I figured out why the Breaking Bad movie is so unsatisfying. I watched it, I liked it, but it didn't get me excited and interested like the series did. I decided to re-watch the last season to see what the difference was. There are many great things about the show. The use of music, the weird camera shots that are integrated with the plot. It's artistically ecelectic in so many ways. But it's also slow. Things develop very very slowly. But there's no space in a 2-hour single-episode show to develop the puzzling intrigue of the series. No time to spread out, relax, take your time, go slow. So not much happens, and then it's over. It's not really Breaking Bad, it's a 2-hour movie with the characters of Breaking Bad. That was the same problem with the Deadwood movie. The only thing that could work is another 10-episode season, played out over 10 weeks. #And Succession. It had one of the all-time great season finales last night. No spoilers here, except to point to a video that HBO produced that summarizes the deliciousness of the end, do not watch it if you haven't seen the whole season. It really would spoil it. #
- I've been emailing with my old friend Dave Carlick about customized searching. I've also been writing about it here. I'm not sure I've made my point, but now I have an excellent example that might shed some light. Dave, take note.#
- I just searched Google for Old School.#
- It came back with pointers to a 2003 movie. A Facebook group. A dictionary definition. The urban dictionary version. And on and on.#
- But I have a product named Old School. I've written about it on my blog a bunch of times. If Google knew I was the author of this blog, it would also know that when I search for Old School, I want to see my product first, because in all likelihood that's what I'm looking for. #
- That's what I mean about associating the searcher with the searcher's blog. Think of it as SEO for a person. #
- PS: Here's another one. I just searched for Dave Carlick. Google asks if I meant Dave Carlock. That's crazy. I've been friends with Dave Carlick for 30-plus years. If it read my blog it would know that. It's so wrong. In fact, if I type Carlock it should know I meant Carlick. #
- PPS: Google is so crazy that when I restict the search to my site, it still asks if I meant Carlock, even though there are references to Carlick on the site I'm searching going back to the 1990s. And the only refs to Carlock are this post. That is just plain wrong. #
Over the weekend I tried out an idea. It's a little Node app that runs on the same server as the CMS that builds this blog. Every minute it looks at today's posts, for those that have titles (like the post your'e reading now), it checks if it changed, and if so it renders it as Markdown and uploads it to GitHub in a calendar-based structure, along-side all the other parts of the blog I maintain automatically on GitHub. I like using GitHub this way, I have a feeling it'd make a good shared object database.#- I've been hand-generating links to the GitHub version to get you all thinking about this idea, like this. #
- I did this based on an assumption that I would be able to figure out a way to make it possible for any of my posts to become a sub-project on GitHub. I'm not saying any of them would become projects, only now it would be possible. I thought this might work well with the new email distribution system which has stimulated so much discussion. #
- I'm not sure how this is going to work, or if it will work, I'm just trying an idea out. 🚀#