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| Friday, August 30, 2002 |
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At least somebody's having fun 
| | While the right seeks converts, trying both to persuade and entertain, the left spends its journalistic energy policing the movement. |
| | No shit. When a rightie says something disagreeable to fellow travellers (around here, bloggers), their opinions don't get called something ending in ist. At worst all they get is an argument. Glenn nails it: |
| | ...it's really the whole Left that went wrong, shifting its focus from Abbie Hoffman's pranks to Andrea Dworkin's prudery over the course of a decade -- a decade in which, surprise, the Left lost its popular support. |
| | Over in the inkstream, Powers reports, |
| | As gray and unappetizing as homework, The Nation makes you approach it in the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis -- where else can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by saying, "We're having big fun over here on the right." |
| | Of course, the righties have sugar daddies like Rupert Murdoch behind them, and the political winds since 9/11 have been blowing their way, making the sailing easy. Warblogging, well done as it often is, remains a summer soldier sideline. Meanwhile it's Winter soldier time over on the left. |
| | After The War starts, it'll be a lot less fun all around, I'll betcha. |
And it's a real purty one too
| | Trumpets to the parapets! Jerry Michalski has a blog! Wow! And it's all meaty and thinky and humane, just like I'd expect. Wunnerful, wunnerful. |
| | Welcome aboard, old buddy. |
| | And thanks to Ev (and his newly artful and white-spacey blog) for the pointer. |
Journalistically Incorrect
| | Actually, Bill's already got something of a blog. It's a start, but it's got that delegated, glands-off look. It's... you know: a site. |
| | Hey Bill: Sites are for buildings. Blogs are for players. Do you know Gulf War II ("Operation Eventual Freedom") is being planned and run by one guy with a blog? Like, in his spare time? It's part of the Free Brains for Bush movement, and it's happening here. |
| | TV is dead. With you and Miller gone, what's left? Letterman's fangs wore to nubs ten years ago. Leno replaced McMahon, not Carson. |
| | News? The Big Three are relics. Decoys. Rather and Jennings are human furniture. CNN is a talking scroll. The only fun at Fox is watching Greta's old face come back. |
| | Remember that stuff you talked about here? We're doing it. It's the new ride. Come along for it. |
Doc Pro
| | Over at Linux Journal I added my own story to the two reports Jeff Gerhardt filed covering Caldera's morphing into SCO, the larger and older company Caldera acquired last year. |
Fair share
No smoke, same fire
| | Cheyenne is smokeless, and dealing: I have gone 3 hours without a cigarette and I am dying. Now for 10 minutes straight I have done nothing but sneeze. People are starting to stare. |
| | Last I saw her was when I was leaving Gnomedex at 4am. She was outside the hotel, enjoying one of her last. |
| | Hope she sticks with it. Might help to look to Dave for inspiration. |
| | I know it's not the same grade of jones, but I'm two weeks off carbs and it's been real hard at times. But I'm down twelve pounds and two belt notches, so far. Twenty pounds and four notches left to go. |
Self-exile
| | Have a good time, big guy. It really does look like a cool idea. |
True
Meow
| | Sleep
When I closed the TiBook and took it outside tonight (like I always do), it crashed when I brought it back to my desk, hooked everything back up while it was still asleep, and tried to make it wake up. All I got on wakeup was a blue screen (actually, a pair of them, since I use a second monitor as well). This never happened under 10.1.5, though it occasionally did under earier 10.1.x versions. |
| | Appearance
Better looking fonts in Carbon apps is a big plus. IE 5.2 doesn't look blurry on everything. Apple's site appears to have nice bit-mapped fonts. This blog is just prettier in an anti-aliased way. |
| | Search
Search for file names and content has been broken out of Sherlock, and works much better. With a 60 Gig hard drive and a 40 Gig external FireWire drive, I need to give it a few hours to memorize stuff for Search by Content. |
| | The Sherlock Yellow Pages are awesome. Fast and handy. Soon to be indespensible, I'm sure. Havent figured out how to tell it where I live yet, though. Hence: no driving directions. [Later... thanks to readers for telling me (duh!) to enter that info in preferences.] The movies, stocks, flights and dictionary are also cool (especially movies... wow). The Internet search facility excludes Google and seems to have no serious advantages over Google (even though it aggregates results from lesser engines), so it's not a primary tool. The rest of the features, however, are mostly terrific. Worth the price of admission right there. And proof positive that there are better interfaces than browsers for lots of Web-type stuff. |
| | Instant Messaging
I'm sure iChat is a wonderful IM system (no chance to play with a buddy yet on it) but the fact that IM remains mostly a closed corporate experience rather than a Net-native one like email and the Web is a wasted opportunity for all the BigCos involved. Apple reportedly uses the Jabber protocol (the only IM protocol with a chance at Net-native ubiquity) for some of its peer-to-peer iChat functions, but does nothing to help it along like the company did for 802.11b, FireWire, and a host of other now-ubiquitious standards -- and like they're doing right now for Rendezvous (ZeroConf). In fact, they give the Jabber protocol no credit at all. (Perhaps they don't know there's no need to credit the company or even the .org. The protocol is free & open.) Anyway, I'm surprised Apple isn't pushing universal IM on the Net, when the strategic opportunity is wide open. After all, why brag about Windows compatibility and do nothing toward becoming compatible with IM systems other than AOL's? There's still room for Apple to take the lead here, and I hope they do. |
| | Personal Information Management
Without an obvioius way to import contacts from my Palm files, the Address book is useless to me. I undersand a calendar is coming along soon, and maybe a better import facility will be available then. If it is, I'm on it. Palm Desktop has sucked forever, and is still in beta for OS X. |
| | [Later...] Many readers have pointed out that Palm exports its calendar archives in vCard format, and that Address Book imports them as well. And they're right. It's pretty simple. Something in Help would be nice here. |
| | Email
I'm tempted by the Mail app, just for the anti-spam feature, although I remain highly attached to Eudora and its many independent windows. So far I haven't been able to get Mail to talk to my mail server, FWIW. |
| | Other stuff
Fave application so far: Calculator. It has basic and advanced modes, both of which finally have a paper tape! Thankyou thankyou thankyou. |
| | Huge bummer: DVD Player no longer works. "The current machine or system configuration is not supported [-70013]," it says, with a big red stop sign and a white exclamation mark. I suspect this isn't Jaguar, but the fact that I'm using a G4/500 TiBook that inherited a bunch of stuff from a G4/800 (I cloned everything from one onto the other.) No idea how to fix it. Suggestions welcome. (I have ver. 3.2, fwiw.) |
| | [Later...] After thinking about it, I'm with Eric now on the matter. Apple's real gripe has little to do with copyright or the DMCA. It's nothing more than a licensing issue. Apple doesn't want anybody else writing patches for iDVD. Fine. End of story. |
| | Apple committed a huge PR mistake (certainly by its legal department, rather than by it's excellent PR department) when it brough the despised DMCA into the conversation. That cost the company a lot of points with potential customers as well as with the developer community. |
| | That's all I've had time to check so far. More when time permits. |
discuss
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