Monday, March 28, 2005

Stephen Pierzchala: "The public school system in the Bay area is one of the reasons why I was not too upset to move to Massachusetts." 

Bloggers in Malaysia report on today's earthquake. 

BlogPulse conversation tracker via Tim Jarrett via Steve Rubel. 

Jon Udell: "I wasn’t even planning to enable RSS subscription to InfoWorld search. It just came for free. When that happens, it’s a sign that things are deeply right." 

Wired: "MGM Studios v Grokster, pits all the major movie studios and record labels against two operators of file-sharing services." 

Liz Smith: "With the whole world writing gossip, where is the place for the professional gossip?" 

Private Radio: "I wrote a PHP script that captures the Google News home page every 15 minutes. It then logs all the news sources it finds." 

Liberal is a code word 

When someone uses the L-word in conversation, chances are 999 out of 1000 that they're using it as a code-word to mean: weak, effeminate, misguided, powerless geek without morals. And it's equally likely that they're talking about you when they say it, although the play book says they should make it a question if it's directed at you at all.

"Are you a liberal?" they might ask. Who could say yes, but if you're honest you say that you have a heart and want your country to not take shortcuts, and you're concerned about the environment, and education, and think the government should stay away from our genitals, or telling our families when it's okay to pull the plug on a loved one, but you realize they've put you on the defensive before you've said anything.

So on Saturday night at dinner, when one of our companions, a man who considers himself a conservative, in the mold of Limbaugh, DeLay or Hannity, a death penalty proponent who feels deeply for the parents of Terri Schiavo, used the L-word in an argument, I said "Wait a minute, that's a code-word that means, weak effeminate, etc." I told him if he's going to talk about that, I'm going to expose him for what he is, an emulator of loutish, idiotic talk show hosts who say they're conservatives, but come on, they're not conservative, they're idiots who got a gig that pays them for being idiotic. The stupider they are the more they make. Competence in their work is incompetence everywhere else!

It worked.

The fading light of Silicon Valley 

If Steve Lohr is right and Silicon Valley's brightest days are behind it, it will have been their own fault. Technology isn't stagnant, we're going through a rebirth, the deals being being floated are incredibly rich, for the right people this time, and not in Silicon Valley. Not for the carpetbaggers, not for the imitation impressarios, rather for the technology that's making the difference and the people behind it.

Last week I wrote about insiders and two-tier communities. That's Silicon Valley. The hubris of financiers thinking they could do it by paying nothing for technology, nothing for ideas. Yeah Hollywood is corrupt, and they want to tie up tech to serve their purposes, but they are still turning out product that some people want. Can you say the same for Silicon Valley? Imho, it's become another gray metropolis, the ideas long gone, replaced by corporate strokers and lap dogs.

However, it's still the most welcoming of climates, a temperate haven, warm in winter, cool in summer. The garden you can grow in a SV back yard is one of the most diverse and nourishing anywhere in the nation, that's why Valley real estate is holding its value. Its got great schools, roads, shopping, even culture. What's missing is a heart and a purpose.

On the generosity of programmers 

1/2/02: "Of course there's nothing wrong with financiers, we need them to get our stock public. But as a group they did something really stinky to the software industry in the last part of the last decade -- they helped promote the myth that programmers work for free. In their folklore we're so selfless that we're willing to write new software and fix bugs, without being paid to do so. Another way of looking at it -- they get to keep all the money and programmers get nothing."