Scripting News

Man I love that li'l old pig

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:58:06 GMT

He sure knew what he was talking about!

Hope he didn't get into too much trouble.

Why the Bear Sterns bailout was a good thing for small investors

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:43:07 GMT

First, a caveat, I am far from a financial expert, so I may have some of this wrong, if so, please set me straight.

The cable news shows didn't do a good job of covering the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns, and as a result there's a misunderstanding about whether it's good or bad. It is, imho, an unqualified good thing because it saved us from a run on the banks, something we haven't seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

First to be clear, a run had already started. That's what was going on with Bear Stearns.

A run is a form of panic. You hear a rumor that your bank is in trouble, so you go down to the bank to withdraw all your savings. You tell a few of your friends, and they tell a few, and all of a sudden the bank's reserve is gone (banks don't keep all your money, they lend most of it out, that's how they make money). Meanwhile one of your neighbors who keeps her savings at a different bank gets the idea that her money might not be safe, so she goes to withdraw all her money, tells her friends and so on, and eventually their reserve is depleted and they have to refuse requests for withdrawals.

A bank run a viral thing, and once one gets going, there's no way to stop it. But the US govt did do something to prevent runs, with the FDIC, a government entity that insures deposits. This really did prevent runs, we haven't had one since.

Now here comes a new form of bank, offering better returns than the insured bank accounts, people feel safe putting their money there, but they are not insured. Like Bear Stearns, where a run started on March 11 of this year, putting the Fed in a difficult position, stop it, by backing the accounts, or let it run. Thankfully they did the right thing, and stopped it. Why? Because if they hadn't, every one with a savings account at any brokerage firm might have lost his or her savings! We came perilously close to a complete meltdown, and most people don't even know it.

I have a theory why they aren't explaining this on CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- and they may be doing the right thing -- that by explaining how close we came to an across-the-board run they might precipitate one. Now the government is acting, we hope quickly, to get FDIC-like insurance in place for brokerage accounts, and charging the companies appropriately for it, so they pay in advance (unlike Bear Stearns), so the general taxpayers of the US don't end up footing the bill, and hope that while this system is being put in place, everyone who has their savings in a brokerage feels comfortable leaving them there, at least for the time-being.

But note that Bear Stearns didn't get the bailout, the people with deposits there got it. True, the rest of the brokerage industry got a reprieve, but that didn't cost us anything, at least not yet.

PS: It's a Wonderful Life features a bank run.

Burnout in the blogosphere

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:30:59 GMT

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

In the process I learned a lot about heart disease. It seems the Times didn't take the time to check with a doctor to see if the premise of the article was reasonable or even possible. Could you work yourself into a heart attack? Perhaps. But not in a year or two, it takes decades for heart disease to become symptomatic. They did autopsies of soldiers killed in the Korean War and found that many of them already had heart disease, some of them in their teens and early twenties. They wouldn't have known until they were in their forties, fifties or sixties, maybe even later.

There were other reasons to hate the Times piece, but those were amply covered elsewhere.

Wish I had something to write about

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:54:37 GMT

I had a really bad cold all last week and through the weekend, but it's better this morning, I believe the sickness is gone, but the symptoms linger. It would be great if I had fiery blog post in me -- some newly apparent truth to expose, an insight into an opportunity, but I don't have one. But I wanted to post anyway, to say hi, and hope all is well.

In any case...

I'll leave you with one good thought.

On the news this morning, a profile of the guy in the General Accounting Office who's in charge of the transition that will start later this year, as we swap the government we have for a new one. He's renting huge amounts of office space, buying computers, networking equipment, Blackberries, everything you need to instantly bootstrap a new government running in parallel with the old one. What an interesting job!

And it put me in a good mood that, even though the process drags on, eventually it will conclude, and by the end of this year (it's already April) we'll be starting the transition to a new government.

So I guess I had something to write about after all.

Why this is the end for the Clintons

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:04:51 GMT

Yesterday we got our first look at the Clinton's tax returns, and the top line is a stunner. $109 million over the last seven years. Before that I found Obama's income from his book, about $1 million, a bit hard to deal with. But the Clintons blow that away.

Here it is in black and white, the books of an ex-President, opened up. Finally, we the people, get an idea of what this job is worth. A lot.

I suspect we'll never see the tax returns of the current President, seven years after he leaves office, but I supect he'll be adding another zero or two, as he calls in the chits from his buddies in the oil and defense industries who profited so much from his Presidency. He'll give speeches too, the fees will be even more obscene than Clinton's.

I'd love to see a breakdown of the speeches. Who pays $1 million for an after-dinner speaker and why? Maybe I'm missing something, but something doesn't sound right here.

Anyway, back to the Clintons.

In tech entrepreneurship, repeat success is rare. Not saying it doesn't happen, it does, but often, the second time an entrepreneur gives it a go, the venture flops. It's happened to me, and I've seen it happen to a number of others, and I understand the reason.

The first time you ran, you had to sacrifice everything to win. Failure was something you visualized around every corner, but something you could never deal with, so you made sure you didn't have to. You did whatever it took to make it work.

The second time is different. Now you expect success not failure. You've mostly forgotten the sacrificing you did the first time, but you remember some of it, the long hours, the lack of sunshine and exercise or a personal life. This time, you want success on your terms. It's not enough to win, you have to win the way you (feel you) should have the first time.

Problem is, that's not how success works. If what you seek is worth something, and as we can see from the Clinton returns, this job certainly is worth something, there will be competitors, and if they don't bring the same conditions you do, if they're willing to sacrifice the way you once were but aren't any longer, well, you'll lose. As the Clintons are losing.

I watched Primary Colors the other night, it served as a reminder of the cult around the Clintons in the early 90s. I didn't like them, but enough people did, so he won. He cut corners, lied into the camera, but exuded a charm that was compelling. This time, sad to say, the lies and cut corners are still there, but the charm isn't. And to see where that went, look at the tax returns. The Clintons don't live on the same plane as you and I. The air they breathe is richer. Their friends are powerful. Once she's elected that'll be the last we hear from her till she wants to be re-elected, just like the current president.

She doesn't offer hope (as Bill did in 1992, and Barack does today). She laughs at the idea of hope. As if you poor wretches are entitled to any of that!

Remember this when you're plotting a comeback, you're going to have to deal with this too, everyone does, or so it seems.

Why did Seesmic buy Twhirl?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:16:48 GMT

Yesterday Seesmic announced that they're buying Twhirl, the AIR-based Twitter client.

I usually don't comment on acquisitions, but this one is right up my alley and I can offer some insight without breaking any confidences. I've been spending a lot of time over the last year trying to understand Twitter, and it's not an easy thing to figure out, so I welcome the chance to discuss it again from another point of view.

First, a disclaimer, I considered investing in Seesmic, even announced that I was doing so, then changed my mind. If the stock market hadn't tanked I almost certainly would have gone ahead with the investment.

Second, I think buying Twhirl is probably a brilliant move for Seesmic. I can't tell for sure because we don't know how much they paid for it, but assuming it was a reasonable amount (low six figures) what Seesmic gets, as Om wisely says, is the only thing that matters -- users.

That's the first epiphany that's available from using Twitter. It's all about the users. It's the second epiphany and the 208th. Nothing else matters, not even the reliability of the system (though that's much better these days) -- even on its most flaky days, there was never an exodus to any of the alternative systems that exist. However, fortunately for Twitter, none of the alternative systems have tried to clone Twitter, and that may be in Seesmic's future, but I get ahead of myself.

Another reason it's potentially a brilliant move is that it keeps Seesmic in the conversation. After an initial rollout that made Seesmic the talk of the town for a couple of months, now the cursor has moved on (not sure where), and Seesmic isn't that much the topic du jour. With a Twitter client with say 10K or 20K users (they've had 100K downloads) now there are all those people that Loic can pitch daily in hopefully a tasteful not too intrusive way.

Another key thing -- now you don't have to "go" somewhere else to see a Seesmic video. If you live in Twhirl (they should change the name, please, it's so hard to type) one suspects that Seesmic videos will not come to you through the normal Twitter mechanism with a bit of text and a URL. They can make it much more seamless, and I bet they do. And in doing so they will be creating a very nice demo of payloads, something I've been saying Twitter themselves should be doing. But, no problem, now Seesmic can, at least for video (which is a very large piece of the problem).

No matter if any of this speculation is correct, if the price was right, Seesmic bought access to some very good users and they have the ability to converse with them through the very personable Loic at the helm.

Update: Compete.com comparison between Seesmic and Twhirl. Tells an interesting story.

You only get to lose your virginity once

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:29:27 GMT

First, sorry for the light posting, I've had a bad cold for the last 3 days, and have mostly been sleeping and getting caught up on Battlestar Galactica in preparation for the season premiere on Friday. Some call it the SuperBowl of SciFi. I can't wait.

I've been keeping an eye on the blog discussion about the faceoff between Demo and TechCrunch50, trying to figure out what it means.

First, I think what Arrington said about Demo needing to die is way over the top. Can you imagine Pepsi marketing against Coke saying "Coke needs to die." Or even Apple saying to IBM that they need to die. There's a reason people don't go this far in marketing -- it puts others in the uncomfortable position of appearing to agree with you if they buy your product. You don't want anything to stand in the way of that.

Scheduling it on exactly the same days as Demo is too predatory for my taste. Why not win on the merits? Why not let Demo have a chance to morph, to learn from the competition, maybe as a result we'll have two great conferences.

I haven't been to a Demo in many years, but I was one of the founding Demoers of the conference, and was once offered the job of running it (I declined because I was running a software company and felt that would conflict with the demoers).

Originally, only a handful of products were demo'd on stage, most of the demos took place in a ballroom. The presenters were seated, and there were two or three chairs for people receiving demos. All the desks were the same, the signage was the same.

It was designed to be a civilized version of Comdex. Instead of walking between the few far-apart booths that had interesting demos, and having zero percent chance of getting a demo from someone who could answer your questions, at Demo you would be guaranteed that the person giving the demo was either the developer, product manager, or CEO of the company. Someone in a position to answer a question.

Stewart Alsop chose the products, I don't remember if they paid or not (I have an email into Stewart asking) but it wasn't a lot of money. It was nothing like $18,500.

I've started two companies. At either of them, we might have spent $18,500 to get our product in front of the right people. We were spending several times that every month on advertising. Today there aren't as many places to run ads, and startups raise more money. If I were running Demo and there was a product I really wanted to have and they couldn't afford the fee, I'd comp them. I hope IDG does that. (I paid expenses for some people to come to BloggerCon because I wanted them there, and they couldn't afford to come without the stipend.)

However, I can't imagine that I, as an entrepreneur, would choose to roll out my product at either conference. They're both shitty deals for entrepreneurs. At TechCrunch50 there are 50 products. At Demo there are 70. Since they're happening the same week, at best I'm one of 120. I would rather, as Jeremey Toeman advises, roll my product out on a quiet week in the middle of summer when my product is the only new thing shipping. Much better chance of finding new users and maybe getting a review or two. Or pick a venue where not many new products are shipped, like SXSW or Foo Camp (as Twitter and Chumby did, respectively, with good results).

You only get to lose your virginity once, so choose your venue wisely.

Honestly, what both conferences say about the technology industry is that it's way over-supplied with new product. There's no way there's demand for even a fraction of those products. It's probably not true, esp if the rollouts were spaced out over a few months, but blowing them out all at once only serves the conference promoters. It's hard to see what's in it for the entrepreneurs or their investors.

I got a response from Stewart Alsop:

"Calacanis and Arrington are both troublemakers, which as you know could be said about me too. So I can't too exercised about the debate, other than wish they would get their facts straight. Neither one asked me the question you did below, so thank you for asking!

"Demo has always charged a fee to Demonstrate. It has never charged a separate fee to be on stage. One thing that Chris Shipley has done that is different than the original Demo is that every company is introducing a new product that has not been previously demonstrated. (They define "never" broadly, but you get the idea.) When we started Demo, the idea was that all interesting new products that were current would be demonstrated but only truly new products would be shown on stage in live demos (along with bake-offs and other fun stuff, but no panel sessions).

"So all companies that had a station in the demonstration hall paid a fee to demonstrate, which was really to cover the cost of providing the stations and (most important) the infrastructure for having the demos work, although the internet wasn't an issue then; it was client server time and we needed to put in a LAN.

"We (Alsop Louie Partners) had portfolio companies at both events (Cake Financial at TechCrunch and both Ribbit's Amphibian and Redux at Demo 08), so I got to see how both operated. The difference was that TechCrunch was 'inexpensive,' which meant that the infrastructure didn't work well (demonstrators had to be prepared to demo without the internet and the schedule was managed loosely). Demo was on schedule and the infrastructure worked because they had redundant systems.

"On relevance: People still like to get together and do demos to talk about products and design and coding. But it's much less about client apps and PCs now and much more about web apps and systems. Infrastructure and systems don't demo well (remember the bake-off between dBase and Access?). So it's really all about doing demos of Web apps now. It's an open question if that's big enough to draw people to a resort or if it's better in a major city like SF..."

Today's Clinton conference call MP3

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:26:30 GMT

It's always darkest just before dawn, the saying goes. Yesterday I said we probably weren't going to get the campaign conf calls, and today I got one.

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/04/02/call1.mp3

Thanks to Sarah Lai Stirland, Evan Hansen and Michael Calore at Wired for their help in bootstrapping this.

11 years of Scripting News

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:29:31 GMT

To mark the 11th anniversary of Scripting News, here's a pointer to docs on the software I used to edit the site.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier/netscripting/newsPage.html

I thought of what eventually became the weblog as a News Page, a roughly reverse chronologic list of links to news stories. Then as now I edited using the outliner in Frontier.

We made the NewsPage suite and all the other code that ran in the Frontier environment (the "Aretha" release) available in source to anyone who wanted to use it, and amazingly, a fair number of sites poppped up that more or less followed the pattern of Scripting News.

I don't remember them all, but the most notable one (to me) was Robot Wisdom, which was managed for the first few years with this software.

There will be people who give me a hard time for writing this, but that's their problem not mine. One of the benefits of creating something that really took off is that you get to gloat about it.

A Wimax N810

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:50:52 GMT

Nokia announced a new version of the N810 handheld Linux computer designed to work over a Wimax network, which raises the obvious question, does Berkeley have Wimax? What other cities has it? What are the economics?

Podcast followup on campaign conf calls

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:45:55 GMT

Here's a podcast following up on where we're at with getting MP3s of campaign conference calls.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/followupOnCampaignConfCalls.mp3

Summary: It's not looking too good.

Our standard April Fool party

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:22:49 GMT

Watch out for the lunacy tomorrow as April Fools is celebrated on blogs and other websites far and wide. I imagine it's already started since it must be April 1 in New Zealand or Australia by now.

Here on Scripting News we celebrate something else... Our birthday! You see it was on April 1, 1997 that a blog-like website first appeared at www.scripting.com. Last year it was our 10th birthday, which implies that tomorrow is the 11th.

To celebrate, I've cobbled together a humble page that calculates the age of Scripting News with 10 digits of precision.

http://age.scripting.com/

So at midnight tonight, it should flip over. If you like such things you may stay up to see it flip.

Hey it's a geeky site. What else would you suggest?

So enjoy the other sites, and keep coming back through the years, Murphy-willing of course, as we all grow old together.

I love Battlestar Galactica

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:06:15 GMT

Working my way through Season 3, in prep for Season 4, which starts this week.

Mixing tech industry politics with U.S. politics

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:30:24 GMT

Something I didn't know, but now that I do, it makes sense.

One of the reasons I'm not so popular in the tech industry is that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama, and I look forward to the day, coming soon, when the Republicans leave the White House and we can get on with fixing the problems they created, and then getting on track solving some long-term problems that we've been ignoring.

Now of course, I understand that there are Clinton supporters in the tech industry, and there are even Republicans who like Bush, and to them my enthusiastic support sometimes goes a little too far. I understand, totally. If for example, I were following a Bush supporter, like Tony Perkins, on Twitter, I would have unfollowed him long ago. I don't need that level of annoyance. He and I are never going to agree on politics, not even how to discuss politics, so I would just tune him out. Knowing Tony, I don't think he'd hold it against me, as I wouldn't hold it against any Republican tech person who unfollowed me.

What I can't support are personal attacks and name-calling just because we disagree. General attacks are okay with me. In other words if you think all Obama supporters are idiots, go ahead and say it (I'll probably unfollow, but BFD). But if you say I'm a jerk just because I support someone you don't, then I have a problem with that (esp if you don't make it clear that's why you're saying it). You're getting confused between personal issues and political ones, and I think you're going to even lose the support of people who agree with you politically, and imho you should.

After all is said and done, when we elect the next President, we're still going to be Americans (with apologies to readers who aren't). That's been the problem in the last few elections, we forgot, after the election was over, to find the common ground that we agree on. And as a result the Constitution is in trouble, and our economy is a mess (even Bush agrees), and our reputation overseas isn't good and it's getting worse. I think this is because we forgot to bind our wounds after the election, and our elected leadership didn't lead.

So this is what I learned. I think some people hide their political differences behind personal attacks. This is what none of us should support. We should be able to have a discussion and keep our self-respect and dignity. That US politics gets masked as tech industry politics is very confusing and should not be tolerated.

BTW, as a constructive step toward fixing this problem, I think all tech industry bloggers should let us know their politics. If you're American, which of the Presidential candidates do you support. I wouldn't have thought this was necessary just 48 hours ago, but now I'm sure it is.

Where did you have your great idea?

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:31:56 GMT

Wired has a fascinating photo-essay with narratives from famous innovators explaining where they were when they had their biggest idea.

For example, Reed Hastings got the idea for Netflix in a movie rental place in La Honda, CA (a fairly remote place between Palo Alto and the Pacific Ocean).

Now that we have digital cameras and know people from far away through our blogs, Twitter and Flickr, it seems we could tell stories like this about the places we live and more mundane but still important events in our lives. They could become quick collaborative documents like the Wired photo-essay.

Examples:

1. A photo-essay of opening days at all major league ballparks in the US.

2. Church services in every major city on a given weekend (different religions have services on Friday, Saturday and Sunday).

3. Following a candidate for the Senate or House as they campaign for one day. (The major news outlets don't cover local races very well anymore.)

Projects like this are important warmups and proofs-of-concept for amateur newsgathering, and perhaps new politics. It's not just for Democrats or Republicans, maybe this is how we bootstrap new parties, or maybe it's just for fun. Who knows. Learning doesn't have to stop when you leave school. I like stories, esp short ones, along with pictures of places and people that are different or strangely familiar. This is part of what I meant in yesterday's post. Let's reset the dial back to the beginning, start small, and stay small. Now we have some new tools that we didn't have last time amateur public writing started up (or whatever it's called).

There is no A-list, just people with ideas.

The difference is people doing it for fun, versus people doing it to either get rich or earn a living. Yes, there really is a difference in approach.

PS: In case this turns out to be a great idea, I had it in my kitchen.

Why would Google Web Services cost $0?

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:57:33 GMT

Google Web Services, or GWS, is the hypothetical competitor to Amazon Web Services that I wrote about yesterday.

The first question that comes up is how can they afford to give it away? That came up in yesterday's comments and the answer is important enough to deserve its own blog post.

So here goes...

Google has always challenged conventional wisdom that way, as Netscape did before. Remember when they let people download the browser for free, how foreign that seemed.

Google's search engine cost nothing to use and had no ads for the first few years, and look at how well that turned out.

Flipped around, I don't see why Amazon charges me to use AWS. I think I produce as much value for them as I use just by writing about it, but they haven't been willing to bend (not that I've asked them to). If there was no cost to it, I'd use their services for new things that I'm not willing to try as long as I have to pay. I know that because there are projects I've not attempted because the cost was prohibitive.

Perhaps Google is thinking about acquisitions. How much would it be worth to buy companies without having to transition their technology to their platform? There would be no retraining either, all the programmers in the companies they acquire would know how to work in the environment. Further, can you imagine that they'd charge universities to teach comp sci using their cloud?

Given the cost of acquisitons, recruiting and training they can afford to blow a lot of money on free bandwidth, storage and CPU to make the buying and hiring process more efficient and increase the hit rate (the percentage of programmers who work out).

If they're smart they won't get involved in deciding which projects can use the service, as Apple has taken an interest in who can develop for the iPhone. How can a bureaucracy decide what projects will have merit in the market? Better to let a thousand flowers bloom knowing that the best ones will be available to you first because their software is perfectly compatible with yours.

My guess is that's why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, which is built entirely on open source system software. Microsoft will be in much better position to acquire companies after Yahoo than before.

Of course Google is doing this, how could they not be. What's hard to believe is how much of a running start Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have been willing to let Amazon have.

Proof that the end is near

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:29:27 GMT

Over on Twitter I am unceremoniously blocking all tech industry superdelegates.

Let me explain.

Imagine if the tech industry was the Democratic Party, then the insider's insiders would be the superdelegates. The people who talk about people talking about people talking about people talking about tech.

Somewhere at the end of the chain there are products and users, forgotten in all the drama.

I'm sick of it.

I pulled out of the tech industry and started blogging in 1994 or 1997 depending on what you count as the start so I could get away from the crap. Now Mike Arrington is talking about turning TechCrunch into CNET. That's a sure sell signal. Get me the fuck outta here. Beam me up Scotty. This isn't Kansas anymore Auntie Em.

I announced this on Twitter, and people asked me to explain.

I struggled, then I bounced over to TechMeme and found the perfect explanation. Click on the image below for the punchline.

I'll tell you the answer. Most people wouldn't recognize an original thought if it bit them in the ass.

What we used to call blogging is now just bullshit about recycled bullshit about recycled bullshit and on and on. Who bit who in the ass, never mind anything new or hard to comprehend, cause that's not what we do. We aggregate eyeballs and clickthroughs and CPMs and god knows what else.

Back in the old days before any of you were blogging, we (the olde skool bloggers) used to write about them watching us watching them watch us watch them.

It's happening again...

Nothing wrong with it, it's human nature.

But it's time to decentralize again.

Head for the hills.

If I could only remember where they are!

PS: Google is doing something itneresting. So much for finding all the juicy bits on TechMeme!

PPS: Tech industry people dis Marc Canter, they're idiots. Marc always knows what's going on long before they do. It sounds strange when he says it cause new stuff is strange.

PPPS: Further proof that the end is near. This idiotic meta-meta-post made it on TechMeme. Oh the humanity.

PPPPS: Thsi stupid piece is now the #2 item on TechMeme. Proof that the more stupid a post is, the higher it rises in what passes for the tech blogosphere. Update: It's now #1.

PPPPPS: This won't be complete until Mathew Ingram tags on his two cents. Update: It's now complete. Good night Chet. Good night Daivd.

How the Democratic process will likely conclude

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 17:48:46 GMT

Like everyone else (or so it seems) I have been following the Democratic nominating process, even though we're in hiatus now between the early March primaries and the Pennsylvania primary in mid-late April.

I'm an Obama supporter, so I like the way the conversation has turned back to "Why Doesn't Hillary Quit?" instead of the soul-sickening stuff we were talking about for the last couple of weeks. (Even though there was a lot of growth there.)

This morning Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo circles around all the possibilities.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/186346.php

But it seems obvious to me this is how it will end:

1. On or before June 3, enough superdelegates declare for Obama and he wins enough delegates in the remaining 10 primaries to give him more than the 2025 delegates he needs to get the nomination. The key is that the superdelegates don't have to sit by and do nothing. Winning favor from Obama who is pretty likely the next President is going to be worth more than hedging against the chance that HRC prevails. The Clinton's currency is already heavily devalued, and it's likely to keep going down.

2. Then HRC is free to bring whatever fight she wants to the convention, it won't matter, because Obama will have the nomination, and will (correct me if I'm wrong) also control the Credentials process, so she'll have to do what he wants in the end wrt Michigan and Florida. (A more than fair resolution of Michigan and Florida, already offered, would be to split the delegates 50-50. This slightly favors HRC and dilutes BHO because he currently has a delegate lead, and that would go down after a 50-50 split. A minor point.)

3. Then all that's left in question is HRC's self-respect. If she wants to keep some of it, she'll bow out gracefully and tell her supporters to make it unanimous in Denver, or she won't and will probably retain her Senate seat as long as she wants but will always be a Democratic Party outsider. It probably won't bode well for her husband as an elder statesman, and there goes Chelsea's chance to run for President in 2024.

Pigs

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 04:35:59 GMT

A little pig came up to me while I was waiting at a stop light in Walnut Creek.

He squealed "Pssst down here." I looked down. The pig looked up at me and asked: "Can you keep a secret?"

I don't know, I said. It depends.

"Oh hell," said the pig. "I'll tell you anyway."

"You know how Amazon has all those great web services."

Yes, I said, I use them and they're great.

"Well how would you like to get all those services and more, and get to run software in Google's cloud, just like all the people at Google do?"

Yes, I would, I said, wondering how much this would cost.

"How much would it cost?" I asked.

"That's the best part," said the little pig. "For a guy like you, a blogger, with modest needs, it would be free."

I bent down and gave the pig a kiss on the cheek and said "You're a very nice little pig."

The light changed and I crossed the street. I noticed the pig was stopping the next person and asked if he could keep a secret.

A digital camera designed for bloggers?

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:41:49 GMT

I really like the way my iPhone works for publishing pictures.

I have it wired up so that I can send an email to Flickr. And then I have a script watching my Flickr feed that routes new pictures to Twitter where 6000-plus people follow my feed.

The only problem is that the iPhone is a shitty camera. It's great for pictures where quality isn't the most important thing, but timeliness and convenience are.

So what if I wanted to buy a new camera, in 2008, surely one must have the ability to send a picture to Flickr the way my iPhone does? Without thinking about it too much it seems like it must be possible, but then there aren't an camers that are also phones (there are of course other phones that are cameras). But I want the quality of a Nikon or Canon with the communication ability of an iPhone or Nokia.

I'm sure nothing like this exists, but I thought I should ask.

PS: I'd settle for really clean simple wifi access. I'm tired of the mess of tethering via USB. And I'm looking for a camera that costs no more than $250 on Amazon.

PPS: Instantly I'm overwhelmed with pointers to http://eye.fi/ -- yes of course I've heard of them, and even been told by a friend who has one that it works great. My mind forgot about it until now. Of course now the flood will not abate.