Know how when you're an east coast guy transplanted on the west coast how you always say "Man I miss those thunderstorms back east." You know the ones with lightning and hail and sheets of rain?

Well, we're having one of those, right now.

Neener neener!

 6/9/2011; 6:56:31 PM.   .

TBL had a breakthrough idea, we all know that.

If you want to know what a breakthrough looks like, look at the web.

A Eureka moment. "Honey come look, I just invented the web."

His idea was this -- we can have hyperlinked writing without waiting for a solution to the two-way-link problem. Just go ahead and link and we'll worry about how to pick up the pieces later.

Most people can't relax enough, intellectually, to stop the objections that pop into their heads (everyone has them) from stopping them from going forward anyway, over the objections.

Glad we have the web! Thanks TBL.

But the web is only half the answer when it comes to hyperlinking. It says how to hyperlink reading, but offers nothing in re hyperlinked writing.

I realized, that's the problem we have to solve, in Blorkland. And we'll do it the same way TBL did it with hyperlinked reading. By relaxing and not worrying about how it isn't everything we ever wanted it to be.

 6/9/2011; 11:33:04 AM.   .

I was going to see Super 8 even if they hadn't tried to make it go viral by running a Twitter campaign for it. I mean a movie made by JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg? Come on. No matter how bad it is, and I can't imagine it's anything but great, you have to see it just for the historic dimension. They're two of the best story-tellers alive today. Working together? Get me some popcorn!

But since reading about their pre-meditated attempts to make word of mouth go viral, I'm thinking there must be something wrong with it. I don't know if they realize that people are always doing things to try to make things go viral.

We have another word for that: Spam.

I'm getting so bombarded with idiots saying "Super 8 is Great!!" or "Highly recommended" that I'm beginning to think they're either robots, kids in Mexico or Guatemala, or they're getting a free t-shirt if they say it the most.

Makes me think two of Hollywood's most interesting people are really tacky spam merchants. Uck!!

PS: I'm also pissed I wasn't cool enough to get invited to the Wednesday night super-secret preview. If you're going to do something like that, geez Louise, don't publicize it. It just makes people hate you.

 6/9/2011; 8:45:11 AM.   .

I was going for some Weiner sensationalism last night, so I turned to CNN to see what Eliot Spitzer had, and was so impressed I stayed for the whole show. The guy is intelligent, earnest, persistent, and has a good sense of humor about himself. That probably was helped by his own sexual downfall a few years back. (And like Weiner, he has a funny, Jewish name.)

What really sealed it for me was to see how he conversed with his reporters. You can tell how smart an anchor is by how alive the correspondents are, how intelligently they speak, how they focus on interesting stuff and maybe even important stuff (god forbid). It was the same kind of relationship Aaron Brown had with his reporters.

It's the opposite of the connect between John King (for example) and the correspondents who come on his air. They seem bored, focused on trivia, perceptions of perceptions of perceptions. Same with Wolf Blitzer who has to be the dumbest on-air fuck person ever. I want to slap him every time I hear him speak. And Rachel Maddow? Well, without Olbermann to make her look calm, she comes off as shrill and not too interesting. She repeats herself. Draws out her story too long. As if she doesn't have enough to say.

Spitzer, imho, has the makings of a superstar. He still has some coming-into-his-own to do. I have a feeling he's not getting the greatest guests because of his scandal. And he has to stop being so nice to Republicans. Come right at them, and sneer at them and even growl when they lie. Same of course with Democrats. And when a guest is boring, interrupt them, and redirect. And if they don't take the clue, cut them off and go to the next segment.

But on the whole, I think Spitzer is the best thing going right now in cable news.

 6/9/2011; 8:24:45 AM.   .

Yesterday I wrote a howto. Nothing new about that, I've been writing howto's since I started programming many years ago.

What is new is that the process was so much simpler than it's ever been before.

Here's what I did...

1. Navigate to the My Sites section of my outline.

2. Press Return.

3. Enter the title of the howto.

4. Press Return and Tab.

5. Enter a subhead.

6. Press Return and Tab.

7. Enter a section. (A few paragraphs.)

8. Press Return and Back-tab.

9. Enter a subhead title.

Etc etc.

That's how I wrote the document.

Now to save it.

1. Click on the title headline.

2. Add a nodetype, value = "howto".

3. Add a domain attribute (left blank here because the contents of the howto is still private).

4. Click the Save button.

In the browser I went to the domain. Boom. There it was. It just worked.

This isn't the first time we've gotten to such a place. MORE, circa 1987, had hierarchic rules that worked the same way. I could specify a style at the root level, and all the subtext would inherit it, unless it was overridden by a more deeply nested rule. That way you could use MORE to store not just a single presentation, but a whole library of presentations. Or a library of libraries.

Now we're writing publicly. But the same idea applies. Why should I have to start a new document just because I'm starting a new web page. Use the outline to organize it all. As a side-benefit, my web presence is nicely organized. Another thing I've always wanted.

I've been trying to find a way to explain to programmers why this is so cool. Our users already get it. But it hit me, this is just like object-oriented programming, without the programming.

 6/9/2011; 8:15:32 AM.   .