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Under destruction Don Marti just sent me a "mindless link propogation" note pointing to a song by Timothy F. Crist off the Worm Quartet album, which you can buy on MP3.com for $5.99. It's called "I don't give a shit about your website." A sample lyric: So I went out for a walk, Remembering Thom I just read that Thom O'Hair died last week. Thom is a radio legend in the Bay Area and also one of the founding spirits of the Strawberry Festival at Camp Mather in the California mountains. His obituary tells the basics. All I want to add is that Thom was one of the hearts who pumped real blood into real radio while it lasted. If you ever loved KSAN, KMET, KKCY, KFAT or any of the other great stations Tom served in their heydays, he's the spirit to thank. I knew Thom mostly on line, when we were both heavy participants in Compuserve's Broadcast Professionals Forum. He was totally impassioned. Man, that stuff is so gone. What a fucking bummer, too. Lately he'd been running Fat Music, a site descended from the legendary KFAT Radio, which lives on today in KPIG, which has less range in the air (Monterey Bay vs. KFAT's old Bay Area-wide signal) but plenty on the Net (it was the first commercial station broadcasting on the Web). I see there's an audio Tribute there that ran on KPIG. It's in RealAudio. Thanks, Thom, for giving Real Radio the best balls it ever had. Be afraid Among the few ads in what remains of Business 2.0 is a series of Macromedia 5 x 5s that paints people who don't use Flash as stupid, criminal or both. ("96% of online users have Macromedia Flash Player," they all say. "The other 4%, frankly, scare us.) For awhile I've agreed 100% with Jakob Nielsen that Flash is 99% bad. After thinking about it for the last minute or so, I've decided that the remaining 1% should allow for delusional and self-defeating acts of public masturbation. California as a third world country My cousin lives in Equador, where they still ration electricity. They get volts for about half the day. The other half they just do without. For an hour and ten minutes yesterday, we were in Equador. As a deliberate "rolling blackout," PG&E rationed the state's electricity. Demand exceeded supply, so supply was allocated. We're in Block 3, our bill says, and ours was one of the minority that got turned off for a while yesterday It wasn't a huge deal, though some warning would have helped. Afterwards I spent an hour getting a surprising number of clocks going again (VCR, TV, microwave, oven, answer machine, thermostats, lawn sprinklers, outdoor lighting...), plus the computers, which don't all take kindly to having their plugs yanked. Looks like it's time to buy a generator and a UPS for the house. I don't tend to be paranoid about these things. The collusions of large public and private bureaucracies tend to screw stuff up in the long run. But if you really want to get creeped out, read what Tom Matrullo's following in his weblog. This is a complicated story. It would help if we changed just two rhetorical conventions when we talk about it: 1) defaulting to "deregulation" as the cause; and 2) calling customers "consumers." We can blame "deregulation" for the Califonia energy crisis as much as we can blame democracy for failing to prevent an ambiguous presidential election result. We probably would have been better off with no deregulation than the form of deregulation we got, but blaming deregulation in general doesn't help. I don't mind being called a "consumer" of television programs, because that's about the extent of my role (unless they're on a public station I pay for the goods). I do mind being called a "consumer" of energy that costs me about $500 per month. I'm a customer. Big difference. I'm actually optimistic. The most millennial events in the past year have been three highly instructive crashes: the stock market, the presidential election and California's energy bankruptcy. All three were due to lack of long term thinking and responsibility. I see it happening in responsible quarters of the technology community, and it encourages me a lot. The Clock of the Long Now is my favorite example, if only because it's focussed entirely on the issues of time and responsibility.
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