Are you addicted to the feeling the world is about to end every day. I found that I had a mild addiction to it, but I have been able to give up the drug now that Biden is president and the Dems are in charge in DC. I am happy to be a citizen, very tired of being a pundit. #
Listening to President Biden's schmaltzy speech about the 500,000 Americans who died of Covid, I was sobbing in tears through practically the whole thing. I don't have any family or friends, that I know of, who have died of the virus. But the words reach inside this American's heart. Love of country and family live in the same place. We've lost a lot, but we're still America. You could argue, factually whether or not it's the greatest country in the world, but to the heart of this American, whose family found refuge here, who simply wouldn't exist if it weren't for America, there is no argument. We are great, when we choose to be great. #BTW, that might be the first time the term President Biden have appeared on this blog. Oops it has appeared once before. #
If you're a regular listener to Radio Open Source, and would like to help boot up a nice community around this foundational podcast, please send me an email or leave a comment here. #
In 2017, I wrote about the (then new) Scripts menu in LO2. I've been spending the last few weeks working with that functionality because we solved a big problem with JavaScript, how to make it work like an actual scripting language. This menu/script editor idea goes back to the early days of Frontier, and menu sharing, which was a feature adopted by Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, and then basically everyone else, in the early days of the web on the Mac. People say blogging is coming back, I hope so, and blogging came from scripting, and vice versa. The two technologies are very intertwined. That's why this blog is called Scripting News, btw, which is a pun. #
- In response to yesterday's bit about Scoble and me lusting after a Tesla, I got a wonderful email from John Naughton about his love of Tesla. Even better, he told me which one to get! đź’Ą#
- I saw Scoble’s post, which I thought was perceptive. I was receptive to it because last year I took the plunge and bought a Tesla — a Model 3 — and it’s been a transforming experience. What makes that remarkable is that I’m a recovering petrolhead — I had a 3.8 litre Mk II Jaguar towards the end of my grad student days — and believe me that was a big deal in those days. So I’ve always been interested in cars, and over the years have owned lots of good and interesting ones.#
- But the Tesla is something else. It’s basically software with wheels. Every week or so it gets a software update — mostly bug fixes or minor features added. For example, it used to be quite a palaver to open the glove box: you had to go to the touchscreen, go down a level, find glove box and tap on the icon. Now you have voice control and you just say “Open Glove Box”. That came in a software update. Every so often there are more consequential updates — there’s one coming soon to the Autopilot and, eventually, to the (optional) Full Self Drive software which, theoretically, enables a measure of autonomous driving. So it’s a car that improves steadily the longer you have it.#
- I’m not interested in FSD because I rather like driving. But also I’m getting older and I wanted a car that could look ahead and take avoiding action if I missed seeing something — which it already does when Autopilot (which is basically just smart cruise-control) is on.#
- The Model 3 is a delight to drive — it’s as nimble as a Porsche (and indeed seems quicker — zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds — than even a Porsche 911). And it’s soooo quiet. My wife and I can whisper and hear one another at 70mph on a freeway.#
- The other big deal is that Tesla starting building a supercharger network almost as soon as they started building cars. This was smart because the non-Tesla charging networks are still chaotic and often unreliable — which is why people with non-Tesla EVs continue to find long journeys sometimes erratic and problematic.#
- If you do decide to go for one, I suggest you go for the long-range, dual-motor version of the Model 3. That has all-wheel drive, which I reckon is necessary in the winter for where you live.#
- And get a home charger, so that whenever you leave the house the car is fully charged.#
- In a way, after I got the car I thought of you. Tesla is what the automobile industry ought to have been doing when the tech arrived, just as you think the journalism/media business ought to have pivoted when the Internet and the Web arrived.#
