They're having a Social Media Summit at MIT next week. I have always been bothered by conferences that call themselves summits. Here's a picture of a summit. At the end of WWII, FDR sat down with Stalin. That's an actual summit. BTW, not sure why Churchill is there. :-)#

BTW, if it's a summit, you don't have to say it's a summit. The conference with FDR, Stalin and Churchill was simply called the Yalta Conference. My father once told me that a university doesn't have to say it's a university if they really are one. You don't see car window decals for proud parents that say Harvard University or Stanford University. Just Harvard and Stanford will do. He was putting down the window decal I got him for my school, which did proclaim itself a university. Even worse, they called themselves The Harvard of the South. Oy! That's not a good sign. I wonder if they still do that. And doing a search today I learn that Duke, Rice, Emory and Vanderbilt also consider themselves THOTS. Maybe they should forget it and just try to love their students more.#

BTW my father was an undergrad at Rutgers, which, while a fine school, isn't exactly The Harvard of New Jersey. Just sayin. 😄#

The Harvard of New Jersey is Princeton, another school that can leave off the University part. Some people think it's an even better school than the other top most prestigious schools in the US, which imho would be Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale. #

I like to listen to audiobooks on my daily walks and bike rides, they're good to have around when podcasts aren't so interesting to me. It happens. Right now I'm listening to Roots, narrated by Avery Brooks. It's a beautifully crafted story, and the narration is among the best I've heard. I'm still at the beginning, but I love it, I'm even listening when I'm not out getting my exercise. #

BTW, to follow up on yesterday's posts about tabs and bookmarks in the outliner part of Drummer. It looks like I did get it stabilized yesterday. I have to qualify that because I saw some problems before I shut down for the day yesterday, after fixing a huge number of really serious mistakes and omissions. But I feel confident that I can start the post corner-turn cleanup and get ready for more fun projects starting tomorrow. (Update: Re the problems, oy there was a huge problem. In the main closure for a tab there's a background thread that I did not kill when the tab was closed. As a result it kept running. Whenever it saw a change in a file (not its file) it would save it, to the now-closed file, thus wiping out the contents of the closed file. This was hard to track down. Now everything is really smooth. Haha until I find the next horrible omission! Users never see these problems, hopefully, but this is what you have to deal with getting to the point where software is useful.)#

Hope you don't mind me saying this, but the Mac Finder should have a Bookmarks menu. #

I'm learning that more people from my Ulster County neighborhood are reading this blog. I find that exciting. Maybe we should have some meetups this summer? At the beer garden at the Colony? I love the idea of a beer garden in Woodstock, and as everyone knows, summers here are the best. There's a lot of planning to do now that cannabis is legal everywhere in NY State now. And Tuesday is 4/20. It looks like the weather is going to be nice. #

I don't know if I've ever told this story about my uncle at his hippie commune outside St Augustine, FL. Once I went to visit, on vacation from my Silicon Valley startup. When I arrived at his little off-grid geodesic cottage in the woods, he showed me they had pinned up an article in Business Week with a picture of me, which labeled me as President Dave Winer of Living Videotext. My uncle who claimed he had changed my diapers when I was an infant, thought this was insanely funny. He told me they started calling each other President Ken, or President Dorothy, or President Pumpkin (one of their dogs) or President Dump Kitty (one of the cats). I didn't object because in my mind I had a terrible case of impostor syndrome. No one in California dared make fun of it, but here in the woods with my dear uncle and friends, it seemed fine. #

BTW, there's a whole neighborhood on his 25 acres. Unbelievable how fast things grow, esp in Florida. #