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I know it's a self-link, but I think it's interesting (if not a tad depressing) that the entry on this site that has managed to generate anything resembling a discussion is this one: why do you hate America so much?
What's strange is I don't think any of the posters actually followed the link in the entry. Instead, they are all responding to the title of the post, which line is a running gag in the Tom Tomorrow cartoon I was pointing to. At least the first poster thought that I was actually saying that myself. I wasn't. I pointed to it because I thought it made an excellent satirical point regarding "patriotism" and dissent in the current political climate. From there, however, the participants have mostly been at that line with some fervor. I'm not even sure how they're finding it. All I know is every now and then, I get an email with a new comment on that page, 2 in the last day. We finally got a pro-American yesterday, though it was soon followed by a Brit who was actually responding to the pro-America guy. It's self-perpetuating now, I guess.
Now that I think of it, it's pretty pathetic that I consider 5 comments to be a lot of traffic. I need to insult some BigBlog and get some flow.
Update: Well, the debate goes on, pretty much independent of me; there's a response to the UK guy. But I think I may have found a reason for the post fomenting (forget it, still no links to definitions. Look it up yourself. I assume you're literate.) discussion: the post is the #2 link on Google for "hate America much." Ye cats.
Have you ever been to this intersection?
What an utter shithead. But it's just a joke, damnit, why do you have to go and get all politically correct about it?
Ignore this should you read it, I am just checking on something.
Well, we have returned, I am back at work, I am noting with some interest the whole new Tara Sue Grubb single-issue candidate meme, watching the usual guys get themselves worked up into the usual frothed mouths over How Big Media Just Doesn't Get It With Regards to Content (suuuuuuuuure they don't,) and I am participating in the testing for Bill Stillwell's (x)emacs mode for MT weblogs, which I am using quite happily to edit this post. This one looks pretty good. Check it out.
Vacation winding down, we go off-island Sunday. One thing I will note: in the Bunch of Grapes bookstore's miniscule computer section, I couldn't get a copy of Secrets and Lies, but both of Rebecca Blood's new blog books were in stock. Make of it what you will. Am reading John Thorne's Pot on the Fire though, it's really good. Highly recommended.
Only if you live in Kalifornyuh. Otherwise it's just so fucking tedious.
Not many entries lately, and not many to come for this and next week: I'm on vacation on Martha's Vineyard. We have rented a weird but comfy house with a spiral staircase fashioned from a tree. We just got back from Illumination Night (D had a terrific time swinging, throwing and hiding his glowsticks, quote: "Next year I'm getting all the colors"), and are looking forward to the arrival of friends and the Ag Fair this weekend. A much needed rest.
Via MovableBlog, your one-stop MT hack shop: the good folks at MovableType are trying to figure out how many people are using it (probably with a view towards determining pricing), and have a survey up. I took it; if you're using MT, go and fill it out. Only takes a minute or so.
I saw this Searle-y sentence:
and thought, cool, a Moxie link. Moxie, the New England beverage par excellence. Strong. Character-building. But alas, no, the link points to some damn weblog. Whose author Doc has a crush on.
Then I perked up and remembered that next week I will be in a place where Diet Moxie is freely available. I intend to drink a lot of it. It's caffeine-free, too.
UPDATE: Unfortunately, I am wrong. Moxie indeed contains caffeine, meaning that it's off-limits for me for the time being, due to my many lovely health problems. Sigh. I discovered this after a cursory perusal of the label while drinking a big bitter icy glass of it. Eeek. Thank god there were no ill effects. Dodged that bullet.
The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, August 9, 2002
The "Bernie" here being Bernie deKoven, the schmuck who both Dave and Doc have been hyping endlessly for years, apparently to no avail. When Dave was doing it was to promote Bern's stoopit notion of running meetings via remote outlines. Which I guess dovetails neatly with many of Winer's stoopit notions. Kalifornyuh. Save us all from Kalifornyuh.
Now it's in BErnie's new positon as the "Guru of Glee" where he teaches you how to have more fun. Which I guess you need if you're a Cisco middle manager with a stick so far up your ass there's a bump in your forehead, but otherwise seems a little forced to me.
I would like to get a notebook and fill it with diagrams and notes. In pencil, mostly. Some ink. Not even sure what the diagrams and notes refer to. I need a vacation.
The blog is monkeyspeak, and this guy is smart and funny, too.
Also see his interesting response to Bruce Sterling's OSCON speech. Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the command line covers this sort of thing better, as well as being much funnier ("Stay away from my house, you freak!" ) Both are well worth reading, though.
More examples of the meaning (self link) of politically correct:
In other words, "when I am talking out my ass." Also note the implication that it's purely the overblown reaction on the community's part that necessitates the correction.
Some great shots from this past weekend's New York City Cycling Championship 2002. One of the participants had some success in some big bike race in France recently. Seen via the ebikes list.
Approvingly linking Nick Denton's spew regarding our need to (I quote) "humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millenial fantasy" Glenn Reynolds goes on to say:
He's right of course, and I suspect (and hope) the Bush Administration has thought of all this. It's just politically incorrect to say it.
But why? The people who would object are always saying that it's a good learning experience when the United States is humiliated.
"Politically (in)correct" at this point has devolved to the point where it's come to mean "any stupid thing that comes into my head, no matter how racist or unthoughtful or just plain fucking dumb, is legitimate discourse, and if you even think about criticizing it, you're engaging in censorship and guilty of being politically correct." It's a quick and stupid attempt to head off dispute. Maybe not so stupid, since the right seems to have been able to paralyze the left with this sort of imbecility. It's not that you shouldn't be able to say it, free speech is an absolute as far as I'm concerned, but you should also expect to be called up on the carpet for it. "Politically correct" is little more than trying - far too often successfully - to shut the other side up completely while you spray your bilge.
In any case, it's not a matter of dispelling the "Islamic millennial fantasy" (as if Christianity lacks any millennial fantasies of its own - can you say "The Rapture?"), it's a matter of stopping fundmentalist elements of Islam that remind me strongly of fundamentalist Christians in this country, in rhetoric if not in the extent of their actions. If Jerry Falwell doesn't represent all Christians in this country, then you can't say that millennialist Muslims represent all of Islam. No matter how much you need that reasoning to justify warmongering "the Other."
OK, today's Gold Box offers were all for chairs in one form or another, the sole exception being the interestingly named Fire Engine with Costume. Did I get this because I'm in the tri-state area?
Eeek. Soon as I closed the Gold Box on the dressup firetruck (even though that "close and pass forever" phrasing always gives me pause) I was taken back to the "Your Recommendations" page, where the first item listed is Tonka's Electronic Chuck My Talking Firetruck. Perhaps my next recommendation will include a healthy supply of commas.
Sigh. What a crock this is. It completely ignores Movable Type, for one thing, but I really really wish sometimes this guy'd get over the massive inferiority complex and not have to piss and moan everytime someone writes anything about weblogs and doesn't pay him obesiance. Remember: whenever DW says "There's more to commercial software than Microsoft," what he really means is "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" This is the only thing he ever says about OSS, no matter what the inspiring link. Over and over. Open source vs closed mind.
Plus this bushwah entry just rehashes his usual tired arguments against open source: no one can make a living writing it (demonstrably untrue, unless you completely forget the corporate development market and just reduce the industry to companies whose main business is software) and that open source is only good for infrastructure and not end user development. Again, only perhaps true if you reduce the market to companies like UserLand, and if you ignore the great deal of recent progress on fronts like KDE and GNOME. Do they meet Apple HIG? No. Are they improving all the time? Yes. A good deal of my own career has been spent writing software for a corporate user base, but we never meant to sell any of it; and yet somehow, despite the fact that we were using open source technologies in many cases, I managed to make a living.
As a matter of fact, we had much more trouble with one commercial developer, who were doing things like shipping their software with asserts still enabled, causing our implementations to sometimes just drop into a debugger, costing us money and time until the data center personnel noticed the error on the server. They also decided that the product was going to become a website IDE, abandoning the paying customers (in our case at least, and in many others I had heard of) who had significant investments in said product as a system-level scripting language, leaving them without any level of support for the product whatsoever. Determining the identity of this developer is left as an exercise for the reader.
Via Jon Udell, Lee Felsenstein now has a blog on Salon. Jon mentions his role as the long-time moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, but what I remember him more for is the Community Memory project, an attempt to provide publically accessible computer terminals which unfortunately never worked out. One of the real pioneers.