Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Christian Science Monitor: "This Saturday he'll host BloggerCon II, a conference at Harvard Law School for both new and veteran bloggers." 

John Battelle: "A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today." 

The forecast calls for a high in the 70s on Saturday and sun. 

For Tim Jarrett last night's Bush press conference was the tipping point.  

Doc Searls: "What I heard from Bush's speech last night sounded like leadership. What I heard from the Q&A that followed sounded like a man cornered by wolverines." 

Boing Boing is linking from each post to a Technorati query that shows you who's pointing to the post. Andrew Grumet has been doing this for some time, probably others too. Anyway, if Technorati wants to encourage this, as I assume they do, they should come up with a small icon that stands for this query. "New! Other blogs commenting on this post" is way way too long. Even "Cosmos" is too much space. Something about the size of the pound sign we use for permalinks. Also be sure not to do anything that limits it to one brand of blogging software. 

Tim Bray on the CNET file that's not in RSS format. I bet $10 it's a mistake, and that's their internal format, revealed by accident. The NY Times does it this way too, by the way. They have their own internal format for headlines, it's not RSS. I wrote a script that runs on a UserLand server that polls their feeds, and produces RSS 2.0. It's a pretty common practice, certainly nothing to worry about.  

Mail is back up. "It's even worse than it appears." 

James Gosling: "We're not a bunch of moronic secret subversive Microsoft lapdogs." 

Andrew Grumet has a few interesting ways to link to accessibility engineers who don't want you to link to them.  

A reminder I still have to plan something for Amsterdam. I'm there at least 4/25 through 4/28. My flight back to Boston isn't until May 4.  

It's raining heavy in Boston today and tomorrow. But it will clear on Friday, it'll be sunny and warm in time for BloggerCon. Watch the forecast here. 

Four years ago today, Salon ran reactions to the stock market carnage, the bubble burst so many anticipated. Three years before that on this day, Time Magazine named Marimba CEO Kim Polese one of the 25 most influential Americans.  

BBC: "San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds hit his 661st career home run on Tuesday to move past his godfather Willie Mays into sole possession of third place on the all-time list." 

People with futures 

Another point of view hit me hard listening to Bush bumble last night. Every day at least three or four young Americans are killed in Iraq, and an order of magnitude more Iraqis. What an incredible amount of misery. These people had futures. Maybe one of them would have gone on to be a senator or a doctor or a poet, dancer, thinker or peace-maker. Maybe they would just be people who would like to know that Barry Bonds hit 661. They were people with futures, but now that they're dead, no more.

For the families, where exactly do they put their grief? Why should they care about Iraq? For the Iraqis, why are the Americans there? He says he feels their pain, but I don't believe that. I think if he did, he'd resign immediately and let someone else, with no personal stake in this, manage the war. Having resigned, and feeling responsible for all that death and destruction, he would have no choice but to go to Iraq and fight and give up his own life to get us out. It would be understandable if he didn't want to send his children to fight with him, and it would also be understandable if other American parents felt the same. If one more life was spared it would be the right thing to do.

Also I have no doubt that at least one of the Americans who have died would be a better leader for this country. This is the best we can do? What an embarassment for such a great country to be so utterly without direction, wasting a potential prosperity, for nothing.