Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Screen shot. Three days into the ad program at Techmeme, one of the advertisers, oDesk, has used their spot to announce something noteworthy, and it bought them more visibility, at least with me. The second just says Techmeme Sponsorship which seems a fair waste of the attention, why not say something about your company. The third does explain what the company does, but not very efficiently. Seems like people are still figuring this out, or the price isn't so high that it's worth much thought. If I had a slot there I'd be trying more ideas out, for sure.  

Scoble: "Find me the best blogs from Demo." Ditto. 

Random idea -- A BitTorrent device that plugs into your router (or maybe it is a router) that senses when you're not using the net, and starts serving BT content. As soon as you start using the net, it goes offline.  

Steve Matthews: Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms. 

I took the MacBook down to the Apple Store in Emeryville. The "genius" (no sarcasm) took a quick look at the machine and said they know what the problem is (he wouldn't explain), and ordered a replacement part. I'll have to leave the computer at the store for 4-5 days in about a week. Why I had to drive down there I don't know. What would it be like to own a Mac where the Apple Store is a hundred miles away?  

Another dumb question. I have a Windows machine that's misbehaving badly, but I think I can trick it into launching the Explorer, but I have to do it from the command prompt. But I'm stuck, cause I don't know how to type the name of a directory that has a space in it. In other words, I want to CD to a directory called "FOO BAR" without the quotes of course. Is there a way to tell command.com to change to that directory? (Postscript: Two things made all the diff. 1. I switched from command to cmd. 2. And instead of launching the Explorer, which seems to be damaged in some way, I just used MS-DOS to copy the files to a backup disk. It took a couple of hours, but it's done. Thanks for all the great advice!!) 

Martin Schwimmer says I'm right, the monkey is wrong.  

Liz Gannes reports on Day 1 at Demo. 

Duncan Mackenzie is thinking about tags vs categories in blog posts.  

On this day in 2003, Doug Kaye added an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for IT Conversations. I wrote: "Hey we're starting to get a (very small) installed base of interesting feeds that use the enclosures." That's how standards get created. Someone goes first, then someone goes second, compatibly. And so on. In this case, Doug was the "ratifier." 

When I see this dialog I think it's only talking about photos. But then I read it carefully and "albums" might refer to music. Is this the place where you lose all the music on the iPod if you click on Yes? I don't see how it could be. And damn if I know what they're talking about. I've never synced (is that a word) this iPod with a photo library or folder. I just use it for music.  

More on MacBook random shutdowns 

Via email from Tim Joransen...

"A coworker's daughter had one with this problem. She had it sent in before she started college, but it happened again once she got to college. After a lot of stress and pushing Apple, they resolved it, by trading it up for a Mac Book Pro. So they spent more money, but they did get $200 off for having to do this. I guess the Apple tech person said they probably didn't want to bother risking it continuing. Not a pretty picture for those it afflicts.

"His daughter loves the Mac Book Pro even better (bigger screen), but my friend isn't too happy."