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AP: "Investors staged a late-day rally, sending the Dow industrials up more than 260 points."   Last night's movie -- The Women, starring lots of women including (you guessed it) Joan Crawford. Guys, if you think all women are cute and sweet, you gotta see this movie. The women spit, lie, scratch, curse and bite. Not one man in the cast. 1939. Crawford plays The Bitch You Have To Hate (but secretly admire). Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard steal the show. Norma Shearer gets top billing, the tiresome goodie-two-shoes who learns that you have hit hard to keep a good man. Best line: Crawford asks "What does she want with me?" Another woman: "Maybe she's slumming." Ray Ozzie: The myth of cybersecurity. A joke from Mitch Wagner's cousin Beth.   Favorite commercial in years. Peter Fonda driving down the road on his motorcycle. Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild playing. "Like a true nature's child we were born, born to be wild. We can climb so high. I never wanna die." A scene from Easy Rider. A nerd in a white shirt pulls up next to Fonda and gives him a thumbs-up. Fonda smiles with subtle approval. Cut to the nerd on a commuter train wearing a Walkman singing along with Steppenwolf in an embarassingly high-pitched voice, and oblivious to the disapproving looks from other commuters. Back to the motorcycles. Product shot. Think young. Close. I have a small favor to ask. Weblogs.Com is very close to an all-time high this morning, with 981 blogs in the list as of 10:37AM Pacific. The high water mark is 990. It's been flirting with 1000 for the last few weeks. If you have a weblog that's part of the weblogs.com network, please update it now, so we can cross 1000, and I can get on with other things? "The high-water mark is 1005 weblogs, on 8/14/2002; 11:06:25 AM."  Another previous-generation computer scientist dies. Kristen Nygaard was co-inventor of Simula, the first object oriented programming language. It was the first Algol-like language I learned. As it was for many of my generation, Simula was a big influence for me; you'll see lots of his ideas in UserTalk. Tis the season I guess. My teachers' generation is passing on. To the big bit-bucket in the sky? The Eatonweb Edit Your Weblog Listing Drive. NY Times: "Top executives at nearly half the companies required to do so have certified their financial statements ahead of today's deadline. But many companies remained confused last night about their responsibilities and potential penalties." Jake Savin: "Why doesn't Macromedia come up with a really kick ass cross-platform browser-based WYSIWYG editor plugin? It needs to be really fast, do spell checking, send data via HTTP POST, and ideally be extensible using locally running native code." Rick Klau goes to an expand-collapse outline template for his weblog. Joey deVilla: "During TV appearance, do not put accordion down close to hot stage lights." News.Com: RIAA goes for broke, moves to put online music users in jail. Also on News.Com: The users tell the RIAA to shove it where the sun don't shine. "Digital distribution of music through services such as Morpheus and Kazaa will continue to thrive with use peaking in 2005, according to a report released Wednesday."  Our best advice for HIllary Rosen. Offer the same service that Morpheus and Kazaa operate, with high quality scans, and a $50 monthly fee. Run an ad campaign aimed at parents, saying that this is the responsible and honest thing for their families to do. Give Mom and Dad an easy way to spend a few bucks on the kids' happiness (and find some of their favorite oldies too). Promise to get some of the money to flow to the artists. Everyone says "In the end, Hillary did the right thing." You must know in your heart it's going to end this way, so you might as well do it sooner than later. BTW, you gotta apologize before any of this. People who use music on the Internet don't think of themselves as pirates, and every time you repeat it in a press release you're building negative goodwill. When you ask the parents to do the right thing, first you have to show that you're willing to do it too. The facts are out. You keep all the money for yourselves. The artists get nothing. You care not one whit about the art, on either side of the equation. That's the insult. That has to be dealt with. How dare you threaten to throw users in jail. You should be in jail if there were any justice. ThinRSS is a "Java Web Start enabled RSS browser." Last year on this day, I ran an excerpt from David Bank's excellent book, Breaking Windows. "In this excerpt Bank tells the story of Microsoft's decision to comply with a judge's order to open up Windows to other browsers by breaking Windows, an act of self-defacement that illustrates how far Microsoft will go before bending to authority." The Bank book is, imho, required reading for anyone who wants an informed opinion about the software industry. The publicity tour was interrupted by 9-11, so not many people have read this landmark book. Four years ago: "I like to pour spaghetti on my father's head, and tell him that as long as I'm paying the bills in this house (I am!), he's going to do it my way. Sometimes I even lock my virtual father in the bathroom for 48 hours so he gets a chance to think about it." Today is the two-month anniversary of No Smoking Dave. |
 
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