Please wear the mask even if you're vaccinated.
#
Podcast: What I've learned about where we're at with the virus. When will it be over? Depends on a lot of things, including many that are completely out of anyone's control, and unknowable. All we're doing basically is going with hunches, and trying to see what works. The virus our vaccines were tested against is not the same virus that's out there today. Variants and mutations make the virus a moving target. We need better monitoring, hopefully the Biden Administration is working on that. 15 minutes.
#All of a sudden the opportunities to get vaccinated are exploding here in upstate New York. We are over-supplied, it seems. It's always been true, the United States is the country you want to come help when you have a disaster. We were not prepared for this pandemic, but we could invent, test and manufacture a vaccine, and we are able to distribute it. We're good at this stuff. And we're big and rich enough to do it right. If the pandemic had happened with Biden as president, we'd have cleaned up the virus by now, and also gotten started of ridding ourselves of the insurance industry, which does nothing for us, and takes so much.
#
One year ago today I recorded a
podcast about how the world was about to change and how Americans weren't ready for it. And for a few hours I replaced the contents of the home page of my blog with a simple statement in very
big letters: "A deadly virus is taking over the world and the United States doesn't have a government." A year later, and the virus did take over the world, and thankfully the US now has a government, yet it is very damaged by the traitorous behavior of the ousted president. But we're doing better now.
#In the podcast I said the virus was going to hit us hardest, because we feel invulnerable. Lots of other things, it's worth a listen. I'm glad I did this podcast. It was a transition point, the world changed around March 5, 2020. On the other hand as it turns out I overestimated how bad it was going to be.
#We should all write something that could get us fired to get this idea flushed out of the system that expression of our beliefs, even if other people don't like them, or they trigger bad memories, is dangerous. That we are all scared of being true to ourselves says we’ve already lost a lot of freedom.
#
- In JavaScript you enter this form a lot. #
- It seems to me there's an opportunity to create a construct to factor this repetitiveness. #
- But for the life of me, I can't come up with something simpler. #
I think all apps should be scriptable, whether they run on the desktop or in the cloud. See the use-case in this
tweet. Eli wants a feature in Zoom. He has to wait for them to give it to him. If the app were scriptable, any developer could write it.
#BTW,
Stallman has a similar idea. He says everyone should give him their source code. But if you do that, you get a million silos instead of one. The correct way of doing this (freedom for users) is to build powerful systems that can be easily and arbitrarily hooked up to other systems.
#BTW, I'm going to be beating the drum for scriptable apps probably just as
annoyingly as I did it in the 90s. We need to do it. Too many silos. System-level scripting is the same idea as it was on the Mac, except most of the apps now run on servers in the cloud.
#John Naughton might have the best view of independent writing on the web. Through him, I keep up with an amazing number of people, many of whom I knew long time ago, but have lost track of. I wonder if there's a way to develop something with that info.
Hmm.
#
All the water my house uses comes from a well 140 feet underground. The water contains some minerals, not much, because the Catskills are renowned for water quality. The pipes also contribute minerals to the water, esp when the pressure drops to zero as it did the other day when the pump failed. And again when the power went out. When the water comes gushing back after an outage, it dislodges little bits of crap from the walls of the pipe that were loosened when the support of the water suddenly disappeared. There are filters that catch the chunks large enough to cause problems in some of the devices hooked up to the water supply. But not all, some have no filters, and the bits get lodged in bad places, but then given enough time, they disintegrate and things slowly return to normal. I learned all this in the last few days.
💥#
- An idea -- a net where no one knows your name or bio. #
- People listen to what others are saying without an idea of who's talking. All you know is that they were chosen to be part of the group because they're interesting, known to think well/carefully, have respect for other points of view.#
- There are criteria to be accepted, like a university has criteria. #
- Maybe you have to take a test. I know entrance exams are inevitably skewed to favor white men. Hire a team sociologists to try to overcome that. #
- Limit to say 10K people. Like a good-sized town. #
- I live in one, so have an idea how communities this size work online. With good moderation, the communities solve problems, people help each other. #
- Your real world identity is secret. #
- All you know is that everyone in the community likely has something in common with you.#
- Your screenname persists, so people get to know you but have no idea who you are in the real world. #
- If you reveal your identity, you are kicked off the system. 😄#
- BTW, I was part of such a community a long time ago.#
- It was called CB Radio and was a service on CompuServe, an ancient and long-gone social media site. #
An idea re Andrew Cuomo. Do a full investigation. Invite all accusers to come forward. The allegations are published by a 9/11-style commission. Then have an election, let the voters decide. I explained in some detail how I feel about this situation in a
podcast I recorded yesterday. Summary: No I don't think Cuomo deserves our mercy, I think
we deserve it. He led us very well during the darkest days of the pandemic, and for all we know even darker days are ahead. We are not out of the woods yet, although
some states are acting as if we are. The very things that make Cuomo such an asshole may also make him a great leader in times of trouble. In this way it's totally parallel to the Al Franken cancellation. Also I suggest his daughters, whom we've heard a lot about (too much, although his critiques of their boyfriends were funny, I guess, you may have to be from
Queens to get the humor), have a talk with him. Sit him down and make him listen. Dad we can possibly save your ass if you listen now. I'm guessing they know how unacceptable his
non-apology apology is. But ultimately this is not a decision for the press, or for other politicians, it's for the voters of New York to make. I think that in all but the most egregious emergencies, that's the right answer.
#
BTW if you asked me when I was a kid if Queens would someday elect a president, have the best
Chinese food in the US, and pretty much every other kind of Asian ethnic food, I would have thought you were out of your mind. On the other hand no one expected the Mets to win the World Series in 1969, so there's that. Queens is a weird place. But it's kind of nice that the world comes to Queens these days, and it emanates from Queens too.
#On this day last year, in a dream, my father, who never apologized for anything to anyone at any time in his life, as far as I know, apologized for something. I accepted it, and we became friends. Does it mean my subconscious is ready to forgive and move on, or did my father, after being dead for 11 years, process his life and realize it was time to
make amends? I don't know, but re-reading the post, I was able to feel the relief today that I felt last year. One of the many wonders of having a blog. I went back looking for comments about the looming (then) pandemic.
#
Yesterday with the
power outage, I listened to a lot of podcasts, including
The Argument from the NYT. They had a two-sided discussion of the filibuster. One side for getting rid of it, and the the other for preserving it. The latter was argued by a establishment Republican
conservative from the
Heritage Foundation. I kept thinking, they aren't the other side any longer. They represent possibly 10 percent of the Republican Party which represents maybe 40 percent of the electorate. The real "others" are the nutjobs and fascists. They want to
burn the whole thing down. I doubt if they have anything specific to say about the filibuster. I'd love to hear a debate between the
Ezra Klein faction (smart, thoughtful, polite) and the
guy who runs the US Postal Service or Josh Hawley. I also listened to the
Michael Cohen podcast. He has something. A real radio personality. A
Lawn Guyland guy for sure. Surpringly it held my interest.
#
- I think some of my friends might enjoy a little thing I put together a while back called thesaurus.land. #
- It's a word navigator. Enter a word in the text box, click the button and you get a list of synonyms. You can then double-click on any of them to see its synonyms, on and on as long as you like. #
- I love words, maybe you do too. #
- PS: Here's a video demo I did in 2016.#
- I was founder and CEO of a small Silicon Valley company in the 1980s. A few dozen people at its peak. I had invested everything in the company, and it was touch and go all the way. If I lost, I would have been totally broke, financially and personally, so I didn't have time to play around. #
- I also had a girlfriend, a long distance relationship, and remember being frustrated that her friends told her no man could be faithful that long, but I was. Maybe I was a fool because I got blamed for it anyway. But that's not the story. #
- There were plenty of women in the company, including execs. I wanted the best people I could get for the job, and I was raised by a woman who was accomplished and smart, so I believed in the idea of gender balance and practiced it. #
- I also was propositioned a fair number of times by women who worked for me. Totally inappropriate. I brushed them off, but occasionally had to sit down and say this was something you could get fired for, if it didn't stop. #
- There was so much sex going on in the company. And there was also gossip about who I was sleeping with (CEOs get gossiped about, no surprise). The whole thing was depressing. Our company was often on the brink of going under, and to some it was just a job, and maybe they felt it was hopeless, but I couldn't afford to. And there was no way to stop the gossip without making the issues even bigger. #
- Eventually we had a hit product, and noticed that when the company was growing the gossip became less important. #
- The point of the story is that sex in the workplace is complicated. It isn't just about men with power using it to take advantage of lower level employees. I think a lot of people must know this, and are overlooking, deliberately or not, when discussing this topic. #
Podcast about where we're at with Cuomo.
#
In
mid-February I made a change to my
script scheduler to attempt to get rid of drift, so that the nightly email would go out more or less precisely at midnight. The fix worked. Sometimes it's one second after midnight, but usually it's exact. The important thing is that any difference is not cumulative, it gets back on track on its own the next day. Here's a screen shot of
footer on last night's email.
#
The weather. Oy! Very cold very windy and the power has been out, on and off, since yesterday afternoon. I charged up all my devices before the power went out and loaded up lots of podcasts, so I'm very entertained. Made a
nice fire, but the house still got down to about 45 degrees. I was worried about pipes freezing if the outage lasted much longer. But the power is back at about 12:20PM Eastern and I'm feeling pretty good now.
#BTW, if you download Netflix shows to a mobile device, why does the app refuse to open if you don't have a net connection? What was the point of downloading them? I swear it used to work. How did I watch Netflix shows on airplanes?
#Brian Lehrer is one of the best podcasts out there. Just listened to his
summary of the Cuomo situation, including calls from listeners. They covered it all. Totally worth listening to.
#Why aren't there teams owned by corporations. Imagine if Amazon had an NBA team. I bet they'd figure out new ways to monetize it.
#DocServer was a Mac app, before there was a web, that let you read the verb docs for the UserLand scripting language. Once we transitioned to the web, DocServer became a web app, managed by our
website framework. I had forgotten it was an app before it was a website. And, btw, it was fully scriptable, as were all the apps we were making at the time. Here's a screen shot.
#
DocServer screen shot, late 80s?
#
Not knowing what ideas will not be tolerated in the future must make it hard for people to write for the NYT now.
#How are we going to be sure we remember January 6 and the fact that we've done
nothing so far to punish those responsible. Congress is filled with instigators. Yet the Dems go along as if it's four years ago and perhaps HRC is president and the Repubs are just being assholes.
#I was asked what would you do if you were in charge of the Dems. Okay. I would do the equiv of what Trump did on Jan 6, but do it legally, within the limits of the Constitution. Turns out the Constitution gives the Dems enough power to do what's needed. Yes, it will provoke what remains of the Repubs. So when are you going to stop worrying about that and realize that the rest of us have been totally provoked. They don't worry about provoking us. Maybe that's something we have to fix.
#Like many others I learned to live with an alcoholic parent. You try desperately not to provoke them. They drink and that's all the provocation they need. But they're the adult, and you're a kid so you believe them when they say you provoked them. But kids are not stupid, you can't see how.
#Yes. The Knicks are surprisingly good this year, and fun to watch. Finally NYC has a real NBA team. Not like Brooklyn which was annointed by an itinerant group of star players. They'll be as hollow as Miami or Cleveland when they move on.
#
We're making
good progress on the prototype discussion site for the Radio Open Source podcast.
#
I am pissed that the press is going after Andrew Cuomo, who led us through some very dark times, when it helped to feel like someone was in charge. We may need that again, and thanks to this purge, he may not be available. But if you really want to nail him, learn about the
1977 campaign between his father and Ed Koch, for mayor of NYC. It was very mean-spirited, and Andrew was part of it. I find what the Cuomos did utterly abhorrent, but you know what, we still need people who can lead. Perfection is nice, if you can afford it. We can't.
#Donald McNeil has started to write about his leaving the NY Times. It appears it'll be coming out in installments.
The first, which was published today on Medium is mostly preamble. I know what he means about being edited. I wrote briefly
for Wired in the early days. I loved my
first editor, she made an effort to understand my topic and me, and always made my writing better. If I disagreed she listened. Then I got a new editor, who did none of that. I read a piece with my name on it that was the opposite of what I had written. I felt like I had to write a letter to the editor saying the author (me) was an ignorant fool. It happened again, then I quit and returned to blogging where I often make mistakes, but they were my mistakes.
#
I have Apple's credit card, and it's got good integration with iOS as you would imagine. I get a notification every time some business charges my card. That's a killer feature.
#
Selfie taken in my Manhattan apartment in 2017. Look for Central Park in the glasses.
#Good morning! March is coming in like a lion for sure. It sucks. This afternoon a super cold front is blowing in, after a warm few days, with slush everywhere, and it's all going to freeze. Oy. I got so tired of living in California. Oh no another beautiful day, when will the torture end. Right now I'd give anything for a warm breeze, a bit of green, some flowers, a bike ride perhaps. Can't come soon enough. Anyway welcome to another month of my life.
#
If a software developer from the 80s were transported to the 2020s by a time machine, the first thing imho that he or she would want to know is what happened to all the word processors. why do people mostly use such shitty software to write online.
#Sometimes I write
good stuff on Facebook and that kinds of sucks because it's hard to point to. If we had a good scripting tool for the internet as a whole, then we could pull together all our creations, so at least we could archive, index and make them searchable. I hate when I deposit a good idea on Facebook or Twitter. They often are impossible to find even 24 hours after I write them. We can do much better.
#
- I started a newsletter using Twitter's newly acquired service, just to see how it worked. Four people subscribed. The email went out last night at midnight. Here's the report.#
- Since no one read the newsletter, I thought I should post the content here. Why waste some good off-the-top-of-my-head writing? #
- What I want, and will accept no less, is to be able to use my editor, my writing space. Ask any writer how they like to write, and they’ll tell you that they like to write where they write. Forcing me to use your tool says you have an attitude of world domination. Unfortunately quite a few other tech companies have the world domination strategy. This is how we get silos, and how we create weak tools and limit communication. At a time where we need better communication tools.#
- Also one other question? Why don’t they suck in my tweets? What a missed opportunity. In my editor, I have a command that gets all my recent tweets, so I can use them as a starting point for more writing. Twitter now makes a pretty good place to drop an idea for exanding on later. You’d think Twitter itself would understand that.#
- One more thing. Their writing app needs automatic vertical scroll. I don’t want to take my hands off the keyboard while writing to do something like scrolling the screen vertically, that the software should be doing for me.#
- Anyway that’s enough for one issue of this proto-newsletter.#
- PS: I am one of the four subscribers and as far as I can tell I did not get a copy of the newsletter via email. It says I subscribed over three years ago. That's pretty weird. Maybe I tried it once before they were acquired by Twitter? I tend to do that. Oh well. 💥#
I write code the same way I write blog posts: as if someone is going to read it. I want to make sure they understand, to the best of my ability. So I leave clues, and use names that hopefully give the reader an idea of my intention. With code, it has to work, at a machine level, so sometimes you have to trade off some human sense for machine sense. But the basic motivation is the same. If I can't work on it later, even when it isn't fresh in my mind, it's not worth nearly as much.
#In the early 2000s we had an
API for writing tools to plug into content systems. We felt that writing tools should develop independently of how the writing is distributed. Simple idea, any developer can understand the need. But today, the systems don't offer choice. If you want to publish in their environment you have to use their text editor. Facebook makes you use their editor, it's a piece of crap, it has tiny little type, hard to read, super buggy. Why can't I use my own editor. Just want to tell non-devs out there, they could do it, easily and cheaply. Their reason for not doing it is to lock you in to using their tool. What a waste of our brainpower. It's as if your printer came with word processing software and you could only print stuff from that app. That's what Substack is doing, and Twitter's new newsletter software does it too. Use our primitive writing tool, that's the only choice. Ridiculous. It's a throwback to the way tech worked
in the 1970s. Bottom line, start evaluating these services based on the quality of their writing tools, really criticize them, until they get tired of hearing it, and offer you a chance to use the ones you love.
#Have you ever heard this idea on the op-ed page of a major news org or spoken by a commentator on cable news. "The reason news is in such hard times as a business is that they let the tech industry control their distribution. If they had competed they'd be making plenty of money."
#
How would you feel if Biden supporters invaded the CPAC meeting on Sunday when El Orange is speaking, and shot up the place, killed a cop, beat up a few more. Par for the course? Shit happens? Move on? Get over it? MAGA! Why not? Look who's up there on stage. Individual 1.
#Perhaps my favorite thing about my
Subaru Forester is how well it fits me: "It has more headroom than any car I've owned, which is cool because my torso is huge. In most cars, designed for normal-size people, I hit my head getting in, and have to scrunch my body uncomfortably just to fit. I sail in and out of the Forester, and I can sit any way I want." Is the same true of a Tesla, if so which one? I would certainly have to verify.
#One answer to all the new Republican voter suppression is to move Presidents’ Day holiday to the Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November.
#
- The other night it was super windy, and my house makes pretty nasty sounds when it's windy, but nothing like what it did that night. A huge crashing sound from the roof, like a big tree had hit the house. I was surprised the house could be rocked so hard and still be standing. #
- In the morning, I checked. No tree. This really weirded me out. #
- I had no idea what had happened until a few minutes ago, when I saw on the upstairs patio off my office there were these huge chunks of ice. I tried picking one up, and it wouldn't budge. Hundreds of pounds of ice, all over the place. #
- Clearly what had happened that night was a chain reaction of ice that had accumulated through all the storms this winter, dislodging and crashing down off the porch at once. Right over my poor sleeping head! #
- Oy at least it wasn't a tree. And the house is still standing!#
The culprit. Lots of heavy ice.
#
Poll: If you were a Republican who believes in the rule of law and the Constitution, what would you do?
#If you don't believe such a thing exists, listen to this
discussion between David Frum and Preet Bharara, all the way through. Obviously Frum, a Republican, passionately believes in the rule of law, and he is staying a Republican, he says so clearly. I read Frum's
latest book, I read all his Atlantic columns. I cringe when he talks about Republican campaigns he worked on, and his experience in the Bush II administration. How could someone so honest be so corrupt? Somehow it works for him. Who am I to question. I have a philosophy. I don't ask how you got to the party. I don't care if you took the subway, or cam in a limo or an Uber, or you walked, rode a bike, or hijacked a bus. You're at the party, that's all that matters. Let's work together to get back to a place where we can respectfully disagree, and retain our honor. I'm pretty sure Frum would agree.
#A video demo shows how un-disruptive it would be for Twitter to go beyond 280 chars.
#
If you work at a tech company and hear someone say that you're going for world domination, tell them I said it's okay but you should plan for co-existence and working with your competitors for the benefit of users. Just in case you don't achieve world domination. Always good to have a Plan B.
😄#
Following up on the
question about
English Muffins. The
consensus is they are not muffins. This, believe it or not, is a practical question. I was at the grocery store, loading up the conveyer belt for checking out. I dropped a pack of English Muffins on the belt, and accidentally dropped the other on the floor. I said "there are two packs of muffins, please run that through twice." When I finished she said she didn't see any muffins. I laughed, and pointed to the
English muffins. We had a nice discussion about whether or not they really are muffins. I thought I should ask my Twitter followers and Scripting News readers. We are mostly in agreement. 👎
#Twitter has a newsletter service. I signed up to see how it works.
You can subscribe, but there probably will only be this one issue. Functionally it's very similar to the others. You have to use their editor. I already have an editor that's customized for the way I work, so there's no way I'm using their editor. I already have
email distribution of my own. It's ridiculous. They must not understand how writers work. We find the tool that's right for us and it becomes part of our bodies. Too much world domination as a strategy in tech, as always. That's how we get situations like this.
#These few years will determine the fate of the world in so many ways. It’s like a comedy, a very dark one, that so many focus their attention elsewhere. From Repubs trying to rig the elections so they win even if they don't have the votes, to liberals trying to enforce philosophical purity in journalism. Meanwhile
the world burns.
#
- My wish list for Twitter itself follows, not any of the things they announced today, all of which could be done just as well by others, and have been. #
- To the core product, this is what I want. #
- Tweets with more than 280 chars. #
- Tweets with titles.#
- Simple styling, bold/italic.#
- Links.#
- Enclosures (for podcasting).#
- A "more" button after 280, so it's functionally equivalent to today's limits.#
- Would be enabling, explosive, powerful, society-transforming, useful, something only Twitter can do. Why not.#
- Let my tweets breathe! #
Are you addicted to the feeling the world is about to end every day. I found that I had a mild addiction to it, but I have been able to give up the drug now that Biden is president and the Dems are in charge in DC. I am happy to be a citizen, very tired of being a pundit.
#
Listening to President Biden's
schmaltzy speech about the 500,000 Americans who died of Covid, I was sobbing in tears through practically the whole thing. I don't have any family or friends, that I know of, who have died of the virus. But the words reach inside this American's heart. Love of country and family live in the same place. We've lost a lot, but we're still America. You could argue, factually whether or not it's the greatest country in the world, but to the heart of this American, whose family found refuge here, who simply wouldn't exist if it weren't for America, there is no argument. We are great, when we choose to be great.
#BTW, that might be the first time the term
President Biden have appeared on this blog. Oops it has appeared
once before.
#In 2017, I
wrote about the (then new) Scripts menu in
LO2. I've been spending the last few weeks working with that functionality because we solved a big problem with JavaScript, how to make it work like an actual scripting language. This menu/script editor idea goes back to the early days of Frontier, and
menu sharing, which was a feature adopted by Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, and then basically everyone else, in the early days of the web on the Mac. People say blogging is coming back, I hope so, and blogging came from scripting, and vice versa. The two technologies are very intertwined. That's why this blog is called
Scripting News, btw, which is a pun.
#
- In response to yesterday's bit about Scoble and me lusting after a Tesla, I got a wonderful email from John Naughton about his love of Tesla. Even better, he told me which one to get! 💥#
- I saw Scoble’s post, which I thought was perceptive. I was receptive to it because last year I took the plunge and bought a Tesla — a Model 3 — and it’s been a transforming experience. What makes that remarkable is that I’m a recovering petrolhead — I had a 3.8 litre Mk II Jaguar towards the end of my grad student days — and believe me that was a big deal in those days. So I’ve always been interested in cars, and over the years have owned lots of good and interesting ones.#
- But the Tesla is something else. It’s basically software with wheels. Every week or so it gets a software update — mostly bug fixes or minor features added. For example, it used to be quite a palaver to open the glove box: you had to go to the touchscreen, go down a level, find glove box and tap on the icon. Now you have voice control and you just say “Open Glove Box”. That came in a software update. Every so often there are more consequential updates — there’s one coming soon to the Autopilot and, eventually, to the (optional) Full Self Drive software which, theoretically, enables a measure of autonomous driving. So it’s a car that improves steadily the longer you have it.#
- I’m not interested in FSD because I rather like driving. But also I’m getting older and I wanted a car that could look ahead and take avoiding action if I missed seeing something — which it already does when Autopilot (which is basically just smart cruise-control) is on.#
- The Model 3 is a delight to drive — it’s as nimble as a Porsche (and indeed seems quicker — zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds — than even a Porsche 911). And it’s soooo quiet. My wife and I can whisper and hear one another at 70mph on a freeway.#
- The other big deal is that Tesla starting building a supercharger network almost as soon as they started building cars. This was smart because the non-Tesla charging networks are still chaotic and often unreliable — which is why people with non-Tesla EVs continue to find long journeys sometimes erratic and problematic.#
- If you do decide to go for one, I suggest you go for the long-range, dual-motor version of the Model 3. That has all-wheel drive, which I reckon is necessary in the winter for where you live.#
- And get a home charger, so that whenever you leave the house the car is fully charged.#
- In a way, after I got the car I thought of you. Tesla is what the automobile industry ought to have been doing when the tech arrived, just as you think the journalism/media business ought to have pivoted when the Internet and the Web arrived.#
It's all up from here.
#
I spent much of the day at the eye doctor, and left with my eyes dilated, still feeling weird. So you are forewarned this is not the usual
Scripting News fare. No doubt many typos.
#
Scoble is trying to convince me to buy a
Tesla. Confession: I'm starting to lust after one. But I'm also lusting after a Ford 150. Oy such problems. This is what I meant about feeling reborn after being double-vaccinated. I'm wearing a mask, frankly I think we should all wear masks from now on, for the foreseeable future. The way they did in Asia. People just wore them. I always thought it was weird. Then Covid happened, and they did a lot better than we did in mask-averse America. I think part of the return to "normal" is to understand that normal means something else now.
#About normalcy. I was telling a friend how there was a party atmosphere at the place we all got our vaccines. She pointed out that it might have been that we had been so deprived of social contact, and I slapped my hand on my forehead. Of course. I am not usually as gregarious as I've been in the last year, when I have had a chance to be with other people. I thrive on it.So we were all high at the vaccination site not just with relief at gaining some immunity, but also because here were some real live humans to talk with! It's why I think, no matter how dire the reality is, when we achieve new kinds of social interaction we will be a happy place, probably for quite a while or hopefully. I remember how it felt after 9-11, but the togetherness was short-lived. Maybe we should think about what kind of normal we want?
#One more thing. I had to spend a few hours at an eye doctor today for a checkup. I wanted to be chatting with people, but they weren't interested. Then I realized they work in a busy office, to them there's nothing unusual about having someone to chat with. As I waited for my eyes to dilate, I heard lots of random conversations, and didn't realize then how unusual that was, a fairly normal thing in the past, but foreign to me now.
#Okay yet another thing. Apparently after the 1918 pandemic no one wrote about it, no songs were written, no great movies or novels about life in the pandemic. I wonder if it'll be like that this time.
#
The exam room at the eye doctor.
#
I keep sharing this idea with my friends at
Radio Open Source, but I don't think they get it. It's the same advice I'd give to any professional news org. Build more community around your podcast. If you do a weekly show, say on a Thursday, compile a set of emails from listeners and publish it on Tuesday, via email, as a newsletter. That way you get to know who's listening, and we get to know each other. Chris's podcast no doubt has some very interesting listeners, who are they and what do they think, what do they know? They've set up, imho, a too-narrow pipe, necessitated by the technology
we used to use for radio. Today's tech makes so much more possible. You just have to want to do it. I don't doubt they could find volunteers to read and curate the emails, so only the really interesting stuff goes out. What made me think of this was
last week's show, with a famous
English prof, going through how short stories work. It was just a tiny sliver of a scratch of the surface. I want to know much more about this. Also glad to get away at least for a moment of end-of-the-world stories, which tend to dominate the podcast-o-sphere these days.
💥#Lizzie Vann, a famous entrepreneur, did something bold, she bought and renovated
Bearsville Center, a theater, studio and restaurants and other buildings in
Bearsville NY that were built by
Albert Grossman in the 60s and 70s as a place for the musicians he worked with to gather. He died in 1986, eventually Bearsville was abandoned. But now, it's beautiful again, an up to date and very attractive venue, what a great gathering place, as it once was, esp for people who produce audio (eg podcasters). Watch this
video to get an idea. A beautiful place. Lovely in summer. An idea, as we come out of the pandemic of course.
🚀#
There should be a way to opt out of Fox on cable. I realized recently that I've been paying them as much as the most MAGA person in the world,
for decades. I want to stop paying them. I want my money back too. Let's organize this. Fox is something that truly needs to be cancelled.
#Ex-Repubs should join the Democratic Party. What matters most is a commitment to the Constitution and rule of law. We can work on the rest.
#
I posted this on Facebook five years ago. I thought it was funny then, it's even funnier now. I hope.
#
Just read the name "ivanka" in a Facebook message and had to try hard to remember where I had heard that name before. Another thing I'm having trouble with is remembering if and when "intent" matters with the NYT. They run an op-ed from a troll, I guess intent is irrelevant?
#A platform like Facebook is very hard to build. Serving billions of users, hundreds of millions at the same time, is a mostly unheralded accomplishment, probably like putting a man on the moon. Yet this never comes up in the public analysis.
#
I don't watch a lot of movies these days thanks to the pandemic I guess. But in the last two days I watched two,
NomadLand and
I Care a Lot. It's hard to imagine two more different movies. NomadLand is a character study, played by a 63-year-old
Frances McDormand. Her age is important. I understand this somewhat because I'm 65, and it's like that great
Al Pacino speech in
Any Given Sunday, as you get older
things are taken from you. Parents, friends, lovers, and then pieces of yourself start going, and you're left wondering what the fuck. That's NomadLand in a nutshell. The acting is beautiful, the scenery, the characters, the feelings (somewhat) -- but the story? It's like viewing a work of art in a museum. It's just there. It's for you to decide what it means and a lot of that will depend on how old you are, I imagine. I Care a Lot is very much the opposite, but interestingly it's also about things being taken away from an old person, in this case played by 72-year-old
Dianne Wieste. So much happens in the first few minutes of the movie, and it's so anger-making, I turned it off at least three times to regain my composure to continue watching. But then it becomes a rollicking ultra-violent comedy, kind of like a Quentin Taratino movie, but funnier. If you want entertainment, I Care a Lot is for you. I will watch NomadLand again. Sometimes movies like this don't grab me on the first viewing, for example,
There Will Be Blood, which i panned after a first viewing, then
loved after a second. I'll let you know.
#BTW, the title, I Care a Lot, is a joke.
💥#
My friend Jeff Jarvis is going on CNN shortly to talk about Google, Facebook, Australia and Murdoch. #- Had a thought. Simple arithmetic. There was a fantastic boom, blogging made a lot of stuff happen. Where did it all go? The thesis from journalism seems to be all that is over, ancient history. I think the evidence is to the contrary. Blogging reshaped the world. Not only for good, of course. #
- Journalism plays a magic trick, ignoring the changes, and the good, and only focusing on how the new tech (yes it still is new) can be used for evil. #
- Perhaps possibly because of their conflict of interest.#
- Jarvis is going on with Brian Stelter who I understand got his start in blogging. So it would be interesting if Jeff asked him a question. Do you think the flow is just one way, from journalism to Facebook, or perhaps something more is going on. #
- My thesis is that blogging may be somewhat vestigial, may be a virtual dinosaur, but its genes are still in ciculation, the equivalent of online birds. #
Finally a future-of-journalism
pundit who sees (and says) that the users are a huge asset that the news industry has ceded to Facebook and Twitter. There's simply too much news happening for the journalists try to cover it all. We need a cooperative effort. And despite all the trash talk from journalism about Facebook, a lot of very important stuff happens there, without their awareness or help.
#My perspective has shifted since being twice-vaccinated.
#I Care a Lot is a fine movie, in a way, the best movie I've seen in a long time. The beginning is hard to watch, but if you're getting on in years, you should know that what they depict actually happens, out of the blue people are committed, by strangers, and their assets stolen, legally. Anyway, once you get over that hump, almost every time you turn a corner, there's something new and wonderful. I haven't had my attention held by a movie like this in a long time.
#
I was once invited to speak at an
RSS conference in NY. I was living in Florida, they refused to pay my expenses, so I sold advertising for my speech. The promoters were offended. Of course all that anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was how to add advertising to RSS.
#
- A recital of some facts. #
- The US is great at elections. We have been running them since inception, longer than any other country in the world. We are the gold standard in elections. #
- Our elections are not perfect, but their imperfections heavily favor Republicans. #
- The 2020 election was a standard US presidential election. #
- It was secure, fair and not in any way rigged. #
- Joe Biden won the election, in terms of votes, and in the Electoral College. #
- On January 6, Trump supporters attacked the US Congress, and came close to overthrowing the elected government of the United States. This was and still is shocking. We have not fully processed yet what happened on January 6. #
- Whether you think Trump caused it or not doesn't matter for this question. Trump supporters did it, in his name. It seems impossible for one to support Trump at this point, and not also support and accept the insurrection. If you self-proclaim as a Trump supporter, you also support the overthrow of the elected government of the United States by force. Sorry if this is news to you but you are not a patriot, you are a traitor. #
- Before the insurrection you could possibly shrug off our "differences" but now your friends who are Trump supporters are no longer willing to accept the result of a fair election, and their response to the fair election is to try to overthrow the government. You can't accept this. Even if they are family members. You have to turn your back on them. #
- I thought Julian Castro said it brilliantly at the impeachment trial. Asked if he was concerned about Trump winning in 2024, he said no -- he was afraid of Trump losing. He's afraid of a repeat of what happened on January 6. He's right to be afraid. #
- Trump supporters live in an incompatible alternate country. The two cannot co-exist. We have to defeat them. It's not just about the people who crashed the Capitol, it's about the people who accept that. No excuses, not interested in discussing. We do not co-exist. #
Question: Is there a movie you’ve watched a dozen or more times, that you’d watch right now if it were on? Lots of responses.
#
I just cancelled Fubo and YouTube TV. I was able to replace both for
much less money by re-hooking up with Spectrum, my cable provider. So
cutting the wire is not economic. That word should get around. When you look at the set top box and think "I can save money by getting rid of that," that's probably wrong. This is an ever more divided space, where big media companies use their content to keep you in their networks. And since many of them also own movie companies, and the pandemic has destroyed their distribution system, they;'re all trying, cautiously, to use their streaming services to unclog their new movie pipelines. I guess because of history, the cable providers can offer the best deals? Not sure why it is that way but it is. YouTube TV still has the most comfortable UI in this category, btw. Spectrum's is awkward, but I'm guessing I'll get used to it.
#
The Disney streaming universe. (Typical)
#
One of the reasons I'm so sympathetic with Donald McNeil is that I have a friend whose career was ruined by something not all that different from what happened to McNeil. And unlike McNeil, he's still got a number of productive years before retirement, has three children to provide for, and more important deserve to look up to their father. #- There are some people whose loyalty is so valued that no matter what happens I'll stand by them. There aren't many in my life. There was a time in 2002 when I was really sick, and had a long recovery in front of me. I made it is because of the help of three friends. And one of them is this person, who I'm not going to name, because I think there's a chance doing so would make it worse for him, and that's the last thing I want. #
- This is something "the left" does, and it's real. They're pretending they don't do it. But they do. It's just as awful imho as the people who attacked the Capitol, at least they had the guts to try to ruin things out in the open. The people who attacked my friend had nothing against him. It was all laid out in a Medium post, crafted to make no specific charges, just to phrase things that made him seem like a Harvey Weinstein type, when he is nothing of the sort. #
- Anyway another friend who reads my blog pointed this out. You are taking a lot of notice of McNeil, she said in a phone conversation. It's true. I love what McNeil did during the early days of the pandemic. I will miss his commentary as we go forward, but hopefully he can find another path to the podcast universe. I also like the rapport he had with Michael Barbaro, and I guess that's gone. I think the NYT is a lost cause. #
- But friendship, that's still the whole thing. The personal connection. The knowing your friend is deeply flawed but still he's your friend. I can openly advocate for McNeil without much risk, but the issue is much bigger than McNeil and the NY Times. #
If I recall correctly, everything is in bloom in California this time of year.
#
My Mac is in
Notification Hell. Can you help? And a few minutes after posting this I got to the end of the list. And that's that. No more notifications. I think the Computer God had mercy on me, after I pleaded properly. Anyway, never mind.
😄#
The Republican Party, what's left of it, has one common value. Freaking out libtards so they can say they don't give a fuck about your feelings. They will keep upping the outrage to get this reaction. My mother taught me about people like this. I've met quite a few in my life.
#
Got my second vaccination today!
😄#Anyone who has an opinion will be seen as grumpy.
#People don't know that
podcasting came out of the blogging and RSS community in the early 2000s.
#Something to be grateful for, if
Rush Limbaugh had died a month earlier, Trump would've probably had a state funeral for him.
#
I use a Mac. I keep the
desktop Dock at the bottom of the main screen. I want to be sure the dock doesn't magically get moved to the second screen. It happens every few days, if I click in the dock in a certain way. Is there some way to lock the dock in place, at the bottom of the main screen? It doesn't seem there should be any mouse click that gets the dock to move such a great physical and conceptual distance.
#More
bad human factors from Apple. I've had this problem where it complains about disks being ejected that I never ejected. I deal with it, but today there seems to be an infinite number of these dialogs. I've been clicking on the Close button in these dialogs for ten minutes, and it's impossible to know how many there are. It feels like thousands. I've tried pressing modifier keys while clicking, to no avail.
#One more. I got a new pair of AirPods, couldn't live without them. I couldn't for the life of me read the very
simple instructions. Letters are a light gray on a white background and tiny. Why? They have so much space. Why not use a big font and black letters? Did they user-test this at all? Are their designers sadists? Questions questions.
#Trump: "Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack." The description also matches Trump. I wonder if he knows this.
#Imagine if the only sound the human voice could make was this:
oy. We'd develop a whole language around various intonations and combinations of oy. Give it a try. Sing
Jesus Christ, Superstar, but replace all the words with combinations of oy. Try not to laugh.
#
I thought "cutting the wire" would save me money, but it actually costs a lot more for the same programming. I am currently spending $65 for both YouTube TV and Fubo, and $12 for Hulu, and no HBO, though I really want it. If you add it up, it's about $150 a month. So I called Spectrum to see if I could get that without the set top box, and if so, how much would it cost. Turns out it's about $40 on top of my internet service, with all the local sports, weather, news, CNN, MSNBC and HBO. I'm going to cancel the others, I'm sure I'll miss something, but one thing I won't miss is having to remember where to go for each of the shows I'm interested in. And of course I still have Netflix and Amazon. So I'm back to where I was before I naively threw all my cards in the air. Back to Roku and Spectrum. I guess I learned a lot.
❤️#It's ridiculous at this time to say that Clubhouse will be a raging success. But people like
verdicts. I remember when
push technology was the rage, and Wired proclaimed the web dead as a result. 1997.
#BTW, I forgive Wired for doing that. That was the culture at the time.
Web Energy -- I called it. I drank the Kool Aid
myself. But it's especially important to keep your own scorecard, so next time you temper your enthusiasm and negativity with a proper amount of self-doubt.
#Power outages and an internet outage. We're having the same weather here half the country is having. Freezing rain and fog. Dramatic!
#
- Here's the disconnect with journalism and Facebook.#
- Facebook is not journalism. And that's not an insult to Facebook. #
- It's not journalism the way the telephone is not journalism. #
- Facebook says you can publish on our site. Go right ahead. That's the opposite of journalism which says, you want to publish on our site, get in line, and conform to our values, look like us, and then 1 out 10000 will get in. It's even tougher than Harvard or Princeton. #
- So journalism keeps trying to fit Facebook into their model. Facebook says this can't work. Journalism calls them names. That's where we are right now in this great fight between the people and journalism. #
- The real force here is not Facebook the company or their servers, which are impressive and very valuable -- it's the people who use Facebook.#
Good morning sports fans!
#Back in the late 80s I started a company called
UserLand. My second company. I knew that was going to be the name when I was running my first, Living Videotext. It was named after the tech. By the time I was ready for the second, I came to believe that every company is about the users, not the tech, hence UserLand. 33 years later, I feel the same way, only more so.
#
- I hoped that when Ben Smith wrote about the Donald McNeil firing at the NYT, he'd look at the media angle, not the internal chaos at the NYT. I guess maybe in a sense that is media? It's an old story, honestly I think only journalism insiders care. I don't.#
- McNeil was like Jeremy Lin in 2012 and the NYT was the Knicks. Right person at the right place at the right time. And (oddly) the NYT did the same thing with McNeil that the Knicks did with Lin. Weird how that works. Someone should write a book. ;-)#
- What mattered with Lin and what matters with McNeil is that the users love them. You should check that out. I could go into great detail, but honestly that's not my job. I'm a user and actually a longtime fan of both the Knicks and the NYT. #
- Ask the NYT reporter who covers the Knicks now. They're doing great. They have a bunch of Jeremy Lins now. Somehow they figured out their business. The NYT imho is drifting further and further away from it. #
- The combo of McNeil and the Daily podcast was gold. Why did they break up the team? Ben, that would be a story worthy of you. Again imho. A fan. Dave#
Podcast: It's the day after the death of the thing we called Donald Trump. In this podcast I explain how magical things happen in the days after someone you're close to dies. It feels that way with Trump. We got one last look at him, not in person, because the person is gone, the Trump who watched TV and tweeted all day from the White House. Gone, not forgotten, becoming a distant memory. What little is left is finishing up old business, and then will depart for good. It's a 20 minute series of stories. Hope you enjoy!
#Jason Calacanis
says the Knicks are good at basketball again. They really are. They have two full teams now. I love the way they did it, not like the Nets, Clippers, Lakers. They didn't buy a team of rental players. It's a home grown team. There are a half dozen Jeremy Lins on this team. So much fun to watch.
#I think Apple could make a diff in cars. The other day I was on a longish drive and wanted to listen to the NPR coverage of the Senate hearings. I went in and out of range of various NPR stations. Something the car could have handled for me. A data processing function.
#The fact is Trump is guilty, regardless of what the Senate decided.
#Listening to pundits yesterday, it was remarkable they forgot how scared we were on
January 7 that this wasn’t the end of the insurrection. Something had to be done and impeachment was the only option. That’s why I keep
a blog, it’s like a time machine.
#There is a silver lining to Trump's acquittal. He can now go back to his new occupation of Former Pain In The Ass. Let the bill collectors and district attorneys have him. And Hawley, Cruz and Cotton can go back to their Hitler lessons. Maybe a new reality show that every week gives you a glimpse of the miserable life of a would-be despot, who failed.
#BTW, having served on a
jury, next time maybe they should require deliberation among the jurors.
#
- Net-net I'm not too depressed about the Senate acquittal because I remember how the impeachment happened. It was the only instant response possible. (Except as David Frum pointed out at the time, the Senate could have met and voted him out of office the same day, that would have been awesome. Wish they had the guts to do it.) #
- The inauguration was two weeks away. The concern was what would happen next. People say McConnell refused to have the trial before Trump left, but actually that was somewhat rational. They needed to clean up the Capitol, it was trashed, covered in blood and human excrement, and secure it. It sure looked like there would be more attacks at the time. Also don't forget that then-VP Pence refused to consider the 25th Amendment. He gets his share of the credit, if you want to blame McConnell.#
- We know how it turned out now, but we did not know then. And of course a conviction wouldn't have had much practical value. I think it's better if Trump fades into obscurity. Let minor government officials harass him now. He'll protest. "But but I'm the great Trump!" No, you're now a defendant in criminal and civil trials. Then, no you are a bankrupt resident of a federal or state prison. #
- Let's give him something to really complain about. #
It's time to say goodbye to 45.
#
What Omar
would say to McConnell. "You come at the king, you best not miss." Shot his wad. He's a nobody now. He should retire.
#I guess most people think we go back to business as usual with Congress doing more or less what it did at some point in the past. If so, I think you've got blinders on.
#
- We have bigger fish to fry with the pandemic, and it's not just good enough to defeat it, people have to feel the government defeating it. Maybe we don't have a Congress anymore. Maybe it's Biden and a fig leaf for a Congress. Clearly they can't deal with the problem of Trump.#
- For right now, treat Congress as a museum. This is a shell of what it used to be. You have to use your imagination to see that there once was a co-equal branch of government here. Now they're a PR appendage for the executive branch. They give the MSNBC and CNN journos something to fuss over. Keeps them busy when they aren't reporting on President Biden's latest heroic battle against the virus. #
- If the Repubs win Congress in 2022, who cares. It’s a powerless former coequal branch of government. #
- President Biden will do as he pleases. #
- Next up, as with the filibuster there will soon be a virtual insurrection. #
- A fantasy presidency#
- And then Biden renames Air Force One The Rocinante.#
- Biden and his wily clever sidekick -- Fauci Man! ;-)#
- Biden and Fauci and Super Veep roam the country, fighting the MAGAs and The Virus, making America safe for whatever comes next. Have to figure that part out. #
Are you a first-generation something?
#This is what I posted on the
home page of my blog on
March 5 last year. "A deadly virus is taking over the world and the United States doesn't have a government." It occurs to me now that the United States does now have a government.
#I don't believe in the death penalty for people, no matter how enraged I am at what they did. But I do believe in the death penalty for political parties. If the Repubs don't vote to convict, a small gesture of respect for the Constitution, we must condemn the party to death.
#I asked my
biomedtech friend to review my immunity
post: "You’re good to go anywhere a week after the second shot, don’t worry about it! Even if you’re that 5% yes you almost certainly have some immune training that will keep you out of the hospital. Now is the time to enjoy your life and not worry, at some point a nastier variant could evade the vax but not yet man so go enjoy the spring and summer!"
#I tried watching Trump's impeachment defense, but the instant I tuned in I heard the lie. I immediately turned it off. This is the moment of truth when the Republican Party, or most of it, legally, openly and on the record becomes
the party of sedition.#
Another update in the
Airpods saga. Recall that I
gave up on the
Jabra and Skullcandy earbuds. They both sounded horribly tinny, like an old style AM radio. Actually I didn't give up, it turns out. While watching impeachment hearings, I searched for reports on the Jabra earpods and the word
tinny, and read
this thread on Reddit. Basically they said do a bunch of voodoo, put them back in their case, take them out, do it again, change the silicon fits, do it all again, say a prayer, and sooner or later they will sound like you thought they should based on the glowing
review in Wirecutter. It worked! Unreal. This is another example of the way we used to fix broken Apple II's, just take them for a drive in the car, and they start working again. Anyway, good enough. And in the interim I ordered a new pair of Apple Airpod Pros, because I got hooked, and had headset-envy every time I saw someone on TV wearing them. As I've said many times, I collect headsets the same way some
people collect shoes.
#BTW, Google search is getting worse all the time. I know I've told the story of how we used to fix Apple II's by driving around (they always seemed to work when we got to the repair shop), and I've also said many times that I collect headphones the way some people collect shoes, but Google can no longer find either. I've been using Google search since 1998. I hate Google for the way
they treated RSS, and the way they are doing the same
to the web, but I've been using their search engine for 23 years, and it's a hard habit to break, but one way to break it is to break search, which they seem to be doing. They should shrug this off at their own peril. Imagine Coke taking the fizz out of their cola. Same basic idea imho.
#
- It seems likely say 8 Repubs are going to vote to convict.#
- That means 58 out of 100, a solid bipartisan majority.#
- That's pretty damning imho for the 42 who voted to acquit. #
- I bet that puts pressure on *some* of the 42 to either be sick the day of the vote, or vote to convict.#
- Next week I'm getting the second dose of the Moderna vaccine. #
- I had mild side-effects with the first shot, which I got on January 20, also Inauguration Day. I expect it to be worse this time, but I'm excited and a little disoriented by the new reality. #
- A couple of weeks later, say by March 3, according to the science, I will be at 95% immunity. This means the probability of me getting infected, everything else constant, is only 5% of what it was before January 20.#
- A bit of info I don't have -- if I were to get infected would it be less likely to be severe or deadly?#
- Of course I'm going to continue to be masked. I ordered some new Docker brand masks for the event. #
- What should I risk after immunity? Go to the movies? Drive down to the city, just to get some bagels perhaps or ride a CitiBike in Central Park? These would seem very exotic now. #
- It's been 1.5 years since I've been to a city larger than Kingston, NY. I'm actually quite happy about that. I like life in the mountains. #
- Suggestion to movie theater owners. Offer 1/2 price to anyone who is fully vaccinated. Or Olive Garden, or Applebee's.#
- And yes this is yet another boomer privilege. It's fair to hate me but only for this. 🚀#
New code. I've been looking for good sample code for a JavaScript pre-processor, couldn't find, so I wrote.
#
I love
Fresca Blackberry Citrus sparkling soda water. I tried it because I like regular
Fresca. My first taste was yuck this is like water with just a little hint of flavor. So I kept drinking my Diet Dr Pepper, my current go-to carbonated beverage. But then I ran out of chilled DDP, so I went with the backup, and the second time, wow, it was a super refreshing, bubbly instant thirst quench. I know this sounds like a commercial, but that's really where I'm at now. I'd pick Fresca Blackberry Citrus over
anything at this point. Have to get some more.
💥#I've been watching the impeachment trial on and off. It's excellent. They thought of everything. Just asked a big question -- what if Trump had succeeded. He came close. What if they had killed a few senators, the VP, the Speaker. What would have happened next? Clearly this whole thing was planned, probably around the time Barr left. Did he see how it was shaping up and decided to get out then. Are the only ones who stood with Trump up to the coup, Hawley and Cruz? Were they surprised when the mob got into the Capitol? So many questions. A lot of them are off-topic for the impeachment, but historians are going to want to know how this came together.
#
- I have never watched The Mandalorian, never wanted to. I saw the big comeback Star Wars movie a few years ago and was bored. All the comic book movies are boring. So I have no idea who the actress is who got cancelled, I don't know what she said. But the reaction to her being fired is huge and obnoxious, as usual. So I know it's wrong. Whatever she said, the response is not appropriate to the offense. It's like one of those cytokine storms that kills you when you get Covid. #
- In other words, she's been fired, you won, you can shut up now. #
- It's supposedly all about your feelings. But that's bullshit, right? It's really about power. You like being part of a mob. It's primal. It's probably the same rush the people who invaded the Capitol got. You didn't get sad and depressed, you were excited.#
- The Trumpers say they don't give a fuck about your feelings. That gets them hot, and I bet it gets you hot too. The conflict is what you love, right? Here's your chance to have power over someone else. #
- I am a big fan of Donald McNeil. i've read everything i can get my hands on about his cancelling by the NY Times. There isn't much out there. They say 150 staffers at the NYT wrote a letter where they say that he said a word that makes them feel bad and because of that McNeil must go. And he is gone. #
- Balance that against the huge good that keeping him at the NYT does for people who want to be informed about the pandemic. His interview of Anthony Fauci on the Daily podast was amazing. i don't doubt that he saved people's lives in the last year in the podcasts he did and the reports he wrote in the Times. i don't know if he saved my life, but it's possible. I was thirsty to know what was going on, and he has been learning about this his entire career. And he knows how to explain things. Really powerful stuff, right up there with Fauci. He was cancelled. no transparency, no consideration of anyone outside their elite bubble at the NYT. They're royalty so their feelings rule. #
- So we replace one Trump with another. #
- Please just stop. #
Trump came very close to overthrowing the government.
#It’s weird but good that Trump hasn’t figured out that he doesn’t need Twitter to broadcast his virulent trolling on the net.
#Braintrust query followup: It took a couple of days of head scratching and trial and error, but I now have a skeletal JS preprocessor.
#
Airpods followup. As you may recall, I
lost one of my AirPod Pro's 10 days ago. I tried to order a replacement through the
Apple website, but
the page appears to be broken. So I compromised, and bought a couple of less expensive bud-style headphones, one from
Jabra, which comes highly recommended by
Wirecutter, and
Skullcandy. Together they cost about what the Airpod Pro's cost. But here's the thing, both of them sound awful on my iPhone. No bass at all, all high end. So I tried them on my Pixel 4a, same thing. My hearing is fine, I tried the one remaining AirPod Pro, and it sounds great. So now I'm trying to figure out how to equalize the audio on either of these phones. I can't believe there isn't a built-in equalizer, but it seems there's not. I really got to like the AirPods, didn't think I would. I find over-ear headphones clunky now.
#
If the Titanic sank today.
#
I woke up in the middle of the night, as I often do. I always get out the iPad, check the nightly email. Make sure it went out at midnight. Noticed that the mail-sender's clock is drifting, have to do something about that. Every few days it sends the mail one second later. This is cumulative, leading to drift. So last night's mail went out at 12:00:21 AM. There is definitely a way around it. I'll let you know when I write the code. Next I started
doomscrolling through Twitter, only tonight I'm seeing clever women putting down men. Some of them are really funny. A woman listening to a neighbor playing the
theme for
The Pink Panther on his sax over and over, poorly. Next up, a woman sings an Irish ditty a cappella telling a man to stop explaining things to her. Then a NYT reporter who's been attacked the way only a woman can be attacked, to which I say, no -- men really do get attacked on the net too, in more horrific ways than you describe, sometimes involving police with weapons drawn, with all the fire trucks in Berkeley, lights flashing and sirens blazing. Other times, knocks at the front door in the middle of the night at your real actual house, the place you sleep. Also people who stalk your friends, so you have to have a conversation with your friends about this. Anyway, long story, sorry, I know I suck. Then I came across
this ad for Paramount+ -- a new ridiculously unwelcome expensive streaming service. But the
ad was
perfect for my mood. You have to
watch it, I'm not going to narrate it, for fear of being excoriated online. But sometimes
Beavis and Butthead just nail it. Amazing.
❤️#So many programs when you sit down to use them for the first time, don't explain themselves. It's impossible to figure out how to make it work, even if you already understand the general purpose of the program. A good friend sent a pointer to
AST Explorer, a tool that takes input from some language and shows you the
abstract synatx tree for it. Okay that's something I want to do. The language is JavaScript, and let's say the parser is Acorn. Now what? So many choices. And where's the button that says GO, do the thing, give me result. I clicked on the ? in the menubar, hoping it might give me a 1-2-3 to see the app in action, but it starts out with a list of all the myriad things it can do! I can already see that from the UI. I want the docs to give me a procedure for using it. I'm human. I don't know how to use the app. Help me please. (This is generally good advice not just for this app. Before you give it to a user to try, sit down yourself and pretend you know as much about the app as they do. Use newbie eyes.)
#As the music stars of my youth are dying now, in their 70s and 80s, I realize that they aren't much older than I am, but when I was a kid, of course it seemed they were.
#
An administration that communicates directly with the people.
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