Ten years ago I was in terrible shape.

I had four clogged arteries on my heart. I was having chest pain. I knew something was seriously wrong. And on June 14, 2002, I had bypass surgery, which very very clearly saved my life.

Yes, I was a smoker, and not exercising, and doing hugely stressful work, and I had the worst genes in the world for all that, and wasn't really aware of it.

I dodged a big one. And I'm still here. And thankful for that.

If you see me being reflective and taking more risks in the near future, it's because this milestone is on my mind.

 6/3/2012; 2:45:46 PM.

Xeni Jardin is angry with the NY Times for leading their piece about the Kleiner-Perkins sexual harassment lawsuit with: "Men invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago."

What they're really saying though is that the men at Kleiner Perkins invented and continue to invent the Internet.

So the problem is much bigger than saying men did it. The problem with the Times is they think the money did it.

At dinner the other night, one of my friends, a real entrepreneur who creates real products, and really stirs things up -- a man, btw -- pointed to the next table where a VC sat. A VC that blew him off. Having been blown off many times by VCs who had no clue what I was talking about when I was speaking plain English about the future of the Internet (with the benefit of hindsight that's not a speculative statement) the problem is we have some pretty dumb gatekeepers in Silicon Valley, and reporters who carry their water.

So come on Xeni, let's work together and get past the surface stuff and fix what's really wrong.

 6/3/2012; 2:26:08 PM.

A friend emailed to ask if it was possible to write a small application that read all of the RSS for back-issues of a specific blog and gathered information about links, number of words, etc.

I answered that it was not possible, as far as I know, but it should be.

So, to my engineering friends, here is a use-case. A smart user who thought of a feature that really should be present in every blogging system.

Now, I'm in a position to suggest, very specifically how this feature could work, because I've implemented it in my linkblogging software, Radio2. I've documented it in the form of a namespace because it adds a few new elements to my feed, that are not part of the body of RSS 2.0. Very straightforward, and documented, so that if it were implemented this way, all blogging software would be compatible. And one could write an app that started with a feed, downloaded all the previous posts. It would be possible to write backup software that worked with all blogging tools.

First, here are the docs for the new namespace.

You can see an example of it in my linkblog feed.

There's a single RSS file for every day. The directory is arranged as a calendar, with a folder for each year, containing folders for each month, which contain folders for days which contain a single file for each day. I went with a folder for a day because you might want to include other content in the calendar structure. And any of these can be missing, because some days (or months) you don't post.

All that's needed here is a common way to do it, otherwise known as a "standard" -- so I thought I'd put one out there and see if it gains any traction. Next time a user asks for about this, I'd love to say "If you used the X blogging tool, you'd have this feature." Or even better "All blogging tools support this, so you're in luck!"

 6/3/2012; 10:44:14 AM.