When I saw the previews of Contagion I knew I had to see it.

Pretty good, not great.

One comment -- yet another movie where the blogger is a sleazy hypocrite.

The only real villain in the movie -- the blogger.

Even the Homeland Security spook and his hedge fund buddy have more integrity.

Ugh.

 9/9/2011; 6:57:57 PM.   .

I don't know who said this first, but he or she was one smart mofo.

It's one of my mottos, along with Still diggin, Let's have fun, It's even worse than it appears (also a favorite). We make shitty software and We make shitty software, with bugs.

What's great about this slogan is that it has several meanings which sneak up on you as you ponder its meaning.

Here are some of the things you can glean from it:

1. I care who I steal from.

2. To me, stealing is a sign of respect.

3. I am selective about who I steal from.

4. I give credit to them.

Also, you can almost infer that I wish to be stolen from, on these terms. (I do.)

And I think it's implicit, almost definitional, that you steal from people you respect. Because respect means listening, and stealing indicates you were listening.

When it comes to ideas implemented in software, I choose to see it like music. It's okay for the Rolling Stones to build their repetoire based on traditions pioneered by blues musicians. So it's okay for people working on realtime systems to use what we did with RSS. Or people working on authoring tools, or methods of knowledge representation and presentation, or narrating your work -- to use outliners.

I do my work not just to create products, but to advance the art.

 9/9/2011; 10:35:13 AM.   .

Krugman was given access to the text of the President's speech under embargo. He was at a conference where reporters were sure they knew what the President was going to announce. They were wrong, and Krugman knew it. He felt the satisfaction that comes from being an insider.

I know the feeling. I have been an insider myself.

But then he observes that there is no advantage to being an insider. The same insights are available to everyone, no matter who they are, as soon as the news is made public.

The same thing is true, of course, in tech. I need to know if the product works, not which competitors the product manager dreams of killing. That's why the rare review that actually incorporates a few weeks worth of use of a product is so much more valuable than a scoop.

Fact is most scoops are just sneak looks at press releases not products. I'm more interested in long, detailed, arms-length looks at products.

PS: Perfect example of an insider, dropping names, talking nonsense.

 9/9/2011; 8:22:28 AM.   .