If you follow one of my "river" pages you'll see a bunch of empty pages slowly re-filling. I had to reset the database.
The one exception is podcatch.com, which has its own aggregator, and was unaffected by this outage.
I made the mistake of watching the Knicks last night.
I got suckered in. It was a travel day in the World Series. And the Knicks had won their first game in a blowout. Everyone was saying This is not last year's Knicks.
One quarter was all I could take. After all the glory of the Mets, it's so hard to go back to the Knicks.
For people unfamiliar with NY sports, it must seem like we're all Yankees fans, but we're not. Each of our teams appeal to different flaws of NYC human nature. The Mets appeal to the believers. I'm not going to say what the Yankees appeal to.
The Knicks are all about losing in ever-more-hopeless ways. It would be one thing if there was a future in our future. But there isn't. This is a team that trades away top draft picks in return for big-contract failures, who stay on the payroll long after they are gone. Maybe that part is over now with the new regime. But we're still paying for the lunacy of the past. Anyway the Knicks are hopeless and not fun.
The only things the Knicks really have going for them are: 1. The Garden. 2. Clyde. That's about it. And the memory of a long-ago team that exuded confidence, competence, even scholarship. The Knicks did at one point deserve New York, but that was a long long time ago.
Speaking of TNT, I listened to a podcast interview with Shaq at the NYPL. He is so smart and funny and positive but absolutely none of that came out in the interview because person conducting the interview apparently had no idea who he was or what he did. I wonder how people who don't know Shaq react to his size. He's a sweet funny guy who wrote a children's book..
I moved the software behind this blog so far in the last few hours, encountering absolutely no resistance.
This always bothers me. Esp after a number of days when I could hardly move at all because I was in such a tight corner.
It's realllllly hard for me to trust this. But I will get a chance to do some more testing before deploying more widely, mostly because there is no baseball game on TV tonight.
However, there is a Knicks game on TNT. The first of the year. I will will be watching. I want to watch Kristaps play with Melo.
Yes yes I know the Mets "lost" last night.
I know, I know.
Updated prognosis: Mets in 6!
A long time ago software was a retail business.
You'd create a box and put disks, a book, coupons in it and ship it off to distributors. They in turn would send it to retailers. Then we would run ads in monthly computer magazines that would get people to visit the retailer and hopefully buy the product.
Each step in the process involved selling, and decisions made by the buyers as to how successful the product was going to be, initially, thus determining how much they wanted to have on hand for the first few weeks of the product's life.
This was called the pipeline.
It took time for product to go into the pipeline and show up on dealer's shelves.
So you had to try to build demand for the product before it shipped. Long before it shipped. Which meant going on a press tour and then starting to run ads. Ads that were wasted mostly, because the users couldn't actually buy the product yet. The ads were there to impress the reviewers and the buyers in the distribution chain, to show them how we planned to create pull for the product.
That meant you had to show the product to reviewers long before it was ready. The "manufacturing" process for software was mostly intellectual. It took just a few weeks to actually print the books, duplicate the disks and put it all together and ship to the distributor.
This was inefficient and the system and was eventually scrapped. I doubt if there are any shrinkwrap software distributors today.
The point: The need to show the software to reviewers before release is gone too. When you read a review of a book or a game or utility, you should be able to go get it right then. And no need to give exclusive to reviewers who are paid to do the reviews. They aren't more authoritative these days, users are clued into their conflicts, and wait to find out what other users think of the product. Bloggers are more likely to influence sales than the big name reviewers.
It's possible that might shift over the years, as software review becomes as serious an activity as say film or TV shows. But you can only really have a useful opinion about software from using it for a period of time. Not like a movie very much.
We still have a bunch of evolving to do here.
The Mets must win Game 2? Nonsense! Just to prove these guys wrong maybe the Mets should just continue their competitive research from Game 1. Probing the Royals to find their weak points. No rush to win the series and humiliate the Kansas City ballers. After all they have feelings too, even if they come from the American League which we all know is not a "real" league.
Some free advice for Twitter re news..
I would pick up news by a different thread. You have an advantage that almost every newsmaker makes news via Twitter. So when a story is happening, the principals of the story are probably speaking on Twitter.
So I'd look for what they're saying and present it in an easy way to skim. The people are what's key to Twitter, stories, then people.
Also we saw our first Twitter TV ad last night. It's good to see Twitter doing that, but the ads are more confusing than the product. Not good for a product that normal people have trouble figuring out.
Better approach: It could be like the famous Apple commercial about the Crazy Ones, except you don't have to guess about who they are (Jim Henson probably didn't use a Mac, nor did Einstein or Picasso). Your icons are real people alive now, making news, if not history.
The Mac is growing while the iPad is not.
Which is fascinating and predictable.
When a new iPad user runs out of things to do and finds out there's this uncontrolled world over there and it works more or less like an iPad, they probably have an intellectual orgasm.
Think about all the kids being raised with iPhones and iPads now. Wait till they discover the power.
I found an obvious mistake and fixed it. Still quite impressed with how much works after such radical brain surgery.
I think perhaps I was overly cautious. Oh well. Worse things can happen.
As a result of the latest fix, apparently I can edit this item.
I've done radical brain surgery on my content system for Scripting News. It's the kind of thing where you expect it to blow up before it even gets to the welcome dialog. But. It. Didn't. Ummmm. I have trouble believing in this. Let's see what happens when I click the POST button.
First rule of sports humor -- don't ask for an explanation. That ruins the whole thing.
Just know this -- the whole thing is a big joke. None of it means anything in any real context. It's all made up. So everything anyone ever said about sports is simulated reality.
Let's go METS! 
No one knows what happens if the Silicon Valley boom ends, they say.
Hah!
Everything that goes up must come down. It's one of the basic laws.
Sure some things gain escape velocity. Unless there's a total financial collapse people will continue to use mobile devices with screens and virtual keyboards. And there will be big leaps forward. But it might not be such a terrible thing if computer technology became more ordinary and mundane. At the scale we're operating now it might be unavoidable. Whole civilizations don't turn that quickly, even in superheated times.
The point? Prepare for it. Put some new ideas in the pipe. Even ones that go against what you think is the way the world will always work. I've seen Silicon Valley ignore the next thing after the bubble crash, only to deepen the depression, and delay the recovery.
Like the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared.
I wish there were a web page for MLB that had all the readouts of the scoreboards at a baseball stadium, arrayed so I could quickly glance to look at:
- The batting orders of both teams with a red dot next to the guy who's at bat (offense) and the guy who's up next (defense).
- A little box with the current pitcher, how many pitches thrown, strikeouts, walks, hits.
- In the middle the stats on the current batter. His picture. Really big type.
- At the bottom the box score, inning by inning.
- Look around the ballpark for other stats that are given permanent space.
- The key thing is this is fixed, realtime, it's a page I'd put on my iPad and keep in my lap while watching the game. I'd even bring it to the game with me.
Earlier on Twitter I wrote about how flattering rich people in writing can be very profitable. An example of that is Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs. He convinced Steve to let him be his official biographer. But Isaacson is a technology neophyte. Steve was not. But the book is typical tech bio writing, basically junk, having nothing to do with the way we develop stuff. Yet it should be about that. Because all of Jobs's accomplishments, the things that make him worth writing about at all, were software development projects. But you can't do that if you're Isaacson, and it seems that Jobs should have known that.
This was one of Jobs's weaknesses. He was into how things looked more than how they are. He was imho a Disneyfier. Nothing wrong with that, but it can bite you in the butt. I'm sure Jobs would have hated the Isaacson book.
Similarly with the Aaron Sorkin movie that was loosely based on the book. Again, has absolutely nothing to do with anything that made Jobs an interesting character. Now you might say since most people have no idea how technology works, why should anyone care. Well, in the future that might not be true. And Jobs is a historic figure. So anything that purports to be a history should somehow be connected to who the person really was. The future, imho, will need a better book about Jobs than has been written (and I include the Schlender book too).
We need writers who also understand tech, in other words. Not people who write words that flatter rich people. That is if we want to learn and be entertained.
Well, I backed out of the brain surgery project. It happens sometimes. I got too deep into it, and realized "this will never work."
I need to take a step back and come up with a new approach.
Today is brain surgery day for the chatlog software.
It's getting a new brain division. Factoring on a grand scale!!
Expect to see a bunch of test messages to see if any of this stuff still works.
Praise Murphy! 
They're replaying Game 4 of the NLCS on the MLB Channel now. They just played the top half of the first inning. Of course this time I knew what was coming. What a sweet moment when Lucas Duda emerges from his slump with a 3-run home run. Followed by a 1-run homer from D'Arnaud.
An old friend from Living Videotext says I'm on a roll. Can't point to his tweet because it's private.
In a way he's right. And in another it just looks that way.
I've been building in JavaScript, retooling, for three years. And I've gotten to the point where so much of the stuff I had working in Frontier now works here, that I can move very quickly. Which means that when I get an idea I can have it running quickly, and while the idea is fresh, I get to work on the next one and the one after that. I call this a "head of steam."
Murphy-willing I'll be able to get to the next level soon, and even more stuff will be working.
Apparently the term "independent developer" is not universally understood. That's a sign of the times I guess.
Here's a stab at a definition.
Software development does not have to be a corporate thing. Sometimes software is created by individuals working with one or two other people, or on their own. Software development can be an art, like writing or sculpture. Lots of the software you use was created this way.
This is the way the personal computer software market got started. With individuals creating products, bringing them to market, selling them in some fashion, maybe starting companies around it, maybe not. Depending on how successful they are.
It's also how the web developer world got started. Tim Berners-Lee did the initial work on the web as an indie. And independent developers are the backbone of the game industry.
I am not talking about contractors, consultants, part-time employees. that's a completely different thing.
I am an independent developer. Have been most of my career. Lots of other people are.
When I talk about incentives for independent developers, these are the people I'm talking about.
Twitter Moments doesn't seem to be customized for the reader.
They know what I follow, and have access to all of my tweets.
Yet every article they show me is totally not interesting.
How could that be and what's the point of putting this on Twitter?
- The idea of the liveblog is that it's more casual. Items don't require as much forethought.
- Items don't require titles.
- They don't have to be very long. But they aren't limited in length either,
- You can if you want put a title on an item, but no one is forcing you to.
- You can edit them after publishing.
- You can include HTML markup, links, styling, numbered or bulleted lists using a wizzy editor.
This morning I tuned up the liveblog page so it looks good on an iPad Mini.
One step at a time.
I have two lines on T-Mobile.
It took forever to get them to sell me the second line.
Now I'm cancelling one of the lines.
It'll take forever-squared.
Already went down to a T-Mobile office and was told they couldn't do it in a store. I was hoping to cut through all the BS by talking with a human. Funny how when you want to BUY something they're totally happy to help in the store or anywhere.
Now I'm on hold listening to elevator music.
I just recorded a 20-minute podcast explaining what's going on here on the liveblog. I thought it was time to talk a bit about the software that I'm using to edit this blog.
