Twitter's market cap is approx $26 billion, so one could buy a controlling interest for $13 billion.#

Prior art search: I'm writing a command line tool to talk with PagePark, a web server running on the same machine. The question is what should the URLs look like. #

I get this cryptic dialog when I try to update my iPhone XS/Max using iTunes. I've tried all the things the recommend, to no avail. Do you know what it means? I really don't want to reformat the phone. #

I picked a good time to leave the city for the country -- March 2019. Just enough time to get established. I don't think I would have done very well in a 1-bedroom apartment in the middle of Manhattan. #

I think it's going to turn out the virus isn't as infectious in the summer than in the cold months because it doesn't transmit well outdoors, and people spend more time outdoors in summer than winter.#

Old TV shows had a laugh track that simulated audience applause and laughter. This was before they started recorded sitcoms in front of a live audience. As a little kid, I thought they must have little microphones in the TVs, maybe only some of them (not mine of course) and they could pick up the sounds made by people at home. The laugh track and other audience sounds were real, little Dave imagined. So you gotta wonder why they don't do actually that for live sports events in the upcoming seasons for basketball, baseball, hockey, football, etc -- when there won't be any fans in the stadiums and arenas. You could even pipe the audience sounds into the venue so the players can experience them. The technology is totally up to it. Why not have some fun with it?#

BTW, what do you think the odds are that one of the sports players contracts Covid-19 during these new experimental seasons. I figure it's a near-certainty. And what happens then? Do they keep playing? #

The user experience of news sucks. I remember how software exploded when we put the focus on ease-of-use. News people underestimate the power of happy users.#

Laurie Garrett, one of the most knowledgeable journalists about pandemics, who is frequently interviewed on TV and speaks science clearly, has an awful video setup in her apartment in Brooklyn. The video and audio quality should be great, so everyone can hear what she's saying. She asked for help on Twitter, I jumped on it, putting out an appeal for help and Logitech, the company who makes the webcam she uses, just closed the loop. Tech helping journalism in the new media age. I love it. Perfect. #

Why is the only way news orgs will accept money from readers subscriptions? Before the net I could buy a single edition of a newspaper or magazine without a long term commitment.#

The idea of a self-contained news product you subscribe to is a vestige of the way news used to be distributed. Now, in my Twitter timeline, or RSS river, I see links to stories all over the place. This is the way I want it. I want a mix, my choice.#

New Biden ad. It's true. Trump is a deer caught in the headlights. A president who can't handle a crisis is no president at all. #

As I wrote yesterday I really liked Season 2 of Homecoming. I noted that it's based on a podcast from Gimlet of the same name. I've started to listen to that. It's also very good. I like the whole thing. I think finally I'm going to have to re-watch Season 1 on Amazon, to complete the experience. #

So what a nice feeling that a podcast started all that. I can't recall any pundit saying Podcasting is really great. It's made my life so much better. Hooray for podcasting, or something like that. All they write about is how it's going to die, as if they have a clue.#

Podcasting: An always-renewing and expanding explosion of creativity and utility. Because people have something to say.#

In The Atlantic Tom Nichols writes that Trump is not a manly president. I don't particularly care for that approach, I think honor and modesty are traits that should apply regardless of gender. We have the president we deserve. We're the country that went to war without a draft, whose citizens got tax cuts while at war, whose citizens expect more of that, to us it's never enough. We expect to be able to inflict chaos around the world and somehow never to be touched by it ourselves. That's why people are out partying with abandon this weekend. They can't imagine they can pay a price. There's a reason Vietnam is responding to the virus so incredibly well and we're responding so poorly. They remember fighting for their independence. To us, independence is a birth right. A distant memory that's become perverted. We have to fight for it again. The virus is giving us that chance. We can't get out of the pandemic until we grow up as individuals and collectively. Trump is the right president for who we are. We won't get a better one until we deserve a better one. #

Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president? Admitting that, and incorporating it into public discourse, is on the road to moving beyond Trump. #

Taking it easy today, not much writing or programming. The weather has turned gorgeous, real upstate NY summer weather. After a long winter and an even longer almost-spring, including snow on May 9, and a pandemic, it's pretty ecstatic weather, luxurious, great-to-be-alive type weather. It's the contrasts that make the eastern part of the US so much more livable than the west, say I, a native son of the east who spent many years in the west.#

I'm always looking for a good binge, and I found one. The second season of Homecoming is out, on Amazon. I started it the other night instead of watching the news. I had forgotten most of the plot of the first season, I remember liking it, but it didn't leave much of an impression. The second season is nicely done, has a Mr Robotish feel, there's a constant stream of twists and surprises, it's fun and so far intellectually gratifying, and it reviews the plot of season 1 as it goes. We have an inkling of how it will end because the first episode is about how it ends, or so we are led to believe. I don't know otherwise because I still have a few episodes to go. But nothing in this show is a straight line, and as I said it's well done. I especially like the end of each episode. They end with a twist, but they stay wtih the scene as the credits roll. I had not seen this technique before. #

Thread: A friend tells me that Node does breaking releases regularly. I've been working in Node for seven years so far and it hasn't affected me yet. So they must not be heavy earth-shaking things.#

I have been trained not to click on links to most news sites because the experience is so unpleasant.#

Horserace journalism has never seemed less relevant.#

Anybody thinking how we can lobby the Senate to support local governments so we continue to have police, fire, sanitation, health care, teachers, etc. #

Opening churches could flush out the last of Trump's supporters who'd be ok if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. The key assumption was that he was shooting someone else, not them. Maybe George Soros or Al Sharpton. I don't think they stick with him if shoots their neighbor from church.#

Read this quote from the Republican governor of North Dakota about masks. A silver lining to the pandemic is the only way out of it is to cut the level of insanity to zero and start acting according to science. There is no other way out of it, assuming you don't want to bet exclusively on a miracle. Either we stay collectively insane, we'll all get the virus, sooner than later, and a shitload of us will die, and the survivors will have a new Dark Ages. If we could only apply the objective brainpower to this problem that we do to a sports game like football or basketball. There is a winning strategy but it requires teamwork. #

When you hear someone you love and think is smart and literate say Oh it's no big deal if I catch the virus, say "I love you and you're smart and literate, and please read this story, because you're wrong about it not being a big deal." Perfect example of save my life story-telling.#

I've heard reports of people having trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email. If you've been having trouble, please let me know by respoinding to the email.#

New version of publicFolder, a Node app that runs on your desktop and keeps an Amazon S3 location in sync with a folder on a local disk. It's available as an NPM package and an Electron app. I use it to publish this.how, and am starting to use it in place of Dropbox. Much lighter weight, and I have all the source (and so do you). #

I have a Subaru Forester. Nice car. But every so often the rear door refuses to open. Three beeps. So I search, have trouble finding an answer. So confusing, they talk about buttons my car doesn't seem to have. Anyway it turns out if you hold the touch point for six seconds it'll open the rear door. Software glitch of some kind. From then on it works as normal. Wonder what the logic is. If it has the means to reset itself why doesn't it just reset itself without me having to jump through hoops?#

On Maddow last night an interesting observation as to why meat packing plants are even worse than we thought. Recall that enclosed spaces with lots of humans present for long periods of time are bad. The virus has plenty of time to become dense, which it needs to be infectious. But meat packing plants are also loud, lots of machinery, so people have to yell to be heard. And when an infected person yells they emit more virus, contributing to greater density, therefore more transmission. #

Pretty remarkable. Is the common cold a vaccine for Covid-19?#

Or a drug that prevents the virus that is not a vaccine?#

Poll: You see a friend on Facebook doing something ridiculously unsafe. His barber made a house call. A picture shows them in a selfie, touching, breathing presumably, no masks. Comments say how nice he looks with new haircut. #

All you have to do is write an article that says RSS is Dead and you'll get lots of clicks, and I'm not sure if anyone will believe you or think you're smart, but you are wrong. Those articles have been written for decades, and my friends RSS is built-in, like HTTP and HTML, DNS, SMTP, POP and all the other michegas that makes up the net. The stack never gives up anything. Also since it never was alive, how can it be dead, n'est-ce pas? #

I don't see the point of a presidential campaign. There's no way it can rise above our focus on the virus. Everything in the campaign should go to saving lives, just as journalism wastes our attention on the horse race. The war is in American now. This isn't some far-away thing. It's killing Americans. Now. #

I wrote this piece in the month after my father's death in 2009. I call that event Father's Day on my blog. Anyway, I know someone who lost her father last week, to CV, and wanted to share my writeup of a talk by Bruce Sterling. It's about the big moments in our life when change is more than something we dream about. It seems this is a door that's opening for all of us now, so why not post it publicly. And thanks to Sterling for putting this idea out there, so eloquently.#

Gatekeepers pass on ideas from people they respect and not people they don't. It's natural. I do it too. But I've been wrong a number of times this way, and then missed out on important ideas. So I try to pay attention to unusual thinking whether or not I like the person doing the talking. It can be hard to overcome judgement, but it's often worth trying.#

I was talking with an old software developer friend Don Park yesterday. First project we did together was in 1988. He did a Mac INIT that enabled interprocess communication. It was part of the foundation we built Frontier on. We got around to JavaScript and he said I should make packages anyone can use. I said Don I do! No one knows about them, he said. Yeah, but I tell them. Heh. Maybe I should be doing PR. Finding the bloggers who are most influential about new packages that make JavaScript developers lives' easier and more interesting. Anyway, to start, I sent Don a pointer to my davefeedread package. It's a Node package that makes it easy and fast to read a feed. Any flavor of RSS or Atom. GIve it a URL and it calls back with a JavaScript object for the whole feed. Includes a simple example, sort of a Hello World of feed reading. What you do from there is up to your imagination. It's the easiest way to read a feed in Node. A good place to start. 💥 #

This little bird has been attacking a window in my house for hours. #

Quick podcast. Density-over-time is what matters in whether you get infected by the virus. To get infected there has to be a high density of virus and you have to be there for a relatively long time. Distance isn't the only important thing. I've been reading this between the lines of what experts talk and write about. I checked it out with my biomedical researcher friend. He says yes, it's the area under the curve that determines the infection rate. #

I know it's redundant to say Trump is full of shit, but his campaign against the WHO is very bad, even for Trump.#

Pretty much everything in the news that draws attention away from the danger of the virus is imho off-topic, maybe even unethical. Your readers are in danger. Many don't know it. Find ways to make them understand.#

An observation about servers on Node.js. Node is optimized for servers that handle millions of requests an hour -- to run services like Google and Facebook. Billions of users. But Node is most often used by services with far fewer users. Tradeoffs are everything in software. There should be popular server software, based on JavaScript, that creates more reliable, debuggable, easier to write servers, for the loads most people really have.#

Cuomo is going to make mistakes. At least he's managing the state's response to the virus. Other states can't say they have a governor doing that. And the country doesn't have a president. Also, be careful what you call a mistake with the benefit of hindsight.#

We're seeing videos of customers going crazy in stores. This had to happen. People are under great stress. On both sides of the counter. It's going to get worse and worse.#

The problem I have with Farrow’s reporting is that as a reader I’m expected to judge against the subject, without either of us having enough info to do that.#

There's a new graphic for the Cuomo Briefing Podcast. I thought about putting some text on it, but decided a simple color picture of the governor was sufficient. If people want to give it a try, send me your version. I'm totally open to improvements. BTW this is the original version. #

Braintrust query. I'm getting what appears to be an internal error with NPM. Others have reported same problem. Looking for a fix or workaround. Help much appreciated. ;-)#

Problem solved. Whew. Thanks to Aaron Axvig for his help. Upgrading to a new version of Node fixed the problem, whatever it was. #

I've heard it said that the lockdown in NYC hasn't been very complete, but look at this snapshot of a Times Square webcam at 1:40PM on a sunny warm Saturday in May. First question I'd ask is how did they do it?#

Poll: "Was the lockdown necessary or is this "reopening" stuff a massive delusion that's going to result in Pandemic 2.0?"#

This piece in the New Yorker is a model for how post-Covid journalism should work. Instead of writing the first draft of history, tell me how to save my life. In a vacuum of leadership, that is killing your readers, you could fill it. #

It's funny what kinds of businesses do well in the current environment. Restaurants -- not so good, it seems. But bike stores? Doing a great business. Everyone wants a bike.#

A 20-minute rambling podcast with two simple ideas for journalism: 1. The customer is always right. 2. Let me show you how to make it easy for me to give you money.#

In news everything is a race between two political parties. The reds and the blues. There are other perspectives, for example I have the perspective of a citizen: voter, taxpayer, juror, soldier (according to the president), and now -- possibly infected, transmitting, part of a death toll. Yesterday's testimony by Rick Bright wasn't just a scandal, as much of journalism characterized it, it was also a clear statement that the US government isn't doing anything to save my life. That should have been the headline. We are being rolled over by a killer. No one is driving the bus. #

Perspective is everything. I'd love to see just one publication adopt the perspective of the people even if just for a little while. Do something shocking. Report from the perspective of the voter, taxpayer, governed. Always say what the news means to us.#

Ref the famous question from CBS reporter Weijia Jiang asking Trump why make the amount of testing a competition, well -- please ask the same question of journalism. It's only a horse race if you choose to view it that way. Sometimes there are other more important perspectives (see above). #

Trump's promise about the vaccine recalls promises about his tax returns. The end of the year is also after the election. At that point, either way, he'll have no need to follow-through on this, as with the tax returns. He'll say he never thought there was going to be a vaccine.#

I wish Metacritic reviews were available directly from program listings on Netflix and Amazon. #

New header image on my blog home page, a snapshot from the Olana webcam, overlooking the Hudson River. #

New motto: "Nothing focuses the mind like imminent doom."#

Poll shows 80% support wearing masks. Catastrophes unify us.#

She has Covid-19, is still very sick, writes passionately about America, our disaster of a health care system, how little help is available to most patients. One of the most powerful pieces I've ever read. #

It seems fair if a news org can keep us from reading their articles, that we should be able to tell Twitter orX Facebook not to show us their links. Like a "no-thanks-wall" to their paywall.#

Maybe only "essential" workers should have jobs, everyone else could get a government grant monthly and hang out and read books and learn to play the guitar. Maybe all this work we do is not necessary? Maybe if we didn't do so much work, then we'd live more green.#

Someone should be working on a virtual political rally where people in the audience can make noise, clap, laugh, chant etc. I think the net is up to it. Also would be helpful for sports and comedy. #

Contagion is on HBO. The first half is a pretty good dramatization of Covid, then it goes off the rails. I do not like the blogger, btw, or Elliot Gould who says bloggers aren't writers. It's probably not his fault, someone wrote that line for him. A writer, of course. #

Kingston barber tests positive for COVID-19 after cutting hair in violation of NY order. For some reason when I linked to this piece on Twitter, it got a relatively large number of RTs and Likes. I'm trying to link to more local Ulster County news, as more people in the area are tuning into my blog. Something I've been trying to encourage. #

Contrary to what may seem obvious, the stupid virus might be saving humanity. #

Braintrust query: It appears that C-SPAN has stopped livestreaming the Cuomo daily briefing. Looking for a site where we can reliably find the recording on a daily basis. Any help much appreciated. #

Last night I was watching the news and a bear family was walking across my yard. Mother and three cubs. Luckily I had my phone handy. The image is dull because the picture was taken through a dirty window. #

Listen to Mitt Romney, he speaks the truth. #

Back in February, I wrote a review of Scroll. I have more to say about it, quite a bit, but here's the top-level -- why don't the publications sign up already? There are quite a few that I am interested in, but don't want a relationship with. If I want to watch a movie or TV show I don't have to give my credit card info to each studio, I wait until the program shows up on Netflix. I buy lots of stuff on Amazon, but they don't actually manufacture anything. That's what Scroll would like to be -- a distributor for news. It makes a lot of sense. We're always hearing tales of woe, how are the pubs going to make money, how they need money from the tech companies and governments. How about getting money from readers? If they listened to the readers they would tell them what I'm saying. Make it easier for me to pay you. Scroll has stepped up, why not just say yes. If the situation really is so dire, maybe it's the answer? #

From time to time people ask how I do the email distribution of Scripting News. I looked at the various services that do this, but they all had lock-in in the center of their business model. I already have a way to write my blog. So that meant that they had to publish from my site's RSS feed, and none of them do that. Since I'm a developer, I wrote my own mail-sending software. I have made bits of the software open source, but it's not something that an end-user could use. I can't productize everything I write, and typically when I do, very few people use it, so I just made it for myself, and at least I know the user is happy, and will give me good feedback and bug reports. 💥#

When an idea is right it snaps into your mind like it always was there.#

In the Supreme Court I love how they talk about the president's massive todo list. This president just eats, farts, watches tv, and throws his poop at the wall.#

There was a kerfuffle in the RSS world yesterday when it appeared that Apple wanted aggregator developers to get written permission from sites whose feeds they include as defaults. It appears this was an error, or Apple changed their mind. Also, I love the word kerfuffle. Surprisingly, it's not the first time I've used it, according to Google. I'm surprised. But it appears to be the first time in 13 years. #

As you watch Fauci today imagine if he were on every day. Maybe it's because I'm a former entrepreneur that I see tons of ways to do this. Biden, for example, could give Fauci a pulpit. I've tried this idea out of people inside the Democratic Party, they say this just isn't done. And that's a reason not to do something? Bill Gates could do it. He's entrepreneurial. It doesn't have to be Fauci himself, any affable avuncular scientist who tells the truth. As Trump fades into oblivion we should fill the airwaves with facts. That's a good way to save my life. 😇#

The William Barr chicken polka. Enjoy!#

We're not just dying for Trump, we're also dying for CNN.#

I hope that behind the scenes the Dems in the House are testing the waters for a bipartisan impeachment. #

I wonder if any of the news orgs with a paywall have thought about doing what Netflix and Google TV (and perhaps others) do. They let you share your membership with "family members," which really means anyone you want. It might be good marketing. #

Another idea: A special deal for bloggers. People can read the stories if they come from my blog. The NYT used to do this. I felt like we had risen above crass commercialism, and were focused on informing people. Here come the lectures on how I don't understand news!#

How about a twist on that. Any paying user gets to forward stories from the site a certain number of times? Not sure about that. It's always so irritating when a friend RTs a story from the WSJ. It just doesn't make sense for me to subscribe. I did at one time, so I know what they do. I just am not that active in business these days. But sometimes they get a great story. Maybe what we need are peering arrangements of some kind. You get 50 free articles from the WSJ with a NYT subscription, and vice versa. Maybe those two pubs don't do it. But maybe say Mother Jones and National Review. Kind of like William F. Buckley debating Gore Vidal?#

Happy Mother's Day to my friends who are mothers.#

Podcast about where we're at with the virus. It's been a while since I checked in on this. #

Video: A Colorado restaurant opens for Mother's Day and it's packed with future Covid-19 victims. #

I've been looking for this video of Bill Barr doing the polka dressed in a chicken suit. I would love to get the video in a form that doesn't depend on Facebook. Don't want to lose it again. (Be sure to turn the audio on.)#

I'd bet money that the things that are "opening" now are going to be closed quickly at great cost to: 1. the economy, 2. human bodies and 3. morale. #

Who would have guessed that drive-in movie theaters would become the new essential art and business form factor. #

Why isn’t there a Covid-19 game where you win by having your town not die before a treatment or vaccine is developed. When one of your citizens is infected you can isolate them for a bit and also do contact tracing. A mafia don in an orange jumpsuit shows up at random times and steals all your PPE! It’d be fun cause kids who master the game can explain it to their clueless Fox-watching parents and grandparents. They could even be part of the game! #

Trump wants to change the subject to the Russian probe. I find this somewhat amazing. He got away with all the Russian michegas. But he wants to go back to it. Because as they say Covid-19 doesn't respond to his bullshit. We could learn from the virus. Don't take the troll bait.#

Just heard a report on NPR that began with a quote from Trump, a big bold lie, and they just went on as if he had made a good point. This has to stop. It's not saving my life, quite the contrary, it's killing people, to let Trump get away with lying about the role of testing. He says we have the highest numbers because we do the most testing. Yeah. Not true. And they went on to say that governors don't know why they need so much testing. What? Hello. Yes, everyone who cares knows. We need to know where the freaking virus is and isn't. That's why we test. It's the same reason we launch weather satellites, so we know where and when it's going to snow. I keep repeating this, hopefully the idea will spread. News should be in the business of saving my life and yours. It's never been more possible and more vital. And it's a good business model. If they're not just relaxing entertainment, if they save my life, we'll make sure they get the money they need. The news doesn't understand its own role. #

Braintrust query: Writing my own synchronous functions in Node. The conclusion -- anything you can do from the command line in the OS can be synchronous, because they're easy to invoke from a Node app. A wide gaping loophole in the design of Node, and I love it. #

I love this story about Cuomo and the people of the Catskills. I think he's right. I went to the supermarket today too -- the new routines are starting to feel routine.#

I did a long podcast today about robustness in software, but even I got bored with it after a few minutes. I'm putting it here for the record, why I made a decision about how to run code in PagePark the way I did. I don't imagine many people will be interested. 💥#

As voters we gave up our power when we chose to vote for leaders who we'd like to have a beer with instead of people who represented us. They were never going to have beer with you, btw. #

Something to think about. The buildings of our government could be as toxic as a nursing home, prison or meat plant. What then?#

I’m glad I live in New York where we have a governor who believes in science and keeping us alive. Amazing this is America, the country that went to the moon.#

Virus testing can work like polling. You don't have to talk to everyone to get a sense of who's leading in a poll. And you don't have to test everyone to find out how we're doing with the pandemic.#

A song you should enjoy.#

A couple of nights ago Rachel Maddow told the story of a group of entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City who set up a free Covid-19 testing program. Yes, they had the arrogance that's common to tech entrepreneurs, I know it very well. But they were trying to do good. I don't often notice the sarcasm and superiority in Maddow's stories, but I did for this one. I kept waiting for her to say what evil they had done, but it never came. Some doctors commented that their arrogance was ugly, and their tests could suck, sure, but it colored everything I hear from Maddow in a new way, the way she seethed when she talked about Facebook a couple of years ago, from ignorance. In that case I knew the facts. So why not just report the facts, without so much attitude, and let us make up our own minds. And then I wondered how much do I listen to her for the superiority versus getting any real information. Another way to see it is what if a Fox News person used the tone she used. Would you see it then. I actually shut her off in the middle of the show last night, I want to re-think whether she is a force for good, and should I be paying attention to her at all. I know I've been here before with her and the rest of MSNBC. There aren't a whole lot of choices. #

Maddow even saw as corrupt, with a raised brow, that the tech industry in Salt Lake City calls itself Silicon Slopes. It's dorky, and so what. NYC calls its tech industry Silicon Alley. #

When I get fed up with MSNBC, I switch to 30 Rock reruns on Amazon. At least their attitude is funny. Really funny. LOL funny. #

We don't know who will be affected by Covid-19 in the future. People assume most young people don't have symptoms, but we really have no idea. One thing we do know that it isn't binary. You don't necessarily just recover back to who you were before you got the disease. The symptoms linger. The damage in some cases is permanent. Chickenpox shows up again later in life as shingles, for example. Covid is a serious illness. People who play politics with it, and want to convince you it's not serious, don't have a clue, because even the most skilled and educated medical scientists don't know what lies ahead. #

Science fiction version of today's news. First the air pollution was gone. Then there was the spring that never came. Snow in May. Next up, the coral reefs come back to life, occupied by alien beings. It's the first we learn that we aren't alone. They would like to speak to our leader.#

A robocall. "I am calling to speak with David Winer. Are you David?" A computer voice. I hung up. If you want your computer to contact me, use email. (Postscript: I looked up the number, and holy shit, it was a hack. They want to record you saying Yes. Good thing I didn't fall for it.)#

BTW, a medical researcher friend offers a theory why CV-like diseases slow down in the summer. Might not have to do with heat, rather the health of the people. We exercise more in summer than winter. We're generally in better shape, he says. A theory.#

On MSNBC last night, I learned something from David Frum that I had read in one of his Atlantic columns, but hearing him say it verbally brought it home in a whole new way. The reason McConnell wants the blue states to declare bankruptcy instead of defaulting is then the states will be administered by judges. The crazy corrupt Putin-approved judges he's been getting confirmed. So they can loot every last bit of money from the US. It's not enough to loot the US treasury, he wants to get the money of New York, California and Illinois, and also the purple and red states. It doesn't sound as good if he bullshits about Georgia, Texas and Arizona, but he wants their money too. Putin and his cronies are experts at hoovering up all the money. They should give Frum a permanent ten minutes every night on MSNBC to explain stuff this way. (Also get him a better net connection.) It would at least be more interesting, we might even be able to head off some of the depravity.#

Imagine we’re trying to get in shape, have to lose 50 pounds. We diet and work out for a month, lose ten pounds. Wow that was hard. We’re done. Let’s go out for a food party. 2 weeks later we’ve regained the ten we lost and added another 40.#

To a friend who lives in the UK. "Anyway we're both fucked. You live in the crazyiest European country, and I live in America. We just surrendered to the virus yesterday, in case you didn't hear." 💥#

BTW, there is some schadenfreude-type gratification in knowing that the virus is going to destroy Putin too. #

Good journalism should save your life.#

I build code forts. Forts of code. Only a few ways in and out, heavily defended, lots of valuable powerful stuff inside. #

Now that the Apple is happy with the Cuomo podcast, it's really nice the way it updates so quickly in the Podcasts app on my iPhone. A few seconds after a new episode is available, the podcast moves to the top of the list and it starts downloading the new episode. I wonder how they do it. Is my iPhone polling the feed constantly? Is an Apple server doing the polling and relaying a notice to all subscribed clients? Or perhaps they hook into the rssCloud functionality that the feed supports (part of RSS 2.0). That would be the best answer. #

Jay Rosen outlines all the likely news from the White House through the election. It's depraved, awful, and totally predictable. Not much point sending reporters to cover Trump, instead devote limited news resources to finding information that could save my life. #

On my bike ride the other day I saw a group of 10 or so people off on the side of the road, talking. Like they were catching up. All wearing masks. Except they all had them down so they could see each other's full faces, I imagine, which defeats the purpose of wearing a mask, of course. #

In the future it will be as rude to talk with someone publicly with your mask off as it would be with your pants down. Future porn will be people talking without masks in public places.#

I am a lip-reader. I guess over the years my hearing has become less accurate, and I compensate for it by getting more information from lip movement. I noticed this in a new way, waiting in line at the supermarket last week. If you depend on lip-reading, listening to people talk through masks is harder.#

Seeing all the Pulitzers today, including a new one for podcasting, it’s notable that tech doesn’t do awards for innovation and good works beyond IPOs, i.e. wealth creation, which might have something to do with the lack of new ideas in tech.#

Why can't airlines provide breathing masks for each passenger, so you breathe your own air supply, filtered and sanitized before it enters your system. #

Lincoln Project: Mourning in America.#

My SNL-awareness is spotty. I didn't learn about Kate McKinnon or Bill Hader until they had already been on the show for years. Same with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and so many others. Well, over the weekend, I discovered the Whiskers R We series. OMG. They're so good. Two lesbian cat rescue ladies, a different partner for McKinnon's character, Barbara DeDrew. every time. #

People seem to feel it's over, they see the weather changing, winter is finally over, summer is here, we must have survived, time to go out and play. That's evolution for you. Of course the virus is still out there hunting us. #

Such a beautiful day , almost summer weather, everything is in bloom now. Winter is finally over. I rode my bike both yesterday and today. Lovely. #

A video from President Bush. It's not hard to say the right words. #

It's great to get John Naughton's nightly email. He writes frequently about contact tracing, as he did last night. I believe that our phones can help with contact tracing, and we should be willing to give up some privacy. This is an emergency. I don't agree with Schneier who dismisses the help mobile devices could offer, but some of the comments on his post were right on, imho. More later for sure.#

Maybe journalism can stop tiptoeing around the plan, and just say what it is. 1. Reduce new infections to zero. 2. Contact tracing. 3. Low-cost, fast testing. That's how we get out of this.#