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| Wednesday, January 16, 2002 |
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Geeks casting the Net at sea 
| | Bernie Dunham has checked in with the latest of his series of reports from the Perl Whirl Geek Cruise, via wireless connections on board the Veendam somewhere in the Caribbean. |
| | Here's the cool context: the big complaint during last Fall's Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, which I reported on here, was lack of wireless connectivity. And that barely edged out complaints about lousy Net connectivity, period. So Bernie and friends took it upon themselves to correct matters. To say the least. |
| | Bernie's earlier reports (in reverse order) are here and here. |
| | I believe there is a Mac cruise coming up that Glenn will attend. I hope for his sake the system will be up for that. |
Quote of the day
| | Astronaunt Pete Conrad, on discovering after returning from the Moon with a retrieved device on which bacteria had survived the Lunar environment for 2.5 years: |
| | I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it. |
Slaphackery
| | My friend and fellow Linux Journal editor Don Marti has been has been having fun with Unisys' clueless intransigence about its intellectual property rights over the .gif standard — a position that has done much to reduce the degree to which .gifs continue to matter. The same fate will meet the .mp3 standard if the politics of ownership don't get sorted out. In fact, I predict that Ogg Vorbis will ultimately kick mp3's ass for that very reason. |
Wow
| | J.D. talks about his problems getting Windows apps to upload to his Web site since he upgraded to XP. Meanwhile I am having no trouble running any classic Mac apps on OS X. The only one that ever gave me trouble (only in OS X) was Radio Userland 7.x and now that's been replaced by Radio 8, which rocks on OS X. [Later... A friend just told me on the phone that the only way to solve some problems with Win 2000 was to re-install the OS, but that when he finally installed XP it was a very smooth process. All he had to do afterwards was re-install every application.] |
| | My only persistent complaint is that OS X does not appear to have its font/type act together. I've made the changes recommended by friends, but they're stopgap hacks at best. The fuzzy type problem is a real flaw. But it's the only flaw. |
| | In all other respects OS X on the TiBook (which I'm writing on now) is near-infinitely better. It goes to sleep and wakes instantly. Last night I unhooked seven plugs (speaker, power, 2 USBs, firewire drive, ethernet, SVGA monitor), closed the thing up, took it up on the roof, opened it up, quickly figured out how to set it up (for the first time) for wireless, plugged in a USB mouse, and hacked away. Then I closed it, took it downstairs, opened it up, watched the Mark Twain thing, wrote on the blog and did some correspondence, closed it up, brought it back down to the office, plugged all seven cables back into their sockets, opened the lid, and it was all back up again. The OS fired up the external monitor, recognized the Firewire drive, and had no problems doing anything other than remembering the background picture for the external monitor. |
| | And Radio Userland didn't miss a beat either. I just continued editing and blogging, like nothing had been interrupted. |
| | Uptime: 18 hours, 19 minutes. That's since the last install which required a restart. |
Huh?
| | I want to download Palm's public beta (have they ever had any other kind for Mac?) sync software for OS X. There's no download link from the download site, although there is a bright yellow button that says "Register for Public Beta." I went through all that, and it thanked me. Was that it. |
| | Okay, I just checked my email, and sure enough, it provides directions. But I have a sneaking suspicion that two things are going on: 1) A bunch of personal info just got harvested in the registration process; and 2) Keeping the software in beta relieves the company from providing support for it. Not that they should have to, since it's freeware. But still, I gotta wonder. |
| | By the way, the download from the Palm site is proceeding at about 3k/sec. Pretty darn slow. Hm. Just switched to the Apple mirror site, and it's coming down fast. |
It's the writing, geniuses
| | Mike points to Virginia Postrel's Age of the Editor speech and concludes, albeit tentatively, Whenever we try to explain what we do for a living, we perform this information sifting process. So bloggers may not be Journalists, but we do look a lot like Editors. |
| | In the recent past I made a casual distinction between journalism and Journalism that may have had more substance than I thought at the time. Tom certainly found some a few days back. |
| | What I see now is that our conversation has drifted to a division in caste. Upper-case (and caste) Journalism is authoritative, credentialed, certified by mastheads, while plain old lower case (and caste) journalism — what we do here in blogs — is something lesser: casual editing, filtration, gossip, back yard fence stuff. Whatever it is, it can't be Journalism. By saying "whatever it is," we imply the one thing it is anything but. |
| | Read between Virginia's lines when she writes, If blogs are so important and influential, how come the only two listed on Drudge Report are those run by people with New Republic connections? It's not what you know. It's who you know. |
| | Here, friends, we have the rhetorical ten-foot pole of elitism. "Good breeding," Mark Twain writes, "consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves, and how little we think of the other person." Capital-J journalism is, if nothing else, well-bred. |
| | Blogs aren't bred at all. Not yet, anyway. What we're doing here in is new, experimental, avocational, vernacular, noisy, personal, and no less occasionally brilliant than anything expressed in ink. It's a necessary temptation to measure it against the stable, the familiar, the institutional. But not a necessity. |
| | Capital-J journalism is a civilized grace funded and hosted by the publishing industry. Blogging, which consists almost entirely of little-j journalism, is underwritten not by the software industry, but by its independent iconoclasts. As Virginia says, it's who you know. |
| | There's something we bloggers have in common, regardless of whether we belong to the upper or lower castes (and cases) of Journalism. Or to both. We are all, each and every one of us, many things; but we are all writers. That's what we do here. We write. |
| | Mark Twain was many things too: traveller, businessman, adventurer, river boat pilot, reporter. But he was always at his best a writer. With a lower case (and caste) w. And so are we. |
| | John Taylor Gatto says no concept is more offensive to the industry we call education (which mills elites by the classload) than the abundance of genius in the world: the truth is that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. |
| | Gatto also says the true calling of the teacher is not to add curricular content to the empty vessels we call students, but to remove obstacles that prevent "the inherent genius of children from gathering itself." |
| | We may not all be Writers, but we each have a voice, and all of our voices are different. The genius of blogging is what it removes from the throats that run from our minds to our fingers. It lets us listen, finally, to Walt Whitman: |
| | Loose the stop from your throat.
Not words, not music or rhyme I want.
Not custom or lecture, not even the best.
Only the lull I like. The hum of your valved voice. |
| | Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams.
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. |
| | Long have you timidly waited,
holding a plank by the shore.
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again,
and nod to me and shout,
and laughingly dash your hair. |
| | I am the teacher of athletes.
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own.
He most honors my style
who learns under it to destroy the teacher. |
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