Good morning sports fans! #
I was telling one of the devs I work with yesterday about Lotus 1-2-3's macro language. I'm going in that direction again, I think the web needs a scripting language. Not one written for devs, but for people who think of themselves as users. That was the thing about 1-2-3. Also Hypercard. And my own product, UserLand Frontier. The idea that there are programmers who would reject the idea that they are programmers. It's a very subtle idea, people who are great hackers in the sense that they will work endlessly to find a way to do the thing they must do, who will develop a deep understanding of the problem they want to solve, but not as much depth on the nature of programming. Mitch Kapor was one of these people. He wrote a product in 1980 or so called VisiPlot. Written in BASIC. It sold really well. Programmers didn't like it. But they sold a lot because it worked really well with Visicalc, the leading spreadsheet of the day. He went on to found Lotus, and they put a macro language into 1-2-3, and the loop was closed. A user created a tool for other users to create tools for other users. The beat goes on. I love the idea of empowering users to create the products they want out of the components us "serious" devs create. #I had a bunch of errands to run today and thought to get my car washed, to get rid of all the caked-on mud from the winter. It was so dirty, you couldn't even tell it was a white car. When I pulled up to the car wash the guy was just waiting for me, far away from the entrance way. I kind of got annoyed and opened the window and asked if he worked there. He asked if I have a mask. I wasn't wearing one. This is the attitude of a vaccinated citizen. Sometimes we forget to wear the mask, even though I know that's no excuse. Rather than say "Hey bud, I'm vaccinated," I just put the mask on. I felt a bit ashamed because I used to be so militant and vigilant about masks. I wonder if other vaccinated folk are having a similar experience. #
Aliza Sherman: "Sometimes I think the hardest thing about life may be that you finally begin to see and understand things about yourself as you are on the other side of middle age and have less time to live who you are."#
Whatever the problem was with the emails, it now seems cured. Lots of things get screwy in the cloud when we switch to Daylight Savings Time, or even when you change time zones, not that we do much of that these days. But the emails went out last night at midnight and they sent the proper stuff, so I'm going to relax about until it happens again, which no doubt it will. Remember -- it's even worse than it appears. #
About politics, I'm not one of those people who cherry-picks bits of news to support a cherished theory. I try to see all the info that's available to me, and I do change my mind, sometimes in a very big way. I used to vote for Republicans, don't ask me why, I can't believe it myself. But I stopped that nonsense in 2004, and ever since I can't imagine why any sane person would. I also know that Andrew Cuomo was part of a very nasty campaign against Ed Koch on behalf of his father, Mario Cuomo, when both were running for mayor of NYC. They were picking on Koch because he was a single man, questioning his sexual orientation. Back then this was nasty bullshit, but it didn't disqualify his father. Today, if the word ever got around, if people knew the slogan they were using, it would probably ruin Governor Andrew, as it should. To this day I can't hear the name Cuomo without thinking of this bit of nasty. Basically the Cuomos ended up fucking themselves, and they deserve it. #I'm also curious about how short people's memories are, apparently, and if people have any thoughts about how close the journalists came to throwing out Joe Biden's candidacy for president in April and May of 2020. Now, as president, he's doing a great job (I think he is, despite my not supporting him in the primary). But he was almost Frankened. There was no process with Biden, it was as if by magic, the journalists decided to give him a pass, and let him run for president without making an issue of the accusations of sexual assault. No explanation. They just erased our memories and went on. But Wikipedia didn't forget. :-)#
I think business, politics and journalism must have a code of ethics, and that includes treating everyone fairly. But we don't do that. We destroy lives of innocent people in the name of justice, which is exactly why I oppose the death penalty. Decisions about life and death must not be part of a political process, and neither should someone's banishment from public life. If the charges stick, if we believe the person is really guilty, first take steps to protect potential victims, then have a process for determining innocence or guilt, and apply that process to everyone equally, regardless of whether they are a nominee for president, governor of a big state, or just some random schmuck. This is America. We believe in protecting people from mobs. We are nothing if we allow mobs to tear people down. And we are living through a period where people do just that. This is not acceptable. #
I'm sure at the time many people thought Joseph McCarthy was doing god's work by protecting America from un-Americans. That was really a concept in postwar America. American citizens who were un-American. Now, from the perspective of history, we can see how wrong that was. And I'm sure in the future, if America survives, we will look at this time the same way. #
- Sad moment. I was doing a lookup for a bit about a programmer of my generation, I wanted to write about some of his ideas. I found they had a lot about him in the Computer History Museum. I started looking around at the other people they interviewed. I knew all of them, they knew me. But for some reason my ideas and my work are not part of their record. #
- Why? Probably because I was the main blogger in Silicon Valley in the early days of the web. You've seen how they respond to journalism. How do you think they felt about one of their own writing publicly about what he thought of what they were doing. I was hoping they would join me. That's how I develop. By doing. And then building the software to support what I'm doing. That imho is part of the history that belongs in the Computer History Museum. #
- I think they must be missing a good 50 percent of the story. The literature of the web. They didn't understand how these were not just personal computers we were developing, they were personal publishing machines. Now in hindsight, they should adjust the image they're trying to project into the future. These machines were used for something they have never appreciated. #