Saturday, August 07, 2004

Pictures from this afternoon's BBQ at the Scobles.  

Can you spot Allen Searls, son of Doc, in the photos? 

New comment management features for Manila.  

The Guardian asks us to forget the bloggers, and they have a replacement in mind, the vloggers. 

John Markoff, the self-proclaimed blogger from the NY Times, is still poking fun at his fellow bloggers. He's so clever, I've decided that my pompous lie-filled advertiser-owned "fact-checked" newspaper is Scripting News.  

I'm happy to report that my hotel room is a non-smoking room that doesn't smell like smoke. But the sign the hotel puts on the desk could use a little editing. For the continued comfort our non-smoking guests. Hmmm. What does the word "continued" add? Maybe they weren't comfortable to begin with and will only be comfortable if you don't smoke in this non-smoking room. And I'd love to see a room that's "equipped" for smoking. Perhaps it comes with an iron lung. An EKG machine? A nicotine patch on the pillow at bedtime? Or maybe a huge fan in the floor and the ceiling to move smoke quickly into the atmosphere outside the hotel? When I was a smoker I always wished the airlines would provide bathroom-like places for smoking with those kinds of fans. Anyway, net-net I'm happy to be able to sleep in a room that doesn't smell like an ashtray. 

Here's the edited version. "This is a non-smoking room. Don't smoke in this room. Non-smokers can tell you smoked here. If you smoke in a non-smoking room we will bill your credit card for the cost of removing your smoke, it usually runs around $25,000. If you want to smoke, we'll do our best to find you another room, it's much less expensive." 

Kerio Personal Firewall helps users "control how their computers exchange data with other computers on the Internet or local network." 

A .NET bloggers dinner in Boston, August 18. 

Phil Haack: "The firewall built into XP blocks incoming traffic, not outgoing." 

On this day last year Scoble was hanging with someone even more interesting than yours truly. Item 2. Lest anyone doubt that we lost a great blogger when Douglas Adams died, here's a piece he wrote, six years ago today, about his nose. Item 3. He wrote a testimonial for Scripting News. "His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative and quite often wrong." Heh. 

Julie Leung wrote up my visit on Thursday. I didn't need a visitors badge, but I did have to take a ferry (which was very nice) and I was charmed by two new special friends who showed me their unusual blogs posts, on paper, if you can believe that. A generation is on the way to whom blogging is no big deal, esp when both Mom and Dad do it. I asked for Julie's help in planning a west coast con, since she flew all the way to Boston to help make the second one such a great success.