Good morning. I'm back in NY. Gorgeous fall weather. Starting to fill in my to-do list. Trump claims his administration has accomplished more in its first nine months than any previous presidency. How foolish, he hasn't passed any laws. But there's an argument to be made that it's true. Read about the dismantling of the EPA and the State Department, and realize how long it will take to bring them back. Some people feel it's for the best that the US not have any controls on pollution or have any foreign presence. For them these are accomplishments. Trump may not know or care about what they're doing, that doesn't mean it's not part of a plan, that the Kochs and Mercers, aren't intelligently looting the government. Things are happening faster than people may realize. #
How you know what the "Marine general" said is indefensible. And they're all violating their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.#
I finished binge-watching the Mr Mercedes TV series on the flight back from Denver yesterday, and man it was good. At the same level as Breaking Bad, only more bizarre. The acting was great. I thought the story from Stephen King they had to work with was so-so, that's why I expected the TV series to drift and get sappy, because that's what happened (imho) in the novel. But it didn't happen and I think I know why. The writer of the teleplay was Dennis Lehane who himself is a fine novelist, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island, two great movies. He also wrote for The Wire. #- In Mr Mercedes Lehane developed King's story into a 10-hour movie that would have been fine without the gore and violence, but it made it better, because it was delivered with humor and was outrageous and thrilling, on the same level as The Shining or Carrie. #
- Even the computer stuff mostly made sense (in the novel it didn't, King doesn't really understand computers imho). There was even some good Mac humor in the story! How about that. #
- Lehane found the thread in the King novel that worked, he changed a couple of things, and let the plot develop at a good pace, and the characters were fun, entertaining, cute, motivated, lovely and brave, and most important, believable. I loved it. Highly recommended if you like this kind of thing. #
- Update: The NYT review says there were three great writers working on the show. #
While I was vacationing in Taos, with a very slow Internet connection and a slowed-down mind, I wrote a Twitter thread saying I was happy about podcasting, proud of how far it had come, and how many people's lives it was enriching, and because it was open and had no limits it didn't have the problems of platforms that were created roughly at the same time, platforms that are corporate and silo'd, like Twitter and Facebook. #- I had just driven a full day from Denver to Taos and had listened to a bunch of podcasts, more than I had in one day since my cross-country drives in the mid-2000s. Back then there wasn't very much podcasting and since then it has boomed, several times. #
- My thread drew a comment from Jason Rowley, a writer at Crunchbase. "It’s almost like the RSS protocol finally found its killer app. Not in distributing text, but mp3s." I know he was being positive, but the comment was wrong from a couple of perspectives. #
- I promised an explanation, so here goes. #
- First, people focus on the connection between RSS and podcasting, but it's deep technology, most people, users and creators, aren't aware of the connection. That part of the bootstrap, writing the spec, implementing an authoring tool and adding the feature to my RSS reader, took a couple of days at most. The hard part was figuring out how to get people to do it! It wasn't a matter of "build it and they will come." It was a totally different story, like Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence. #
- Second, RSS was already well on its way when we started up podasting, and would have thrived even if it had not come about. In hindsight the killer app for RSS was the New York Times. Once we had them on board, in April 2002, with daily updates to their feeds, it built out to a news network that to this day is delivering far better results for news consumers than anything else, even Twitter or Facebook. True, most people don't get their news directly from RSS feeds. But the people who really care about news do. #
- RSS didn't need a killer app, it already had one. And RSS as a basis for podcasting, was essential to the bootstrap, but it was not the hard part. For that, we needed a bit of yeast to get the bread to rise. That came, as far as I'm concerned, from Chris Lydon, myself and then Adam Curry. At that point, we had enough examples for people to get the idea that they could do it too. #
- Jason's well-intentioned understanding of how podcasting came to be, and what role RSS plays in today's news ecosystem is the one many people have, but it is wrong. Every time I see it I try to correct it. It's important because people who want to follow in the footsteps of RSS and podcasting, and develop open technologies, should know that there's more to it than technology. Without compelling content, that gets other people to do it, you don't even have a good demo. #
- I did a podcast about this in 2015, if you want more of the background. #
Checking in from Colorado. My stay in New Mexico was very refreshing. Tomorrow, back to NYC to complete my next product ship. This one has nothing to do with web publishing, it's something new that imho shouldn't be. 🚀 #
Got a notice from NY State that I've been automatically re-enrolled in my ACA-based health insurance. Some parts of the system are working.#
Suggestion: Choose to not be offended, at least once a day.What if we lose the First Amendment? It's a serious question that deserves serious thought. All the reporting about stamping out fake news on Facebook amounts to suppressing speech. It can't be done without suppressing the First Amendment. And since the current govt is run by this fascist, you should expect that news would omit stories about Puerto Rico, govt sabotage of health care, even the Harvey Weinstein story might not have come out considering how much El Presidenté has to hide.#
Sometimes serendipity is worth noting. I was posting a link to this fantastic piece by Jon Chait about the last act of John McCain's political career. The software I use, a linkblogging tool I wrote called Radio3, presents a random slogan above the edit box. The slogan was especially appropriate to the piece. Finally, hopefully before it's too late, McCain-the-Maverick is showing up. #
I am a non-conformist. If you tell me I have to conform to your way of thinking I say no. And not with respect.#
I've been trying to write this morning, but everything I write comes down to this. Humans have made a total mess of everything. I could write more, but it would amount to the same thing. #
Took a long drive from Denver to Taos today. On the map it's supposed to take five hours, but I took nine. Lots of stops. Listened to a bunch of podcasts including two Sunday news shows. Conclusion: the best Republican liar is Tillerson. That guy is slick. I didn't hate his lies. But Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu, they just plain out lie, no spin. Insulting to the intelligence of the listener. I can see why Trump likes them. #
When I was driving cross-country in the mid-2000s, I remember wishing that I could ask the maps app to tell me what Starbucks were on my route, not nearby. I wasn't going to backtrack to get coffee. They have it now. I wanted to pick up groceries before checking in. I searched for groceries, it gave me a chance to search on my route. It presented a list of choices along with how much time they'd add to my trip. A button next to each one offered to add it as a stop. Smooth as silk. Another bonus, Google Maps says "Welcome to New Mexico" a mile or so before you see the official sign. It was a surprise and made me laugh. I guess what's next is the Google Home interface for the Maps app.#
Very slow Internet at the place I'm staying. Barely faster than a 1990s dialup. I guess it's via satellite. I may have to use the Google Fi Nexus phone, if it's faster. Or find a Starbuck's. #
Best podcast I listened to was the Longform interview of Michael Barbaro of the NYT Daily podcast. It has become the Visicalc of podcasts. I think everyone is listening to it. I don't miss an episode. He of course talked about the famous interview with the coal miner, but left out the best part, the thing he got dinged for the most (at least of what I heard) -- not challenging the guy on his opinion that coal didn't cause climate change. I totally supported that. I wanted to hear the guy's story and have the interviewer just let him say his piece. We know the arguments. It wouldn't have added anything to the story. Also, he defines the Daily as a podcast about the reporters who report the news. And the Longform interview was a podcsat about the podcast about the reporters who report the news. I wondered if another level is possible, but for now I couldn't imagine it. #
I get a lot of ideas when I do long drives in the western US. #
Someone should do an interview with Hoder about life in Iran for young bright entrepreneurial people. The deal Obama did with Iran wasn't just about the military, it opened up Iran to the rest of the world, and as you might expect from an intelligent population of an ancient civilization, they are rebooting. The theory is that the hardliners will have more trouble being jerks internationally if their citizens are bringing home lots of money trading with the rest of the world. It's a theory that works. It's why what Trump is doing is so wasteful and sets us back. It's not just about nukes. #
CBS had an interview with the Iranian chief diplomat, who speaks good English and repped his case well. The snotty Repub they interviewed to balance it of course lied, bigtime. Iran is not on the UN Security Council. DIckerson is performing a service, by clearly stating reality knowing (probably) the Repubs will just lie. He's telling the listeners the truth. They should have an alternated channel with narration, sort of a translation. What he really means is.. That kind of thing. #
Did you ever wonder where North Korea got the money for their nuclear program? Planet Money has the answer. Kim Jong Un has let an entrepreneurial class develop. They say he's funding it with tax money. How about that. #
Watched the first two episodes of Mr Mercedes, expecting it to be drek, and was surprised at how good it is. I knew the story because I read the book. The book started great and then like a lot of late Stephen King books got bogged down in smarmy bullshit. Most Stephen King movies/shows are crap, like the recent It. Some of them make great movies like The Shining, Carrie, Shawshank Redemption. This one is promising. #
Good morning sports fans!#
A Twitter thread I wrote without benefit of Electric Pork. Freestyle. I think it's pretty good. It starts out like this: "Twitter users who think you are a customer. You are not a customer. You are the product."#
I knew when I saw the web that's what I had been born to do. Just because people want to use Facebook doesn't change that simple fact.#
One thing's for sure, if we want to have a chance to survive we're going to have to start seeing the good in each other.#
Yes indeed NYT, Silicon Valley is not your friend but the open web is. As often is the case, corporate media has trouble seeing anything but corporate tech. But before there were tech companies, there was the web, which sprung from academia. It instantly wiped out the business models the tech industry had for networking, all of which were designed to lock users in. It took a couple of decades for Silicon Valley to re-establish lock-in, at least partially because news let them take over their distribution system. It may not be too late for the open web, but it needs a lot of help. #Michelle Goldberg writes about sexual harassment. She has only experienced it once, in college. Her theory, she has only worked in organizations with women at the top. That fosters an environment of respect. #
- In 2003, almost by accident, the company that I founded but had left, surprised me by directing requests to a popular domain to one of my colocated servers. I tried to keep it running but there was too much traffic. I couldn't do the work required to stabilize the service, i had a new job and my health was still iffy after heart surgery, and I would have had to buy a bunch more servers, and there was no revenue to support it. So I had to turn the service off. Really the only choice was to risk my health, and spend a lot of money. #
- A few of the users went on a campaign aimed at punishing me personally. Many of them had empty sites on the service, they had never published anything, so they didn't have anything at stake. I completely disclosed what happened. None of the bloggers referred to my post or the podcast I did explaining. They kept right on attacking. I appealed to blogging friends but they wouldn't say anything in my defense. #
- Eventually the story was covered by mainstream journalists, and guess what -- they listened, and told my side of the story too. The ranters wanted something else, certainly not the truth. Most of the users just wanted their sites back. Quietly I worked with them, and got every one who wanted one a backup of their sites, personally, on my own time. #
- I waited it out, they got tired I guess, but never forgot how awful they were. That's why I empathize with Twitter. #
Little Outliner tip: If you keep LO2 open all day every day, when you start work in the morning, reload the page. There's some kind of performance issue in the app that causes it to get slow if you leave it running too long. Reloading the page is the same as quitting and relaunching an app. Fargo didn't have this issue. I must be doing something differently, but I don't know what it is. Still diggin!#
It seems to some, all men are responsible for the worst of men. It's analogous to blaming all Muslims for the acts of "Muslim" terrorists. It's one of the reasons I talk about "Christian terrorists" -- to make the point that it's a form of racism to connect a religion to the acts of murderers. So perhaps, instead of talking about "men like Harvey Weinstein," try "rapists like Harvey Weinstein." That would help. #
BTW, I look like Harvey Weinstein. So I realllllly resent it when people say he looks a certain evil way. Please. The awful stuff isn't on the surface. That's why body shaming is the worst thing. And it applies to men too. #
Idea for a new social net: Last night Doc Searls was in one of my dreams. I don't remember what we were doing. But it was nice to see him. What if there were a place I could go to record that event. And what if by chance Doc recorded that I was in his dream last night. Then we'd know there was some kind of cosmic connection. How would we know if we don't have an app for it? 💥#
I see parallels in the way people attack Twitter today and the way the music industry reacted to Napster in 2000. The great thing about Napster was that ALL the music was there. And it sort of had an API. It could have developed into a music operating system. But it was attacked, and broken into pieces. And once that happens you know they almost never come back together. #
Hey it's like everything. I'm amazed that we still listen to journalists. I finally got re-awoken when I heard Rachel Maddow ranting about FB ads and Russia the other day. Did she somehow think that a human being at Facebook could have been involved in the content of the ad or who it was targeted at? It's all based on keywords and pointers to stuff on the web. #- And how could Russians possibly know how to speak American English or know what our divisive issues are? Well they could have gone to school here. We are a remarkably open society. They could read academic journals, or watch conferences on livestreams, or even go to the conferences. They could read Nate Silver and Jon Chait and many others, the same columnists that Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes read. Russia must have people who do what our CIA does. Read everything they can get their hands on and look for all kinds of changes and vulnerabilities. How do they think espionage works? You think they need help from Cambridge Analytica? Maybe there is a linkup there, I hope so -- but you're insulting our intelligence if you think the Russians can't carefully study us, the way we certainly study them.#
- I came away wishing they'd do a one-day training for journalists about how Facebook ads work. If they don't learn we're going to have the same kind of debacle that we had w Hillary's emails. #
BTW, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you can and should call me Dave. I don't like fancy names. I'm kind of a beatnik. And when you call me Mr Winer I am reminded I never got a PhD and that makes me sad. But I get over it quickly. 😐#
Reporters of all people should have open minds and be good at listening. But I find it's the opposite. It's a very closed world. I've had a little taste of it from the inside when I wrote for Wired a bunch of years ago. It's not a good thing for a profession that depends on listening.#
I'm going to be in Boulder on Saturday night, if anyone wants to get together for dinner, or drinks. I remember there's a pretty good Mexican place with Margueritas. If you're doing a Boulder startup, tell me about it. I did office hours in 2008 in Boulder with Techstars it was a lot of fun. We can talk about Node, browser-based apps, how to save the world from Trump, you know the usual stuff. 🚀 💥#
So, I just signed up for Caviar. They deliver Shake Shack in my neighborhood. And I found out they also deliver Momofuku. I'm hooked. Then ten minutes later I get an email from Delivery.com offering a 15 percent discount if I order today. You think they have a spy?#
- First, I wish there was a table somewhere with all the emoji and their hex equivs expressed in HTML format, like this: F4A9; But it's not so bad, you just have to do it for yourself. #
- Look up the char on this page, and copy the "code point value", something that looks like this: U+1F4A9.#
- Remove the U+ part.#
- Add &#x at the beginning and a semicolon at the end -- yielding: 💩 #
- Here are the translations of a few characters:#
10-minute podcast on Harvey Weinstein, in two parts, two stories. Please listen generously and be kind in your criticism. #
It's a good time for one of the universities to have a one-day training for reporters on how Facebook ads work. How to use the software. Let's get in front of the problem before news makes another mess like the one with Hillary's email. #
If you find yourself saying someone else must shut up, you're very likely wrong.Carl Sagan used to say that humanity is the cosmos becoming self-aware, coming to "know itself." I always thought that was a super elegant idea. Well, Bob Corker saying the White House is adult day care is, in a similar way, the United States deciding to know itself, to tell itself the truth. Now reporters can quote him, saying what they could easily have said before, and imho should have. News has become news for lawyers. They're all trying to prove what's obvious, that we're reeling and teetering and sputtering on the edge of a cliff, with a guy juggling nukes in both hands and while they're in the air tweeting insults at everyone and anyone. It's as if Don Rickles and Joan Rivers were running the world, and they weren't just comedians. #
SQL question: When I say a value is varchar (255) does that mean in every row it takes up 255 chars in the database? #
Yesterday I did an interview with Brian McCullough of the Internet History Podcast. We talked about many of the things you'd expect. When we got to podcasting, I realized his was exactly the kind of podcast I hoped would emerge when we did the work in the early-mid 2000s. Something that starts out as a hobby, a passion, an idea, and develops into real media with regular listeners. A weblog for the ears is what I called it back then. I'll let you know when the interview is available. #BTW, you want to know how disgusted I was with Maddow? I switched stations to watch the Yankees in the playoffs. I might have to get my head examined. The Yankees won, btw. And oddly enough I find myself rooting for them (really need to see a doctor). Why? Well Cleveland is favored to win it all this year. And I love to see the favorites get knocked off their perch. Same reason I pull against the Warriors. That the Yankees are underdogs now doesn't really mean that I don't hate the concept of the Yankees. I do.#
Another BTW, Brian thought, like virtually everyone I meet, that I am a Brooklyn boy. Not so. Why do they think that? Wikipedia incorrectly states that I am a Brooklyn native. I was born in a hospital in Brooklyn, that much is true. But I grew up in Queens. First in Jackson Heights, and then in north Flushing (near Whitestone and Bayside). Ask anyone from Queens in that era if they came from Brooklyn (as I said on the podcast) and you're likely to get a (virtual) punch in the nose. And that, my friends, is where my hatred of the Yankees comes from. These days you see people wearing Yankees hats in Queens, but not when I lived there. #
Last night I turned off the Rachel Maddow show in disgust. Never thought that would happen. They're going after Facebook on the flimsiest of pretense. She made it sound like there was collusion, something nefarious, as if Zuckerberg had sold out the United States to Russia to make Facebook richer. #- I have no idea why they're doing it, but it was coordinated. Ari Melber, earlier in the evening, became a panelist on his own show, and expressed the same ridiculous ideas. So much so that longtime tech journalist David Kirkpatrick started interviewing Melber. Melber was full of it, but Kirkpatrick was more polite. It doesn't reflect well on the rest of MSNBC's reporting.#
- I don't know what they're doing, it was never exactly journalism, but now it's become total advocacy. It's wrong and dishonest and as fake as anything you hear on Fox. I'll give her another try, maybe there's an innocent explanation, but they crossed over into something mean and evil last night, and I'm not going to support that. #
- BTW, I am not a fan of Facebook, the company or the product, or Zuck. I do think they're evil, but not very likely in the way that Maddow et al say. Maybe it'll turn out they're onto something, then I'll apologize. But I think the odds of that are miniscule. #
- Like I said I don't know what they're trying to do but whatever it is I'm sure it will end up restricting the First Amendment rights of users of the net. I don't think most journalists give a damn about that, they care about their rights, not ours. Never have I seen a better demo of that than last night on Maddow, a former hero of mine. #
Idea: One team in each league doesn't play the anthem or honor the military, they play the sport and everyone has their own opinions.#
It's not wrong to think beyond Trump. Indulge yourself. You might get some ideas. ;-)#
Does anyone take Pence seriously? A thin veneer of ersatz Reagan, under which is the soul of Rush Limbaugh. #
I now have the ability to attach a video to a node, as illustrated in the post above. I just set the urlvideo attribute on the node. It assumes the same HTML embed code works as would work for YouTube, so theoretically it can be used to embed videos not hosted on YouTube. Now here's the Grateful Dead performing Uncle John's Band to wash away the taste of Rush Limbaugh. #
When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.#
Programming won't really take off as an art until we accept a certain basic set of tools that more or less remain constant. As long as the debate is at such a fundamental level as synchronous or asynchronous, and we keep flip-flopping back and forth, we'll never get to the next level of refinement. It's as if great cooks couldn't agree on knives, forks, spatulas, frying pans, collanders, etc. These tools have been around for centuries. Not that they haven't been evolving, but they do it slowly. We really do know at this point the basic tools of programming. There haven't been many new ideas in the time I've been active, and that's about as long as anyone. #
The Second Amendment doesn't say anything about using a gun to protect your family from burglars and home invaders. 👈 #
I watched the gun "debate" on CNN this morning and had to turn it off. So much shouting and interrupting, slogans and distractions. The gun advocates have it down, they can stop anything from being seriously discussed. On CBS they did a better job, with two advocates, Diane Feinstein and Wayne LaPierre, who were not on a panel and thus no one could interrupt. A much more useful format. On an issue like this, where many of us feel the wounds (I walk on streets with lots of windows every day), it hurt me physically to hear people treat the subject so casually. #Still no one has an answer why it should be possible for one person to shoot 600 people before being stopped. It's as if we made it legal for people to drive tanks on city streets. #
In the aftermath of the NYT story about Harvey Weinstein, and the fact that it was common knowledge in the movie industry that he was an abuser, suppose you were one of the people with that knowledge. What were you supposed to do with that? #
- I have a rule that I don't point to Facebook posts. Rules were meant to be broken. It's a story I posted three years ago, about the time I pointed to a story written by NakedJen. Read all the way to the end, please. #
- I just got a lecture from Facebook on their community standards.#
- First they logged me off everywhere, requiring me to re-enter my password on every system I use Facebook on.#
- Then a dialog saying they removed something I posted. (Okay fine, I'll click the button.)#
- That's not enough. We want you to review the community standards. And then click another button to indicate that you heard us.#
- What was the offense? It's so silly. A couple of nipples attached to a simple and lovely very Facebookish post by NakedJen.#
- BTW, it looks like she removed the picture. It was a picture of NJ on the stairway at my old house in Berkeley, naked of course, but with her legs crossed, and arms spread out in the usual NJ way. They have to have their standards, I understand, and nipples are a no-no, this picture crossed the line, but..#
- Get this:#
- It was THEIR choice to grab the picture. Not mine. I just linked to her post. Maybe they should lecture their bot, not me.#
- Postscript, in 2017#
- I don't blame Facebook for this. They tried best they could to keep porn off their site. In my country nipples are considered pornographic. Their software hadn't learned yet to distinguish between photos scraped by their bot, vs photos posted by users. #
- The moral of the story. When you want Facebook to stop political ads aimed at Americans from Russia, that means we're all going to be subjected to this kind of interrogation, not just about nipples, but also about our political values. People who believe you can cut out Russians without interfering with normal speech are naive about how the technology works. #
23 years ago today this blog I find that people mistakenly assume you're a newbie at everything if you're a newbie at something. They talk to you like you're a child, often forgetting they know you know a lot of shit about a lot of shit. BTW, this is not about you. It's a general comment. I learned a long time ago when you make a general comment on a blog people assume you're writing about them. I do it too. Seriously this is not about you. 🎈#
- An earlier version of this piece remembered last night's MSNBC show incorrectly. I have since fixed the piece. Still diggin! 💥#
- It was fascinating to watch Chris Hayes and Kara Swisher together on Hayes' show last night, talking about Facebook. Swisher kept saying she thinks Facebook can get fake news under control. That idea deserves exploration, I wanted to hear more about why she thinks that. I suspect it might be right, and it's necessary imho for their survival. But I suspect they won't do it, because tech giants, and Facebook is that, don't see the cycle.#
- Both Hayes and Swisher talked about the cycle. They talked about how once we thought Microsoft was the big threat, but now not so much. One of the other guests said it was the antitrust suit that knocked them down, but I don't think that was the reason for them becoming not-dominant. #
- Here's what happened in a nutshell. Microsoft achieved its moment of dominance on the shipping of Windows 3.0. No threats in sight. They must have had quite a party that night. IBM vanquished. Lotus, Apple, left in the dust. That was about it. Microsoft rules. #
- At the same time the web was booting up. Microsoft responded in a scrappy highly competitive way. And they won, for a bit. They managed to replace Netscape as the dominant browser. Then they tried to turn the web into a feature of Office. That was their basic posture re the upstarts, Google, blogs, all the things that were popping up around that time. All were apps that ran inside MSIE. A threat? Nah. Only the blogs turned into Facebook and Twitter, and Google was the glue that tied the web together. And where MSIE was stagnant and not moving (kind of like Facebook today) Firefox became the browser everyone used because it was fast and the bugs weren't so bad.#
- The bugs were, imho, the real downfall of Microsoft. Adware, malware, virii, they had lots of names, everyone was getting hit, and Microsoft didn't consider security their problem. It was a "third party opportunity." I remember realizing in a SLC hotel once that my laptop had been infected through the wifi network in the hotel. That's how bad it was then. Microsoft wake up, your platform is dying. They ignored all the signals. #
- I switched to the Mac in 2005 and never went back. No problems with malware. For me there wasn't anything intrinsically better about the Mac, it just worked and Windows and its browser was always broken or about to break. Firefox on the Mac was a great browsing experience. A lot of people switched in that period. #
- Microsoft missed lots of opportunities to win back users, they didn't seem to care. I don't think it was any single thing that took them down, rather a lack of awareness of the world around them, a lack of interest, curiosity. In other words they became a big company. They generate their own gravity, and people who work there become focused on that, rather than the rest of the world. That was how Microsoft knocked down IBM, by being agile and scrappy, and how Google et al did the same to Microsoft.#
- Facebook has done a great job of preventing the kind of malware that hit Microsoft so hard. That's like the Maginot Line. We always prepare to fight the last war. I guess fake news is to Facebook as malware was to Microsoft. And if Facebook can't clean up this aspect of their product, they could suffer the same fate as Microsoft. Or it could be just a symptom of a larger problem, too much internal gravity and not enough outward curiosity. #
- I think it's great that the MSNBC hosts are interested in the history of big tech. It's not hard to understand. They're just stories like gods, royalty, sex, empires and great wars, victory and vindication. In other words, it's a human story. #
- Ultimately the reason why Microsoft lost dominance and Facebook will is that no one gets to be dominant forever. #
After listening to this podcast, I understand why people like guns. I get it. And I think I can explain it. Let's give it a try. #- I used to have a fetish for stereo equipment when I was a kid. I'd go into the city to high end stereo stores and get demos of the best equipment. I went to the electronics show at the Coliseum. I studied the equipment bands used. I became a sound engineer. I loved everything about it. The sound systems I lusted after were more power than I could afford, the systems cost thousands and I was just a kid. #
- I also had fantasies about guns as a kid, like a lot of my young friends, we'd play soldier, or The Man from UNCLE, or James Bond, or Star Trek. There were lots of guns in the kid culture of the 60s and 70s. When I was in college, at Tulane, in New Orleans, typically my roommates had guns. One took me to a firing range to learn how to shoot. I hated it. I didn't trust myself with the power. I realized I could just turn to the left and shoot someone. And they could shoot me. I couldn't wait to get out of there. I felt like I sometimes do on subway platforms. I could just jump in front of the train and be killed instantly. I step back from the platform and hold on to something to reassure myself that it's just fantasy. #
- To some people the guns must be a combination of the lust I felt for the powerful sound systems and the weird way you feel when you can end it all with one irrevocable act. The fantasy gets better -- your country needs you to defend The Constitution. You have your guns ready for the day when you're called on. The NRA feeds the fantasy by saying who you will be defending the Constitution against. We're fighting for freedom, and our guns make it possible. More guns, get more guns. Because the country (in your fantasy) needs you. #
- The reality is the country doesn't need you. If you ever start shooting people with your guns, you may kill others, like the guy in Las Vegas did, but you will be dead yourself a few minutes later. You are not responding to a threat. It's all in your mind. #
- I've made a lot of progress, but it hasn't been pretty. Here's the story.#
- It's going slowly as I fumble around in an old semi-familiar place. I know what I want, in user terms, but have to translate that into a database that's running on a system others can access.#
- My only experience with SQL was in 1978, as a grad student at UW, I took an introductory class to databases. I don't remember why I chose that class, maybe it was a requirement? I also don't remember how the database was set up, how we submitted our queries and how we got back the results. It's possible the work was done on punch cards and printouts. That's how long ago it was. I do remember having fun with it once I figured out what it was doing. #
- Between then and now, I've used all kinds of data storage systems, mostly ones I wrote myself, for outliners, for the object database in Frontier, stuff like that. I only had a couple of apps in all those years that used SQL, other devs did the database work. Now I want to learn how to build these kinds of apps. I've put this off for too long.#
- Yesterday, I got MySQL running on my desktop Mac through MAMP. The instructions were better than with the download from the main Oracle site. But they weren't really good. It's common in this world to leave out the bridge you need to get from installing to using. In this case, they didn't tell you there's an app in the Applications folder called MAMP.app, that it put there. They also didn't tell you that you can access a local web page to find a dashboard for the MySQL server. They also never told you there's a REPL available at the command line called mysql and you can type SQL queries at it. I figured it had to be there, why have a command-oriented language like SQL if you can't enter it interactively? All of this info should have been in a bulleted list. These are the things you need to know to get started. 1. 2. 3. #
- Anyway, after getting it up, and running a few commands, I quickly realized having it local will do no good, I need it on a server. I tried setting up a new server with MySQL on it, first on Amazon and then on Digital Ocean. On Amazon I went through Amazon Aurora, I don't know exactly what it's supposed to be. It sounded like it was supposed to be an easy hosted way to run MySQL; it was the easy part that attracted me to it. This time instead of not finding the bridge, I was asked to make a lot of decisions that 1. I had no idea how to make and 2. I suspected would not make a difference for my first application. They could have made these decisions for me, with good defaults, and I probably would be using their service now. Instead after guessing at answers on the first page, offered yet another page of impossible choices. At that point I realized I was deep in a rabbit hole. I closed the tab and moved on. #
- The problem I hit on Digital Ocean that stopped me was that I couldn't figure out how to access the database from code running on my desktop. I know it's possible. The security program I ran offered me the option to do it, but it still wouldn't accept operations from my desktop. Okay so I have to run Node on the machine, and that means I have to run Dropbox, so I can update the code as I iterate. Setting that up was problematic, because I had chosen a machine size that I didn't think was up to running Dropbox. I could start over, but I had another idea.#
- I have a couple of underutilized servers. I chose the one on Digital Ocean because I had been able to install MySQL there. The server already had Node installed and Dropbox. It was ready to go. I hadn't wanted to install MySQL on an existing server for fear I would do something I couldn't undo -- but at this point I had already uninstalled it once, and was pretty confident I wouldn't break anything. So I sucked in my breath, said a prayer and installed MySQL, wrote a test app in Node, and hit another wall. My new app needed the new version of Node, there was a problem with the request package, I had seen before on another server. So I fumbled around for about an hour trying to remember how I worked around this problem last time. I ended up completely reinstalling Node and then, boom, my little MySQL app worked! It showed an error message that it couldn't find the database. Correct, I hadn't created it yet. #
- This morning I created the database, added a table, added a record to the table, did a query, and yaha it all worked. Now I get to think about next steps.#
- PS: If you have comments, add them to the ongoing thread. Thanks!!#
Follow-up on yesterday's braintrust query. Per Scott Hanson's recommendation, I installed MAMP. It's running and I've got a Hello World app working. Also looking for a REPL, some way to issue SQL commands in the Terminal app. That must be possible, right??#
Facebook has my number. They show me ads for real estate in gorgeous places. Some of it way too much house (I try to signal to them to stop showing me that stuff). My sweet spot is betw $400K and $600K, in the Berkshires or Santa Fe, NM. I'm scared if they had a one-cick-to-buy button on some of the places I might actually click! The Berkshires esp must be a depressed real estate market, because the houses are amazing, and the pricing history indicates lots of markdowns in the last year.#My friend Cat Mikkelsen recently moved to Hawaii with her high-school-age son. I know her through her husband, a famous Mac developer from the 80s. She posts pics as she explores their new lifestyle in paradise. Yesterday she went kayaking on the ocean. That's a very effective way to sell real estate, indirectly, because seeing where she's going and what she's doing makes me want to buy something and live that lifestyle myself. #
The Repubs get to frame the whole conversation about gun control. Don't politicize it, they say. A proper mourning period please. This is first class trolling. Don't engage. Just plow ahead. #If you want to download MySQL for the Mac, here's the direct download link. They really try to upsell you to Oracle and get you to create an account. Meh.#
Two-factor actually makes your account less secure. Security on phones is terrible. If your phone is hijacked, the hackers could control of any two-factor account you have. And it's easy to talk a telco into giving you control of someone else's phone. Two-factor is a very misleading name. It's not two factors, it's the weakest of two factors. It's not and it's or.#
Speaking as a lifelong Knicks fan, currently somewhat in remission (hah!), I have to say Fox Sports hit the nail on the head with the Knicks Hopeless campaign. The moment of max hopelessness was reading the headline that Tim Hardaway had gotten a $71 million contract and then learning that it was the Knicks who paid that for him. Until Dolan leaves, the Knicks will continue to sputter in hopelessness.#
- Jay Rosen tweets provocatively, where is the wolf for news? He includes a stunning video about the rebirth of the Yellowstone ecosystem after they reintroduced wolves. It's totally worth watching.#
- Anyway, no one knows what if anything will cause a rebooting of news in a constructive way that responds to the challenges of 2017 and beyond. But if such a thing exists, I suspect it has something to do with aggregation, because we need it, and the current ways we get it are so inadequate and not near the potential of the Internet to deliver.#
- Aggregation is what Twitter and Facebook do for news. Neither company designed or tuned their products to news, it sort of just happened. What if there were a news aggregator that provided a customizable feed from many sources and only included vetted sources, known to at least be trying to present accurate news. I don't know if that's the wolf, but it's needed.#
- Over the years the news industry has pointed the finger at every tech leader, in turn, without ever taking on the problem of net-based news distribution itself. We gave them a great start with RSS. Now Facebook is to blame. All they did is ruthlessly harness the native power of the net, in a fairly crude first-approach sort of way. Lots more iteration and refinement is possible. To win it requires cooperation among the competitors in news, and that might be impossible. #
Fargo has finally been retired. I changed the home page to point to places someone looking for Fargo might want to go. It has been a good run. Four years. Not bad. And seriously thanks to Dropbox for making it possible. The idea of an ecosystem of apps running on Dropbox storage was a great, if unfulfilled, vision. Onward! :-)#New header graphic for the new season. (BTW, that photo was taken on Nov 11, 2014, in Central Park. The leaves aren't turning that much yet.) #
Journalism people say Google is bad at journalism. I must be missing it but why don't they fix it and get Google out of their business. They don't feel they're responsible for anything, not even what they do. Of course Google sucks at journalism. What Google does the best is keep a huge network of computers running against unbelievable attacks from everywhere. The bad guys must always be trying to knock them down. Yet their servers are reliable and run fast. That's what they do best. Everything else is so-so. #Well it's all right, even if the sun don't shine. #
Today's gun tragedy is different because the victims were probably mostly white and they were probably well-distributed from all over the country. This one more than most is an American tragedy. #
This was the vision for the worldoutline software. You could think of this document as a site or this site as a document.#
I wish blogs could have the concept of required reading for the people who read the site. If I were permitted to require you read something, it would be this episode of the Planet Money podcast about how Russia used fake news to fight and win its war with Ukraine. They haven't rolled in the heavy artilery in the US yet. It would be great if we could all get out in front of it, a little. Russians use the net much more effectively than we do, to (I kid you not) wage war with the US. But we are so confused we don't even know we're at war. Listen. #I'm still using a CNAME for the roots of domains and wondering why it works. I opened it as a new issue on the Scripting News repo. Let's find out. Also sent a link to the people at Hover. #
I'm still repairing sites, and finding old work I did. For example, here are two experiments I did with opacity. I remember how eye-opening this was for me, figuring out how a lot of the special effects on the web work. I ended up using this in a bunch of different places. For example, the purple poundsigns on this blog aren't full opacity. It always bothered me how disruptive they are. Drop the opacity and they aren't so visible. #
- I want my Electron app to handle drag-and-drop from the desktop.#
- I want to drag an OPML file onto it, and have it open it.#
- I have done this before with Electron apps, for example Public Folder lets you drag a file onto it to upload it. It works. #
- For this app, it works when I'm debugging, but when I build the app, it launches the OPML Editor. This is so weird. #
- When I drag an OPML file onto Chrome, it shows me the OPML source. But when I do it with the browser inside Electron it opens it in the OPML Editor.#
- I figure I have something configured in the OS to make it do this, but I have no memory of doing it and no idea how it might have worked. #
- Any suggestions most welcome. #
- Apply what we've learned about bots. When someone recites talking points at you in a tweet, you don't have to respond, it might not be human.#
- Thoughts and prayers count for shit. The way to kill the NRA is through legislation. Remember when you vote. That's how you create change. #
- Terrorism is a racist term in the US. It means white people were harmed by people who aren't white. If the shooter is white, he's just crazy.#
You can fake caring but you can't fake showing up.#
I changed my name to 140-char Dave on Twitter, not as an endorsement of the 140-char limit, the exact opposite. It's a disclaimer. You're not getting full-strength Dave, you're getting a highly abbreviated version. I favor no limit, with a simple "show more" link on tweets over 140. I understand some people don't favor such a change, but imho they are wrong. 💥#
I have a server that's been unreliable, running software that I no longer wish to maintain. The result -- a lot of archive sites are offline. I'm going to work gradually over time to bring them back, using more reliable software. #- They are the sites I created in the period 2008 through 2013, using the worldoutline software. I had the idea that domains and documents should be one and the same. Turns out there weren't so many advantages to that as I thought, and Google and EFF et al with their push to HTTPS made that an expensive decision. None of these sites can make that transition. There are too many -- a thousand of them, or so it seems. #
- Side-note, this is why platform vendors with their seemingly arbitrary "deprecations" are so poisonous to longterm creativity of developers. I'm sure it never occurred to Google or Mozilla that someone had tried to innovate this way. They can't keep up with everything, and aren't inclined to. That's the way big companies are. That's why the web was so enticing. No platform vendor to fuck with you. Well, Google wants to be the platform vendor for the web, and now we're dealing with the usual malaise that platform vendors bring. #
- Anyway, you'll see me pointing to various sites today and hopefully in the future as they get resurrected in the new way of things. #
- Two to start with: morningcoffeenotes.com and rsscloud.co.#
- In 2013 I wrote the foreword to an O'Reilly book about the Bootstrap Toolkit. #
I saw Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation. He says that the press used to be gatekeepers, but not so much these days. I still get my news from the major brands, only a few new ones have entered my zone of trust. And they are total gatekeepers. My number one frustration is the inability to join the discourse. I feel my ideas are good enough to be part of the flow, esp when there's so much boring repetition. For whatever reason it's impossible. And that's very frustrating. I don't know what the answer is but I think about it all the time. #- In that context I find the new voice of Carmen Yulín Cruz to be inspiring and optimistic. She was unknown just a few days ago, and has said things that normally would never get through the gatekeepers. But she had what it takes. A big enough title to make her not such a risk, and an eloquence and directness that serves as a wonderful foil to the panic, cowardice and covering-up of El Presidentè. Her anger comes through, and it seems real, which is very unusual for TV news.#
- What if everyone kept a public list of things everyone should know that they probably don't know, and why they should know it.#
- Here's one of the things I'd put in my list. Most supposed online jokes are not funny because this is not your living room and the people who hear it don't know you. #
- I figured out today the key mistake white Americans make about people who aren't like them.#
10-minute podcast about how politicians really spend our money by endangering what makes the US special in the world economy. We are the #1 safe place to park wealth. But as we creep toward being Third World, we become less special. We can't base our political system on outright lies and still be the business, tech, science and education leaders. There will come a time when we are #2, and from there it's freefall.#I grew up in the same part of NYC as Trump about 10 years later. Things hadn't changed much, for sure. There is a lot of racial prejudice among whites in Queens, esp re Puerto Ricans, which are a large minority in NY. I was raised to believe many of the things Trump still believes. A lifetime of trying to keep my eyes and ears open and questioning assumptions has helped me undo some very wrong ideas. This is something Trump clearly has not done. #
How would El Presidenté feel if another country mounted American-like relief efforts for Puerto Rico without all the Trumpian bullshit. #
Good morning sports fans!#
A 13-minute podcast around a simple idea. The campaigns we create every four years should not disappear after the election. They should be built to have lasting value, to continue to serve the interests of the people who contribute, just as the Repubs continue to serve their donors. I'm thinking about the value I buy with my $2000, as if I were giving to a charity. How efficient are they at implementing my political values? I think we can and must do much better. In the podcast it takes a while for me to get going, but if you listen to the end I think you'll get what's driving me. #
Wondering what other countries are preparing relief missions to Puerto Rico, and how Trump would react. #
When designing a promotional website, ask yourself this question. What would a visitor want to know. And then make sure the questions are answered on the home page of the site, near the top, in plain language. For example, if you're hosting an event, the basic info is -- 1. Where. 2. When. 3. How much. 4. What is it for. 5. Who should go. So often none of that information is anywhere in sight, even one click off the home page. Who designs these sites? They often look nice. I think people forget to do this because they already know all that, and they're thinking how to wow you and excite you. It's 2017, soon to be 2018. Websites aren't exciting anymore. Just the facts ma'am.#Changed my Twitter name to 140-char Dave, to make clear you're getting the abbreviated version of me. Of course full-fidelity high-def Dave comes to you via blog, at scripting.com. #
A proactive idea: Every company can agree with the idea that black lives matter. It's time for them to say they do.#
I changed the Updated message on the home page. There's no room for it on phone and tablet-size screens, so I disabled it there. And I changed it from displaying the time of the last update to the amount of time since the last update. Here's a screen shot to illustrate. #
It's not just Trump who's a narcissist, our culture is built on it. Break its grip. Work with someone today expecting nothing in return.#
Yesterday I gave in and subscribed to the Washington Post. #
Something to think about. If the Trump Administration would form a commission to screw with elections, how far behind could Chinese-like net censorship be? All the railing about fake news, and how Facebook is rigged against Trump and the stories about how Russia used Facebook to steal the election. It's coming. No doubt Facebook already has the software implemented and ready to go. #Over on FB, sorry no link, a friend posted a picture of a gorgeous autumn morning scene in New England. He wrote "It is a heartbreakingly beautiful fall morning." I wrote in a comment: I often wish it were possible to annotate a FB post with a comment to myself that no one else sees. Often someone else's message is a perfect place to make a note. Like in this case -- Why is it heartbreaking? I'm guessing for this reason -- because it's something you're going to miss when life is over. Or something you'd like to share with someone who's no longer here. Or something you did share with someone who's no longer here. In any case, this is just a note to myself. ;-)#
Braintrust query: Has anyone done a JavaScript implementation system calls are synchronous? I'd like to use JavaScript the way other people use shell scripts. #Here's an example of the kind of code I routinely write as part of my development process. This script runs when I save fargoPub, one of my Node projects. It copies the public files to the place where my GitHub repo lives. It's not written in JavaScript, but I'd like to create a system where it could be.#
Andrew Shell sent a pointer to StratifiedJS which appears to be exactly what I was looking for. Same philosophy as Frontier, but they added structures for threading that we never got to. Now I have to see what's involved in getting something working in an Electron app.#
It'd be cool if a product that uses sports celebrities gave Colin Kaepernick an endorsement deal. Get him out of the corporate shit house. If not maybe LeBron and Steph and a few other superstars should start a competitor to Nike. #
The air travel scandal makes it look like Trump's cabinet secretaries see themselves as royalty, not govt employees.#
Apple should keep coming out with new "Crazy Ones" videos. Celebrate people Steve Jobs would have respected.#
Small nice-to-have feature on Scripting News home page. We now say the time the page was last updated. You can quickly see if there's anything new. The time is in your local time zone. Screen shot.#
With censorship on the rise everywhere, it's pretty certain it's coming in the US, esp when you consider who the president is. The centralization of Twitter, Facebook et al, make it technically easier for the govt to do.#
In studying the Trump Administration there are only two concepts: 1. Kleptocracy. 2. Narcissim. It's never more complicated than that. #
- Because they're silos they have become responsible for the content they're hosting. If they would let the web do that, then people can do what they need to do anywhere and have it viewable through Twitter and Facebook with no loss of fidelity. Here's what they'd have to do.#
- Both services support a subset of HTML.#
- Twitter blows through the 140-char limit, removing the length limit on text altogether. Twitter can preserve the user experience, by only showing the first 140 characters (or 280 if they're committed to that), and adding a Show more link as Facebook has been doing for years. #
- Allow a post to be a pointer to the original content, in JSON form, which they can cache, but will read periodically so changes can flow through to their versions of the content. #
- With these simple changes they stop being silos. Posts can appear in a variety of places including Facebook and Twitter. The companies are clearly no more responsible for the content than anyone else. #
Here's the RSS feed for my Electric Pork-generated threads. Interesting how many are two tweets long. 280 chars, not 140. Believe me, in my process, I start writing in Twitter, try to make it fit in 140, and only when it won't, do I edit it in Electric Pork.#
Would you contribute to an IndieGoGo-style campaign that created a fund that would be given to Trump the day after he resigns.#
BTW, Trump's NY fundraiser last night completely screwed up midtown traffic. They had Broadway and 59th St closed. Can you imagine. Those are pretty major thoroughfares. All so El Presidente can raise money for Repubs. Very very very far from win-win. #
Coming clean, I point to Political Wire and TPM summaries of stories on NYT, WaPost and CNN so I don't drive traffic to their paywalls and to autoplay video that autoplays. It all keeps getting worse. I pay myself for the NYT, but still have to wait for ads to complete before I can read the stories I paid to read. Overall I'd much rather point to the original reporting. This is part of the malaise around web-based news. Just a part. It seems to me it has to be a fun and rewarding experience without gotchas before it can ask for money. #
- This howto shows how to publish howto's in Little Outliner. #
- I added a section on customizing the howto's using CSS. #
- Fixed a bug in Little Outliner. If you deleted a file-level attribute, if would not save the deletion in the OPML file. v1.68a.#
- I used PagePark to implement this feature. Here's how I did it. #
This subject comes up whenever Twitter flirts with the idea of increasing the 140-char limit. Some people say the limit defines Twitter, and without it, Twitter would lose its identity, and something terrible will happen. #- I'm. So. Tired. Of. This. It's like that West Wing episode where the president says "Let's just dangle our feet in the water." They talk about doing all kinds of things, but don't do them. At the end, Leo writes something on a notepad that has been used by real presidents at least a couple of times since -- Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. Well, it's time to Let Twitter be Twitter, and no, I don't think it has anything to do with the 140-char limit. #
- I think the 140-char limit is something like the 640K limit on PCs. At first it seemed enough, but then a few years later, memory was full of spreadsheets and word processing documents and TSRs, and all kinds of crazy fixes appeared for extending the memory, and in doing so made the whole thing much more unusable. Along came the Mac with its mouse and graphic user interface, but as a developer, I think the fact that the Mac didn't have the 640K limit was an equally important factor. There were no limits to the Mac's growth for software developers. In this analogy, on Twitter, writers are the developers. And any writer who thinks every idea can be expressed in 140 chars, has imho never seriously used Twitter. #
- If we're going to Let Twitter Be Twitter, maybe there are other things that are more important than the 140-char limit? I think of Twitter as the place where newsmakers make news. Where the people who write the news work, and where people who want news gather. It's all focused on news. #
- In 2010, I did a study to see, from NYT feeds, how long the average synopsis is. It was more than 140. And 280 characters would have been enough for all but the longest. #
- Also, just sayin, it isn't really working for Twitter-the-company. I bought a bunch of Twitter stock a couple of years ago, so I could have whatever upside was available, and so I could understand Twitter from the perspective of an investor. When the Knicks were faring as poorly as Twitter is as a stock, they basically got rid of everyone and started over. Sad as I was to say goodbye to JR Smith and Iman Schumpert and everyone else, I had to agree, this isn't working, and it's lunacy to keep betting on a team that's delivering such poor results. #
- So if you think the 140-char limit is so great, why isn't Twitter making money for its shareholders? If you were management at Twitter would you be conservative or would you take risks? As a shareholder, I want them to take risks. Big ones. Why not? They don't really have anything to lose. #
- It could be that when you remove the 140-char limit, Twitter will just crumble into a mass of servers and Russian bots, and all the good people will go to Ello and Mastodon, or whatever -- maybe Facebook. After all, now that the 140-char limit is gone, why not just go ahead and post unlimited-length messages on Facebook? It could happen that way, but I don't think so.#
- I wish Jack and team would stop dangling their feet in the water and just make the change. I don't think the complaints are real. The people complaining don't know that easing the limit will screw up Twitter. They say they know, but they don't. If they don't like it they can always unfollow or mute people who use too many characters. But they won't. Users always complain about change. Sometimes they're right, but usually it doesn't make as much of a difference as they think.#
- Also, why not make the limit 1000 characters or even 1,000,000? I can attach a video to a tweet that uses more than 1MB. Why not text? I don't see what they have against text. I did a design for them a couple of years ago that shows how it could be done with zero disruption for 140-char lovers. It's not an original idea, I stole it from Facebook. This is an easy software design problem. #
- We do this every time Jack Dorsey flirts with the idea. This time just do it and stop dangling your feet in the water. Let Twitter be Twitter. And next month let's break another rule and learn from it, and start growing this platform again. #
I now have PagePark serving public outlines edited with Little Outliner at the domain my.this.how. Here's what the canonical states outline looks like when viewed in this mode. If you're clever you can figure out how to get your Little Outliner outlines to do the same thing, or wait for the howto, coming soon. #
Got an email from Dropbox. Tomorrow will apparently be the last day for Fargo. It's been a good run. #Feature request for Twitter. Please, in addition to reporting followers and followed, also report muted. That is, report the number of people who have muted an account. I have muted the current president, and would like to have that officially counted. #
In 2010 I did a study to determine the ideal length for a nugget-of-news. Turns out it's approximately 185 chars.#
As he often does, David Frum nails the flag issue. He understands how the Repub pollster mind works. The flag is a good fight for Trump, he picked his foil, strong, young, virile, violent black men, telling his fans that the people they're rooting for in the NFL don't respect the flag or them. This is a must-read. #
Always thought it incongruous that people in very white places love their black athletes, but don't accept the humanity of black Americans.#
Must-watch speech by Shannon Sharpe. The protest eventually came not to be about black lives being snuffed out, rather the president challenged the owners and players to follow his order, and they don't accept being bullied. It was programming. In other words, he agrees with Frum. We have left the domain of Black Lives Matter, and are playing on the racists' turf now. Not a good place to be. #
