Kurt Vonnegut 

The author speaking through one of his characters, Eliot Rosewater:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

Nappy ho 

An old white radio personality didn't just wake up one morning and think of "nappy ho" all by himself.

Okay he's white and he said something stupid and he's old, so he's easy to pick on.

But maybe black people should take the issue up with the music industry too.

And its not just music, all that kind of stuff was in a movie that lots of white people saw, myself included. 9 years ago. In that movie Halle Berry said "Don't you know you my nigger" -- to an old white guy!

Maybe it's just a sign of respect. Certainly when some people say it, it is. I don't know, seems a little racist to me to have a huge national shitstorm when a white person says something that if a black person said it wouldn't be any cause for alarm.

Maybe Imus didn't mean any harm at all. Just a thought.

Postscript: A commenter named "Solo" points out that Jesse Jackson has a lot of chutzpah going on national TV saying that Imus has to go. Maybe he forgot Hymietown?

Sitemaps 

Autodiscovery for sitemaps. I'm working on sitemaps for scripting.com. An example, the sitemap for the "misc" folder.

We can arrive at a fair solution 

I don't think my old attorney blogs, but maybe he should. Maybe by the time we're done with all our michegas, he will.

Two weeks ago I posted a proposal, in public, to try to get a dialog going. In that proposal, I tried to see things from his point of view. I like to figure out what's right, and then do the right thing. I don't want anything I'm not entitled to.

I did all the work to create weblogs.com, and took all the risk, and withstood all the flaming -- and I also invented it (unlike RSS, weblogs.com was invented), so it might seem fair that I get all the proceeds. (I did all that without getting a salary from UserLand, all my time was at my own expense.)

But UserLand did help, it registered the domain for me (something we did for anyone in our community who wanted us to, back then domain registration wasn't so easy), and I did run the site on one of its servers (also something we did for others, at no charge), so let's, for the sake of argument, assume that UserLand owned it when it was transferred to me in 2003. That was the starting point for my proposal. From there, I thought we could easily arrive at a fair solution, shake hands and go forth and do our respective things.

So here we are at a fork in the road.

As far as I'm concerned the proposal is still on the table.

But -- today I thought about what it would be like to go through depositions and a trial. I can do it. I blogged Jury Duty and got something from it, and so did my readers. Maybe I'll write a book from the inside of the legal process, I suspect there will be plenty to write about. Sure it'll cost money -- but I have money.

Net-net: I believe in being fair, to others, and to myself.

AppleTV here 

My AppleTV arrived. I'll try to install it later today, and of course will report on the experience here.

Engadget reports that AppleTV hardware is capable of doing HD, but inexplicably, the software isn't provided to do it.

3PM: I have AppleTV hooked up to my kitchen TV set using the HDMI cable. Everything worked the first time. Connected it to the LAN through a wifi router in the den. Connecting my laptop to the unit was like connecting a Bluetooth device -- you enter a password that's displayed on the screen of the TV. It's now synching all the content in my iTunes library, even though I didn't ask it to, and when I stop it, it starts again on its own. I've decided to let it have its way. I want to link it to a folder of photos on my laptop's hard disk, but the command it says I should use isn't present in my copy of iTunes. I tried copying an AVI file I ripped from a DVD, but it was rejected. So after setup it's confusing, and not working the way I expect it to. More later.

I found the tabs, I was looking in the wrong place. It's synching pictures now.

I happened to have a copy of a video Meet the Press podcast, and it got synched to the AppleTV in the initial setup. And when I browse through the menus, which are patterened after the iPod menus, there was a section for podcasts, I chose this podcast, and there was the first "aha" moment -- I was watching an episode of Meet the Press, albeit an old one, and it looks pretty much like it looks when I watch it on NBC throug my cable box -- far from HD quality, but still a pretty good demo of what it can do.

They have a full selection of trailers, already downloaded. That's cool! I'm watching a preview of Grindhouse.

Twitter slowdown? 

The furious pace of growth on Twitter, for me, has slowed to a trickle, and now all the action is on Jaiku -- or maybe it's just that Jaiku is catching up? It's hard to say because everyone's view of these systems is different. Jeff Pulver, in Scoble's video description of Twitter, said it was IM or a chatroom, and Scoble corrected him, pointing out that it was very different in one important way, that people opt-in to listen, and can opt-out at any time. So true. But to others, with very few people listening, it must look like a chatroom, a chatroom they can't post to, a conversation they can listen to but can't participate in. I imagine for some personality types this is exactly what they like.

Web 2.0 conference 

I will be at the Web 2.0 conference next week, at least for one day (not sure which one), so if there are any products or companies you think I should see, or for that matter anyone should see, please post a note here or send an email.

Thanks to the folks at O'Reilly for approving my request for a press pass.

Doug Kaye 

I had a nice lunch on Monday here in Berkeley with Doug Kaye. It had been too long.

I learned a lot about Doug that I didn't know before. I thought he was a tech guy, turns out he's a film and audio guy who learned tech out of necessity. No wonder his stuff is so useful.

I first met Doug when he was an early member of the Radio developer community. Come to think of it, that's how I met most of the people who went on to do great things in blogging, podcasting, and Web 2.0 in general.

Doug recommended a movie, Memento, saying it was one of the ten best movies of all time. I had never even heard of it. Of course, with that kind of endorsement, I had to see it, and I now have. Very good, really haunting. I bet Doug likes it because it is a technical marvel, I'm not a movie technology guy, but even I could see that putting this movie together required greatness. I rated it a B+ on Yahoo. (Also you have to see it twice to get all that's going on.)