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| Monday, July 30, 2001 |
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How to make a valuable new service work like a pay toilet, only worse 
| | On the whole I had a very easy time connecting both on wires and over wireless 802.11b in San Diego. In fact, I'd say that Mac and Linux users on the whole had an easier time of it than PC users. But that was just my observation. Not exactly scientific. |
| | A bigger issue is the scammy way some providers are delivering their services. There's a bait-and-switch feel to getting nailed for a cost you don't expect, and some of these guys are proving masterful at delivering it. This story is a perfect example. |
Vetting a bloggy verb
| | I see Dave just got on the vetswagen. I didn't like "vet" when I first heard Chris Locke use it a few years ago (mostly because I had no idea what he was talking about and didn't want to admit it). But since it's just about all I do on my blog, I can hardly avoid it. (By the way, the vet the #2 v. tr. listed here. |
| | Unrelated (ya gotta read more of today's Dave to know what I'm talking about): if you're going to tattoo something to your forehead, make sure it's backwards, so you can read it in the mirror.) Just a little public service message. |
Jacking into the atmosphere
| | I heard about Cooltown at the O'Reilly thing. Now I'm reading about it. For the first time I sense a shift in context from wires to space. With 802.11b showing up in every Starbucks and hotel meeting room, and radical improvements coming to bandwidth in the existing cell infrastructure, I think we'll soon have the telcos talking about "Web class" connectivity, and "the last acre" rather than "carrier class" and "the last mile." |
Does vanity have an "egology?" Just wondering.
| | Interesting post by Ken Kennedy about Freedom Zero. My response vets some of the thinking I'll be putting in my Linux Journal report on the O'Reilly and Burton Group conferences last week. It'll hopfully hit the Web tomorrow sometime. |
Information Boulevard
| | What I love about blogging is its outdoor cafe nature. It's not all coffee & smokes on bentwood chairs outside Parisian cafés, but it's close: a cross between civilized socializing and journalism in its most literal form. |
| | This café analogy came to me at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego last week, where I often found myself in the surreal real world space where journalism and intellectual social networking: in a press room outfitted with abundant connectivity — both wired and wireless. Got some great hang time there with Dan, Craig, Rael, Clay, Eric, Tim and a bunch of other folks, many (perhaps most) of which were alternately involved in live conversation and live blogging, right onto the Web. Some of us were writing columns and other pieces for our employers. Others were writing more independent stuff. Others were just talking trash. But most of the time (so it seemed to me) conversation involved passing along didya-know? kinds of information, and and alternately asking and aswering questions — all of which pushed what-we-all-know to a higher level. |
| | Now that I'm back at the office, the mode is similar but a bit more slo-mo. An email from the Lemur points not to his own site but to JD's July 27 piece about what we might call the ad hoc formalization of online journalism. From there I jump over to Deborah Branscum's Buzz blog, the leap made easy by her listing among the few on J.D.'s blogrolling list. Lotta good stuff in Buzz, but one item really stood out because it seems to speak plainly about the matter of status amongst the blogariat: |
| | Speaking of popularity, I noticed yesterday that I've fallen from grace on http://www.scripting.com. Dave's tossed me down the column, way down from where I used to be. I don't blame him--that's what I get for my erratic devotion to blogging. |
| | Last week Craig pointed out to me that his blog has never even been on Dave's list (in case you don't know, it's the vertical column of links on the left edge of the Scripting News page). I know I'm on it, but I rarely pay attention to it unless it's to look up some URL I've forgotten (say, ironically, the most-read list). |
| | Other people have pointed out to me how important it is to make Dave's list. It means, naturally, a lot more traffic for the linkee. But is traffic what we really want? Isn't that a bit too industrial and broadcasty? |
| | Speaking of irony, Dave recommended early against doing something like his list (or many of Scripting News' other visual graces) on my own blog, so I'd leave more room for my own writing. He suggested putting my list on another page instead, which is where it still sits. That page, called Sites I Read Regularly when you mouse over the right coordinates at the top of my page, is titled Blogrolling on the page itself. |
| | But frankly it's there mostly for my own convenience. I like to go there every couple of days and click on some links that have turned blue, or to add some new links I've just discovered or had forgotten to add already. I also don't pay much attention to where in the list I add new links. Usually it's near the middle because it's easier for me to copy and paste around the middle of the page in the EditThisPage HTML editor. |
| | I'm also not sure Dave pays much attention to his much-observed blogrolling list. Some people have told me he does, but I've never asked. My guess is that he has matters more pressing than ranking his friends, or whatever else he's doing with the list other than adding to it and shuffling it around every once in a while. (Maybe he can correct me on this, but it shouldn't be that important.) |
| | Anyway, I'm finding myself a little bit bothered by the notion — even if it's true — that any of us are especially "big" or "hot" or popular in some other way. Maybe that's because what blogging tends to make us friends as well as journalistic colleagues. Maybe we rank our friends unconsciously, but it's bad form to externalize it, no? |
| | Maybe I'm also a bit creeped because I was not one of the popular kids when I was growing up. I didn't hate the kids who were popular, but I still have a gut-level understanding about what drove the bad guys to snap in Columnbine. (Somebody on a trumpet is playing "Taps" in the distance. How's that for weird?) |
| | My daughter, a theater director, gave me an education recently on the importance of status.Seems that acting is full of "high status" and "low status" characters, and that making status clear is a big part of what acting and directing are all about. |
| | I guess we can't help doing some of that here. But there's a limit to how low our status can get if each of our blogs is a cafe on the Web's wide boulevard. |
Death and amateurism
Putting the moves on mom
| | Yesterday Jeffrey said this to Joyce: "Mama? One of these days, when there's no school and no sitters, I want to take you out to the Seven-Eleven." |
Can you buy this guy's clothes and still avoid his company?
Prepare for the other shoe
| | I probably won't blog much more today because I'm working on my write-up about the conferences last week, for Linux Journal. I'm planning on saying some things that haven't been said before, and I doubt are being said elsewhere; so stay tuned. I'll letcha know when it's up. |
Happy Craig Day
| | I see Craig got pointed at recently by three out of four "big bloggers." Missing in action was his oldest friend among the four: me. So here ya go, buddy. Make it four-for-four. |
| | The  pointage was all about Tim's concept of "Freedom Zero," which Craig wrote about on Friday. Since then Craig's been having fun doing one of the things he did at the O'Reilly conference last week, which is give his friends (old and new) shit. It's teasing stuff. Craig likes to kid the people he likes, and it's often hard to tell because he usually does it with a straight face. |
| | I love Craig like a brother. He's been a first-rate friend for a very long time, but this last week was the first time we actually shared a hotel room. It was cool — literally — since both of us like the thermostat set around 65 degrees. We were like two boys at summer camp. Now that I'm back home, I miss him. It was a fun week. |
| | It's interesting to watch Craig struggle with writing a blog. Unlike so many of the other folks here (including all those who pointed to him recently), Craig isn't a writer. He's a student of language and extremely observant about meaning and nuance; but writing has never been his thing. |
| | Yet blogging isn't about writing, per se, methinks. It's closer to talking than most writing; and talking is something Craig does very well. As he writes more and more for the Web, I expect the job will get easier and easier for him. And as that happens more and more of his genius will show through. |
Post-Slashdot blogdown
| | From 16,781 reads of Thursday's Slashdotted blog, things have declined a bit. But who's looking? |
| | Meanwhile, JY reports some interesting secondary effects. |
Using the calendar like an oldies station
| | So people want to know what I did on my birthday. "Yeah, you feel old. Maybe you look it, too. But who cares? What did you do? Did you have a party? Eat cake? Go to a movie? |
| | So okay, okay. First we got up late and hung around trying to decide who was going to go for a walk and to where, and who was going to go to church if the phone would stop ringing. Cell phones don't work well at our new place, so we stayed tethered to the wall while the clock crept past half the mass. Joyce, Jeffrey and I ended up going to the 10am mass at around 10:30, just in time for the Eucharist. |
| | Afterwards we went to the Greek Festival in Oak Park, which was fun. Then we went to the apartment and tried to get Jeffrey to take a nap. Then Joyce took him to the wading pool while I talked with distant family on the phone: my Mom & sis in North Carolina and my daughter in Spain. Then we went out to dinner at Olio E Limone, an outstanding little Italian place downtown. Chef Alberto Morello and his wife Elaine hang out with the guests, making the place friendly and convivial. I think it's becoming our favorite restaurant in town. |
| | And then we went home. After our guests drove off, Joyce crashed while Jeffrey and I sat out on the deck in a rocking chair. I'm not sure if hte fog was high or the clouds were low, but the hills were thick with billows of gray. Jeffrey and I had fun examining the mist with a big flashlight. It gave Jeffrey a fun sense of power to whup the oaks with a cone of light that looked like the ghost of an immende baseball bat. Then we read all about plate tectonics in his favorite book (which I'll recommend highly when I remember the names of the authors). |
| | I promised Jeffrey we'd have our birthday cake the next day, since we missed our chance earlier that day (he had a sitter while the rest of us went to the restaurant). And then we both fell asleep in the mists. |
| | Not a bad birthday at all. |
Redefining middle age
| | So now I'm 54 for real. Shit. |
| | Well, my grandmother lived to be 107. If I tie her record, I've got another 53 years to go. Rationalization is a powerful thing. |
| | I'm reminded of what P.J. O'Rourke said about his bad habits. It went something like this: "I know if I quit drinking and smoking and driving fast, I could add ten years to my life. The problem is, I'd be adding them at the wrong end." |
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