Part of me thinks I should be an insider at SXSW, that because I am one of the founders of the community, and a developer of the technology that SXSW bootstrapped out of, and continues to grow through, that they should have at some point asked me to talk. It's a matter of honor, I guess, and some amount of pride.

I've asked them, many times, why I was never invited to speak, they haven't been willing to answer. They've asked me to apologize for offering my own explanation, in a comment a few years ago on Marc Canter's blog -- and I've said I would be happy to, if they would tell me the real reason I'm on their short blacklist (maybe at the top of it).

I know you can apply to speak now, I even started to fill out the forms last year, but they asked so many "Who Are You" kind of questions, and my pride kept kicking in. Why don't you know who I am? I am willing to play the hamster up to a point, in some contexts. But this is so totally over the top.

There were years, at the beginning, when you had to get an invite and they weren't willing to provide one. They still invite people to speak on their keynote stage. Ahh, I'm not important enough. But they've invited people, many of them, onto that stage to talk about my work, my contributions -- so why can't I speak for them too?

I know it's supposed to be a lot of fun, and some of the participants have been very nice to me, offered good places to stay for free, etc. But I want to get past the gatekeepers. I'd like to be invited, for real, by the people who run the show. I think they've benefitted from my generosity, why not reciprocate?

Update: Paul Ford says the theme of the web is Why Wasn't I Consulted?

 2/22/2012; 11:37:08 AM.

The Repubs say they don't like Keynsian economics. Not sure what they don't like about it, because they seem to favor some very Keynesian ideas when they talk about "job creators" and growth trickling down.

When you cut the taxes of people who supposedly create jobs to encourage them to create more jobs, you're stimulating them, whether they create jobs or not. I believe they mostly just pocket the profits, and don't worry too much about creating jobs (I've got personal experience with this, when I pay very low taxes on windfalls, I don't generally think that any obligations come with the lower taxes, I don't even see it as lower taxes, just low taxes). This theory seems quite Keynesian to me.

But when the stimulus is in the form of paying teachers, cops, sanitation workers, construction crews, etc -- that's socialism! And supposedly discredited because it's Keynesian. But what's the difference? You're just choosing to stimulate different people. Never mind that it's likely to create more jobs because the people you're stimulating can't afford to pocket the profits, they have to spend it because they don't have much of a surplus.

The Repubs, who are I assume educated people themselves, act like the elites they decry, by ignoring their education, and pretending there's a difference between subsidizing the rich and subsidizing the working classes. There are differences, but they're not moral, just pragmatic.

Glad I don't have comments so I don't have to hear about how I'm a liberal (I'm not, I'm actually very conservative). But what the heck, why not call people names before even beginning to find out who they are?

 2/22/2012; 10:24:45 AM.

A few weeks ago I noticed that my river was filled with FreshAir podcasts. Hundreds of them, dating back to 2007. One for every weekday for five years.

I figured something glitchy happened, and shrugged it off. Sometimes people adjust their content management system, and the feed guids all change, so the aggregator thinks they're all new. It's a bit more expensive in the case of podcasts because it downloads them all, and it wipes out all the other MP3s in my Podcatcher folder, because it's managed by the software to only use a fixed amount of storage. So every time a new podcast is downloaded, the oldest one is removed.

But then it happened again. And again. So I had to do something about it.

I was busy with another project so I did the simplest quickest thing, I unsubbed. But this meant I had to go to the FreshAir site to manually see what's new, because I like to listen to FreshAir on my daily walk. Not always, but often.

This morning I didn't feel like tackling my next big project, so I did something "lite" -- I made a change to the way River2 works to allow for this quirk in the FreshAir podcast.

Here's how it works.

This keeps the flow marching forward in time, not backward -- but allows items to appear out of order in the feed, and for items to be published a bit after the feed's pubDate for that item.

Now I'm going to see if:

Here's the worknote for this item.

 2/22/2012; 10:03:38 AM.