If you can't get a realtime readout on the line at the 14th Street Apple Store?

I mean if I get up at 3AM and there's a party down there, I might actually take a hike. If it's just crazy drunks screaming at and about nothing, I'll just sleep in.

I mean come on people, it's 2010! ">

 6/23/2010; 6:11:42 PM.   .

According to DSL Reports, Time-Warner is offering DOCSIS 3 in NYC for $99.95 per month.

I'm sure I don't know what DOCSIS is, but I do know this much -- it's faster than what I have.

"According to Time Warner Cable, they're now offering a 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream for $99.95 per month."

That's the deal I want. Now, I've been to the TWC website, and I can upgrade to "Turbo" for $9.95 more per month. But I'm only paying $34.95 per month now, so it seems that can't be the faster DOCSIS 3. There is no technical information on the site. And I definitely don't want to get on the phone with one of their fast-talking bull-shitting hucksters.

I also want to order cable TV with the minimal package I need to get HBO. I'm sure their hucksters can't handle that either. I want an online form I can order it from.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

PS: My mom is getting 23.5 Mbps down and 15.5 Mbps up from Verizon FIOS in Queens.

 6/23/2010; 5:54:36 PM.   .

This is more geeky tech stuff, and might interest about a dozen people, so if you don't understand -- no problem. It won't be on the final exam. ">

Edit This Page was the central feature in Manila, the blogging tool we shipped at UserLand in 1999. For me, a blogging tool without it isn't much of a blogging tool. But it's not easy to implement. C'est la vie. Neither was Undo, but the Mac required it, and it's one of the reasons people like the Mac.

The premise was that every story in the system would have an ETP button that, when clicked, would open the story in an editor, so you can make the change, hit Save, and get on with it. Content management systems of the day didn't have that feature.

Anyway -- Scripting2 will have that feature as well. I'm getting started implementing it, so if you look at the HTML source for this page, you'll see a <script> element that links back to the local server, 127.0.0.1. If you don't have a server running there, hopefully your browser just ignores it. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this post, to see if that assumption is true.

On my machine, the HTML the script returns is a form with an Edit button, that, when clicked, loads the source of the page into an editor where I can change it, save it and move on.

Update: 6:21PM Eastern -- it works! ">

 6/23/2010; 12:53:53 PM.   .

I'm back in NY, after returning from Calif where I sold my house. Now it's time to get back to my real job -- writing a new blogging tool called Scripting2.

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to make paragraph-level permalinks work a little beter.

In their first incarnation, implemented a few years ago, a pargraph would get a unique name derived from its timestamp which was converted into a number to make the name. So if this paragraph was created at 12:28:08 PM today its name would be "p934826408.' It works, but it's pretty unsightly.

In the next iteration the names were a bit nicer. As it was rendering the story it would bump a counter each time it moved to a new paragraph. So the names would be p1, p2, etc. The only problem is if I added a paragraph in the middle, all the numbers would move down and links might point to the wrong place, which defeats the purpose of having the permalinks.

So now I'm doing it a better way that has less distracting names than the original approach, but won't break if paragraphs are added in the middle.

When I create a new paragraph I give it a serial number. So the first paragraph in a story might get serial number 249, and the second would be 250, and so on. The corresponding names would be p249 and p250. Later if I add a paragraph between them, it could be 284. The numbers would appear to be out of sequence if you looked closely, but they would remain unique.

In fact this post was written using the new system. If you're reading this on the web and not in a feed reader, try hovering over the purple pound signs at the end of each paragraph. A paragraph was added in the middle. See if you can find it!

BTW, the serial numbers are reflected in the OPML that's linked into the HTML rendering and the RSS feed, so if you're writing an alternate viewer for my posts, you can use the serial numbers in generating your paragraph-level permalinks.

 6/23/2010; 9:35:48 AM.   .

Yesterday Google announced that now Google Voice is open to everyone. That's great! I'd love to use it.

But when I set it up initially, about a year ago, I didn't understand how it works, and I made a mess of it. I was just trying stuff out, like I often do with online apps, thinking it would be easy to start over once I understood how it worked. Apparently not so with Google Voice. Unless I was missing something.

I've tried to ask the question through other means, but haven't gotten an answer. So I thought, as a last resort, I'd ask you guys if you have a clue how I might nuke my account and create a new one.

Update: Apparently there is a way to request that a Google Voice number be transferred to a different Google account.

 6/23/2010; 5:05:13 AM.   .