual ones. We don't really matter in the end. If you've ever had someone you're close to die, you know that truth. We're only here for the moment, so let's have fun. #The Ashokan Rail Trail will be quite a bit longer as of Thanksgiving. This is great news. It's so beautiful, flat, and long. Great place for walks and bike rides. #
- Good morning coffee fans!#
- This is something I used to do in the early days of the blog. When I started work in the morning, I'd create a section for the first notes of the day. It's nice because it leaves room at the top of the page as the day goes on, and I don't have to shuffle the morning stuff off to new places.#
- Morning Coffee Notes was also the name of my first podcast, in the summer of 2004.#
- Want to see and hear my first podcast? Scroll down to 6/11/2004. #
- Later that year I started another podcast with Adam Curry called Trade Secrets. It was a cool name for a podcast, It would be cool even today with the glut of podcasts because it's a double entendre, and inviting if you're into secrets that are traded. #
- Now I forgot why I started today's MCN section. #
- I'll catch up on my next coding break. 💥#
Are you still trying to get ahead while our civilization ends?#
Watching Adam Schiff on CNN yesterday, he tried to explain that this is not Democrats vs Republicans, that we all lose if we lose our democracy, and Jake Tapper was having none of it. Excuse me Mr. Schiff can you tell me about the horse race please?#
Journalism, get a grip, some things are not a horse race. If Trump wins, kiss our species goodbye. That includes you. #
Another example of horse race journalism. They say "black turnout" could make or break Democrats. I would change the headline to "Black turnout could make or break the human species." #
For the first time, in 2019, I have a doctor who uses email, and there's a portal where I can see results of my medical tests. How many people would be alive today if more doctors used email earlier. #
I'm moving apps from an old server where Dropbox stopped working to another old server where Dropbox still works. It's like taking apart a robot and putting it back together. Lots of wires to hook up. And just getting the old pieces off the old server without Dropbox was a pain the ass. Lots of chances for mistakes. I really need to make this kind of thing easy. I know just use containers. But it's at the next level up where I need more factoring and abstraction. #Imagine you were alive in the 1920s when cars became a mass market product. A movie star gives a speech saying Ford must make perfectly safe cars that no one ever dies in. Would you have realized then that it was unattainable? #
"You need to step outside your culture to see the shackles it has placed on your thinking."#
An idea for a New Year's resolution. At least once a day agree with someone. Not silently. Say "I agree with you." No qualification, not "I agree with you, but.." It's jarring at first, then liberating. And the responses will surprise you.#
- It's the best time of year for binge-watching. I'm up to date on Mr Robot. As far as I'm concerned they could stop right here at episode 7. Best season yet. But there are still six more episodes in the series. Now I'm working my way through the third season of The Crown. Another tour de force. Waiting in the wings is Man in the High Castle and The Morning Show, which is fantastic even though it got
awfulmixed reviews. I only watched the first three episodes, the ones that were released when AppleTV+ came out. I want to wait until the season is done so I can watch it in a binge. I'm not a big fan of waiting a week between episodes. I'm a fairly modal person in most things I do and TV is certainly one of them. I also know a few people who are just now catching up on Succession. Can't wait to hear what they think. No spoilers. 💥# - BTW -- the reason The Morning Show got bad reviews is that it isn't what a newsroom really is like. Because presumably the reviewers know what newsrooms are like. The rest of us don't. We loved The West Wing even though it was nothing like working in the White House. Dramas depend not on the reality of what they portray, rather the ability of the writers, actors and technical people to tell a story that pulls you in, gets you to care, makes you forget you aren't in their world instead of your own. They become your friends, and you develop an intimacy you can't get with your real friends and family. That's why The Morning Show is so good. The writing, acting, and everything else are done by people who know how to get you where you want to go. Whether it resembles the way newsrooms work, the only people who care about that are reviewers. #
Also -- one of the great things about Mr Robot is that the writers understand how software works. They do take shortcuts and at time make word salads of tech jargon, but most of it is about things that hackers would really do and use. One thing they gloss over is bugs. Elliot and Darlene's code always works the first time. They never get so much as a syntax error. I'm waiting for the next generation shows where the plot revolves around a platform vendor removing a feature that the firewall depended on and the hackers figure it out and Evil-Corp crumbles and the Dark Army takes over or someone worse than Trump ends up running the country. #
Democratic impeachment strategy: House hearings continue indefinitely, until Senate agrees to remove president. Explore every nook and cranny of Republican corruption. Target Repub senators up for re-election in 2020. Draft articles of impeachment are posted publicly and kept current, registered voters can vote individual articles up or down. A full week of hearings on why Republicans are repeating Russian talking points. How about the July 4 visit to Moscow by senators. Why are Repubs so beholden to Putin? What happened in Helsinki? So many questions. Let’s get the answers.#
Occam's Razor says if you want to grok the hows and whys of the Republican Party, look at how the political system of Russia works. Why do the members of the Russian legislature do whatever Putin wants? That's why the Repubs do what Trump wants. #
Living in the country, as I do, I order a lot of stuff on Amazon. The nearest department store is about 40 minutes away and it's a Walmart, not exactly my favorite place to shop. #- In the last week the UPS driver on my route decided not to deliver to my house. The reason keeps changing, but it seems there's nothing I can do about it, so I gave up. I asked the UPS people in Kingston to return the packages to Amazon. I expect Amazon will refund the purchase price. They're usually pretty good with that. #
- There are no Amazon lockers nearby. But UPS has a relationship with the hardware store in town (8 minutes from my house). That's going to be my next approach. To see if there's a way for UPS to deliver my packages to the store. #
- And while the UPS people I've talked with have been professional overall this leaves a really bad feeling here for UPS. One day they deliver to your house and the next day they don't. Whatever the reason (it keeps changing) it's not cool. #
I just had a freaking nightmarish development experience. I was moving an app on a server, and the address of the server was hard-coded in an Electron app I use. I figured when it changed, I could just edit the source and rebuild. I know everything should be an option, but this was just for me. But when I rebuilt it, Electron would have none of it. So much deprecation. So I ended up on a trail of tears having to update one thing after another, and they all refused to work with something else that had just changed. Platform developers, stability is something we should rate you on and you should get paid accordingly. Typically it's highly paid developers at BigCo's who feel entitled to pull the rugs out from under our apps and tear up the pavement just for the hell of it. Oy oy. Two oys. But shit I'm good at taking the punches, and now it's running. Whew. Back to work on fun stuff. #People should simply use their names in the space where you put your name in a tweet. After a couple of years of playing with it, I find it's confusing to put messages there. An example. David Weinberger is someone I would read every tweet of, but sometimes miss because he's endlessly creative with his twitter name. I believe this is called cognitive overload. My brain screams "too much" and I move on to the next tweet.#
I'm glad we don't have hearings today, allows us all to start catching up on what we have been ignoring. #
Many of the comments I receive via email should be blog posts in their own right. But keep them coming. We'll figure out how to thread this needle. #
A long time ago I was having lunch with someone I thought was a friend. He told a story about how he tried to buy Radio UserLand, a product I developed, from the company that owned it. I guess at the time he didn't know that I still owned a majority share of the company. The people who were running it never brought the idea to me. I asked why he didn't just try to work with me. I would have totally been open to the idea. He explained he wanted to own it. I've seen this happen over and over. People who build careers with products that are copies of stuff I had already done. I keep wondering why we couldn't work together. They do it in other creative fields. I just got caught up with Mr Robot. I picked the right moment to do it. S04 E07 was a total masterpeice and a big reveal. Look at all the talent that had to come together to make that happen. Andrew Singer a former colleague said once that in tech we don't stand on the shoulders of giants, we stand on their toes. It's so sad. I know at some point we will work out collaboration. We have to. #They still make portable AM/FM radios. Same features as the transistor radio I had when I was a kid. Spooky. No Bluetooth. Can't charge via USB. #
American journalism is never far from falling back to the horse race in everything. Who the hell knows or cares how many senators will ultimately vote to remove. It's impossible to know, or even if the vote will ever happen. Waste of time to speculate. And it isn't even up to the senators, it's up to the voters. The senators will vote to remove if it means they feel they will lose their election. #
Fiona Hill could have been written by Aaron Sorkin. #
Trump no longer controls what people talk about, not even his base. The hearings are on Fox gavel to gavel.#
"The Three Amigos" is now part of American political folklore after Sondland said he was proud to be an amigo. You can say you were there when this happened. Also this scandal doesn't have a short name, like Watergate, Iran-Contra. I guess the Clinton impeachment didn't get a name either. #
Sorry for the sparse updates here. I'm overloaded, watching the impeachment hearings and at the same time dealing with a server that Dropbox fails on. Moving these apps to a new server is tricky. On Digital Ocean. #
Sondland: Everyone under the bus!
Trump rides around on our Air Force One, we're paying millions for his golf vacations, so he can hack the next election using our money. When did we become such chumps. There's got to be a line in here somewhere. #
BTW, let's see those tax returns. #
The faceoff is over the Constitution.#
A lesson I've learned from recent successes in blogging. You must always think of your blog as if you were starting it now, not in the past. The world is different. There was no Twitter in 1994. Twitter wasn't usable until last year with the switch to 280 chars. Facebook was used for serious discourse (somewhat) until a couple of years ago. Email is resurging as a publishing medium. People are still thirsty for stories that relate to their lives. But getting into their minds with all the competition requires constant creativity. Not showmanship.#
NYT reporters are supposed to care about facts, yes? Why do they report that Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was trying to “turn up damaging information about Democrats.” Not true. They just wanted an announced dramatization of an “investigation.” That’s all they needed or sought. Probably because there was no actual damaging information. That’s the depravity of Repubs. They manufacture insinuation, not information. And the complicity of the NYT for accepting their lies as fact.#
It’s a good thing Google discontinued their RSS reader product. Had it continued, they would likely be torturing RSS the same way they are HTML and HTTP. Had they kept it they could have siloed podcasting, for example.#
Yesterday I wrote about the need for a Marshall Plan for Republicans. I didn't explain what the original Marshall Plan was. After the Allies won WWII, the US did something unusual for a victor. We rebuilt the country we defeated, Germany. We didn't have to. In fact at the end of WWI we did the opposite. We imposed reparations on Germany. Then came the Depression, and thus were planted the seeds for a rebirth of Germany as an even more ferocious military force in the second war. There was no third war, probably thanks to the Marshall Plan.#- When the Soviet Union broke apart in the early 90s, we kicked back, not a terrible idea, because any intervention by the US would probably have been seen as a threat. That would come later, during the Obama presidency, when Putin was reinstalling a Soviet style government, and we, via our State Department, were encouraging the opposition. Nothing wrong with that, except it didn't work. And we're left with a Putin who seeks revenge, and knows nothing helps a despot like a foreign enemy to blame everything on. That would be the pre-Trump United States. #
- Now we're on the verge of defeating the Republican Party. I don't want to go into detail on that, I can -- imho it'll seem obvious in hindsight, like the dissolution of the Soviet Union seemed obvious after the Berlin Wall came down, but until it happens it can be hard to visualize. The Repubs have been a fixture in American politics all our lives. But it has been changing all the time, trying to put off the inevitable by becoming more and more insidious relative to constitutional America. And now people of the party, the base, will be forced to decide. Finally we have broken Trump's monopoly on news flow. They're broadcasting the hearings on Fox, they have to. And it's going to get worse, much worse, in the next few days, for the fascists in the Republican Party to keep the base unaware. There is a splitting coming. The question is how big. My believe is that it will be big enough to create an opportunity that we should not miss. A chance to rebuild America before we fully fall apart. To be a Marshall Plan for ourselves. Because now finally we will have to accept Republicans as our fellow Americans, with some differences, important ones, but underneath it all, we don't try to steal elections and we accept that no one is above the law, especially the president. #
If we don't bring the constitutional Republicans in, without a solid majority in the Senate even with a Democratic president, we'll just see the McConnell Stonewall again. Obstruction. Nothing happens. And Trump, second of his name, comes along in 2024, this one is not Baby Huey, and a true fascist, much more schooled in the ways of America, and one who plays the part of president much better than this Trump does. That really will be the end of America. We'll be out of moves. #- PS: This is a rewrite of a Twitter thread. Twitter is becoming pretty useful as a place to develop my ideas before writing a blog post. This is a good example of that. #