Scripting News

Getting this on the record

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:02:02 GMT

Sometimes I just make predictions to friends verbally and forget to put them on the blog, to get them on the record. So...

I stand by my prediction that Bush, if he doesn't end up in jail, will be a very happy ex-president.

Check out this CNN piece about his regrets. There will be more like that.

I think Bush never really wanted to be President, I think he wanted to run for President. He was a very good campaigner, you really could see this during the 2004 campaign. On the stump, his timing was perfect, he was a fantastic speaker. I wonder if McC didn't make a big mistake by not having Bush go out for him this year (glad he didn't!). Anyway, once the campaign was over and he had to be President again, he was stumbling and bumbling and tripping over his words, as usual.

This point is emphasized in the Oliver Stone movie. He's the dog who caught the car. Now what? That's the part Bush wasn't so good at.

But as an ex-President life will be one big Texas BBQ with non-alchoholic beer. He can read a book every once in a while, watch a game, have some of his friends over, tell everyone they're doing a heckuva a job, and not have to worry about the shit he had to worry about.

You could see it clearly when he was hanging out at the Olympics this summer. Man, he was having a great time, he looked fantastic, confident, tan, relaxed. Until Putin reared his head and brought him back to reality and then a few weeks later so did the economy.

Now he just has to make a deal with Obama for a pardon (heh wonder how that's going) and in a couple of years he can go on a book tour to sell his memoir and I bet everyone will be nostalgic for the guy, amazing as that might seem now. Things kind of work out that way.

If only ads were so direct

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:19:55 GMT

From the excellent Bushian farce Idiocracy.

unsummits and more

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:52:58 GMT

Don Ball reports that there was an unsummit in Minneapolis in October, along the lines of what was discussed in my Sunday post. They even grabbed the .org version of the domain. I think there's a movement here to create a parallel universe that focuses on getting things done.

Dan Farber on the search for the national CTO.

I wasted two hours this morning not getting ProxyPass to work in Apache on Windows. Kept getting an error as Apache was starting up. As always with Apache, the docs don't tell you everything you need to know. You know what we need? A version of Apache with the GUI configurator, like the one WebStar had on the Mac. Man, that was an easy server to set up. Just launch the app and plop some files in the folder and you're off and running.

Speaking of easy configurators -- you know what EC2 needs? Well it's interesting, but most of the settings you need to fuss with are exactly those you need to set up a router. It's spooky the problems are so close. I would do a deal with D-Link, that as far as I know has the nicest browser-based UI to make a version of their software for EC2, or just copy the UI. Amazon understands mass market products, and EC2 is a mass-market product just waiting to be productized. I think there's a lot of money being left on the table here.

And while we're talking deals for EC2, how about rounding out the offering and do a deal with Apple to get a Mac version of EC2 running in the Amazon cloud. Wouldn't that be cool?

New conference format: The unsummit

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:16:07 GMT

I've never liked the idea of conferences calling themselves "summits." Too often they are self-parodies. Too self-important. And often anything but summits, excluding people who would be at a summit if there ever were one.

Even with nations it isn't always obvious who belongs at a summit. If you want to have a summit of the most powerful nations on earth, you'd have to include Russia, China, the US. But what about India? They have more people than either Russia or the US, and they have nukes now, and a fast-growing economy (at least before Sept). But if you have India don't you have to have Pakistan? You see where this is headed. Maybe they should just call them meetings and be done with summitry even at the world level.

If they call something a summit it probably isn't one.

It's esp ironic to have pseudo-summitry in the world of Web 2.0, where the whole point of the technology is to decentralize and distribute power.

The other day at lunch a friend was talking about "the blogosphere" as if it were centered in San Francisco. I know other people who think it's centered in Washington. I wonder how many centers "the blogosphere" has.

I'm tempted, every time I hear a summit coming up, to have a parallel unsummit nearby. I thought I could reserve the domain, but someone else (smart!) had the same idea in a completely different industry.

When people have a summit they're assuming for themselves the right to say whose opinion matters and whose doesn't. As my mother used to say, if they have to do that to feel good about themselves, it's probably not worth it to be part of their little group. Okay mom, you were right about that one.

I tend to mis-spell summits as submits, as if when saying it you had a cold. Submission, now there's something worth having an unsummit about!

There's actually a lot to say about submission. It's one of those cool things you don't think is cool at first. I wrote a piece about submission in 1999. Young people tend to struggle against submission, but you're born to submit. You submit to gravity from day one. It's possible, with enough energy, to escape it, but in normal times we're quite happy to submit to gravity and have all our friends and belongings submit to it as well.

And of course that's just the beginning of submission. In the end we all submit to the grim reaper. That's just how it is. And I think the folk who have summits are fighting the inevitable as well, sooner or later no one cares what any of us thought, the world goes on. As a great French philosopher once said, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." In much the same way, so are summits.

So the unsummit would begin with a word of thanks for the bounty of ideas and experience before us, and the doors would be open to all who wish to contribute.

Links for the day

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:15:41 GMT

Charles Krauthammer on Obama: "A president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan."

Yahoo user interface library. I must learn how to use some of these tools. They look very interesting.

PJ O'Rourke, a conservative, explains how "We Blew It." He's still blowing. Try self-deprecating humor, make fun of your own clothes. Explain why we shouldn't care about natural resources. You guys have some debugging to do, you've realized it, and that's a good first step. Now it's time to join the 21st century and start concerning yourself with some of the issues of today, not the version of today that Reagan envisioned. Turns out his vision wasn't all that accurate, imho.

China unveiled a $586 billion economic stimulus plan. Until now they had been stimulating our economy more than theirs. This is a big change.

Apache can act as a front-end for machines with a single IP address and multiple apps serving over HTTP. I knew it could do this, but I didn't know how.

Amazon EC2/Windows update

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:22:00 GMT

A few observations after a full week of using for real deployed applications.

1. It works. No problems, absolutely reliable.

2. The docs could be vastly improved. They should take a "Hello World" approach, and tell you the minimum you need to know to get a Notepad window up. Since it runs Windows and so many people use Windows, this could be a mass-market product. The idea of having a virtual computer running "up there" is really powerful and it shouldn't just be for programmers.

3. In the end, the cost isn't prohibitive. I'm paying $300 a month for two colocated servers. I expect to pay about $200 a month for the same service at Amazon. I probably wouldn't switch just for the cost savings, but for the extra reliability, I'll take it.

4. They make a big deal about how the servers can disappear, but in the week it's been running, it hasn't gone down once.

5. One bother is that you only get one IP address per machine. I really could use three or four. On my colo service I get five. Yes, I know I can set things up so that addresses are delegated, but it's a PITA.

Obama's decency

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:40:42 GMT

Conservative blogger and lawyer Patterico makes the case for Obama's decency. He admits that all the evidence could be dismissed as tactics to win an election, but then so could anything anyone does be so dismissed. I went through the same process in deciding about Obama, saw the same evidence, while looking for the slightest crack -- never saw it. He's a tough politician, but he doesn't cut corners.

There are a lot of good people in the world, I know quite a few, but what's remarkable about Obama:

1. He's risen so high. When asked today what Presidents he's turned to for advice since winning the election, he offered, with a smile -- Lincoln. As the therapist in The West Wing observed to the fictional President Jed Bartlet, "This is a hell of a curve you get graded on now." But even that's not the most impressive thing.

Update: I had to find the scene. Here's the MP3. Great stuff. Season 3, Episode 13 at minute 37 approx.

2. There are a lot of good decent people in the world, but few of them get credit for it. Obama gets credit. Now, what kind of example will this provide, and how will it change things? Are we looking at an antidote to cynicism? It's clear to me that unless we can create a strain of idealism, we're not going to come through the challenges ahead.

In a piece I wrote earlier today, talking about volunteerism replacing professionalism in journalism, I don't think many people reading it believed that people will work to make our world better without being paid. This has always frustrated me, because the evidence is everywhere that people do. We just elected a President through millions of selfless acts on the part of millions, yet people still doubt that selflessness exists and is so powerful.

I don't know why but today has been a rough day for me. Haven't been this aimless in a long time. Something needs to be processed and I'm not sure what it is. Coming to grips with what's next is not easy, I guess.

Time for a walk!

PS: The Economist doesn't know the first thing about blogging.

PPS: StumbleUpon discovered MockCain.com today.

New moderator for Meet the Press?

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:33:57 GMT

If you recall, Tom Brokaw signed on to moderate MTP through the election. I thought he did mostly a good job, an improvement over the previous management. A couple of times I thought he crossed the line into advocacy, but on the whole, well done.

Now the big question -- who's next?

People I hope it's not: Andrea Mitchell (boring, petty, insidery, bird-like). David Gregory (just boring).

Someone I could live with: Chuck Todd, would bring excellent guests on the show, he has everyone's respect. But he's a numbers guy and numbers aren't the game now that the election is over. You need someone who's better at political nuance. He's better as a sidekick than the main act.

Someone else I could live with: Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe, starting to step out on her own, subbing for Gregory (whose show has a new name indicating he's probably not the choice for MTP). She is intelligent, experienced, and has been in the background too much for all the talent she has.

Now the person I really want who they'll never pick: Aaron Brown. I can't say enough about his interviewing style, intelligent, humorous, disarming, he's the kind of guy you'd like to spill the beans to and then realize you just screwed yourself. My benchmark for this job is who would Lindsay Graham have a hard time bullshitting. Only one answer there -- Aaron Brown.

Like I said, it'll never happen. :-(

Changing the way we do news

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:47:58 GMT

What didn't change in the 2008 election is the way news flowed. This is a big disappointment to me and something that causes great concern. I see the newspapers dying, and the broacast media failing to do news, and I want to evolve to the next thing, but it doesn't seem that's the way it'll go. Instead we're likely to see a sudden collapse, and a void, much like the financial collapse in September. This would be tragic, unneccesary, a very bad for us.

The next thing, btw, involves the same spirit of volunteerism that drove the Obama campaign. It should be possible for a citizen like you or me to take a one month leave of absence, just like doing jury duty, and go to a news story and camp out and cover it. It's not so hard to do. If a citizen can be trained to render a life and death decision (sometimes) fairly and carefully, we can also learn to get "Just the facts ma'am" and report the news alongside the pros. In case the pros should either disappear or fail to be professional.

In order to do this we're going to need the cooperation of the people who the press covers, for example, a new administration taking office. But unless they get this big idea real soon, it can't happen.

People are thinking too small, imho. Bloggers in the White House briefing room? Of course. But if the same gatekeeping applies, you're just going to have people who get through the gates. There's really no difference betw a columnist that works for the Washington Post and one who writes for Talking Point Memo. Yet some how we should feel that we're being better represented by the latter? I don't. They're still gatekeepers, and people like you and me are on the outside looking in, getting the news they want to give us, through their lens, from their perspective, and missing a lot of what's going on and what matters. The only way to turn the system upside down is to just do it, and have a system whereby fresh blood comes in, systematically.

It's been flattering when people have said I should be the country's CTO. First of all, it isn't going to happen, and second, I'm not a good candidate. Most of the technology you'd need to be a good CTO is stuff I just use, and am not an expert at. (That said, one of the first things our new CTO should do is uncover and expose the games Comcast and other big Internet vendors are playing with public access to the net. We paid for the development of the net through tax dollars, they can use it, like everyone else but it's not their place to throttle or control it.)

The job I really want is designing and implementing an open platform for news for our government, and of course that would quickly become the way of doing news in all walks of life. We need something fast here, even the strongest news organizations are seriously undermined and could disappear within months. Just having a blogger inside the new administration is not nearly enough.

Anyway, I'm thinking that a flash conference in NY, DC or Cambridge, like the one we did after the 2004 election at Stanford, might be a good idea. Last night I asked Jay Rosen at NYU what he thought of this, and he was positive. We might do it. I'm thinking about new non-BloggerCon formats, that get people talking about specific ideas as opposed to having wide-ranging discussions. I think we've now learned enough about blogging and public media to work on the next level of change.

Postpartem blues

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:40:35 GMT

What a rush the last few days have been.

Geez, never mind the last few days -- it's been going on since January, since the Iowa Caucus. A continuing stream of "Wait For This" spans of time. First it was New Hampshire, then Super Tuesday, then Texas and Ohio. Then a month of downtime, followed by Pennsylvania and the early May primaries (can't remember what states they were) finally Indiana and North Carolina, and Tim Russert proclaiming we now know who the Democratic nominee will be. Whew.

I think at that time we really knew who the next President would be, but who cares. There were ways to pretend at least that the stuff between then and now mattered.

Now it's all over and I know what has to come next. No matter what the expectation, built up over so much time, can't be matched by reality. Like many others, I imagine, it's time now to look elsewhere for meaning. We will have an African-American president, a Democrat, a smart man with big ambition. It'll be interesting to watch him, but not all-consuming as it was.

What comes next? I honestly don't know.

A new way to use the Internet

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:36:20 GMT

After years of intense opinionating...

Watching some newborn puppies sleep.

Prop 8

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:07:15 GMT

NY Times: "California voters have adopted a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, The Associated Press reported Wednesday, joining voters in two other states who went to the polls Tuesday to overturn such unions."

I voted against Prop 8.

My thoughts on marriage are -- if you have kids you probably should be married, but if you don't who cares what you call your relationship. That's between you and your partner. You want to call it marriage, no problem as far as I'm concerned. I'm a libertarian in that regard. Stay focused on the big stuff and what happens between two consenting adults is none of my business.

And I think married heteros generally are assholes about this. If their marriages are so weak that they need to make it exclusive then maybe they ought to take a look inward instead of focusing their fear on people they don't know or understand (which is what their opposition to gay marriage really is saying, imho).

On the other hand... (And I'm going to catch hell for this.)

I have a friend who I didn't know was gay until he told me he was married and I thought that meant he had a wife (the female kind), but it turns out it was another guy. Truthfully -- I found this shocking, and a bit uncomfortable, and being a Californian, I said "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable" and my friend, also being Californian said he understood, which I'm sure he did.

I remember in 1980, the first time I went to Jamaica to visit my uncle. I was on the beach by myself and I realized I was the only white person. I freaked (not visibly of course) -- not wholly unlike the reaction I had to my friend's gay marriage, above. I remember why I was scared, but I don't understand it. Where I grew up, in NYC, we thought it was dangerous to be alone among so many blacks. I'm sure we were over-reacting, but it seemed real. Here it is not too much later, and the change we're talking about is inside me. Slowly, I've come to see black people differently. Very differently.

The obvious point -- eventually the shock will dissipate, and there will be a time when people don't understand why something like Prop 8 would pass. Transitions like this take time. There's no other way. But this change is coming, for sure.

My first post about Barack Obama

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:50:44 GMT

On 7/26/04, at the blogger's breakfast at the DNC, this weird guy who people said great things about came to talk to us. His name was Barack Obama. Here's the whole post:

Barack Obama, who's running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger's Breakfast. He's an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he'll be President in 12 years.

Dr Dave was off by 8 years.

Bonus: Here's a teeny picture of Obama that day.

Today's song

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:30:20 GMT

Sarah we hardly knew ye

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:46:38 GMT

When she was announced as a candidate I was virtually alone in believing the choice wouldn't age well. When I turned out to be correct, I didn't want to gloat, because the election wasn't over, and there was no way to be absolutely sure. Now we are.

I don't think she killed the McCain candidacy, but had the economy not soured, I think she would have brought him down. It was such a bonehead decision, it was all the proof anyone needed that a McCain presidency would be as filled with disaster as the Bush presidency. Obama was absolutely right in saying that voting for McCain was signing up for another four years of Republican lunacy.

Now I hear people saying something equally wrong about Palin -- that she has a shot at leading the Republican Party in 2012. It isn't going to happen. That's not how American politics works.

We don't give losers a second chance in this country. (Yes, of course there are exceptions, but she isn't one of them, read on.)

Kerry thought he could run for President in 2008 after losing in a squeaker in 2004. It took a month or so before he realized that the Republicans would throw the exact same book at him they developed four years earlier, and while it wasn't fair then, it did work and it would work again.

Same with Palin. What little we really know about her is more than we wanted to know. When she shows up, if she's dumb enough to show up, as a candidate for President in 2010 or 2011, all we'll think of is the Katie Couric interview, and Charlie this and Charlie that, thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere, the hypocrisy of a hockey mom who loves expensive clothes, and the pit bull with lipstick mavericky maverick reformer who fired a commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law.

Palin is no longer a candidate, she's a punchline.

Election aftermath -- Obama's mandate

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:25:54 GMT

Cleaning up some loose ends.

Obama won Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, two states that were on McCain's slim path to a win. Once those were decided, it was over. I felt the networks could have called the election then, but they didn't.

When Obama won Ohio, it was even more certain. In order to win McCain would have had to win California, Oregon and Washington, and that structurally just couldn't happen. I told my friends who were gathered around the TV, in my opinion, it was over. I twittered it. If McCain were to win at this point, it would be the biggest bit of history in 100 years, including 9/11, the use of the atom bomb, World War II itself, the Mets winning the World Series in 1969. You get the idea. Things of that nature are so improbable they just don't happen.

Missouri went to McCain by the slimmest margin, thereby losing its bellwether status. It no longer always goes with the winner. Even the Boston Red Sox had to eventually beat out the Yankees for the championship.

I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion. He has the strongest mandate in so many ways, it's likely he doesn't want that much mandate, and will disappoint in some or many ways. Can he really get us out of Iraq quickly enough to please all who want a quick exit? The public works projects that are going to be needed to keep us out of a depression give us a chance to fix the problems we so desperately want to fix, energy, health care, education, infrastructure. Those are the four biggies.

North Carolina still isn't decided, and I understand that Georgia wasn't decided until very late. Our guy almost won that state too. The whole Red State thing is now questionable. Yes there are still some, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, the Dakotas. But the south with all its newly energized African-American voters and the midwest are now all in play. A new political reality is shaping up, beyond the last four elections -- and that's the stuff of mandates.

We can bail out the auto industry, but in return they have to use the public money to underwrite new products that get the mileage that European cars get. If you've ever been to a European capital you know how oversized American cars are. There, in a nutshell, is the problem with Detroit -- it's really a problem with America. That's one reason we use so much energy. We can make some huge cuts there without having to invent anything, just copy the Europeans.

The good thing about Obama is that, armed with a mandate, he will know what to do with it.

What's next?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:21:04 GMT

Now the next question is -- what comes next?

Probably some writing. But not yet. My to-do list is very long. I need to get my car serviced. Pay some bills and call some friends. After that, I don't know. Hey at least there's one thing that isn't on my list -- I get to stay in the USA.

I wonder what our election looks like to people outside the U.S.

Curious -- there was so much angst, now that Obama is our President-elect, what changed -- what comes next for you?

We won!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Eat some pie tonight

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:51:55 GMT

When Obama wins tonight, celebrate with some pie. If possible, sweet potato pie, but in a pinch any pie will do.

We're having peach pie and pecan pie tonight.

All diets are officially suspended for the night.

Today's song

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:32:02 GMT

Dedicated to our soon-to-be-ex-President, George W. Bush.