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| Friday, August 13, 2004 |
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Dept. of Corrections 
| | I put up a post here earlier today with a huge error in it, regarding Craig's List and eBay. Rather than try to explain what's really going on, I'll just point straight to Craig's own post on the matter, and be grateful that we all write in pixels here, rather than ink. And thank Craig for setting me straight on it. |
Are we having phone yet?
| | In one room last night there were four nearly identical Sony Ericsson cell phones — all, improbably, with the same Old Phone ring tone. One phone would ring and four guys would reach for their pockets. John Perry Barlow had one of them, and knows enough about the UI to give tech support. So he kindly programmed mine to vibrate in my pocket when it rings. |
| | The headline above was Britt's summary of the whole thing. |
Chugging
PubThanks
| | Met the PubSub guys last night, so I got a chance to tell them their RSS feeds are top items in my news aggregators. |
| | We were introduced by Andrew Rasiej, at a reception for yours truly at his amazing house. If I remember right, it was Andrew's idea to call PubSub's service a "matching engine," which differentiates it nicely from search engines like Technorati's and Google's. I like the term. |
| | Got to meet and re-meet a lot of other folks last night too. More about the whole thing later when I have time. Meanwhile, a big thanks to Andrew and Britt for organizing and hosting the event. |
| | Bonus link: Britt's Get Over the Rainbow, which provides a blueprint for re-aligning political patronage with free-range interest groups grazing on the Internet's commons... then closes with this pull-quote: |
| | It's a strange reality we've built. The sweeping ambitions of statesman are overlapping the incidental expressions of enlightened citizenship. |
Missing Dish
| | By the way, when I saw McGreevey's news conference on TV, I had the same thoughts as David Weinberger. Being outed as a gay man is no reason to resign from office. Nor is being an admitted philanderer. (Ask Bill Clinton about that one.) As David says, No, obviously he's resigning because there's some real dirt that's going to come to light, rumored to be about sexual harrassment. |
| | What I wondered was, why stay until November? Dude, if you're serious about resigning, don't just stand on the trap door for three months. Pull the lever. |
Public backup
| | If I didn't appreciate Google enough already, their page cacheing feature made restoring my blog very nearly painless. |
| | A year from now, don't be surprised if everyone with an AOL, an MSN or a .Mac account automatically has a blog, and if those blogs use noncompatible means to interoperate with each other. Just like we've seen with instant messaging since the beginning. |
| | Well it's been a year, and Kurt was right. |
Pro occupation
| | What do you personally think of the US being here in Iraq and what seems to be the overall Iraq feelings about that? |
| | ANSWER: I wish that American Forces stay here in Iraq for a long time. As you know until now, there is no security in Iraq, so we need American Forces to stay here in Iraq with the help of police guys and the help of the ING guys. I think that the situation will be better. Most of the people they like the American Forces to stay here in Iraq, just to capture the bad guys, and just to get rid of the dangerous weapons. So we need American forces to stay here for along time in order to give the Iraqi's freedom and security. |
| | QUESTION: What was it like here in Iraq before the war when Saddam was in power? ANSWER: The situation was very bad. Saddam Hussein prevented us to travel to any country. If you want to travel to another country, you can't travel. Because traveling is very expensive also Saddam Hussein would collect money from you, you must pay the government 700,000 dinar. Too much expensive for a person to travel outside Iraq. We also have no freedom, we cannot speak, we cannot express our feelings towards our government. If you speak about political issues, they gonna arrest you and put you in prison. Three days ago I went to the passport office, I saw many people there, they were fighting with each other, they were shouting, and they don't stand in a line, so some of the workers that work in the passport office, they charge the people to pay, bribery, to get your passport. If you don't like to stand in a line, or like to stay with the people in the crowd, you should pay at least 100 dollars to the worker, to the employee, in order to get your passport. So this is what they did. |
| | QUESTION: Why did all these people want to get passports? |
| | ANSWER: They don't like to stay here. Some of them have relatives outside Iraq. There is no security here, and it's dangerous here in Iraq, so they want to go outside. |
| | QUESTION: Do you think The U.S. did the right thing by coming over? |
| | ANSWER: Yes the United States did the right thing about coming here. As I told you, to give the Iraqi people freedom. Because we don't have any freedom before the war. We can't speak, we cannot talk about the government, we can't talk about the president. We are restricted here in Iraq. |
| | QUESTION: What do you think of people that protest us being here? |
| | ANSWER: I think some of them are crazy, because why are they protesting? They protest for nothing. Why they protest? American Forces came over here in order to help them. I consider American Forces a friend to the Iraqi people, not an enemy, there is no need to protest. |
| | QUESTION: What was it like here in Iraq, when we first came over and started kicking some serious ass in the beginning of the war? |
| | ANSWER: The situation was very bad. Most of the people they were stealing, killing each other and the people were living in chaos. But the American Forces came here and they established everything, they gave the Iraqi people the right to vote, to choose their president, to choose their mayor, they help the Iraqi to build their country. But before the war the situation was very bad. Most other people tried to kill each other, they tried to steal, they tried to fight. But after the war, when American forces came here, they established everything, they help the Iraqi's, they helped by giving Iraq money to build their country. They fixed the water pipeline, they fix the power and electricity, they help the students, and they fix many schools. They paint many schools here in Iraq. So, they do a very good job. |
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