Friday, May 26, 2006

Steve Jobs: "If you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year." 

I had lunch today in Berkeley with George Coates, the creative mind behind Better Bad News. I'll have lots more to say about this, for sure. Possibly some theater for BloggerCon IV. I wasn't sure which of the guys on Better Bad News he is, turns out he's none of them. I asked why his picture isn't on the web somewhere, he said it is, but it's on page 4 of a Google image search. Well, there are only 3 pages. Heh. There is a picture of him in this interview, but it's a very old pic, he doesn't really look like that today. We talked about 9-11 and what blogging would be like after civilian government is suspended in the US. He told me to read this book by David Ray Griffin.  

Wired: Apple Loses Bid to Unmask Bloggers' Sources. 

One of my Sims 2 characters all of a sudden has a cloud of bubbles around her head, all the time, everywhere she goes. I can't figure out what this means! What does it mean?  

Julian Bond asks, humorously, if we can't call it Web 2.0, how about Web 0.92. Hey how about that, it's an RSS joke.  

O'Reilly corporate response to the "Web 2.0" controversy. 

John Battelle: "This is not some evil plot to 'own' Web 2.0." 

Apparently CMP filed for the trademark on 11/26/03.  

Marc Canter wants to know what Cory Doctorow thinks. 

PC World's 25 worst tech products of all time. 

3 years ago today I asked who would pay for software. 

OPML Support is an "extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that adds OPML import/export functionality to the Firefox Bookmarks manager." 

Scoble's mom 

I called him up last night after I read on his blog that his mom had died. It wasn't unexpected, she had a stroke a couple of weeks ago, a bad one, and that didn't leave much of Mrs Scoble alive. Not enough to make it. So he's had a bit of time to catch up, but then I guess you never get a chance to really prepare for something like this. When it happens, it hits you like a ton of bricks, changes everything, forever.

We chatted about stuff, this and that, I mentioned that I was shopping for houses in Berkeley, and he asked if this was a good time for that, and I said, at 51, you stop worrying about things like that so much. By the time it's a good time to buy a house again maybe I'll be dead, or sick, or whatever. Now is the time to shop for a house. Is it time to buy? We'll find out.

He decided to buy his wife a new car, not a cheap one either. The one she wanted. Good move. Now she'll have to deal with a new reality, a husband who gives her what she wants. Everyone gets to give up all the old struggles. Will they find new ones? Not this week, probably not next week either. But now it's time for change, a big tree falls, old struggles are over, forever, it's time for dreams to take hold, new ones, creativity, maybe some happiness.

Mothers and fathers are our teachers, a few years ago when it looked like my dad was going to die, I was still learning from him, and he survived, to be an inspiration, again and again. You never know what's coming next in life, that's the great thing about it. Scoble's mom, even after her life is over, continues to teach. Not just Scoble, not just Maryam, but me, and if you're reading this, you.

Namaste Mrs Scoble and her family, and thank you.