Thursday, June 09, 2005

Miami Herald: "The first tropical storm of the year developed today." 

BBC: "A previously unknown piece by German maestro JS Bach is found among papers from a Weimar library." 

The next funky HTML dialog for your entertainment. (People say Scripting News is more entertaining when I'm shipping something.) 

The same funky dialog as redesigned by a smartass English major.  

Approximately 42 people will know the purpose of the picture to the right, and for them, let me say that it is not yet functional, the number of machines that will respond correctly when the picture is clicked is exactly 0. However before the end of the day there will be one machine that responds correctly, then three others. And by the end of the month perhaps as many as 250. Then from there, we hope not to get sick this time as we did last, and be able to see this through to a universe in the thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and so forth. Today Good Morning Silicon Valley said my ego had achieved its ultimate size before exploding. Well folks, you ain't seen nothin yet. The boy is aiming high!  

In Europe, OPML Easter Eggs were the rage.  

Doug Kaye interviewed me for IT Conversations back in October. 

Ed Foster: "From Apple's perspective, using its lawyers to keep its customers in the dark was a good business decision." 

Okay we're having our blogger-podcaster meetup in Gainesville on Saturday at 3PM. 

Today I unsubbed from a feed because its ads were too big in relation to the value of the content. I found as I scroll through the new stuff, Infoworld's new format got me to stop and look, and and then I'd quickly see it was an ad. I know that eventually I'd tune it out, but then I'd miss illustrations that weren't ads. So this is where my line is, at least for Infoworld. Goodbye old friend. (Irony: The articles in Infoworld are pretty much ads too. So it's ads in ads. What a business model. They managed to forget the user, completely.) 

BTW, Taegan Goddard has, for me, a very high value feed, but his new ads are way too distracting. I'm thinking of unsubbing. (Arrrgh, he switched to Feedburner. Minus ten points for Taegan. BTW, when you point to a Feedburner-hosted feed, it's basically one big ad for Feedburner. Sorry, you also lost a chance for more subscribers Taegan. I don't see why I should point to their ads from my blog.) 

Gallup Poll has RSS. 

Tod Maffin: "I am now one-third on my way to becoming legally able to play music on my podcast." 

Harry Truman was a 20th century media hacker. 

Lenn Pryor, formerly of Microsoft, newly of Skype, is a media hacker. 

Scoble is catching the media hacker wave. "I hinted at the geek dinner the other night that Microsoft is announcing something at Gnomedex." Hmm. Wonder what that could be? 

It's great that Scoble is getting into the media hacker thing. But we must draw the line somewhere. For example, Ben Hammersley is definitely not a media hacker. Maybe a media wanka, if that. 

Some people just don't get that there are two sides to every story. No doubt Hammersley thinks I'm a wanka too. He's written as much, at least twice in The Guardian and maybe other places as well. He doesn't come right out and say it, his editors would never let him do that, but the effect has been pretty nasty anyway. So by openly making it clear how I feel about this schmeggege (that's Yiddish for wanka), I hope to prevent him from getting any more of these supposedly objective writing assignments. He can go fuck with someone else's career using his employer's ink if he wants to, if they'll let him. Anyone who works for the Guardian or the BBC now surely knows he's conflicted when it comes to this wanka.  

Tongues & cheeks 

I almost put a note at the end of that post about the tongue being in the cheek, but it spoiled the ending, so I took it out. I figured either people had a sense of humor or perspective, or they don't. I don't feel sorry for the people who don't, because there are people dying in Iraq or in jail in the US for posession of marijuana.