Friday, February 10, 2006

One of the by-products of the work I've been doing is that now all the content of Scripting News, going back to April 1997, is available as static OPML. I'm probably one of about 15 people in the universe that finds this exciting; to the other 14, enjoy!  

Orbitcast: Syndicated XM Schedules in RSS and OPML. 

Welcome back to DFL, "the blog that covers last-place finishes at the Olympics." 

I'm still deep in the mess I created when I decided it was time to modernize my own content management system. Yesterday I decided it would be okay to move on to new things, and come back to the mess tomorrow (i.e. today). Well, already I'm breaking things because I forgot how they work. The problem, I realize, is that there's a lot of history in this blog, a lot of transitions being preserved (hah) when actually every time I do one of these transitions I break lots of stuff. If you go back to the beginning, to 1997 you'll find almost every link is broken. Oh well. 

Wired News podcasts. 

Anyway, as I was debugging, I came across this daring piece, written in July 2003, about beauty and women. It's daring because men aren't supposed to express opinions about this, at least not in the politically correct USA. Me, I don't care what's politically correct, I hope. The piece gets pretty dorky, but that's the point. I'm not perfect, neither are you, and that's where our beauty comes from.  

I was getting ready to write a followup to the bit I wrote about the slowness in Gmail, when all of a sudden, it got fast again. Wow, I can't tell you what a difference it makes. Before last weekend it was always fast, and then all this week it's been getting slower and then slower. I assume it has something to do with the integration of the IM feature (which I don't want, btw). We still haven't figured out how to do software yet. Because it's free they don't have to care what we think. They probably do care, in an abstract and aggregate way. But what if the performance never came back? Or what happens if Google stock stops going up? Who wants to be on Gmail when that happens? 

Podcasting comes to Harvard Medical School. I wonder if they know that the earliest podcasts came out of Harvard Law School. 

Gary Secondino on yesterday's news about the Bush presidency.  

It's really nice to see the EFF take a position opposite Google.