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Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Dishing up a satellite monopoly 
| | I'm an EchoStar customer, which means our house gets the Dish Network by satellite. Two satellites, actually, through a newer, wider (but still small) dish. Which gives us far more TV than we could ever watch. This isn't a bad thing. The Web has far more journalism than we could ever read, too; and that's a Good Thing. |
| | Now comes news that EchoStar is fixing to buy the larger but less bureaucratically efficient DirecTV from the Hughes division of General Motors, giving the combined entity 100% of the satellite TV business in the U.S. The two companys' anti-antitrust case is that this makes them a better competitor to cable TV. |
| | It's a bogus claim. The two services have constantly improved, innovated and expanded their offerings specifically because they compete with each other. Cable can barely compete with either. At its best cable can't offer more than a subset of the conucopia the satellite services can pump down from the sky, plus the local stations, which in many locations the satellite services can deliver as well. (We've been getting the LA locals for years, even when we lived near San Francisco.) |
| | The feds are completely out to lunch or on the take if they don't shoot this one down. |
| | (Unrelated: I see Dish now has Starband broadband Internet service. But the site doesn't mention speed or technical details. Can anybody point me to those? Thanks.) |
Still uncommonly good
Huh?
| | Does this mean that Linux now has negative value to Wall Street? I'm not sure how else to take it. VA came from two things, other than Larry Augustin himself. One was hardware and the other was Linux. The company dropped out of the hardware business earlier this year. Now they drop out of Linux, sort of. |
Email alzheimers
| | When I stupidly started downloading a grand or more of emails from the airport on the way to a plane in Miami yesterday, and even more stupidly tried to hasten the process in the midst, the laptop crashed, scrambling directories of approximately 10,000 messages. Some, I suspect, were lost. |
| | My point: if you sent me anything that required a response in the week before Monday, you may want to send it again. |
It takes one to disco
Where the rubber leaves the road
Three so far
| | Eric Norlin wonders how many bloggers, besides he, me and Scoble, have rolled a car. |
Scram
| | Of the 32 email items my client just downloaded, 10 were spam. |
| | Woops! Counted wrong. There were 13. I missed 3 identical items from an address in .ro promising a 36% return on stupidity. |
Close call
| | Nice to read Scoble is okay. Bummer about the car. Interesting that the whole matter was blogged in minutes, first by Dave, then by Robert himself. An excerpt: |
| | I unhook my seatbelt, drop to the roof of my car. Turn off the ignition. Crawl out the door. And say "fuck" once again. |
| | His description of the accident perfectly describes the surreal qualities of time and life in the course of a rollover car accident: |
| | The weird thing is that the car seems to get smaller as it crunches. The rapidly-moving road is coming closer to my face. I hold onto the steering wheel and try to keep my face from meeting the windshield that's coming toward my face at an all-too-rapid pace. |
| | When I was nineteen in the Summer of '66, I rolled a '63 Volkswagen Beetle. I was going around a curve on a country road in North Carolina when I passed over a patch of loose gravel and the rear end spun out. I wasn't going more than about 35, but now I was going only a little bit slower, sideways. Then the road came up to the window and passed overhead. Three times. I wasn't wearing a seat belt (they were rare in those days), and the whole time I kept trying to grab and hold on to the bottom of the seat. The car finally tumbled to a rest on the side of the road, scraped and banged all over. There wasn't a skid mark anywhere. The rear window was sparkle on the road surface. In the midst of the debris trail were my shoes, right beside each other, looking as if I had just stepped out of them. |
| | I appeared to be unharmed, although when I took my shirt off later in the day, I discovered that my torso had a number of bruises, and my left arm was abraded under the armpit, probably because it was hanging outside the window, which had been open. |
| | The car brought $450 at a scrap auction — not bad since it was $1200 new. And at some deep level I've never felt completely safe going around a curve again. |
MORE musings
| | It would have been the height of political incorrectness to give my Geek Cruise talk using PowerPoint. So I zero-based the whole thing using the original presention program, the one PowerPoint aped ten years ago and still can't equal in either performance or compositional speed. I used MORE. |
| | I still use MORE every day as an outliner. But it has been many years since I used it to compose or present anything on a public screen. |
| | And lemme tell ya, it rocked. It was so much fun to use, and so fast, and so intuitive... All the old keyboard shortcuts came back to me. I missed a couple of PowerPoint conveniences, but none of the crashy bloat that has come to characterize that program over recent years. |
| | It's funny, but I remember how MORE seemed so labored and slow sometimes on those old machines. I would create graphics-intensive presentations that all but demanded huge hard drives (by '92 standards) and more memory than anyone without big bux could contemplate, and would usually suffer the consequences. This time I created a big presentation full of graphics, and everything I did with it was instantaneous. It was as if the laptop needed to think about nothing. Amazing. |
Active Buzz
| | Got some major hang time with Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords on our last day in Florida. He drove all he way down to Miami from Orlando to pick us up from the boat and share some of his time, some of which he devoted to showing me ActiveWords, for the first time, on his laptop. I was impressed. So was Dan, I see. |
| | Like Dan, I wish ActiveWords also ran on Linux and/or Mac. It has that texty power and speed you expect from command line programs, which are mainstream on Linux and UNIX, and increasingly on Mac since OS X (with its UNIX foundation) came along. Think of it as something across between grep and QuicKeys, yet a superset of both. Think text-based instant shortcuts to anything and everything you might want to use or search for, including identities in directories, documents, parts of documents, Google searches, whatever. |
| | ActiveWords behaves in use like part of the OS — a handy improvement that you can switch on and off at will — which is why I think it ought to be interesting to Microsoft. Even the "Active" name has a Microsofty aspect to it. |
| | You can download a 30-day free trial copy. I'd be curious to see what the Windows users among ya'll think about it. |
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