Good morning and welcome to December. One more month. And then another year and another, and on and on. #

I'm sure others have noticed that today is a symmetric day -- 12/1/21. It might be the last one in this century? Have to think about this. 😀#

Beatles: Don't Let Me Down.#

Poll: When will you watch Get Back?#

I'm glad I read the book about the 1918 pandemic last year, because I understand something that most people should and don't. Mutations aren't necessarily bad, in fact over time the mutations will make the virus less deadly. It's all about evolution and survival of the fittest. Mutation is how evolution happens. A new variant shows up and if it is in some way more likely to propagate and survive than previous variants, it will stick around and thrive, and continue to mutate. If a virus kills its host -- that's not good for survivability. So what happens over time, a virus like Covid becomes less harmful and more transmissible, that's how it becomes "the flu." The 1918 influenza virus is still with us today. But it doesn't kill people in the numbers that it did a hundred years ago. Over time Covid will get less deadly too.#

Heather Cox Richardson confirmed something that I had been wondering about -- do Congresspeople in the US, esp Republicans, worry about the safety of their families if they were to act independently of Trump. I was sure that some of them do, but I had never heard this reported on the news. So far they only talk about threats involving losing their jobs. But if the threats were about physical well-being, that's another thing. That's how it works in Russia for journalism and politics. The one year I was at Davos I spent some time hanging out with Russian journalists. This was in 2000, when Russia had supposedly liberalized. I went to a big session in the main hall where one of the officers of the Russian government was speaking, someone who I had been introduced to by my sponsor, the person who got me my white badge (a journalists' credential, the best one available, got me entry to every session, unlike most journalists attending). At one point I stood up and asked a challenging question of the Russian. He gave me a typical evasive answer. But here's the thing -- after I did that, none of my Russian journalist friends would talk to me. Obviously their political system didn't work like ours. Today when there is no pretense at freedom in Russia, I imagine it's much worse. And according to HCR's reporting, we're headed down that path in the US. The next year seems to be our last chance to turn it around. #

I have continued watching Get Back. Everyone should watch this, if you're a creative, or your work involves creative people. Creativity needs to be nurtured and protected. I'm sure there are other lessons coming, but I'm going through it slowly, I'm still on the first segment. #

Jack Dorsey is leaving Twitter again. All kinds of paranoid thoughts go through my head. Meanwhile, he posted his announcement as a tweet, not in text but as a screen shot because Twitter still doesn't support text in a reasonable manner, even though they support video, images, Clubhouse-style conferences, and email newsletters. This is insane. Twitter is an important platform. Not supporting text is a religious thing, as if they didn't have water fountains in The Vatican. (I just came up with that randomly.) I hope the first thing the new CEO does is fix this situation. Let's move outlines over Twitter. Whatever. Text isn't a new innovation, the blogger said ironically.#

I didn't give up on the Beatles on Disney. It is totally worth watching. The Beatles were falling apart, but all they needed was a little help. A manager. Someone to keep the assholes away. So many jerks were wasting their time and talent. And someone to make sure that George Harrison felt loved, and they were focusing on the music, which is what they were so incredibly great at. At one point, John Lennon is getting briefed on some bullshit plan for a concert, it's all nonsense, and in the background Paul McCartney is working out the music and lyrics for one of the greatest songs of all time -- Let It Be. I always wondered what their collaboration was like, they really did like each other. Such a shame. They had something incredible, and they just needed a little help. #

Yesterday I had one of my Drummer outlines overwrite another. There were no instant outlines updating while this happened, so that's not the source of the problem. If you've had this happen: 1. I am sorry this is happening, that's first. 2. Make sure you do backups. 3. Were you by any chance editing the Scripts menu when this happened? If so, please comment here. I'm looking for more clues. I added more debugging code so if it happens to me again, I'll get closer to knowing that the cause is. I really want to get this bug out of there.#

I hear there's some kind of controversy over a frying pan that VP Harris bought. I also hear this is getting a lot of play on the news. My filters must be working, because all I've heard of it are ridiculous rebuttals from people trying to argue somewhat logically that this is an illustration of old white men in charge of the Republican Party. I'm sure that's not it. It's marketing. They are always focus-group-testing bullshit like this to see if the people will pick it up, and then they shoot blasts of this bullshit at news people, and 1-in-10 of the focus-grouped bullshit gets picked up by the press. It's worth it, because it keeps the real news off the air, and helps people forget that Trump paid for his golf vacations at his own resorts with taxpayer money. Hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no logic to any of this. And they're not old white menu, that's bullshit. It's just marketing people, and computers. #

I have a new project in the works that hooks up to Drummer outlines (really any outlines in OPML) and puts all the items in a relational database and lets you do searches. I have a few applications in mind for this stuff. The codename of the project is Daytona. Coming soon to a theater near you. #

If you could make an open Facebook without using carbon-spewing blockchain tech why would you burn all that carbon? Do you care about the survival of our species?#

New Drummer verb that generates Markdown from an outline or part of an outline. #

I wonder why the tech industry hasn't done something like BingeWorthy. I think it's because they create data mining tools for advertisers. This is a data mining for users. The more users, the better the data. A real incentive to get your friends on board. BW should really be a product offered by Netflix, Metacritic, Twitter, Facebook, even Google. What show to watch is a question millions of people have, esp this time of year. This is what the platform should look like. Share profiles w friends. An interesting twist, it's not just about finding shows to binge, it's about finding friends with similar taste.I was surprised to find that Jake Savin, who I worked with a long time ago, and I, have very similar taste. We like and dislike the same things.#

Maybe they should do interviews with Covid doctors on CNN from the room where intubated patients are waiting to die. #

Sometimes people deliberately mispronounce or misspell my name, I guess theyre trying to embarrass me? I have a name almost as bad as the Boy Named Sue. It’s hard to get under my skin that way. 😀#

I tried watching Get Back, but after five minutes of holy shit those are the young Beatles acting like normal people it became fairly boring. I guess I like a plot? Did it get better?#

Twitter Blue gives you a pretty lame undo command. I guess it’s impossible to do it for real with their server architecture.#

I added The Great as a favorite on my BingeWorthy profile. I'm well into Season 2. It's a pseudo-history dramedy in the spirit of Succession or The Death of Stalin. It's about a Russian empress who overthrows her husband the emperor. As they say, hilarity ensues. 😄#

One of the stars of The Great, the guy who plays emperor Peter, is a dead ringer for a young Elon Musk. Same mannerisms and look, but he’s funnier and of course a better actor. One of the tech companies or car companies should hire him to do ads. #

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. ❤️#

I just started Get Back, the first few minutes of the first episode, enough to know that it's going to be a heavy emotional experience for me. As a kid I had so much invested in the Beatles. Each period of their existence marked some big period or event in my life, things that I've mostly buried, but come right to the surface with (for example) Paul and George flopping their heads in the chorus to Twist and Shout. To see the Beatles, alive and young and at the peak of their creativity, in a way we couldn't see them at the time, that's like reading a letter from a long-dead relative. The people are gone, the experiences were seminal, and recoverable. #

I'm watching The Great on Hulu, and it's really good. Didn't get the best reviews. I'm only on episode 4. It's about Catherine The Great of Russia. The story is pretty heavy, but believe it or not, it's a comedy! #

I am a NYT subscriber, but can't access Wirecutter. It's weird, the site seems broken -- when I try to log in it just sends me back to the page that says I have run out of free articles. It could be they want more money for WC, if so, the answer is no. I don't read a lot of NYT articles as it is. I have a very bad feeling about them, and it gets worse every year. That took a lot of work on their part because I was raised on the NYT. #

For whatever reason I'm not very talkative this week. Not sure why. Often when this happens it's followed by a period of idearrhea. No apologies, I'm still here, feeling more pensive. Happy Thanksgiving! :-)#

A script that generates the list of Drumkit verbs. For people who worked on outlines in Frontier, have a look. I found a way to work on outlines as JavaScript structs. It's very efficient and much easier to program.#

I love my new Tesla. I'm looking for excuses to drive places. I haven't felt this way about driving since I was a teenager with a new license.#

There are so many interesting things about the Tesla, and I'm just getting started learning about them. It's as if I didn't get a PC until the IBM PC came out. Or maybe later. Here's something I figured out the other night, driving on a mountain road with lots of turns and ups and downs, a road I'm quite familiar with -- the Tesla makes you a better driver. This is something my Subaru does too, you only have to hold the steering wheel loosely while navigating the turns and ups and downs. The road is well-marked and the car knows what to do. The Tesla even more so. It's like my iPhone which takes better pictures in 2021 than the 2011 model did. We like to say "no filters" but the truth is they're just really good filters that make you think you're the photographer, but the phone did the hard work. Same with the Tesla. I like driving it in the same way. It flatters me to think I'm that good a driver. I know the truth though -- I didn't become a better driver, I just got a car that makes me feel that I did. And who wouldn't love that. #

Here’s a thread reader integrated into Twitter. Next: eliminate the numbers, add links, simple styling, let me give it a title (optional) and we’re ready to rock. Think they’ll have that by say 2030? #

Google's search engine really doesn't like this blog. I tried searching for Scott Love on my blog. It didn't find the instance where I wrote about him here earlier this month. #

Yesterday I did my tenth Peloton ride. The exercise is making me stronger. I don't know why I didn't want to do the classes. I love my teacher, Emma Lovewell. She's super nerdy. When we're doing something particularly strenuous, I close my eyes, focus on my breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and I listen to her say that this pain is worth it because it'll become strength when the workout is over. It's so true. I don't particularly care for the music she chooses, I don't know any of it, and it's not catchy. But she's a lot younger than I am, so I guess this is the kind of music the young folk listen to? I'd love it if there were a Tom Petty ride or a Grateful Dead ride. I can see riding to Refugee or US Blues.#

Video demo of a new Drummer feature. Headlines whose type is 'rss' can be expanded to reveal the items in the feed it connects to. #

Poll: If a person from NY uses the word "fuck" in a sentence that means..#

Does anyone seriously think that Facebook-the-company wants to fuel hate in the world? Yet you see articles that say exactly that from supposedly credible news orgs. #

The Repubs get more obnoxious all the time. There doesn't seem to be any limit. #

A new Drummer verb, rss.readFeed, returns a JavaScript object. This used to be a complex thing to do, but it's absolutely as simple as it can be. I did something new here. I'm only passing through values that are documented in the RSS 2.0 spec and the source namespace. That's not as draconian as it might sound, because I'm using a Node package written by my friend Dan MacTough that handles all the common feed flavors, including Atom. His code translates the variants to a common vocabulary. And I further winnow it down to just the basic concepts. To some extent, RSS grew in an unruly chaotic way, but imho the core is solid. After all this time, with Drummer as a new platform, I think it's a good time to pause and create (hopefully) a simpler future that can work better. #

A discussion about how Markdown should be processed for Drummer blogs. Basically, what role if any should indentation play, and how many newlines to generate for each line in the outline. My current position -- indentation should play no role in the Markdown we generate from the outline, it should be ignored. And we should generate one newline for every line in the outline. Note this is not how Drummer works now. #

I did a refresh on the ArtShow collection yesterday, a few hundred more classic paintings. Free to download, or use via web.#

A podcast about Project Glorp.#

I'd love to discuss Markdown with people who know Markdown and use Drummer. We should have a Markdown nodetype. I've been playing around with it, but I'm not satisfied with what I have yet, not ready to lock it down. Here's an RFC with a link to an example. #

Malynda Hale: "Imagine if Kyle Rittenhouse were a Black teenager."#

There's a dichotomy in outliners -- 1. The outliner as a document, like a spreadsheet or word processing file. A file format. 2. The outliner as a file system, a container for documents, a way of organizing them. Drummer, used as a blogging tool is a solid #2. #

In 2006 I ran into PC columnist John Dvorak at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco. We got talking about how he was a troll, and he told me to turn on my video camera and he explained how trolling works. A classic.#

If I had a billion dollars, I'd buy a TLD and sell domains for 10 cents each, to see what would happen. #

About this Web 3 thing. Listen. I understood the Web in about a minute. Web 2.0, I played a role in defining and developing it. So you could say I got it. But Web 3? Why did they choose a name that promises so much, and more than anything -- simplicity. The idea of anything called "Web" being opaque, sounding like a scam, a VC's wet dream -- that's so counter to what the word means in tech. I shouldn't have to read a few white papers, and still not get it. Look, my intuition says that the web is the web is the web and there is no Web 3, there's just the web. I don't like that they usurped the name of something so simple and precious for something that looks scammy. I think they should have chosen a different name. #

Someone once said that music is bass and drums, and all the rest is just dressing up. #

Poll: Metaverse?#

Twitter Blue which I accidentally subscribed to, actually deletes your tweets if you aren’t paying close attention. It’s supposed to be a feature I guess, give you a chance to change your mind. I’ve lost a bunch of writing this way. Did they user test this?#

When I was starting out in tech, after getting a degree in computer science, I was drawn to PCs because the adults hadn’t gotten there first. They were still simple. If they had kept their stuff simple, I might have invested on their platforms. The web after all these years is still really simple if you ignore Google and use common sense. It’s still possible to see the web as unspoiled as it was at the beginning. Just ignore Google and it’s all good.#

Poll: Do you hold any bitcoin?#

I don’t know what “Web3” is and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.#

Just noticed that yesterday was the one month anniversary of shipping Drummer. Continuing the long Scripting News tradition of missing milestones. #

I just want to say that the cultural stuff I get on Facebook is every bit as good as what I get from the NYT, and it comes for $0 and without the arrogance and pretension. #

The name of the scripting language in Drummer is Drumkit. I have reserved a domain for it. There's nothing there at this time but a placeholder. Gary Teter came up with the name in a blog post. When I read the post, I was pretty sure this was the name. I love how it connects to the name of the product, and it conveys the utility of having a language in a product such as Drummer. It also reflects the duality of the product. You can beat the drum in Drummer by writing, if you're a poet, and if you're a plumber, there's Drumkit. It's also nice because it leaves open the option of the language existing outside of Drummer, but no one will miss that the language came from Drummer. That's important I've found. I left similar clues in RSS and in podcasting. I think naming a product is a community thing, the best names don't come from one person's mind. Gary understands a lot about what I'm trying to do with the language, how else could he have devised such a perfect name. He can be proud, much as Dannie Gregoire can be proud of coming up with the name we eventually used for what we were calling audio blogging, even though there's a British journalist who falsely claims to have coined the term. Already the Drummer community has made a great contribution to Drummer. Many thanks! 🥁#

Companies should have a PIN for every customer they want to talk to on the phone. I'm not even going to admit to being me for a random inquisitor who calls and claims to represent one of my insurance companies. Prove it, I say to them. They can't. Sorry, can't help you.#

I was asked why I'm adding great GitHub scriptability to Drummer when Microsoft is evil and huge. First, I use GitHub, a lot, and love it. I loved it before Microsoft bought it, and I'm experienced enough to have known even then that their acquisition by a big tech company was almost a given. Our support of GitHub in the short term won't do much to help GitHub, maybe in the long term it will. But that isn't a good reason not to implement the compatibility. For that I turn to a famous quote of the notorious criminal Willie Sutton who was asked why he robs banks. I'm sure you already know the answer. #

I'm spending a couple of days baking GitHub into Drummer via scripting. We used to call this a "scriptable app" on the Mac, when apps were Filemaker and Quark Xpress, the Finder, stuff like that. Then when Frontier moved to the web, the apps were Eudora, Netscape, MSIE and MacHTTP, then Google and Manila, then WordPress and Twitter. Along the way came new protocols -- XML-RPC, RSS, OPML. Drummer already has excellent scripting support for Twitter. I made this a priority to have one really good scriptable app when Drummer came out. Now I'm working on the second biggie. I wrote yesterday that GitHub could be MS-DOS. What I meant is that it's basic low-cost storage for everyone with a GitHub account that's about as easy to work with as MS-DOS was. For early adopters, what we used to call power users. It's an amazing resource. And that made me think of MS-DOS because both are owned by Microsoft and storage is basically what MS-DOS did, and btw, MS-DOS is the one product they didn't use as a weapon when they were trying to usurp the web, so it has a nice taste to it, still. I have started a thread, on GitHub of course, narrating what I've got working. Watch this space.#

I put about twenty Tom Petty songs on my iPhone and have been listening to them on and off. The thing about Tom Petty is his songs are the kind that you sing in your head all the time days and days awake or in dreams. To have twenty Petty tunes co-resident means you're living the Tom Petty lifestyle, waiting for it to pass, but kind of hoping it doesn't. It's kind of like Rickrolling but with really good music. #

I just heard that a longtime friend and fellow outliner Scott Love has died. Oy. I knew Scott when he was our chief product marketer at Living Videotext back in the 80s. He was part of the team that shipped ThinkTank, Ready and MORE. When we sold to Symantec, Scott went to NeXT where he was on the rollout team for their product. His heart was in outliners. He went on to start Aquaminds, which he explains in his bio on Quora. Scott was a brilliant creative funny friendly and vulnerable human. He put his heart into everything he did. His boss, before he worked for me, Alfred Mandel, called him Nudgie. When I heard that I started using that name for him too, until I realized it might not be the nicest thing. Recently Scott and I reconnected on Twitter. In a private exchange he said he liked the name. I'm sorry his life was so short. His enthusiasm and big heart and super active mind will be missed. #

Scott and I had dinner many times, and often traveled together on business. We always joked about how we were going to take on the then-dominant tech company IBM. It was either Boca or Bucha, which was short for Bucharest, where we were surely headed if we failed to defeat the mighty IBM. We'd talk about catching the red-eye to Bucharest. I don't know why it was then (and still is now) so funny. Bucharest was a pretty awful place at the time, run by an even worse dictator than IBM -- Nicolae Ceaușescu. #

GitHub could be the next MS-DOS.#

I would still love to read a simple summary of the second part of the Washington Post review of January 6. The part where they tell us minute by minute what the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, was doing while the US Capitol was under seige. #

A Twitter thread on the name of the language in Drummer. #

Anton asked why don't the outlines rendered through PagePark support the same Instant Outlines feature that Drummer and Concord Reader support. There was no good answer, so I made it work. There's a quick video demo here. #

Gary Teter has been writing eloquently about Drummer. His latest. #

Public Drummer outlines that are not part of a blog. #

A new Drummer verb -- http.client. #

Even sports journalism, where you'd think horseraces would make sense, they overdo it. As a Knicks fan, I don't care which point guard gets more time, and if the players are good, they don't care either. What we want is the team to play great, fun basketball.#