My least favorite thing is people explaining why they unsub from your feed. I don't care. I have a motto. "Don't slam the door on the way out." That way you know you really are going in peace, vs the passive-aggressive control freakery you're actually practicing. Now suppose for the sake of argument, I try to make you happy and dump every political idea I have. Great. You're happy. You feel powerful. But then someone else wants me to stop writing about tech ideas that come to me, because it makes them feel inferior because last week I posted one they didn't understand. Keep going, eventually there's nothing left here. So, I've been doing this for over 25 years. By now I've heard from every control freak on the planet. Heh probably not, but it feels that way. #Here's a great Bloomberg ad about Trump and the military. If the Dems had run ads like this in 2016, Trump would be a Fox News analyst today, like Sarah Palin. #
I got a couple of reports from people who use the Mail app on iPhones to read the nightly email. The contents of the mail only fills a portion of the window horizontally. I am able to reproduce the problem here. Apparently previously it filled the space. I've started a thread to gather info about this. I don't know how to debug this, but I will try. #
Yesterday, I included the video of Dale Bumpers' speech at the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, but it wasn't displayed by some of the email clients. Here's a link to the video on C-SPAN. #
- We, as a world, should build one great venue for summer olympics and one for winter. Why? Mostly symbolic. To say to the world, to ourselves, decisively, that we can work together, and compromise, for the benefit of humanity and the planet. #
- Think about it this way, we don't build a new United Nations every four years.#
- Further, no more spectacular displays of carbon consumption. Those made sense 127 years ago, at the dawn of electricity tech. Now it's rubbing salt in the wound. And it makes clear that we can and will sacrifice for our survival.#
- Specifically, no more Christmas trees. And turn down the lights in Times Square. You can't air condition the outdoors. (In NYC amazingly, there are places that do.) #
- Symbolism first, change the way people think, shock people out of their sense of normalcy, then rebuild our civilization around the new low-carbon-emission ethos. You can tell your children and grandchildren that you remember a day when we built a new temporary city every two years for a two week athletic competition, and never used it again.#
So far people seem to like the RSS version of the nightly email. I don't like the way it looks in readers, and I want more features, but if that's where some people want to read my stuff, of course I'm happy. The important thing is that you read, listen and watch (and think of course). #
An idea for a recurring sketch on a comedy show. Two actors, one plays a Trump supporter. Someone who speaks like an actual Trumper, who says things that echo what's said on Fox. Vary the gender, where they're from, etc. Each time, they discuss current events with an actor who is not a Trump supporter, serious, plays it straight. Now here's where it gets interesting. The Trump supporter realizes how wrong it was to support Trump. They do something to demonstrate that they see the light. Remember, they're actors. It's scripted. So the outcome is always the same. I would love to watch this, just for the release. Also it would really piss off Trump supporters, which is an extra bonus. Worth trying maybe on SNL or the Daily Show.#
I keep hearing that the outcome of The Trial of Trump is either acquit or remove, but there's a third possibility that we should prepare for. He might not be removed but is not acquitted either. Say the vote is 55 to convict vs 45 to acquit. He remains president, but a majority of the Senate voted to remove him. That's not a win. It shakes his tree. "Keep fucking with us and maybe lose some more support in the Senate and maybe next time we have enough votes to put you out." Before you say that's not going to happen, it might. The Repubs are at least as savvy as we are (heh, we're babes in the woods compared to McConnell), and know that some of their senators come from purple states like Maine, Colorado and Arizona. And there may be other senators who may want to vote to convict because they're more independent, like Romney, Murkowski and Alexander, for example. The Repubs have room to help some of those senators without giving up ten more months of stacking the courts with unqualified Republicans. They might want to send a signal to El Presidenté that the US isn't quite his banana republic yet. It's not an impossible outcome. It's all negotiable in politics. #BTW, to Wikipedia's mistaken claim that a columnist gave podcasting its name, look at this Google Trends graph. See where the graph starts to climb? That's Sept 2004, when we gave what we were doing the name podcasting.#
I just did a transition on instantoutliner.com. Complete rewrite of the server from top to bottom. I want to do a bunch of development work here, so I had to have a clean foundation. The previous version was last updated in 2016, so it was using the old technology. If you published an outline in the last few days, I might have lost the link to it. It shouldn't have happened but it did. And thanks again to Doc Searls for helping be the other side of users and developers party together. It's the formula that works.#I hear that some Republican senators actually listened to the evidence against the president yesterday. #
- Have you ever seen the closing argument in the Clinton impeachment by former Senator Dale Bumpers? If not it's a treat, you deserve it, it gives an idea of how trials bring out amazing things in people. #
# - Having served jury duty twice, once through deliberations to a verdict, I was really impressed at how deep random people from all walks of life can go, given an opportunity to get immersed in understanding other humans. I sense a bit of that starting to happen here. It's not imho in any way a foregone conclusion what will come out of this.#
- It's also interesting, listening to the Bumpers speech, I hadn't listened to it in a a long time, how much this impeachment must hurt for Hillary Clinton. No one gave a shit about her in the Clinton impeachment, yet Bumpers does touch on it. And now she's a subject of controversy again because she dared to say what she actually thinks about Bernie Sanders.#
- A longtime friend Dan Conover isn't watching the impeachment, arguing basically there's no new information, but I think he's making a mistake. You could say the same about going to see a historic play like Hamilton. You know the outcome, so why pay the huge price in money and time to go see it. Because something other than information is transmitted.#
Getting back on track podcast-wise after our brief brush with politics. I explain in this 25-minute cast what I'm doing here and why I value the connection with Doc. It's all about creating a groove with smart people so we can keep innovating. We used to call it (as I'm sure Doc remembers) "users and developers party together." I thrive off collaboration with people such as Doc. I provide examples of other times I've benefited from the insights of others to create new uses for networks. #The nightly email is available as an RSS feed. However I'm sure it's going to look pretty awful because, unlike email, RSS readers don't allow us to include styles. I could of course add the style definitions to the source namespace, where I've put my customizations. If you're an RSS user, give it a try and let me know. #
I was spooked last night by how much Jeffries conveys "Obama." The 8th Congressional District of New York. #
This is amazing. I read a story at the NY Post saying Fairway is filing for Chapter 7. It's a much-loved grocery chain in NYC. I posted a link on Facebook, because I know a few people who go there and got a link to a Twitter post from the company saying they're fine, no plans to shut down. Can't wait to find out what happened here. #
Last night's emails went out late. Sorry. A glitch in the system. This time it was my software, not detecting an error and re-trying. It may be time for a revision to the mail-sending software. #
- First the government insists that Apple help police to access the data on encrypted phones. This is already underway. Then, the next steps:#
- A new app from the US government manages your identity and social credit. It's like a passport and wallet in one.#
- You can't quit or uninstall it.#
- You can't turn off location services or its access to the microphone and camera.#
- You will use it to vote. #
- It's required that you carry it at all times. Charged.#
- The new luxury accommodations will be in the rare parts of the world where there is no internet access. You can go to these places to rendezvous with forbidden friends and lovers.#
- The new national anthem: Back in the USSR. 💥#
Doc's oddcast on what comes after the Repubs acquit. I will respond forthwith. Doc did the outline. #And my retort to Doc. I cover a lot of ground, tying together all the threads on Scripting News. We're headed to a China/Soviet Union type government in the US. Tech will make it so much easier. Doc was right there will be a lot of angst about all this. But forget the election, and forget Congress. It's over. He not only will be able to ignore the Constitution, he also has Barr, who is infinitely more useful to Trump than Sessions. But unlike everyone else, I don't take it as a given that the Repubs will acquit. They must see the danger. What if a majority vote to convict, but not enough to remove him. That's a third outcome no one seems to consider. #
Just tuned into a discussion on NPR that failed to take into account that the president was caught trying to steal the election. If you don't consider that, of course waiting for the election sounds more reasonable.#
Re posting a nightly digest in the RSS feed. Been down that road in other contexts. Feed readers are so inconsistent, the result would be garbage for many if not most people. The platform is good at doing what it does, and that's it. The developers aren't listening. Also it wasn't easy to find an email format that works well enough across email clients, and it still looks mangled for some people. Email has only been an approximation of what works.#
Play it out. The Repubs acquit Trump tomorrow. What then?#
The Dershowitz Defense is the only thing between Trump and eviction. Is it enough of a fig leaf for Romney, Collins and the other so-called Republican moderates?#
In the voting booth we can be true to ourselves even if we can't speak up in public. You have to be careful about creating resentment in your campaign. You might not be able to hear it until it's too late.#
What voters want is incredibly simple. They want to know you hear them. How to show? Say what they say the way they say it. Do that well and you've got the vote. #
When Republicans say the Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the beginning, the truth is that the American voters elected a Democratic Congress specifically so they would impeach Trump. BTW, Trump lost the last election, in 2018, despite having a huge advantage due to gerrymandering. #
There's a folder on scripting.com called rssArchive. It has a lot of files in it going back to 2000. They all appear to be RSS files. I have no recollection how these files were created. But it might be interesting to have a look to see how my RSS support may have changed at times. #
If you've ever been to dinner with me, you know that I almost always ask What's The Song? Well, I have an answer for that. #
- I like that the NYT endorsed Amy Klobuchar. I think she is the right choice for president, as I've written here before. "She's young, but not too young. A liberal who presents as a moderate. Thoughtful. Doesn't shoot from the hip."#
- They also endorsed Elizabeth Warren, who imho can't get in touch with most of America, for a lot of reasons. A video convinced me, she would not be a good president. A good senator, a good Secretary of the Treasury, a Harvard professor? Yes, but she writes off 1/2 the electorate in a snipe that lucky for her didn't get a lot of coverage. Also there's this incident, that proved that she's a Democrat as much as Biden, Clinton or Obama, and in not a good way. #
- A president must be of all the people, not just women or men. We've seen what happens with a president who doesn't get that. Warren, while smart, and determined, is not a leader. Klobuchar still has a way to go before she's confident enough to lead. But she has a lot of things right, and she's tough and from the center of the country, and that's symbolic and important. #
- And this is the year we need a woman president, to balance four years of having a very anti-woman president. But not someone who will undo the past by re-doing it in the inverse. We need all hands on deck to recover from the various crises that confront us. #
- The NYT had a line about Sanders that I knew but had forgotten. His plan for change is this: Magic! He has such a personality that everyone, once he's elected, will get behind him. It's what teenage boys dream of when they grow up to hit a walk-off home run to win the World Series. The acclaim, the wonder, such a good boy! Well it would never be like that for Bernie. He's got a character only a few people like, and many can't tolerate. I have always disliked him, think he's shallow and just plain wrong. What an awful president he'd make, something we'll never see because a cranky old Jewish socialist could not get elected president of the United States. He would be the McGovern of 2020, but at least McGovern was a nice guy.#
When I speak of the limits of RSS, I'm including the limits of reader apps. For many years I've been reluctant to do that. They mostly have conformed to rules set by the now-defunct Google Reader, and by norms set by previous readers, including my own. Unfortunately there's no way to change the behavior of readers. I've tried, in small ways, they just won't budge (or even listen). It's not just mishandling of untitled posts, posts can't be updated and there's more I don't want to go into now. #- The net-net is this: even if I could influence what the reader apps do, they would still be the wrong way to read my blog! #
- If you are just reading my blog through RSS, it would be really hard for you to understand this. Subscribe to the nightly email. Read it from top to bottom once a day, instead of in fragments published through the day. This is the way my blog was always meant to be read. I think I was a bit too willing to compromise, in hindsight. #
- Some correspondents have said RSS isn't wrong. Of course not. I love RSS. I played a big role in its creation. But it's 20-plus years later now, and the limits shouldn't be permanently insurmountable. A re-think is way past overdue. #
- Keep using RSS. Bless you. I use it too. Look at my rivers. I check them many times a day. But my blog is fresh and new and works the way I like, and I get to change anything about it I want, and if you read my blog through RSS you aren't getting it. That really bothers me. #
- No more limits imposed by others or history. That was the epiphany of 2017, and it continues. #
We are at a terrible moment. Until Trump was impeached and the articles delivered to the Senate, there was always something more to do. But this is the end. Trump, post-acquittal, will be the monarch, in control of a hugely powerful military, economy and lest we forget it, the people who make up all this power, Americans. With new tricks the Chinese are working on, and no doubt Silicon Valley is as well, quietly, an American monarch will be all-powerful, able to reach into personal relationships in ways the Soviet Union couldn't dream of. If by some miracle the Senate votes to turn back, then we will have just barely dodged a bullet. But it seems more likely we're going straight into the fire without even trying to hit the brakes. #A couple of worthwhile podcasts. Brian Lehrer's Impeachment podcast is the adult version of what you hear on cable news. It still focuses on process and horse races but it goes into more detail, Lehrer has a sharp mind, and is a great interviewer, so you learn more. And Planet Money, always good, has a piece on privacy and billboards. I kept wanting to show them their own story about social credit in China. No longer are the concerns about privacy theoretical and narrow. It's definitely coming to the US. #
I was corrected yesterday when I used the word exonerate in a tweet. People felt acquit was the correct term for what happens if Trump is absolved (heh another verb) by the Senate. The thesaurus thinks they're synonyms btw. Another verb would be annointed, because no doubt a decree will follow from King Trump I (his new title, no sarcasm) requiring everyone to say nice things about him, or their charge cards won't work to buy groceries. See also social credit an innovation of the Chinese. #
They're still arguing on Twitter about which word is correct. This is one of the saddest comments about what Americans were thinking about as our Reichstag was burning. Is the correct verb burning? I think enflamed was closer. #How to defend against phishing. Stop and think if you’re granting access to your Google account, for example, and ask yourself how did I get here? If it wasn’t an operation you initiated, if you clicked on a link to get there, you probably don’t want to grant access.#
Maybe the solution to the paywall model is daily subscriptions. I pay $1 to read Vanity Fair for today only. Tomorrow it's the New Yorker. Use my browser wallet to pay.#
You'll know we're totally over the line when congressional Democrats are arrested and tried for impeaching the Trump. #
I've been having a big change of thinking re RSS.#- In 1999, I compromised. I wanted journalism and blogging to share a common format. So I ditched the format I designed and accepted Netscape's adaptation in its place, to create unity. And it worked, it was the level playing field I had hoped for. Blogging and journalism both thrived in RSS. But at a price. #
- The price was forcing blogs into the same format that news orgs used. Problem is, as we can see clearly with Twitter, that format isn't the only one. As Twitter discovered, its style of writing doesn't fit into the model of RSS. People were disappointed when they stopped publishing tweets via RSS. But this was the right thing to do, in hindsight. It wasn't working.#
- I turned a corner in 2017 with my blog. I realized then, though I wouldn't have put it this way, the price I paid by merging formats with Netscape was too great. It forced blogging into the title-description-body model of journalism. But blog posts are more free-form, they don't all fit into that structure. #
- So now I'm thinking about what I could have done differently in 1999, if I had evolved my syndication format the way my blog wanted to go, not the way RSS pushed us. #
There was a great New Yorker article in September 2016 that laid out what a Trump presidency would be like. We need to do that again. We're staring at the next level. What if Trump succeeds at fully taking over the government? What if he's acquitted? What will that be like?#
Now that I've said it, RSS really is not a good way to read my blog. The right way is to wait until the day is over and read all of it from top to bottom. That's the way I put it together. It's a daily cycle thing. For now subscribe to the email. We may need a new kind of reader that doesn't have the limits of email (I'm well aware of them, having written my own email distribution software) and RSS (ditto). #I've heard a dozen reports about the mystery of how Parnas's friend knew the ambassador's movements and no one has said it could be because someone hacked her Google account via phishing. You don't have to infiltrate the embassy to do that.#
Plot for a scifi book. An alien race from a faraway galaxy visits earth. We know they're coming and where they'll land. When they show up, they walk by the humans and greet the dogs. Turns out dogs are the master species of earth. And of course the aliens are canines as well.#
People are cackling over the design of the Space Force uniform. Why do they need camouflage in space? Obviously it's not really a priority. I'm a big believer in prior art, and there's an obvious choice here. License the design of the Star Trek uniforms from whoever owns them. It has the advantage of looking vaguely futuristic, and it makes Star Trek downright prescient. That is if the Space Force ever amounts to anything. #
Doc's podcast for the day. This time he has a public outline with notes. I'm going to do some work on the outline reader. Creating a groove. I updated the outline reader software to hot-up his links, to make it a bit more readable on a big screen, and a lot more readable on mobile devices. It's been a long time since I touched that code, I actually had a hard time finding it. 😄#The best way to experience my blog these days is via email, not RSS. That's not the last word, but right now that's where we're at. That goes for my podcasts too believe it or not. #
If I ask you to post something you wrote on Facebook on your blog, so I can point to it, it's because I thought you said something interesting, and I'd like to share it through my blog and feed, but I can't share Facebook posts outside of Facebook. I have a rule about that, and I rarely break the rule. Lots of reasons for it. #
I really liked Jojo Rabbit, even though it got mixed reviews. You start out wondering what the hell they're doing, but in the end it's a good simple little story that has a lot of meaning. A sort of lite version of Handmaid's Tale. I really liked that Rebel Wilson was in it, a good fit, as was the chief Gestapo guy, and Jojo's best friend. What's not to like? #
Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”#
Dan MacTough answers yesterday's query. Add
disown -a after the nohup call. I'm testing it and so far it works.#Who ever thought that titles, or the lack thereof, would be the end of blogging? As they say god works in mysterious ways. Also, it's even worse than it appears. 💥#
I must've done something terribly wrong because there's a symposium in NYC in February about how to keep the silos from taking ownership of podcasting, and I don't know any of the speakers. How are we ever going to get anywhere if we don't work together? Oy.#
Neat new trick in my blog. When I generate links to titled posts, I put the title in the link, after the question mark in the URL. Example. The browser ignores it, as does the JavaScript code in the page. It's there to provide a human-readable title for the post. You might ask, why not just make the title the link? We did that, for many years, but then you couldn't change the title, or the URL would get out of sync with the title. It's more honest imho to just give each post a URL that is not a function of the title. But it's still nice to have the title present. So there you go, a neat solution and an honorable tradeoff. #
Speaking as an authority on the subject of bagels, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a toasted bagel. In fact unless I'm eating a freshly baked bagel, and that's pretty rare these days, I toast them. The warmth of toasting brings out some of the flavor of the bagel when it was fresh. #- However I cannot sanction whole wheat bagels. Why? Bagels are not hippie food. Sesame, onion, everything, these are my go-to flavors. The only thing worse than whole wheat is a cinnamon raisin breakfast bagel. Please. #
- My favorite bagel place is on Utopia Parkway in Whitestone, near where I grew up in Flushing. Neighborhood bagel stores are best. I've tried all the famous supposedly best bagels in NYC and imho they aren't bagels, they have more in common with loaves of bread. A bagel shouldn't be so large. Worst offender -- Ess-A-Bagel. #
- Give me a fresh bagel with cream cheese and lox and maybe a slice of cucumber and bit of onion, capers on the side, with a cup of fresh coffee and Uncle Davey is a happy camper. #
Now is the time for me to respond via podcast to Doc. 28 minutes which seems to be the default length of one of these voicemailcasts. I don't mind vacuous platitudes. Wilt Chamberlain. My first winter in the country. There was no 3-point play when WC was playing. Here's the epic James Harden 3-pointer. If you shove the microphone into someone's face they don't have time to get nervous. Maps. I loved maps when I was a kid, and miss them terribly because of iPhones. Hillary's Emails and how the know-how of literally millions of people didn't influence journalism. Any one of these people could have helped, but journalism somehow didn't figure it out. Why can't universities do things? University is a 7-by-24 conference center. Fargo. Alex Jones and Shorenstein. The speaker whose name I couldn't remember was Bruce Sterling. Sorry man. More about creating a groove. First you become a habit, then you become an example, and that's a groove. #BTW no one or anything is going to "awaken" the Trump base. That's not how it works. When friends are in a bad marriage, one day you hear they're breaking up, you saw it coming but if you had tried to "awaken" them, they would have kicked your ass for butting in.#
There ought to be a TV show entitled What's The Scam!? Contestants compete to design a scam that explains mysterious Trump behavior. For example, Mnuchin gets to loot the Secret Service in return for not disclosing Trump's travel expenses. #
Braintrust query: I thought that if I run an app detached using nohup, that if I quit the terminal window, or my desktop system powers off, the app would continue to run. It doesn't. #
I should do a this.how piece on how to use my RSS feeds.#
I finished watching all three seasons of the Fargo TV series. I can't recommend it highly enough. I started to talk about it in the podcast coming out later today, but didn't finish the analogy. The hottest place in the US is always Death Valley. Every day. So when they report the highest temperature on weather reports, they're telling you the place with the second highest temperature because it would just get boring to always say Death Valley. I think that may be how it works for TV series. Fargo is the best, hands down, nothing compares. It's incredibly funny the way Quentin Taratino movies are, or Itchy and Scratchy, it's filled with Easter eggs, and until you watch it twice (at least) you won't see the connections between the characters. For example, in Season 1, two of the main characters were also in Season 2, but it took place 25 years earlier. And there are echoes of the Fargo movie. So I often say The Wire is the best. What I really mean is it's second best. Fargo is, until further notice, the best thing on TV.#
Every once in a while I put out a tweet that gets forwarded a lot. This might be one of them. Trump has always reminded me of famous Jewish comedians. He borrows bits from Joan Rivers, Don Rickles and this clip reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield, with his self-deprecating humor. He talks about his hair as being magnificent. Everyone in the room must realize his hair is bizarre and ugly. He'd look a lot better if he just got a normal haircut for a bald 73-year-old guy. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? Does he still see the young Donald, or does he see the old fool the rest of us see. Of course the press helps sell his buffoonery. It's our way of laughing at ourselves. Look what the great USA has been reduced to. We used to see ourselves as Uncle Sam, now we look in the mirror and see Bozo the Clown. #
Doc's next cast. The quote he was looking for is "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." Maybe I don't get what you're trying to do Doc. But I actually think we're talking about the same thing. So glad Doc is using LO2. Esquire's Doubious Achievement Awards. Yes! Doc is going to watch Fargo. If this were in Iowa it would be a state park. (His house in Santa Barbara.) You can see 25 million people from the top of Mt Wilson. #
One more thing for Doc re LO2. If your outline is something you want to share with me and the other people listening to your podcasts, it's pretty easy. In the File menu choose Get public link. It will confirm that you want to make the outline public. Then a dialog will appear with a link to a page on instantoutliner.com. Copy that link, view it in the browser, send it to whoever you want to share it with. If you send it to me, I'll post it on Scripting News. Now any changes you make in your outline will be reflected immediately for everyone who's watching it. #
My voicemailcast response to Doc's last. Doc, stay with the Voice Memo app on your iPhone. It's like using the iPhone as your default camera. It fits in your pocket. It's probably there when you have an idea. Here's the link to fat tweets. A pitch for Fargo the TV show. Doug Engelbart and the tech he carried with him. Shedding projects. David Bunnell's story. My grandmother. Creating a groove. #On Twitter all partisanship is fake, until further notice.#
With all the michegas about Bernie and Warren, here's what I think. My friends, they're both perfectly awful choices for president. Bernie is still living in the 60s. He has no ideas about the world as it exists today. Ask him. Second, Warren is a Harvard professor. She's not of the people. She's more comfortable in the faculty lunchroom, making snide jokes about the little people. They're both incredibly terrible choices to run the country starting in 2021. Neither will get done what they say they will, that will require team-building skills which neither have, and compromise, which means you have to listen. Even Obama, a relatively young person, was totally unprepared to deal with foreign hacking of our election. There's a reason Bernie doesn't have any apps on his phone. I bet he doesn't know what an app is or what the capabilities of mobile devices are. If he did, I think he'd be screaming about it in the special way Bernie screams. 🚀#If you look at it as if you were hiring someone to put the country back together after the Trump combination heart attack, stroke, colon cancer, head-on car crash, you'd want someone who has gotten shit done. Who would see the problems we have now as interesting challenges. Would know who wants what in exchange for the things we need to do. Someone with a rolodex of effective people. Neither Warren or Sanders have the ability to do any of that. Elect them and at best you get a Jimmy Carter. I don't mean weak, the way the Repubs do, I mean having no idea how to get things done in Washington, and therefore proceeding to get nothing done.#
On Sunday I wrote a piece about the walls journalism puts up to keep the rest of us only speaking in the aggregate, to all our detriment imho. There are experts all over the place, who can provide fresh perspectives on the news, to engage people's minds, and set examples for creative approaches. I lamented that even though there is a former outstanding blogger running Shorenstein, one of the leading university think tanks for journalism, the walls remain, and we're no closer to fulfilling the opportunities created in the early web. Nicco Mele, the blogger I was referring to, is no longer in charge of Shorenstein. I was so-advised by two former colleagues. I'm really out of the loop, that's for sure. Anyway, the new director is Nancy Gibbs. Best of luck and please let me know if there's any way I can help. 💥#If you're working in Node.js and need to generate an RSS feed, you're welcome to use the package I wrote for use in all my apps. Follow the new example app to get an idea how it works. Just create two simple JavaScript objects, and call rss.buildRssFeed, and it creates a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It's really solid, burned in and tested in a wide variety of readers and aggregators. Variants of this code have been generating RSS feeds since (oy) 1999. #
I wonder if the new features being added to GitHub allow you to point to a specific function, and have the link continue to work through new versions of the code? Something that I've always missed in GitHub. #
I’ve known Lessig for decades and always found him to be a thoughtful, kind, generous person. I read his latest piece, and look forward to a similarly thoughtful response from the NY Times.#
DocCast 2.0. This is an interesting medium because unlike other podcasts I've listened to Doc on, in this mode he gets to talk as long as he wants and can pause, and say whatever you want. Anyway I've decided I'm going to build a basketball court so when you visit we can meditate over shooting hoops. Anyway. Focus is the thing. Creating a groove. And making each other more powerful. That's going to be my next chapter. I do want to hear about your experience with Medium. We all have our own stories. I also want to tell you a story about Dave Bunnell. And why walking is the best.#
A presidential candidate who has no apps on his phone is not qualified to be president in 2021 and beyond. Apps are a frontier we crossed ten years ago. Some people, including a columnist at the NYT are impressed. That tells you something about who writes editorials at the Times too.#The next president should be creating a new social net for governance that involves all the voters who want to be involved. American citizens of voting age only. Doing real things to make America work better in every way, especially politically. I wrote this idea up in 2009 as Obama took office and didn't follow through on the promise (imho) of his campaign. Sanders is a nice guy for sure, but he can't do the organizing we need to do (see above). It's not something you can delegate. I think Bloomberg may get this, but I'm not sure. The politicians running for office are still very old school, and Sanders is the oldest of them.#
I tuned in a bit of CNN and NBC yesterday, they were obsessing about the president's offhand claim/lie that he thought there were four embassies being targeted by the assassinated Iranian general. By now they should know Trump-speak. When he says he "thinks" something that means he made it up. What's the point in wasting so much time on it, when everyone with a mind understands exactly what he was saying. #
BTW, of course they didn't brief the Gang of Eight on the imminent threat for the simple reason that there was nothing to brief them on. #
I'm having the best time writing my blog these days. What makes the difference? You. I play my blog the way a musician plays the piano or guitar. I can hear what I play, but I'm most interested in what you hear. I'm not running McDonalds or Starbucks, I've got a little coffee shop in town. I serve the drinks, tell stories, decorate the place, choose the music and lighting, bring in guests, all to pass the time in the most Dave-friendly way I can. I look for others doing their own things, so we can perform together. Our ideas influence, are tested and improved on. I'm back in the 90s and all of a sudden there's blue sky in every direction. All because, imho, in 2017, I decided to be myself again. 💥#Andrew Shell opens a thread on Twitter for Overcast, an iOS podcast client, asking why he was unable to subscribe to Scripting News. Turns out Overcast doesn't like titleless posts. I don't use Overcast myself, so I can't offer specific advice, but it is not acceptable to use the file name as a title. That's not what the file name is for. I described the use-case in a tweet (of course without a title, tweets don't have titles). Vendors tend to ignore advice on these issues, and that's kept us from growing. I used to budge for them on this issue, but decided in 2017 to stop. All the compromises meant that my blog disappears. Bottom-line: I put podcasts on title-less posts. That's never going to change. #
I was hooked on Klobuchar when she stared down Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing. She doesn't rattle. I think Trump should be followed by a woman, one the Repubs have yet had a chance to work on. I don't think Americans will stand for him abusing her.#
- On this day four years ago the question of bloggers wanting to replace reporters came up again. This was yet another colossal misunderstanding, much like the disconnect re Facebook today.#
- We, bloggers, seem to always be trying to assuage journalists' fear of us. That really shoudn't be necessary, btw. #
- Sidebar: How refreshing that Ben Smith, editor in chief at Buzzfeed News, refers to the "the enduring positive qualities of social media." I wonder if his colleagues at Buzzfeed and other pubs tuned into that. How about a series of columns, updated to 2020 reality, that explore those positive qualities, to balance all the horror stories running in the NYT and elsewhere.#
- I observe that journalists tend be blind when it comes to voters, users, writers, developers, anyone but politicians, rich people, and other journalists. We hardly exist as individuals, we're only considered in the aggregate (polls and the like). They shrink their world, furiously, so they can deal with it. Huge disconnects result. #
- In my talk at ISOJ in April last year, I described the above cartoon. I was one of the bloggers. Of course it hurt my feelings, it was intended to, although some people think it was done with irony. I personally don't buy that. YMMV.#
- Bloggers don't usually wave their credentials in your face, so you might not be aware that many of us at the DNC in 2004 actually had decent credentials. For example, I had a good education from good schools. At the time I was a research fellow at Harvard. I had spent decades proving myself in my field and had risen to the top. I invented a bunch of technology that were in very wide use, and would form the foundation for all computer networking to come. I had been writing my blog for nine years at that point, and if I do say so myself, was a good writer. We were in the process of starting podcasting at the time. And I was just one of the DNC bloggers. The others were just as accomplished. You had to be someone special to be at the DNC in 2004. #
- A request for ambitious truth-seeking journalists -- stop writing from your fear, learn more about the world. Your blind spots are huge, and are killing us. #
- Speaking of Harvard, when I was a fellow there, one of the members of our Berkman Thursday group was Rebecca MacKinnon, who was a fellow at Shorenstein Center, which was the rough equivalent of Berkman but for journalists. Previously she had been a CNN reporter from Beijing and Tokyo. Her fellowship was a turning point in her career. She went on to start Global Voices, a blogging network, among other pursuits.#
- She got me together with Alex Jones, a former NYT reporter, who was then the director of Shorenstein. To say he was blog-skeptical would be an understatement. He typified all the arrogance and fear of blogging in journalism, with what I saw as false confidence, bravado, I guessed, to try to keep me, and what I represented to him, at arm's length. We probably met just twice, maybe even once. I remember a contentious somewhat friendly conversation at Henrietta's Table. #
- I personally asked Jones to come to the second BloggerCon. He came. I watched him and joined in conversations with him at times. He appeared to be having the time of his life. And why shouldn't he? Here was a room full of sources, people who knew about something he was actually very interested in, and they didn't have to be coerced into talking about it. There was a ton of enthusiasm in the room. They were exploding with ideas, because of the huge potential of this space in 2004.#
- But after the BloggerCon we went back to our corners, staring at each other, unsure of how to communicate. By now Jones has retired, his replacement is a former famous blogger, the guy who did the blogging at the Dean campaign in 2004, really breakthrough stuff, and yet nothing has changed. Shorenstein is still a bastion of professional journalism, and ideas from blogging don't penetrate. #
- We should all be working together. I said it then, keep pounding the table, beating the drum. No reason to stop. #
I have a bunch of things on my mind ready to go this morning, including the next in a series of voicemailcasts with Doc Searls, a defense of XML when used as an object serializer, and the awful tendency of techies, esp those who work at Google, to have little respect for stuff that works, always wanting to reinvent without using their supposedly brilliant minds to evaluate their approach, and thereby burning decades of knowhow on a bonfire of geek vanity. Probably a few other things I'm not remembering at the moment. #
Okay first up is the 26-minute podcast that follows Doc's kickoff of our nascent series. You will feel like you're eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends, which is totally what it is. I remember the first time I met Doc, in Buck's restaurant in Woodside, CA. I also remember very clearly the day in 1999 I was at his house in Redwood City, helping him get going with his Manila blog, he was one of the very first, and understood blogging in an instant. Doc looks like Wilford Brimley. He got the name Doc because he was a radio personality in North Carolina in the 1970s. He has a radio voice. In this voicemail I talk about Fargo, the masterful FX series. I just watched season 2 and am now working my way through season 3. I talk about my development process for the last decade or so. Very different from the previous 30 years. That's just the beginning. It's a content-rich podcast. Hope you listen and enjoy. Looking forward to Doc's rebut.#It's a fact that XML can be used to serialize complex objects from all kinds of programming languages. I know this because I do it. Have been since 1998. So when a geek says on Twitter that you can't, he or she could get pushback from me. Here's a thread that illustrates. Further, XML and JSON are equivalents as object serializers. I know because I generate both JSON and XML versions of the feed for my blog. And as an experiment, my new XML-RPC implementation can use JSON encoding everywhere, as an option. Of course there are not many servers that can understand this, so sticking with XML for now is the only practical option. I don't have any love for XML, but I do resent having to lose decades of progress for unrigorous technical thinking. I also don't like debating, anywhere, and especially not on Twitter. 🚀#
BTW, I recall now that there is an issue with how to represent dateTime.iso8601 and base64 types in JSON. #
A family story. My mother was a pure capitalist. She believed in hard work, being productive. She felt threatened by evidence of idleness. I drove her crazy. Even as a kid I would sometimes just sit in a chair in the living room of our apartment in Jackson Heights and think. Once she saw me sitting, lights off, no TV, no book, appearing to be doing nothing, and she lost her shit right there. Anyway, many years later, when I sold my company and then it went public, after years of begging me to get a job, her stock in the company was all of a sudden worth a lot of money. It was the only time I remember getting her unqualified approval. She boasted, even when I could hear, that I was profitable. In other words, the money and time she put into raising me made her money. ❤️#
Interesting tweet, says that it was 19 years ago today that the enclosure element was added to RSS, by yours truly, in an effort to add payloads to RSS. I looked it up, and they are right. And through the rest of January 2001, Adam and I were trying out neat hacks that could move large (for the day) audio and video files back and forth between our offices in California and Europe. Here's the piece I wrote that day explaining the idea. The site, twowayweb.com, is gone, but the article is preserved in many places, including archive.org. #
You want to know how bonded Doc and I are. That day in 1999 when we got his blog started, I saw he had a blue box in his office. I asked what it is. He didn't really know. I took it home with me, I didn't even ask permission. I realized even at the time this was nervy of me, but Doc was happy that I did. Turns out it was a Cobalt Qube, a revolutionary product, an idea that seemed like the future in 1999, but sadly its future has yet to arrive. Hopefully this decade it will. (On second thought maybe it was the precursor of the Raspberry Pi?)#- John Naughton wrote briefly about the difference between Facebook the company and Facebook the billion-user network. There aren't many people in journalism who see this dichotomy. He wrote to say he had a similar experience on the rail in the UK, viewing the backs of people's houses and wondering what their lives were like. #
- I often do that when travelling by train in the UK in the dark, because British towns always turn their (unadorned, unguarded) backs to the railway while keeping their (brushed and spruced) fronts for the street or the road.#
- It's hard for those of us who predate Facebook to not feel challenged by it and even to reject it. But it is what it is. The open web didn't organize the world, Facebook did. I wish it were otherwise, of course. #
- Ignoring Facebook as a technology base that we'll build on in the future, would be like refusing to listen to the Beatles in the 60s. You could do it, but if you were a musician or any kind of artist really, you'd be missing a common language that all your users understand. You'd be ignoring an important tool.#
- The real platform is the minds of all the people. #
- There's a book I read 30 years ago that opened my eyes to this -- Marketing Warfare by Ries and Trout. #
- People don't understand this "battleground as the minds of the users" idea is why people don't grok Bloomberg. He really gets it and has the resources to develop all this virgin territory that I'm sure he understands every bit as well as Trump or Murdoch. #
- I got an email from Seth Godin asking for clarification of one of yesterday's mini-posts about how Google can index the web without crawling.#
- Doc said that Google and Bing are doing an increasingly bad job of archiving the history of the web. When he looks for something he wrote 20 years ago, the search engines can't reliably find it. He also said they're not indexing the current web like they used to. He experiences it thus: Google can't find one of his recent posts, but then after he visits it, presumably in Chrome, it can. #
- From this I conclude:#
- Google isn't crawling his site. In the past it would check frequently updated pages, such as blogs, every few minutes, for new links. On discovering one, it would read it, add it to their index, and then it would be findable in Google. #
- But when he visits one of those pages in Chrome, then, a few minutes later it can be found in the search engine. It appears to be using Doc's human behavior to find new pages to index. They can do this now because they have a popular web browser, so they can retire their old method of discovering links and let the users do their crawling. #
- My own experience. For what it's worth, I've found that Google is still really good at finding my old stuff, as long as there are some good unique words I can search for. If I search for "future-safe archives" for example, it gives me back a really good set of results. But the other day I was trying to find something I wrote about Obama and his online social net he let dwindle after the 2008 election, and although I believe I wrote about this a number of times, I could only find one piece, by going to the January 2009 archive page and scanning it with my eyes. #
- Caveat: This is all based on tea-leave reading. Neither of us have any insight into what Google is actually doing to maintain its index. #
I've been wanting to bootstrap a podcast with Doc Searls for the longest time. When we get together, our conversations are fluid, and full of ideas and stories. In the last few years we've started to exchange voicemails using the iPhone voice memo app. A few days ago I said to Doc, in a voicemail of course, that we should try to do a podcast that was just a series of voicemails. Nothing more fancy than that. So here's Doc's first podcast, to kick things off. He talks about what I call future-safe archives. Ideas follow. I think we should retire domains the way sports teams retire numbers. We should have a plan for how to preserve the web, not a photograph of the web (that's what archive.org does). BTW, since this podcast is part of scripting.com, it is backed up every night. The original is on Amazon S3, which I think it is the most stable and affordable publicly available storage system. If it didn't exist, I'd be begging them to create it. #An interesting idea in Doc's voicemailcast, apparently Google doesn't crawl the web these days, they use the addresses of pages that Chrome users visit. Makes total sense. It's why his pages don't show up in Google search until he goes there. Hadn't thought of this. #
BTW, I thought the idea of a voicemailcast might be original, but alas the idea is described in a post in 2006.#
Reminder: I just did a new release of XML-RPC, first since the early 2000s. The new reference version is written in JavaScript. #
2016: "If they can kill something that's worth $100 to reap $1 of value from the corpse, they see that as good business. That's the approach that has got our species into the climate change corner we're in."#
Bloomberg will continue to fund his digital operation even if he is not the nominee. Of course. What a powerful idea. A campaign that's for the good of the people more than it is for a specific candidate. Brilliant. This is just what I wanted Obama to do when he won in 2008. Continue to run the digital operation after the election was settled. People underestimate Bloomberg. Think of him as a peer of Steve Jobs. Same depth of experience and success. A visceral understanding of tech and media.#- One of the nice things about the nightly email distribution of Scripting News is that I hear directly from readers. Most of the responses are thoughtful and informative, and that's great. But sometimes I receive responses that are neither thoughtful or informative, like the one I received yesterday (author's name withheld so it isn't personal), quoted below.#
- "Just because a billion people do something doesn’t mean the thing they do is good. Two examples: smoking tobacco and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Facebook use is undercutting democracy around the world. It’s not getting better. We need something like Wikipedia but in the Facebook arena."#
- First, this was not written by a journalist, but it could have been. It's more or less the party line among journalists. #
- Second, I am a former smoker, and it was definitely damaging my health, a cardiologist who had just operated on my heart said so. I stopped, and believe I am healthier as a result. I am still alive, and that's something. But I have to say there were positive things about smoking. I won't go into them here and now, I just want to say that they exist. #
- Third, the correspondent is indulging in a logical falacy. It's true some popular things are bad, but that doesn't mean all popular things are bad, nor are all bad things bad in all ways. His second example "dumping CO2 into the atmosphere" is bad, but driving cars is often good. An ambulance that saves someone's life is dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Later today I'm going to drive to get groceries. That's good. I use electricity to heat my house. On a cold night, where the temperature can go down into the teens, believe me that's good. And to get the heat I am dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. #
- As someone who uses Facebook, let me testify that many of the things that happen there are good, unique, empowering and fun -- things I wouldn't want to live without. These things are certainly worth understanding before dismissing the whole medium. You can learn from something you don't like. A billion people doing something raises the question "What are they doing?" We should aspire to not dismiss before understanding, imho.#
- A little unsolicited advice. Don't be so rigid. If someone you respect says something is worth doing, if you dismiss it with a generalization you can't prove, you're missing something, and probably not just in this area. Living a creative and interesting life imho requires considering possibilities you might have rejected without much consideration, stepping outside your comfort zone. Keep an open mind. Challenge your assumptions.#
- Nowadays when you go to a baseball game there is never a moment when the PA system shuts up so you can talk about the game with your friends. This used to be one of the nicest things about going to a live game. The shared experience. Now they play commercials every minute that baseball isn't being played. On top of the $100 you paid for the seat. We are coerced into singing God Bless America, a truly awful song, instead of Take Me Out To the Ballgame, as a form of weak patriotism (weak because if they understood America, they'd realize that forcing people to pray to your god is about as un-American as it gets). We have to rise to thank the troops who protect our freedom in Afghanistan, even if you don't believe that's what's going on. That's the world that Facebook exists in. So if you don't like the commercialism of Facebook, the lies that advertisers tell, you should have the same feeling about America's national pastime. And Facebook isn't nearly that bad, btw. And some very good things happen there. #
Followup on recent threads re Facebook and journalism. Too much attention has been paid to Facebook the company, it's time to learn about the hundreds of millions of people who use Facebook, and what they're doing with it. #Let me tell you a little story. When I was 14, I went to high school in the Bronx and lived in Queens. It was a 1.5 hour trip each way. I had a few choices but they all magically took the same amount of time. One of the routes was to take the Q16 bus to Main Street, then the 7 train to Grand Central, and switch to the 4 train uptown. The Bedford Park Blvd station is two blocks from the school. One day on the train, I remember this really clearly, I was watching all the houses and apartment buildings we passed, first in Queens, then in the Bronx. Inside every window, I guessed, was a family, like my own, possibly. With their dramas and struggles, stories, victories, history, abuse, happiness, fear. I tried to imagine how each of them might live and realized in an overwhelming way that I could never begin to understand who they were. NYC, even then, was an ethnically and economically diverse place. Of course as we traveled through the city, the people on the train changed too. Very few of them were Bronx Science students. There were all kinds of people. Who knew what any of them were thinking. The point is this. The world is huge. To keep our sanity we have to simplify it, and to do that we have to ignore differences. The stories we tell ourselves little connection to reality. And so any general statement about a community as huge and diverse as Facebook is certain to miss the mark, widely. And most of what we read only focuses on the company, not the users. To have that appear as journalism is just wrong because journalism has a higher calling, to find out what's real, what's true, and then say that. #
- A couple of pieces just floated through my river. #
- Maybe Nominating Bloomberg for President Isn’t a Crazy Idea #
- Biden, Bloomberg have largest leads against Trump in Michigan poll#
- Amazing. And Bloomberg is just getting started.#
- What people (mostly journos) overlook with Bloomberg is that he has mastered two very important things for a presidential candidate:#
- Think about who he is and how he thinks and how he made his fortune. A presidential campaign is not that different from his news org. In a way it's as if Steve Jobs didn't die, left Apple again, was mayor of NYC for 12 years, took some time off, made some more money and then decided to run for president. Bloomberg has mastered media and tech as much as Jobs ever did. Very different styles, but similar levels of accomplishment. Do not underestimate Bloomberg. #
- Nominating Bloomberg is not a crazy idea. He's a good fit for the country. A nice rebound from Trump.#
Remarkable. Mike Lee, R-UT, says the Constitution requires he have a spine. Seems a little late to come to that conclusion. #
A diverse thread on Twitter about judging Facebook. For me, a re-hash of the piece I wrote on January 3, about the scale of Facebook, and how the the story you hear most in journalism ignores the billion or so people who use Facebook and focuses on how they feel about the company. I've yet to see an act of journalism that didn't flaunt their conflict of interest. In the thread, Facebook has been compared to a supermarket, NBC and Times Square. It is none of those things, it's much much bigger. It's a community of a billion or more users, and is as diverse as those people are. Most people in my experience have good intentions, and that's true on Facebook. Even the ones who aren't nice, are probably just struggling with something. I'd like to see a few journalists adopt the point of view that Facebook is not a simple place, can't be reduced to good or evil, isn't a product of one or two peoples' personalities, that it's made up of an incomprehensibly huge group of people, from everywhere. #I got curious about the current controversy over .org domains. So I asked on Twitter: What's the concern over .org being privatized? How would that affect the .org domains you and I have registered? I haven't really been following this, should I?#
Dan Callahan writes: "In addition to uncertainty around registration prices, there seems to be a whole lot of shady self-dealing, and no clear motive for the sale other than personally enriching ISOC and a private equity firm run by former ICANN executives."#
In 1996, I wrote a story for Upside, a dream really. I dreamt I was the CEO of Apple. Before Steve came back. I would buy a song, and make a new computer and drop the rest, and focus on getting developers to ship new products. Not all that different from what Steve did when he came back, except the part about developers. 💥#
Doc Searls overheard: "The only question that matters in our time is how to have good effects that last longer than a tweet. Or a few seconds, whichever is longer." #
Yesterday when I posted the instructions for how to share one of my blog posts to Facebook, in addition to trying to help a friend, I wanted to see for myself what the instructions would look like, in writing, without too much detail and without any steps omitted. The moral of the story is this. Come on Facebook, re-join the open web. Let's make it easy for people to do their writing outside Facebook for sharing inside. Let's make the wall of your silo so permeable that it ceases to be a silo. On Twitter I was asked why I keep beating this drum when it seems so unlikely that Facebook cares. I do it because I want to create a historic record, this has always been a big part of my blogging. I want to remember what sharing across silo walls was like in 2020. Maybe we'll look back and marvel that it was once this convoluted. Or maybe we'll marvel that it could be done at all. No one knows. But part of the reason I blog is to create a record. That's why I care so much about bigco's trying to erase that record for selfish reasons. #I appreciate the shout out yesterday from Evan Williams, a former competitor who has gone on to make billions as co-founder of Twitter. It's nice that he still reads my blog, even though I have said some critical things about Medium, but all in the spirit of trying to make the web work better. Hope they have been received that way. I learned from reading his post that he has moved to New York. I think that's a good move, from San Francisco, which as a born-and-bred NYer has always seemed really small to me. Of course I've now moved to a much much smaller place. Anyway Ev if you're reading this, thanks for the kind words. 🚀#
A lot of people I knew years ago who have gone on to great success are keeping their distance. I wish they wouldn't. I have had my own experience with success, having been part of a tech IPO in the 80s, and creating a bunch of the tech in the 90s and 00s that we take for granted today. Some people may think I'm poor. I am not. The stock and real estate markets have made it pretty easy to build on a modest nest egg. But our humanity is so much more important than the ways we measure success and influence. Ultimately, no matter how rich any of us are, we don't really attain the influence we feel we deserve. I've learned that from burying two parents, both of whom had very strong opinions. Today, years after they are gone, well, no one really cares about what they thought. I care about them as my parents, the people who raised and cared for me, and I care about their struggles and accomplishments insofar as it was central to who they were. But their influence now is nil, and sadly, it was probably pretty close to that when they were alive. That's reality. So if we enjoyed each others' company before, if we learned from each other in the past, your great success shouldn't matter, it shouldn't be a barrier to more fun. #
- Kyrie Irving says he may need shoulder surgery. As you may know I am not a huge fan of his. NY didn't need him. And it's obvious he didn't really want to play for the Nets or in NY, he wanted to play with KD. And until KD his healed, Kyrie would prefer to sit on the sideline.#
- Reminds me that the other day I saw a comment about Pete Rose and how he belongs in the Hall of Fame, and I couldn't agree more. For so many reasons.#
- Statistically it's a no-brainer. He has more hits, more singles, more at-bats, more games played, more outs than any other player in MLB history. He was Moneyball before there was Moneyball. #
- And then there's Charlie Hustle. Who else would dive head-first into second with no helmet? Is he even wearing gloves? Hard to tell. He should be in the Hall of Fame for this alone.#
- So I said all that. And Alan Cooper who I know to otherwise be a reasonable person, asked if I would pardon Jeffrey Epstein (enslaver and sexual violator of children) or Nixon (defiler of the Constitution) because I would forgive Pete Rose for betting on his own team. I responded to Cooper that there is an obvious difference between Pete Rose and the others, sports. In sports we get to be judgmental assholes. You may hate Pete Rose, I love him. I loved him as a kid, because he taught me what passion was. It makes total sense to me that a man like that, too old to play the game himself, would indulge in gambling on the game, even when it was against the rules. #
- We are too intolerant of different points of view on social networks. But I refuse to give up the last bastion of intolerant assholery and political incorrectness -- sports. So I'll keep on loving Pete Rose and you can keep hating him, and life goes on. No one is the worse for it. #
- BTW -- in tech, where both Alan and I come from, we bet on our own teams all the time. It's the norm. We give people the means to bet themselves, hoping it'll motivate them. Even in sports there are performance incentives. Players are given bonuses if they achieve a specific stat, or their team makes the playoffs. I could see being pissed if a manager bet against their team, but betting in favor the team? I don't know, but I just don't see the problem. In any case, he's going to be in the HoF when he's dead. Let him enjoy the acceptance and love now. Inside that old body is Charlie Hustle, let him in, if not for him, for the kids he inspired. #
We live in an occupied country.#
Joan Walsh: "If Bolton says he'll comply with a Senate subpoena, on what grounds could he refuse a House subpoena?"#
If Bolton were a patriot, imho, he'd arrange to give testimony in the House asap.#
I write about my blog on Twitter. I write about Facebook on my blog. I refuse to give up on the open web. #
The thing that was so frustrating about the piece from Jason Linkins in the New Republic is that he is the kind of user we need on the open web. They see it as we deserted them, but as a developer who needs smart driven creative and friendly users, when you guys left, and decided to pour your brilliance into Twitter and Facebook instead, you helped drive the downward spiral. Users matter. That's the thing I've never been able to communicate to users. Stop being sheep. Choose. It may be a little harder, you may have to give up some features at first, but if you support a creative individual developer, you could be amazed at the new power they can and will create for you. Work with developers who make tools you like. Help them. #
Postscript on the email outage. Problem solved. The mails went out last night. A perfect programming job for a Sunday. Correctly sized up the problem, determined the solution, implemented and tested all within a couple of hours, in time to take a walk and then watch the Knicks lose to the Clippers, and started reading a new excellent science fiction novel chosen from a list I can't find now. Today, the first day back to work in the New Year, I have no idea what to work on next. I'm going to look for something small and self-contained. I also documented the previously undocumented package, so maybe someone else will benefit from the work. #
Sometimes on FB people say the kind of stuff you hear on CNN from opinioneers whose job it is to say something even when there isn't anything to say. You listen to these people, and it's just a word salad of non-sentences that have absolutely no meaning. Then the host that you somewhat admire (e.g. Tapper, Melber) says that's an excellent point, Pete or that gets you thinking Gloria, and you realize they're just filling time with words that really have no meaning, and you're just wasting your time, you could learn more watching a Law & Order rerun for the 18th time. At least they're getting paid to do it. But on FB, there's just no call for it.#
- Howard Weaver asked how to share a post from Scripting News to Facebook. These days this is how I do it. #
- Open Scripting News in its own browser window. This makes it easier to go back and forth, which we're going to have to do several times. #
- Click on the purple pound sign to the right of the post you want to share. #
- Take a screen shot of the post. Here's how I do it on the Mac. Press Cmd-Shift-4, to go into Screen Shot mode. You can let up the keys after pressing them. Move the mouse to the upper left corner of the area you want to copy, click and hold, then drag to the lower right corner and let up the mouse. The screen shot is now on the clipboard.#
- Open Facebook in another window. Navigate to the place you want to drop the shared post. Click in the text box, and press Cmd-V (on the Mac) to paste the screen shot. Do not submit the post yet, there's more to do.#
- Go back to the browser window with the Scripting News post, click in the address bar. Cmd-A if necessary to select the whole address and copy it to the clipboard (Cmd-C). Switch back into Facebook and paste the address into the message. #
- One more time, go back to the post and select a provocative phrase or sentence from the post. Something that'll catch the readers' interest. Select, Copy, switch into Facebook, Paste. #
- Now you're ready to post. Review what's there to make sure everything is as you'd like it and then click the Post button. #
- PS: Of course I shared this post on Facebook. 💥#
Iran has the kind of opportunity the US had after 9/11. We had the whole world behind us. Had we shown restraint, we could have cemented our "sole superpower" status. Instead of spending trillions on unwinnable wars, we could have put that money into infrastructure. Rebuilt our school system. By now those kids would be in the workforce, kicking ass competitively. We would be solving problems. Amazingly Iran is in a similar place now. The US is the bad guy, the terrorist, with an unprovoked attack of apparently similar scale as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In addition to helping Iran, it would help the people of the United States to get our country off the insane path it's on. By not responding, you deprive Trump of an enemy, and win the support of the world, including in the US. This is how the world wins. #This is so typical. Journalist says the “good internet” ended when Google shut down Reader. Millions of users figured out how to use RSS without Google. I wonder what else this guy misses because he’s not willing to do a bit of research. #
This song is going through my head like All Along the Watchtower was in Battlestar Galactica. I hadn't heard it in years, but there it was, going round and round. There must be some way out of here. #
Trump is like the Knicks, he makes everyone look good. It's like playing checkers with someone who has no idea there is a game or has any idea of what the rules are. Rules? He just does things. #
- Last night's emails didn't go out because I exceeded the rate limit with the service provider we use. It's good that more people subscribed to the emails. I've sent the service provider a request to increase the rate limit. Apologies. #
- I've also added code to my nightly mail-sending app to limit the rate at which we send emails. Previously we sent them out the pipe as fast as we can. Since computers these days are very fast, that's a lot of emails in a very short time. The new code sends mail a max of ten messages per second. It's possible that's the rate limit we exceeded. A lot of times this software stuff is like boxing with an invisible opponent. A very unreasonable opponent. 💥#
- Node devs: The package is davemail, the source is on GitHub. #
A proportional response by Iran would be to assassinate one of Trump's direct reports, for example, the VP or Secretary of State, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense. #
Dear Jack -- this is ridiculous. Why can't we use the native text capabilities that all our computers and mobile devices have? This is an embarrassment not just for Twitter, but for the entire tech community. We have to do better than this.#
I was asked what I said in March 2003 as the war in Iraq started. That's why I have a blog. Not only can you see what I said, but I included what lots of other people said too. #
I wonder if today’s young folk appreciate how boomers, as children, were sure we’d die all young in a nuclear holocaust? Might be an interesting perspective to consider. #
New header image, of Olderbark Mountain. Previous image was Christmas-themed. Christmas did not bring peace this year, unfortunately. #
I want to clear something up. I do not equate the net with Facebook. However a lot of people do. That's where you have to meet them. If you want to go forward with them, Facebook is where they are. Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. ;-)#
- 1997: "The press only knows three stories, Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future." In 2020, Apple is alive, no one worries about Microsoft's character, and Java is no longer the future. #
- But Facebook? According to journalism, Facebook is a bad place. Facebook is a place you don't want to go. Reality is as the great Yogi Berra said: "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded." That's Facebook. It isn't any one thing, it's everything. #
- The scale of Facebook is hard to imagine. To say Facebook is like a low-life bar (something one of my correspondents on Twitter said) would be like saying NYC is a low-life bar. Ridiculous. NYC has 8.6 million people. It has art museums, libraries, great restaurants, office buildings, millions of homes and families to go with them. Two baseball stadiums. Two airports. Dozens of schools and universities. It's a big place but Facebook is much much much bigger. Let's say Facebook has a billion users. That means it's 125 times the size of NYC. The people who go to Facebook are not low-lifers, they're your friends and family, colleagues, classmates, people in power, retired people, rich and poor, from every continent. What is happening on Facebook? Does anyone have the slightest idea? Even the Facebook company probably only has a very aggregated view of what goes on there. #
- I have a hunch that Facebook is where journalism is rebooting. I know we're supposed to scoff at the idea of people doing it for themselves, helping each other get the info they need, but if there's going to be a local news desert, something has to fill the gap. Just because professional journalism is leaving localities (which includes non-geographic locales like industries and professions), does that mean we must live without journalism? I think not. We need journalism, and we'll have it, imho.#
- Professional journalism does not respect online. Look at Farhad Manjoo's latest. What a trip. Some of my friends in Woodstock don't use Facebook for the reasons he outlines. Why? Because they heard it from him, or another NYT reporter or columnist, and believed it. My friends didn't find this out themselves, because if they looked, asked for pointers from friends (for example me), they would have found their people there. If they hang out with evil people, that's probably what they'd find. Or if they live with aging hippies (as in the place I live now) then that's what they'd find. Billions of people can't all be as bad and stupid as a columnist in the NYT says they are. And remember that Manjoo has reasons to want you not to like Facebook. His salary depends on it. 😄#
- Wherein I report a new feature added yesterday. #
Roberts says we take democracy for granted. I think with his Citizens United and Voting Rights Act decisions, he does.#
I keep thinking today is Sunday.#
Journalism has some people believing that there's nothing good about online. That they should stay away from Facebook. It's not safe. But it's where people go now. Billions. I'm not happy about that, but it is what it is. Saying online is dangerous is like saying the subway is dangerous. But if you live in New York, you probably want to take the subway. Driving is dangerous. Everything is. Life itself isn't safe. It's a mix. You have to learn to discern. But most people are good, and most people are on Facebook. And it pisses me off that a few of my neighbors won't use Facebook, and when I ask why, they repeat the talking points of the journalists, almost verbatim. We perceive the world of today as being more dangerous than the world we grew up in. In fact, today's world is much safer. Perceptions that come from listening to journalism too much. It seems, knowing this, it would be responsible to temper their promotion of fear. It creates an obstacle we have to overcome. But they keep at it. Stay away little person. Online is dangerous. Better to stay safe. #If the NYT covered NYC as they cover FB they would never run a piece like this about the Knicks. What they fail to convey in their reporting, probably because they don't feel it, is that FB is much larger than NYC. And as diverse and interesting.#
Speaking of Facebook, yesterday I posted something intended to be wistful and introspective that some people took as a cry for help. Funny how that works. I said this: "Honestly I never thought I’d make it to 2020." Now it's 100 percent my fault there was confusion. Going back to the 1960s, when we had duck and cover drills in school, we all thought for sure we'd die in a nuclear holocaust long before 2020. If you had asked me then what were the chances I'd be alive in 2020, I probably would have said "No one will be alive in 2020." But here we are. 💥#
Melo scores, at the Garden, yesterday… The announcer doesn’t sing carrrrr mell ohhhhhh annn thonnnnnnn eeeee. They could have done it, just once, for the goosebumps. #
Soon we'll be able to write the epitaph of Melo as a basketball player. If I were to write it today it'd go like this. Melo is not LeBron and he's not JR Smith. LeBron is a general, a warrior. JR Smith is a joker, prankster, doper, partier. All three can shoot like nobody's business. Melo is a Black Lab. He's a pet. He should have been teamed up with LeBron or someone like him. He'd make a great #2. But he was miscast as the hero of the Knicks, so the Melo Knicks were losers. But because he's so sweet and he has a great shot, New York loves Melo. #- This cartoon comes closest to describing the dismay of people who did not vote for Trump about people who did. No matter what you may believe, how could crashing the country possibly be better than trying to work together? I'm not talking about parties working together, or news networks, I'm talking about people, American-to-American.#
The picture, to the right, of Jules in Pulp Fiction is from (I think) the first scene of the movie. Here's the actual quote. "Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time!" As Will Campbell says on Quora: "This entire movie is basically one bag of brilliant quotes." True. As I slog my way through the end of the last season of The Newsroom, I realize that some script writing is basically one big bag of terrible quotes. Inserted into actual conversations. And the director makes the characters scream the awful quotes as if they're being tortured. It gets so bad at times I turn the volume off. I dream of the characters killing each other in a Scarface-like ending. I think I have to go back into therapy to find out why I need to see the very end of this terrible show. (BTW one in five scenes is actually pretty good, like every scene with the Assistant Deputy EPA Administrator. And every scene with Olivia Munn is amazing. She's magnetic.)#Here's a fun end-of-year game. 1. Think of the ending of Scarface. 2. Now think of movies you wish had the same ending. Examples: Forrest Gump. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any movie starring Tom Hanks.#
- The other day candidate Joe Biden said he's open to choosing a Republican running mate. I said I thought this was a good idea. Now to be clear, he won't choose a Republican running mate. That would be crazy, wrong, too risky by a lot. #
- I'm sure Biden would want a close relationship with his VP, and you just can't have that close a relationship with a member of the other party. #
- Biden is old, and his running mate is important because they are more likely to become president. A Republican in the White House, no matter how inspired a choice, just won't work. #
- Despite all that, it was a good idea, to say it, not to do it. We're at a pivotal point for the future of our republic. The current president has been caught violating the Constitution in the most egregious ways, not just in his dealings with Ukraine. It's clear that Trump doesn't understand the Constitution and has no interest in learning, or being limited by it. He's going to do what he wants to do, the same way a monarch would. This is what the Constitution protects against in a myriad of ways. #
- We need a two-party system where both parties agree in the rule of law and the Constitution. Where we're Americans first, and partisans a distant second. Not just voters, but the people who lead the parties. Right now we barely have a two-party system because the Repubs are working on behalf of a foreign enemy, and against the Constitution. #
- To get back on solid ground, we need to split along respect for the rule of law. One party supports the rule of law, the other party doesn't. That means Democrats, the name of the rule-of-law party, must welcome people who believe in conservative policies that the Repubs used to stand for, but also believe in our system of government. A huge tent. Then, a landslide election, so that the Democrats have control of Congress and the White House and 3/4 of the state legislatures, overcoming Russian/Republican hacking, and so we can pass new amendments to the Constitution to close the loopholes that they have taken advantage of. To codify what previously were just norms.#
- I hear you saying, cynically, that'll never happen. Then my answer to you is this -- we've already lost the republic. There may be elections in the future, but only Republicans will win, the same way only Putin wins elections in Russia. I said in an earlier piece, that some friends took issue with, that the Democratic Party would be annihilated if that happened, and this is what I meant. There might still be an organization called the Democratic Party, but if they can't win elections because of corruption, well it's not really a political party is it?#
- To win such a landslide, the Democrats will need a lot of votes from people who voted for Trump in 2016. That means compromise. Which is fine because our form of government requires compromise, when it's working. So Biden saying he would consider a Republican running mate is signalling to people who voted Republican that they are welcome in the new Democratic Party. And in order to work, not only will the Republican Party have to be annihilated once and for all, so will the Democratic Party, and further, journalism will have to be annihilated too. What journalism has morphed into, where they only know about horse races, both-sides-do-it and Watergate, has led us to this place. If they continue to rule our discourse, as they have, we can't get out of the hole we're in.#
- Once all this change has happened, then we can go back to a two-party system. We can decide what "conservative" and "liberal" mean all over again, because today I feel totally like a conservative even though my beliefs and policies are what we used to think of as liberal. I want to turn the clock back to Eisenhower and JFK, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, where the US was fucked up for sure, but we respected ourselves and each other, at least somewhat, enough to accept the result of elections we lose. #
- Almost everyone has buried their heads in the sand and think oh well nothing has changed, when in fact everything has changed. We no longer have elections that work. Without that, without confidence that the person holding an office was actually elected to that office, we have a monarchy, and autocracy not anything like the system of government the founders designed. #
- I wrote this on Facebook in 2017, never published on my blog.#
- The Repubs use a trolling technique that was pioneered as far as I know by the proponents of a certain format that was intending to replace RSS.#
- They would say: RSS has "silent data loss."#
- This sounds terrible. Right? Well, it's just like Shariah Law or "chain-immigration." It sounds like a technical thing, but in reality it's a problem they made up. In practice nothing really is lost. XML sometimes garbles stuff if it isn't properly encoded. The solution is to properly encode it. #
- By pointing at this and saying Oooooh silent data loss. Oooh RSS is bad, people who didn't understand would think, oh I need to change to use this new thing. Or so the proponents hope.#
- Just like Shariah Law is not a problem in America, and chain-immigration simply means letting families come to the US (a good thing, most people would think, so why not say it that way, hah), the tech trolls were saying basically that "RSS is XML," which their format was too. If everything is done right (a big assumption) you could possibly avoid "data loss" by using their format, or you could stick with RSS and properly encode the text. The latter approach is much cheaper.#
- Anyway, by the time you explained it the people listening were tuning out because it truly is boring, and thinking you're being pretty defensive, there must be something here.#