Tuesday, September 13, 2005

New header graphic, derived from a New Orleans jazz funeral pic. 

Jon Udell interviews Bill Gates in a podcast.  

News.com has a Gates interview too, not a podcast. 

BBC: Google getting its Microsoft man. 

Scoble called to say that RSS was all over the Windows Vista demos at the PDC today. It's nice to get a call like that. It's not like Apple called to say they liked RSS when they copied and pasted it all over their OS. 

Gadgets are a "new category of mini-application designed to provide information, useful lookup, or enhance an application or service on your Windows PC or the Web." 

Gartenberg on the new Office 12 user interface, RSS support. 

Dan Farber has some screen shots of the new UI. 

German Car Blog: "You can now connect your USB powered MP3 player filled with your personal choice of music to VW cars." 

Richard MacManus reviews the new Memeorandum.  

Britt wants one for Katrina. 

Staci Kramer: "I approached Gabe about doing just that nearly two weeks ago. We went back and forth about the idea; his chief concern was whether a hurried effort would add enough to the conversation about Katrina." 

Why blame is not the issue 

I had to set up a bank account in Massachusetts because Scripting News, Inc is a Massachusetts corp. The bank made many mistakes setting up the account, especially the Internet part of the account.

So here I am, 3000 miles away, and the people on the other end of the line are talking about who's at fault. Some say it's another guy at the bank, some suggest it might be my fault (hard to imagine, I just showed them the corporate documents and answered their questions truthfully). But blame isn't what I care about. A bank is something you put trust in. I want to know my money is safe.

Now we put even more faith in our government. They run everything, including the banks. And the nukes. And the levees in New Orleans. And the war in Iraq. So when Bush says he'll take responsibility for what's his fault, that's not good enough. I want it to work. After I'm dead it doesn't matter who's to blame.

Easing into Firefox 

Thanks to Apple for making such a shitty browser, and forcing me to learn to love Firefox, now I have a way out of the spyware quagmire on Windows, without very much discomfort at all. Read on...

Last week I found myself in a new apartment, a permanent address at last, and a laptop that's so riddled with spyware as to be unusable. While watching Katrina on CNN and MSNBC, I ran all the spyware removal tools I had, they're known to work, but then I couldn't bring myself to launch MSIE, because that's how the spyware comes back. Then I had an epiphany. I didn't use Firefox on this computer in the past because it was so strange, so different from MSIE as to be jarring. I put up with the spyware in order not to be forced to do the uncomfortable. So I installed Firefox, and I use it on two of my three computers, happily, and the spyware-infested laptop is now a spyware-free laptop! Happy days.

Sometimes you have to sneak up on yourself to get something done.

Starbucks 

It's a good place to edit your blog, on a cloudy Tuesday in Berkeley. Just enough activity to provide inspiration without being too distracting. And the coffee, even if it isn't the best in the world, is fresh and plentiful, and the Internet works. And across the street a man who looks like an ape with sunglasses smokes slowly, in the same place he was yesterday. Slowly smoking. Not going anywhere. Just standing there looking like an ape and a man at the same time, smoking, slowly.