Friday, August 26, 2005

I signed up for my Mac account -- scriptingnews at mac dot com. Go ahead and send me some mail. Haven't gotten iChat to work with Google Talk yet (tried, but got confused). Okay it's a pretty nice machine. Starting to grow on me. I wish I could tell it to treat the Control key the same as the Command key that would cut down the brain farts by about 98.23 percent. 

Spanning Salesforce 2.0 "lets you track new and updated leads, opportunities, cases, escalations, and documents in Salesforce.com using RSS." 

New header graphic. An impromptu presentation at BarCamp. 

You know what would be really cool. An office in Silicon Valley that was open 24 by 7, with pizza and coffee, for open source projects. A patent-free zone. A place to work on open formats and protocols. The missing social pulse of the tech industry. I wonder if it would work, or if it would just attract homeless people. Thinking out loud. 

Natalie Holloway. Bombshell news? How many Americans and Iraqis have died while the US media has been obsessing about a young woman who's missing in Aruba. Why isn't this a major story on one of the networks. I'd love to know how they made this programming decision.  

Tim Bray: "95% or more of the population hasn’t yet encountered DRM, and when they do, they aren’t going to like it." 

Megnut: "The Beatles broke up before I was even born." 

Rex Hammock: "...a trajectory, not a destination." 

Cory Doctorow: "PodShow is a new service that talks music labels into licensing their music for free playback on podcasts." 

Marc Canter has an old picture of me wearing SF 49ers glasses and with a dumb grin on my face, and one of his twins in the background. You can tell it's an old picture because my beard is brown (not gray) and the kid is really young (they're tall strapping young men now, not really kids anymore). I had dinner with Marc on Wednesday in Berkeley. I've been reading his blog all along, about how he wants my help with microformats, and I would be happy to help if we could find some way to factor out the reputation-bashing. He said on his blog today that he'll help soften the blows when they come. A very small number of people have been able to keep progress at a snail pace. It would be easy to route around them, if there were a will to do so. Marc tells me that he has such a will. So we'll give it a try, first with something small and not too ambitious, and then see if we can build on that.  

BTW, when the bashing stops, I'll stop talking about the bashing. And if you don't want the finger pointed at you, stop attacking and stop threatening people. Every day I hear new stories of more back-channel bullshit. Marc told me a few chilling stories, people saying if you don't attack Dave, we'll attack you. Something seems to be changing now. I'm willing to try coming back to the Bay Area, to try to create new formats, protocols, and processes for working together. But none of this can happen as long as the attacks continue. So if you get an email from someone who says they won't work with you if you work with me, you can point them to this post, and say they ought to have the guts to make a positive contribution, that you've had enough of people cutting good people down. Call the bullies on their cowardice.  

In the future I'll be able to search for a laundromat within 5 miles of my hotel in the same shopping center as a Starbucks. When the load is done, the washer will send me an email. The user interface will be easy because I'll be able to pay with my ATM card which will already be linked to my blog, which has a mailto link.