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| Friday, April 27, 2001 |
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Making like a baby and heading out:
| | Tomorrow morning I'll take two trains back to the old place in the Bay Area, then a speaking gig on Monday. Back on Tuesday night or Wednesday, driving my old Subaru, filled with crap I've been missing the last month down here. Lotsa prep to do, so expect thin blogging for the next few daze. |
Turning up the volume on that strange, deep, scraping sound:
Get small:
| | The Net radically lowered the thresholds of conversation, enterprise, publishing, entrepreneurship — just about anything that stood to benefit by connecting everybody to everybody. But what about manufacturing? Why should the entire "consumer electronics" business, which consists mostly of stamped-out crap chocked with off-the-shelf-parts, belong to Sony and Philips? For that matter, why should the high-margin computer-syncing corner of it belong to Palm and Handspring? Why shouldn't a few hackers in San Diego, who care more about What You Want than the Production Matrix ever could, get a slice of it too — and redefine the whole manufacturing sector in the process? I think that's what the manufacto-weenies at Agenda Computing are up towith the VR3. |
| | By the way, I have sources who say that the German Manufacturing Economy is packed with small-timers who are ready to gear up and make all kindsa neat shit. |
Gonzero Luminoso:
Flee Speech:
| | Tom gives us a Revised First Amendment. Best line from the previous blog: Time to develop a bomb that leaves intellect intact, destroying only the copyright restrictions. |
Deep death:
| | Don points out that Napster is melting away while advertising for implementors of its shrink-to-fit business model. The Forces of Supply are killing it. requiscat in carborundum |
Blug report:
| | I finally got OS X working on a test Mac — a very nice almost-new G4/500 Dual-Processor cpu with a matching studio monitor. Lots of stuff works surprisingly well, including the new iTunes. The main problem so far is with the default browser, Interenet Explorer 5 (apparently "carbonized" for OS X). I could name other problems, but the big one is with Javascript. When I go to one of Craig's tutorials, "javascript:openViewlet" brings up a new (correctly titled) window with this text: |
| | alt="Your browser understands the <APPLET> tag but isn't running the applet, for some reason." Your browser is completely ignoring the <APPLET> tag! |
| | I'm downloading Netscape now, which will run only in the "classic" OS 9 environment. Hmm. It requires that certain settings be set up first. Now it's asking for the same settings it asked me for when I set up OS X. Why? I'll go ahead and duplicate what I set before... It.... well, we'll see when this is all through downloading. Slow and complicated, even on a T1...... Okay, it's up. And:::: it doesn't open the page either. Just a blank white page. How about IE5 in OS 9? Interesting: I can navigate the OS 9 directory with OS X's Finder, but when I open something in OS 9 it has no bouncing icon to tell me what's happening. This is very UNIXy, so I don't mind. But when I lose patience and click on it again to open it, a box tells me it's already "opening." But: it never does open, it turns out. So there you go. |
| | FWIW, I just downloaded Fizzilla, but it won't expand, de-archive or whatever you call it. Not sure why and no time to find out. A missing app or plug-in, I suspect. |
Old blogger learns new trix:
| | I'm screwing around with Rules today. Right now I'm working with a modified version of the one Craig volunteers here. Anyway, expect the look to keep changing. |
| | At the moment I'm wondering if there's a rule for vertical spacing between levels (what was called outline spacing in the old MORE rule system). Currently I'm getting 1.5 line spacing within a level (in MORE terms this is Level 2 and the headlines are Level 1), but no spacing between levels. |
Blogroll call:
Iceberg proliferation:
Here, have a torpedo:
| | I just checked Verizonwireless.com to see if it had some corporate orifice that might be capable of conversing with a customer. Naturally, I clicked on the Customer Service link, which leads to sales page with a URL that improbably ends with "customer_care." Click on the contact link there and you'll find an 800 number for Customer service. I just called it and avoided entering my phone number, pretending to be a potential sales customer interested in something other than paging, roadside service, extra phones or whatever, forcing eventual contact with none of the above. Eventually this led to a helpful human being who gave me the "direct" customer support number, which is 800-366-5665, and this piece of advice: hit #0 (that's "pound zero") at any given point in the maze to move to the next step toward eventual human contact. I'm sure the poor bloke will be fired for excessive customer empathy or something, but he'll find better work. |
Eat service and die:
| | This morning I got through to a Verizon Wireless customer service "associate" from "Texas Accounting Services" or something. She explained that Verizon's call service maze still ended at her company, which no longer handled service for California customers. She then gave me a new number to call. The recording answered, "We are experiencing an unusually high call volume at this time. Please call back later. Good bye." Click. Exactly. "Customer service" appears to be Verizon's asshole, and there is zero chance I'll ever do business with it again. |
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