I started blogging 25 years ago today. I write every day and publish it myself. Today I've done the same. And hopefully encouraged more people to speak for themselves.#Here's the countdown page where we keep track of how long it has been since this blog was started. If you keep this page open you can say you were here at the moment it had been running for 25 years! If you think it's just a number (and there's good reason to believe that) you can continue with your life. 🍎#
On the Brian Lehrer Show this morning the question came up of why Trump released the "transcript" of his talk with the Ukranian president. I have a theory about that which I tweeted to the show. It goes like this. Trump approved of its release without reading the transcript, or listening to his advisors. They wanted it released because it prevents Trump from throwing them under the bus. It's the new reality of a president who has the attention span of a gnat. Sometimes that works against him more than it works against us. #
Theory why Repubs don't stand up to Trump. After the 2016 election, the Russian active measures campaign turned to building kompromat on every Republican member of Congress. It didn't take long to get each one of them in a position where they had to listen to Russia and Trump. This is one of those Occam's News things. Like black holes in space, you can't see them, but you can infer their presence by the way bodies behave around them#
Repubs want no politics when it suits them, but will make Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts, debt-limit lunacy, war, immigration, Obama's birth certificate, ie anything they want, political.#
Jack Dorsey subscribes to the email version of this blog, so I've started writing directly to him in an open format. I'd do the same for the CEOs of any other tech firm whose products I use. Free consulting. :-)#- Anyway, I find myself hooking into videos on Twitter more and more. Like this ridiculous annoying exasperating interview with a Bush-era Republican, shilling for Trump while trying to sound reasonable. #
- More and more, news orgs are posting short bits of video to Twitter. It's growing, and that's imho good. Further, Twitter has a good API and it's relatively stable and liberal. I've thought for a long time that their API is their big advantage. As a developer I'd like to see them do more with it.#
- Twitter is a new kind of TV news looking for the right user interface. I don't think Moments is the answer. I think Checkbox News is. #
- Here's the idea of Checkbox News in an image. #
- I did this around the time Boris Yeltsin died and the Virginia Tech massacre. I want to watch the news while I work, or tweet while I watch the news, basically news isn't the only thing I'm doing. I want a bit of control over what flows through the video window. I got it, Yeltsin died. All the reports are starting to sound the same, so I uncheck it. No more news of Yeltsin. #
- As media has progressed, we've learned that sometimes it's best to turn things on, and in other contexts that's too much work, I want others to do it for me, and then I need the ability to turn things off. TV news is most definitely in the latter category.#
- With the flow that Twitter already has, if trusted news sources (a super important concept that should also be developed, not by Twitter) would add keywords to their video uploads, we could have Checkbox News running pretty quickly, maybe as early as next year. #
- I just posted this to the private Woodstockers Say Anything group on Facebook. I've been living here since March, but mostly have been posting pictures and questions about what's going on here. This is the first time I've talked about what I do. I thought this was a good day to do it.#
- I haven't really introduced myself to the Woodstock group, today is a good day to do that.#
- I am a software developer and one of the very first bloggers, starting back in 1994, on October 7.#
- 25 years ago today.#
- These days I'm writing at my house in Woodstock.#
- I am lucky that the work I do can be done anywhere there's a net connection. So I've moved around quite a bit in the last 25 years. I started writing on the web in Silicon Valley in 1994. In 2003 I moved to Cambridge, MA, then tried Seattle and the beach in northeast Florida (I had family there). I spent a few years in Berkeley, and then when my father died in 2009, I moved back to NYC (where I was born and raised) to be near my rapidly shrinking family. When my mom passed away in 2018, I started looking for the next place, and this is where I landed.#
- I've always felt that my software development was an artistic endeavor. My materials are unusual, they're almost all virtual. But I've built quite a castle out of all that imagination. :-)#
- The next software product I ship will come from Woodstock. And I'm celebrating 25 years of blogging right here in the woods, with the sound of rain and the smell of nature all around me.#
- One of my mottos of blogging is this --#
- Still diggin! ;-)#
- PS: My blog is at http://scripting.com/.#