Friday, October 15, 2004

Here's something that doesn't happen every day. On Tuesday, Cambridge blogger Betsy Devine's husband got a phone call from Sweden. Frank Wilczek, who I met at Betsy's house last year, shares this year's Nobel Prize for Physics. What to say but wow, congrats and much love and pride to Frank and Betsy! Way to go! 

MSNBC's all-new RSS support. Excellent! 

Earlier this week I was emailing with Martin Nisenholtz, an executive at the NY Times, about various technical subjects involving RSS and podcasting, when he suggested we talk on the phone. He asked if I was up on the Valerie Plame case. I said I was. I found out that I wasn't. 

Jon Stewart is on CNN Crossfire, he's taking them apart. They won't let him finish a sentence. He keeps saying "we need help." This is must-watch stuff.  

Transcript of the Stewart appearance. A discussion on BOP, and (bing!) BitTorrents in WMV and AVI formats. Russ Beattie has an MP3. 

Greenspun: "George W. Bush attracts all of the hatred." 

AP: "President Bush's top political adviser has testified today before a panel looking into who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer." 

Old-time political reporter Hal Bruno was on CNN today. He predicts something ominous. "Last time there was one Florida, this time there may be many." Brrrr.  

I was interviewed by Jon Gordon at Minnesota Public Radio about podcasting. 

Dave Massy: "We feel it is vitally important for web sites and applications that worked with yesterday’s IE work with today’s IE, and continue to work with tomorrow’s IE." 

Don Park reviews Google Desktop Search. 

Jon Udell: "Everybody seems to have a different reason to care about Google's desktop search tool." 

PC World's Tom Spring raises a totally legit security concern re GDS. 

A coincidence? 

Heads up, with a grain of salt. Yesterday, as you know, I installed Google Desktop Search. It spent the whole day indexing my system, and when I retired for the day, it wasn't done, so I let it run all night. Arriving at work this morning, it was still running.

Now, perhaps independently, my computer was almost totally unusable yesterday. It would disappear for a few moments, even the mouse wouldn't work. Listen to the audio blog post I did for an idea of what it was like.

When it was just as bad this morning, I decided to exit Google Desktop Search. Now I'm sure it's a total coincidence, but all of a sudden my machine is quite zippy. All of a sudden it's as if it never lost its mind.

Anyway, being the superstitious sort that I am, I'm going to leave it uninstalled as long as I'm in crunch mode on various projects.

Evangelism 101 

Don't tell the girl you want girls.

Tell her you want her.