Of all the things to be angry about, and there are a lot, the one that gets me the most is that Trump has had Fauci muzzled for three months.#

Poll: If you could have a reincarnated Martin Luther King, Jr leading the Democratic Party today or Barack Obama, who would you chose?#

Perfect. Take down all Confederate statues and ship them to Trump for his Garden of Heroes of White Supremacy and the Not See Party.#

A few days ago I said I figured out that the not-pleasant burnt smell in the air came from fireworks. That was incorrect. A neighbor is having work done on trees. I live in a forest, where trees are a big deal. They're always falling over, and then you need to cut them up and haul the wood away or chop it into firewood. When you cut trees with a chain saw the wood burns, and it doesn't stop burning when the cutting is done. And that adds a stink to the air, like a fire that was put out with water. That's what I was smelling. I know this because I had some trees cut last year, and the stinky smell stuck around for a week. It's the sad smell of a dying creature. On the other hand, when you wake up on a summer morning with dew on everything, and a nice warm feel to the air, with a bit of residual chill, the forest smells like life. It's a wonderful smell. #

Snopes and CNN say Trump did not say Desert Storm took place in Vietnam. I ran a link on my linkblog yesterday that said otherwise.#

After Trump is gone we have to get rid of the cancel cult. It’s an ugly side effect of the power of online communication. When Trump uses it in his campaign it’s one of the very few things he’s right about.#

Suggestion: Choose to not be offended, at least once a day.#

Here's a list of the 37 Node.js packages I've made available through NPM. I was just planning a project and was sure I must have created a package for reading to and from a GitHub repo. There it is. Two entry-points, getFile and uploadFile. Voila. Not much in the way of docs. But there is an example app.#

Arnold Schwarzenegger on his love for America. I totally concur. The US welcomed my family in the 1940s. My parents were children, their parents were running for their lives. All of our love of country is being tested, but as it is, it is revealed. It takes on new meaning. We'll come back from this. There are a lot of reasons for the trouble we're in, some habitual, some technical. I've heard Americans say they wish they had left when they could, but there's a reason we didn't leave. This is our country. We can't abandon it in its time of need. We're the ones who stayed. We will make it work.#

The infinite scrolling feature on the Scripting News home page wasn't a good idea, because it made it difficult to reach the bottom of the page which has useful stuff on it. I just turned it off. I did a video demo of the feature so we can remember how it worked, and if needed I can turn it back on. And the More button remains, so you can use that to scroll back, one day at a time.#

Today's song: He's Gone by the Grateful Dead. No special reason. No one specific died. I just have this song rolling around in my head this morning. You know better but I know him.#

A tweetcast about how things in the US are kind of normal.#

I've been smelling burned ash everywhere, esp at night. Everywhere I go. I'm thinking this must be a symptom of the virus, so I'm afraid to ask if anyone else smells it. Then on my bike ride I saw a bunch of spent fireworks on the road. Yeah that's the smell. July 4. That should be over soon enough. #

Why more white people understand Black Lives Matter now. We're realizing that our lives don't matter, and now all of a sudden Black Lives Matter makes a different kind of sense. It's a bit too subtle for some people. But the virus and our society's response to it is making the lights come on, gradually at first, eventually for everyone.#

Dear Lincoln Project people -- how about forking off a new PAC to convince more Americans to wear a mask. Use your marketing smarts to crack this nut. And save my life.#

I like how they have a Get Involved button on their website. But when you click they don't say what being involved means, beyond giving them money and your email address and zip code, presumably so they can spam you. I'd love for a campaign to define involvement as solving a problem we have in America, right now.#

I like listening to audio books, but I have two peeves. 1. When a book provides numbers for comparison, repeat the numbers at least once. 2. Put the introductory material at the end. Authors go on and on, assuming you won't read it. Oops. #

Another peeve. I was watching a Dave Chappelle show on Netflix. He is really funny. Great comic. But he uses the N-word a lot. And get this -- he uses it to talk about white people. Like this: You my <N-word>. I've been told, not by Chappelle, that it's a term of endearment. To me, that's ridiculous -- it's a threat. Because if I use that term of endearment, a 10-ton weight comes down on my head. I don't like it. We're also told this is a word African-Americans use among themselves, and we wouldn't understand what it means. But many of the people in Chappelle's audience are white. We're his N-words. I'm watching it, and reminded every time I hear the world, and he says it a lot, that this is something I'm not allowed to like. The more I listen to him use the N-word, my inner voice, constantly yapping about nothing, repeats what he says, and I'm concerned that will eventually come out of my mouth, without thought because that actually happens in real life. It's a painful word, not just for African-Americans. I saw Jelani Cobb write on Twitter the other day about the possible capitalization of the word black when used to talk about people of African descent. "Does anyone feel strongly about upper-casing the B in black? I’m generally opposed to this because it turns race, a nonexistent category, into a proper noun." Maybe we should use words everyone can say, and try to stick to words that have meaning, and preferrably one obvious meaning, so we all can understand wtf you're talking about. 😄#

A kitten and a puppy are best friends in this Twitter video. #

A 25-minute podcast I did this morning. It was mostly about what's in the gaslighting post below. Expanded, and starting with an observation by Ken Smith, English prof at Indiana University, that students deserve to be shown how to use the power tools of our culture. Teachers should say that to them, out loud. I tried saying it loud and felt the power. Led to a story or two. The title of this podcast is Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Wish I had thought to play that song during the podcast. Next time. 💥#

Really interesting discussion going on globally on what objectivity means in journalism, esp in re #BLM. I spent many podcasts with Jay Rosen talking about his idea of the mythical View from Nowhere. You must disclose who you are, and disclaim that your writing comes from who you are. This came up in another discussion yesterday about integrity. "A [person] has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in sync. Change the appearance if necessary." It's material if the editors of a publication are predominantly of one race. Until this year, however, as far as I know, the subject had never been raised. Times are changing. #

Reporters can't get it through their heads that someone might want to write publicly to help steer the conversation, not for self-aggrandizement. I know what that's like, I've been a columnist at a big pub. I've had the name of a big university on my business card. This is different. I want to see us survive the virus. I want to survive it myself. Otherwise I don't have any great personal aspirations. I think I can help. That's it. I don't honestly see how, in this moment of crisis in the US, anyone could be worried about getting ahead. Our concern has to be for keeping our system going. It's falling apart, right now, before our eyes. Any idea should be considered, no matter where it comes from. But the gates are really high right now. The keepers are struggling to hold on, and that's exactly what's wrong with discourse.#

BTW can you see now why I want HTML in bash? All those names in the list of apps the server is running should have scripts attached to them.#

I spent the day so far combining the Radio3 docs into one Howto page. Consider this a draft, I still have to do a couple more read-throughs. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here. #

David Rothkopf: "There was a time in our history when the people of this country would be saddened were the president of the United States to stumble into an open pit that was actually a wormhole that sent him hurtling for all eternity to the farthest, coldest, most hostile corner of the universe."#

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a video game that simulates a worldwide pandemic. You get to be Fauci, and have to deal with a mentally incapacitated president and Republican governors who just want to reopen. Your challenge is to make the US virus free, and win the Nobel Peace Prize.#

The best defense against Putin and Trump is to teach every student the basics of journalism. Not just how to detect fake news, but how to write a news story. If we do it now, we'll be glad we did in a few years.#

A podcast voicemail to Doc, who reminds me of Martin Sheen and Wilford Brimley. He has a piece today that he wants you to read. And I thought of a way to make that happen automatically. That's what this podcast is about. 26 minutes. Rambly. 🚀#

How many people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs the number of people who have died so far in the US of Covid-19? The numbers will surprise you. (Answer: We're getting close to the death toll of Hiroshima.)#

Colin Nederkoorn reminds us that the NY Times, even though they've opted out of Apple News still has a full complement of RSS feeds. The feeds are perfect. A headline, a synopsis and a link to the paywall'd article. I still would like to see a way around the paywall for non-subscribers. #

Little-known feature on Scripting News. You can read a whole month's worth of posts on one page. For example, here's the page for June 2020. I think you can see how the URL is formed. #

It would be interesting to make a list of people whose lives, net-net, matter and don't matter, and to what extent, and how that changes over time. For example, American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan didn't matter much before the latest scandal, but now we know their lives matter even less than we thought.#

Today's song: The Good Thing by the Talking Heads. #

In October of last year, before impeachment, I proposed a permanent citizen's occupation of DC. 100K people constantly in protest in DC, rain or shine, 365 days a year, until Trump is gone. On a rotating basis. No one signs up for more than one day. Never more than 100K. Keep a constant presence there for the Democrats and Republicans to remember. To be in the way. To be loud and obnoxious. To help them remember who they work for. #

Not wearing a mask is like not wearing pants.#

Is anyone but John Oliver talking about the eviction crisis?#

I try to keep focused on the bigger picture, and let the small stuff be background noise.#

People who love outliners, esp MORE from 30 years ago on the Mac, we could have an outliner renaissance on the web, now. I have a great lab for development, and the core outliner in JavaScript is open source. I've always felt every app should have a nice outliner built-in. Let's have fun!#

Thanks to Gruber, there's renewed interest in Little Outliner. I'd love to have an excuse to work more on its evolution. I have a series of steps in mind, but not enough of a user base to do it with. Gruber would be an excellent user to help drive development. Note that I did a fair amount of work on it earlier this year, adding a feature that I use every day, to grab all my tweets from the previous day. It's turned Twitter into a blogging tool for me, believe it or not. Pretty cool. #

BTW I should add a feature to LO2 that makes it possible for me to send the URL of an OPML file in a link and have it open in LO2. Might help people get the idea of what an outliner is. Heh. After I finish with Radio3. This is what I mean by "sexier and speculative" ideas. 💥#

Why work on Radio3 now? I've had it on my list for a long time. It's long overdue for an overhaul. I wrote it when I was new to JavaScript and didn't really understand the rules, it's a weird language and the browser is a very weird runtime environment. But I always seem to find something sexier and more speculative to work on. Programmers notoriously hate to clean up their messes. I'm no different. Then I had a Come to Jesus moment. I use Radio3 all day every day. I use it on my iPad and iPhone as well as my desktop. It does a lot of my Twitter posts, it's the Links tab on scripting.com, and the links section of the nightly email. It's an important piece of software. Staring me right in the face. Improving it could make everything better. And making it easier to work on the code means I could add improvements in the future. #

Future possible use for Manhattan. A huge museum for how a centralized economy and cultural system worked before all that was blown apart by the net and a virus.#

I'm starting to work on the UI of Radio3 now that the server issues seem settled. Logging my work here. Will get more formal later. #

We're going to start on the road out of racism in the US when intelligent, loving, courageous, driven and visionary people of all races decide to listen to each other and find things we can do that benefit everyone regardless of race, now -- immediately, not some time in the future. Not symbolic things, but stuff to save my life. #

Jason Calacanis writes: "Imagine if every day Trump and Pence did a data-lead briefing like NY Gov Cuomo did." Of course that the US government should be doing that. The Democrats could do it too, no imagination. Or a startup could. Hire a former head of the CDC, and do the hourlong briefing Cuomo did, a weather report for the virus, and make recommendations for business and people. Huge piece of blue sky here. JC is a risk-taking angel investor with experience in journalism. He would be a good person to do this. I wish someone would. We need it.#

A fantastic instance of save my life journalism. #

For the next few days Radio3 will be unreliable if the past couple of days are any indication. I'm retooling the server, and grappling with some mysterious problems. BTW, the reason I asked about a Hello World app for WordPress is that if there's an easy way to get WordPress support working again in Radio3, (the WP API changed some time back and broke Radio3 in this regard), I will. But I don't have time to do a deep-dive into the WordPress API at this time. #

In the meantime, I think I found what was screwing up my new server. nodeStorage has a feature, that by default is enabled, where it checks with the GitHub repository every 15 minutes and downloads changes. It doesn't restart the app, so you don't see the effect of changes until you restart. The apps are running in the new version of PagePark that has Forever integrated. The way it knows which JavaScript file to run is via the main attribute in package.json. Here's how this goes wrong. At some point, the app checks with GitHub, sees that its version of package.json is different from the on the repo, and downloads it, replacing the one I customized. Ooops. That version does not have a main attribute. So next time I launch PagePark, which I am doing a lot of these days as I debug it and add features, the nodeStorage-based apps don't run. Vexing little bug. The feature should probably default to off. Thing is, when you implement a clever feature like this you want it to default true. Then, years later it bites you in the ass. That my friends is the way programming works, when it doesn't work. 💥 #

In hindsight, it would have been smart if instead of starting the Space Force, the US had started the Health Force. #

Biden, who has suffered tragic loss in his life, and survived, may be the perfect president for 2021 and beyond as we deal with the wreckage of the two pandemics, Covid and Trump.#

This may be the last I write about Trump. Suppose Trump were a brilliant political strategist. On hearing of how awful the virus was, in January, he would have thought to himself, "I just won re-election." How could that be you ask? Simple. He waits a bit until it's obvious to the press that it's an emergency then he gives a big Oval Office speech announcing the emergency and what we're going to do. It's exaclty what the CDC says to do. "This is going to hurt," Trump reads off the teleprompter, "but we'll get through it together." Then guess where his approval rating would be? 95%. Because that's how it works. We rally behind the leader in a time of crisis, even a douchebag like Trump. Who is more dumb than a sack of nails. I'm sure one of his advisors saw this as a political gift. All Trump had to do was listen. #

Braintrust query: I'm looking for a good Node package for posting to WordPress and updating posts. Really simple stuff. A basic Hello World app in JavaScript. Any pointers much appreciated.#

My bet is that none of NBA, MLB, NFL or NHL have a season of any kind this year. The shit is about to hit the fan, not a second wave, but a second order wave.#

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting at the White House where they decided to try to nuke the Affordable Care Act once again. I just like to know where the depravity comes from, and were there any Russian commissars in the room giving the orders?#

Waiting for MSNBC's Steve Kornacki nightly "weather report" on Covid outbreaks around the country. Crosspost to YouTube, Twitter, where ever people watch videos. Both a public service and a competitive coup. Free advice from your friendly media hacker. Dave#

One thing I love about having an iPhone and a banking app is that I no longer have to drive to a bank to deposit a paper check. Progress.#

Everywhere you go people will tell you we don't like your type here. In my old neighborhood in Queens, they said it about Jews, when we moved in. Many years later, same neighborhood, it was Chinese and Koreans. In Ulster County it applies to people from NYC. It's bullshit.#

BTW, when the Chinese and Koreans moved in, the food got a lot better. Funny story. A few years ago my mother and I went out to eat at a popular Chinese dumpling place near Main St. The waiter asked if we were tourists. I said, no -- we're natives. 💥 #

Social media is a moral parade. All we've done is give voice to stupid.#

If you're anti-anti-fascist does that make you fascist?#

In 2012, Obama liked to say the Repubs drove our economy into a ditch, and the Dems would have to pull it out and dust everything off. This time, if Biden were to tell the honest total truth, the Repubs drove us off the cliff and not just the economy. #

Now is the moment when no incumbent Republican can fool themselves into believing that Trump isn't doing massive harm to America. They can lie, but every one of them without exception understands. #

Cuomo says the NYC subway is visibly cleaner. Is it? #

I haven’t had any interaction on my Facebook posts in the last week. No comments, no likes, nada. It’s like it just ended. The people are gone, or Facebook algorithm isn’t showing anyone my posts. Meanwhile it’s rock and roll on twitter and on my blog. Later: Well it turns out, I have been posting mostly-private messages on Facebook since May 23. Not sure how it happened but only a few people were seeing them. I just posted something public and it's as if the lights turned back on. Now I'm going back through the last months' posts and changing the privacy setting on them. Whew. #

Driving on the Masspike yesterday, going west, listening to the audiobook of the People's History, when a phone call comes in. Looks like spam so I don't answer. Then the car's audio, coming from my fully updated iPhone XS Max, via CarPlay switches over to the Podcast app, and plays an episode of The Daily podcast, an episode I didn't want listen to, and there's nothing I can do until I can stop the car and reactivate the Audible app, about 15 miles of driving. To be very clear, it should have resumed the book, which was interrupted, not start a podcast. This is the kind of software lunacy that never gets fixed. Next year they'll revamp the OS of the car, or the phone, or switch the processor, or get rid of iTunes or Cookie Dough or whatever, and more stuff will break, and the process will continue next year and the year after, and it will not have been worth it. At some point some adult will run Apple, someone who can't be bluffed on software, will tell the engineers to shut up and eat your vegetables, you can watch TV when you finish your homework. It's an analogy. You can figure it out. 🚀#

I had to drive today on the New York State Thruway, south of Albany. It was a long enough drive that I had to stop to use the facilities. I dreaded going into the rest stop. Happy to report that everyone, without exception, was wearing a mask. I had another thought, watching a woman walk her dog in the special area set aside for that. I thought geez if the dog can pee outside.#

I started reading People's History of America. It was just what I was looking for. After this, I want to read the equivalent book about the Jews in Europe. I have very little idea what that was about other than it was rough and didn't end well. ;-) #

Trillions will be spent by the US government in coming months to keep the country from crumbling. Do we use the money for big change, or do we settle for symbolic victories with most of the money going to the 1%. PS: IMHO the protests are a good sign.#

Braintrust query: I'm trying to catch the error in a Forever-managed app that caused it to restart. The error shows up when the app is run on its own. I want the same info when Forever is running it.#

Yesterday I linked to a Joni Mitchell song, Twisted -- not knowing it was a cover for a song written by Annie Ross. A reader, Richie B, sent me a link, and I like this version even better. Very sweet, jazzy. 💥#

I asked a friend who’s Jewish, as am I, how he’d feel if a statue of Hitler was in the middle of his town. He said it’s different. It’s not. Imagine, after surviving the war, getting your freedom, the people you lived with, who controlled the town you live in, celebrated your enslavers. #

The people who flirt with KKK tactics, use the intimidation of Jim Crow, we can’t cleanse their minds, but we can force them back into the shadows. Blacks are every bit as American as any of us. Stop worrying about the feelings of the evil people, start caring for their victims.#

My friend Enoch Choi, a brave doctor who risks his life to save people all over the world, reminds us that racist terms like Kung Flu, coming from the filthy mouth of our president, give permission to evil people among us to target Asian Americans. Unacceptable.#

Today is WWDC day, and announcements from Apple. My longtime friend Scott Love says Apple should focus on the user experience. I say it's even more basic. What matters to me is how broken everything is. Every day it seems my flow is stopped because I have to find a way around something someone broke that broke something else. Stop deprecating, stop changing, let’s spend a decade fixing breakage.#

I love fresh cherries. 🍒#

Idea for the WHO: sell individual memberships.#

BTW, I never made software for iOS. I remember clearly when I decided not to. The day they announced the iPhone. I was expecting it to run Mac software. I had a great scripting environment for the Mac. I thought this is it, the perfect platform for me. Then I heard it was going to be nothing like the perfect platform for me. Now, 14 years later, give or take, the big story in tech is that it's an awful platform for developers. Y'all should just read Scripting News. Save a lot of time. 💥#

Reboot journalism: Let the experts speak for themselves. Goodbye view from nowhere. #

Big story: The whole thing, politics, business, health care, journalism, a self-perpetuating mess that’s collapsing.#

If you want to feel good, watch a Dave Chappelle concert, or Stop Making Sense. They both totally rock, in different ways. #

The only reason we’re not in a declared war with Russia is the treason that put Trump in office. What Russia did certainly was an act of war.#

This. This is how you do political advertising. You are watching history here folks. Pay attention. #

A bug in journalism is that it tries to put people in boxes. Your ideas only have value if you have credentials to back them up. This method makes reporters easily replaced by algorithms, and keeps us from hearing the most interesting even eclectic idea stimulating ideas. Of course no one in journalism will hear this because heh I lack the proper credentials. #

Season 3 of Westworld sucked.#

Observation: The US, not just Trump, wants to be distracted from the terror of the virus. Fact: We're so crazy we actually create events to help it spread faster. Action required: Pay more attention to the WHO and less to the antics of the US government.#

The WHO had something to say that we all must hear, but they didn't get much coverage. We were all too busy focusing on Trump's shenanigans, as always. There should be a daily briefing with Dr Fauci, broadcast on all channels, treated as news, I don't care if he has to quit the government to do it. The WHO message is this -- the virus is spinning up to a new level, and it's going to cost us hugely to get it to quiet back down. This has to be said clearly and repeatedly with authority. In America the only one who can do that is Fauci. Without Trump, obviously. Maybe Wolf Blitzer, who clearly has a rapport with Fauci should take a leave from CNN to be his partner in this. #

Before yesterday's rally in Tulsa, TikTok Teens and K-pop fans organized to spam the registration page. So they had 800K signups, with room for only 19K fans. Only 4 million live in Oklahoma. So the numbers were fishy. Even so the Trump campaign hyped them. They seem to have believed them. They must've wanted to. Ethan Zuckerman says it was activism, it was, and it's surprising how well it worked. #

I can't get this song out of my head. "What's so strange when you know that you're a wizard at three? I knew that this was meant to be."#

You don't learn the most from your parents until they leave you.#

There ought to be an amendment. As soon as an incumbent president tries to fire a US Attorney investigating him, he leaves office, and is automatically indicted for obstruction of justice. No bail. It's an admission of guilt, like taking the fifth.#

I went to grade school in Queens, not far from where Trump grew up. There were bullies in sixth grade who were more sophisticated and mature than our president. #

On GitHub, Sergey Ponomarev explains why he thinks JSON Feed was a bad idea. I wrote similar pieces in 2019 and 2017.#

The episode on Reconstruction of Radio Open Source is a must-listen, esp the interview with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. I got goosebumps listening to her, and at the end I was fistbumping YES out loud on my bike ride. We are close to breaking through. The pandemic presents a huge opportunity for change that must not be wasted. Working together is required. I say something she didn't, white people will never know what it's like to be black, but we can work together, we must, we will. #

I started to record a voicemail to Om about his recent piece about Dropbox (it's short, you should read it before listening) but I kept going on, so I decided to make it a podcast. 13 minutes. #

Today was the last Cuomo briefing, and the end of the Cuomo podcast. Thanks to Richard Bluestein for doing the audio. Learned a lot from it, and also got to listen to some good leadership. I wonder who's going to fill the void. I hope the Democrats see there's a vacuum, maybe they could get Dr Fauci to do something like what the Governor was doing. Or a former head of the CDC? We need a trusted source of advice and scientific info to keep going. Not just in New York, but around the country, and elsewhere. #

It's crazy. If everyone in America wore a mask, within a few weeks there would be no more new infections. We can't get that simple idea through the skulls of people who are entranced by the orange blob tweeting from the sub-basement of the White House.#

I tried the new Twitter voice tweet feature. 140 seconds. #

With Twitter's new voice tweet feature, i'd like a very simple way to post a voice message to an RSS feed. I can help with this. I have lots of working code for dealing with feeds, as you might imagine. Let's make podcasts super easy for the people.#

The next Lincoln project ad. China and Trump. #

Black neighborhoods must get the same service as white neighborhoods. Very simple.#

White people are never going to understand what it's like to be black. But we can listen, empathize, and try to do what they ask us to do to help. That would be success imho. Last night Ari Melber asked a panel what victory looks like. It's a good idea for everyone to ask and answer that question. Let's find common goals and work together to achieve them. You have to figure out what needs to change to make America safe for blacks. We can help. One of the big lessons of the 1619 podcast was that the struggles of blacks for equality gave us all greater guarantees. This will happen again and again. But we must not waste the opportunity.#

I’d like to do a new server-side JavaScript environment that’s compatible with Node, ie runs Node apps, no breakage, but it also eliminates the need for callbacks, promises or async/await. I believe it’s technically possible.#

I heard that Hey doesn't support standard email protocols and is not file format compatible with GMail. Is this true? What is their protocol like? How do you get your data out if you decide to switch? Can you? #

I'm thinking of providing free email too. No code written yet, but I do have the domain reserved. Heh.#

The Lincoln Project is going to win the Pulitzer for campaign snark. I want to know is that really Sir David Attenborough? #

Every once in a while, Siri in my back pocket says "Sorry I couldn't hear what you said." I didn't say anything. Or my Alexa says it doesn't recognize my voice, would I like to register. It was Andrew Cuomo talking in a YouTube video. Little unforseen consequences. It's like being in an episode of Westworld. I'm sure it's already happened that the two have had conversations, being confused about what the other said. #

In the piece below I mention the two local papers in Madison in the 70s. I remember their names as the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State-Urinal. One of my roommates put that in my head. #

I'd love to get a picture of Neal Katyal's study as he appeared yesterday on Ari Melber. It looks like the room of someone who spends all his time online and in his mind. I recognize it, I've existed in such a space as long as it's been possible. Also the interview with Fauci with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday which by luck I watched live. They've known each other a long time, clearly are friends. Blitzer asked him a personal question, Fauci answered. He said he spends all his time writing emails. He puts so much in, and he must have so much frustration, given how badly we're doing, and how he's prevented from speaking. I keep wondering if we, online media tech makers, couldn't do more to help him communicate, given the limits of TV.#

I was a paper boy as a kid. I had a route. I delivered Long Island Star-Journals to neighbors in Flushing on my bike. I was emulating the net. Very slowly. #

I missed the anniversary again. 18 years ago yesterday, I quit smoking. The number of cigarettes I've had since, zero. Not one. Yet I still sometimes dream that I'm a smoker, buying packs of Marlboro Lights on the sly, feeling guilty that I'm lying to my friends when secretly I'm still a smoker. I quit smoking because the arteries on my heart were so clogged that they didn't work anymore. I had to get blood vessels from my legs and chest transplanted to bypass the blockages. These continue to work to this day, keeping me alive, riding my bike, writing software and blog posts that seem to make some people happy and piss other people off but are ignored by almost everyone. Makes sense. Anyway, I wrote something on my blog a few days after I quit. "I figured something out in the hospital. I'm the kind of person who likes to solve problems by smoking. How do I know this? Because every time my mind encounters a problem it says "OK, I'll just have a cigarette then." I bet a lot of other cigarette smokers deal with problems the same way. Now that I don't smoke, I still have the idea that smoking will help me deal with problems. It's funny, one part of my brain has figured out that this is wrong (in fact smoking causes more problems than it solves) but a deeper part of my brain still believes it. This leads to some funny arguments inside my brain. But so far so good. I got to go through the worst of the withdrawal in a hospital where there was no possibility of smoking, and now the craving seems manageable. No doubt other people have smoking stories to tell. I was one of the lucky ones, I survived to tell my story. So far so good."#

This is the week when it all falls apart for Trump.#

A podcast about how I merged PagePark with Forever. A few weeks ago I did a podcast where I explained how the pieces came together for Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s. I was thinking about that then because a similar thing was happening with PagePark and Forever. I was putting the two together and had an aha moment where the pieces snapped together. PagePark has a very simple idea of what a website is, it's a sub-folder of the domains folder. The name of the sub-folder is the domain that maps to that content. The aha was realizing that you could also put a Node app, to be managed by Forever, which is a package you can integrate into an app, in one of those folders too. Not only did it work at a technical level, but it also provides Frontier-like integration. It's very nice. I've been managing apps in this little world for a couple of weeks now. #

A random screen shot for docs I'm writing. This is what a table for the command line tool I wrote for PagePark displays. It's equivalent to the table that Forever displays at the command line. #

I read that GitHub is going to get rid of the concept of master for repositories because it's a reference to slavery. According to their docs, "By default your repository has one branch named master which is considered to be the definitive branch." A search of github.com finds a lot of uses of the word master. And in the rest of the world, there are master bedrooms and master's degrees. Courts appoint special masters. There are a lot of synonyms in the thesaurus. #

The consensus from yesterday's query is that adding promises to JavaScript wasn't much of a gain. Some people find promises more readable. There are some problems that are unwieldy with callbacks that are simpler with promises. There are already packages that have cast aside callbacks and only use promises in their APIs. If I need to use those packages I will use their promises-based API. No choice. My two cents. I wouldn't have supported this addition to the language. I much prefer tech that adds functionality in a clear understandable way. I would prefer if we could put our effort into (for example) making Dropbox work on Linux. Everywhere you look systems we depend on are in disrepair. It's like the way NYC worked when I was in high school. Burned out neighborhoods that people still live in. At some point you have to start thinking about the size and shape of the community you're serving and focus on making the language work better, not making it more complex. I still think there should be a JavaScript option to bury the synchronization functionality in the runtime, and let people write code in the natural way they do in pretty much every other language. Why JavaScript is different is something I've never heard a good answer to.#

I'm guessing Trump's Tulsa rally won't happen, because as the next week progresses, the numbers are going to start rising more steeply from all the new unprotected activity. We're going to hit this wall many times before we're ready for the long haul. Even MAGAs will get the message.#

There's going to be hunger and homelessness, soon, and the virus isn't going to spike -- that's wishful thinking. It's more likely the curve is going to go up and up and up, getting steeper all the time, until we stop the party and get serious about saving lives. Let's find ways to help each other. Black lives mattering can help save all our lives. We're all in the same boat now, believe me. The police may loom large as the biggest problem, but imho, they are far from the biggest problem. That's the virus, and the broken political system. We have to work together. That's the only way out. #

Health care is a #BLM issue. With all the trillions the US government is going to spend in the next year trying to keep the economy alive, we could use part of that money to convert the American health care system to a single-payer, no more paying the insurance industry their unearned cut. #

Republicans are desperate to whip up fear of something, anything, that seems more dangerous than Covid-19 actually is. They could, instead, embrace the actual disaster, and you know, as the governing party, help save American lives. #

Perhaps it should be illegal for a company to own both a search engine and a web browser, esp if they dominate. They might try to take full possession of something that belongs to the public.#

Poll: Is Trump the worst-of-species choice for POTUS?#

Do you want to return to normal? Normal was pretty fucked up. Normal got us here.#

The Lincoln Project does to Trump what Trump did to his 2016 adversaries. Thank heavens someone did this. The Democrats are terrible at being nasty. For that you need a Republican. #

What if after journalism purges all the unacceptable points of view there’s nothing left but baby pandas and such.#

I think the #BLM protests will become more substantial as the hardships of the virus get deeper. In the US, for example, the rent moratoria are expiring. Unemployment subsidies as well. Hunger and homelessness will explode as unemployment did in March and April.#

It may be time for fractional horsepower social networks.#

I got an email from The Correspondent this morning, the first communication since they disappeared. I contributed $25 so I could find out what contributors got. Did it ever amount to anything? TheC didn't make sense, didn't come close to earning the universal acclaim it got, or the money they raised from the people. They claimed they would open a new kind of news org in America, and when they met their money-raising goal said that was never their intention. The problem with snake oil pitches like The Correspondent, aside from the fact that they're dishonest, is that they suck resources away from ideas that might actually make news work better. This happened repeatedly in tech. A famous successful tech entrepreneur claims to have found a breakthrough, and the press gets all excited. It sucks up all the money and attention that might have gone to products that could really have helped, and then they do it again and again. People should be suspicious of grand claims, no matter who is making them. And if you, an analyst, really think you've found The One, you should get opinions from friends before you stake your rep on it. #

The other day I wrote a short definition of blogging, including a word I suspect not a lot of bloggers would use -- fluid. To me the process of writing on your blog, if it isn't fluid, it isn't doing its job. By fluid I mean this. I have an idea. Count the steps before the idea appears on your blog and how complex the steps are. The more steps the more likely you'll lose your way, and find it hard to get back to what you were doing. You respond by skipping it altogether next time, the idea is lost. You can engineer fluidity, the same way you can optimize for other attributes. But most blogging software doesn't imho even try. #

Twitter btw is quite fluid. That's one of the things I like most about it. But it has severe limits on what it can do.#

I've been listening to Cuomo's daily briefing on a pretty regular basis, and enjoying them. Maria DeCotis' dramatizations of his talks, which I just discovered last night, are LOL funny. Taking Sarah Cooper's classic parodies of Trump to the next level. #

I don't think any of us from previous generations of tech can say what the current leaders should do, because the scope today is so much bigger. We don't have more experience with today's medium than they do. #

It's good that the market corrected. Otherwise it was saying something pretty horrific. That the economy will just sail along with huge unemployment, hunger, disease and death.#

Lakoff says "defund the police" is a terrible slogan. As I've said myself. Black Lives Matter is brilliant. Impossible to disagree with. But even if you endorse defund the police, you have to immediately explain that isn't literally what it means. #

On Twitter, a question. Name something that your mother cooked that was your favorite. At first I was going to reply my mother wasn't a very great cook, but then I remembered. She sent us, my brother and I, cookies at summer camp. They were the best things ever.#

One of my servers was down at least since midnight. Sorry if you've had trouble reaching LO2 and many of the static sites. Operator error. #

I found the patio lounge chairs I want. Reasonably priced. Sturdy. Attractive. Only problem is they take a long time to get here. 8 weeks. By that time summer will almost be over. (Update: My friend Peter Politi found the chairs on the Lowe's website at a good price for delivery in 8 days. Problem solved.)#

Feature request for Twitter.#

Beatles: Revolution.#