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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
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 Wednesday, January 29, 2003
started 1/29/2003; 8:18:46 AM - last post 1/30/2003; 1:28:45 PM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, January 29, 2003 
1/29/2003; 12:18:46 PM (reads: 6887, responses: 5)
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Blog Angeles 
| | we have an imbecile in the oval office. |
| | lord knows most of you keep trying to make something good from that |
| | I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d¹etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ³Christians,² and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or ³PPs.² |
| | To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete¹s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! |
| | And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. |
| | What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can¹t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody¹s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! |
Blech support
| | We're needing to open some Peachtree files in some other accounting system, in either Linux or OS X. Any recommendations? |
Atkins Rulez
Anybody covering it?
Blournalism
| | RSS creates a level playing field that's open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's not even 7AM. |
| | ... and you can read your friends kicking the tires of your President's State of the Union speech: He's not wearing a uniform. That's a relief. |
So that's what it is
Say where?
| | The nature of blogging allows us to point to what another individual said, adding our opinion without mutilating theirs¹ in the translation. |
| | Each opinion in the string remains intact while the message goes ¹round. |
| | This is very different from the Telephone game where the message is always translated by the forwarder. (The news media is more like the telephone game.) |
| | The ideal scene of blogging being "the voice of the people" is that the precise blogging voice echoes repeatedly, thereby gaining velocity and power. |
| | Interesting. I never though about blogging as insurance against the distorting effects of the telephone game. Now I do. |
Now is the Winter of our Content
| | It's a peer-to-peer thing. Reading about it makes me think "crossloading" is a better term for what happens than "downloading," which implies something more top-to-bottom than peer-to-peer. |
Homebound
| | Had to sit on the tarmac at RDU for an extra half hour, so I ran like hell at ORD to get from the last gate in the F Concourse to the last gate in the B Concourse, just in time to make the plane to LAX. Amazingly, my bag made it, which was good (see, United may be broke, but it doesn't suck completely), because my keys (dangerously equipped with a nail clippers and the smallest model Swiss Army pocket knife) were in it, and I'd needed them after I got off the third plane at SBA. |
| | It was about freezing when I left Raleigh, snowy and 20-something in Chicago, hazy and about 62 at the airport in L.A., and a sunny 65 in Santa Barbara, down from 70 at midday. |
| | I'm tellin' ya, there is not a nicer U.S. airport to come home to than SBA, or a lovelier U.S. town. It always gives me such a lift to arrive here. The mountains are green, the air is sweet with Spring flowers, and baggage arrives immediately, since the baggage pickup tent is a couple hundred feet from the plane. |
| | The way I figure this morning, if I'm going to have an unbelievable amount of backed up work to do, this is the place to have it. |
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Dave Winer - Re: Wednesday, January 29, 2003
1/29/2003; 3:36:05 PM (reads: 545, responses: 0)
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Doc, RSS is not involved in what Google does with news, and of course it should be available in RSS and maybe (probably not) use RSS as a source. I would bet that they are using the NY Times XML format to get data from the Times. It's RSS-like, but not RSS.
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Frank Patrick - Re: Say Where, 01/29/2003
1/29/2003; 5:12:41 PM (reads: 1075, responses: 0)
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Interesting that as a newbie to this world of blogging and RSS, I recently wrote something along parallel lines (triggered by a piece on Human Filtering of RSS by Terry Frazier), using a metaphor that I'm sure has been mentioned by others before...
This building on the work of others, or standing on the shoulders of those who came before, strikes me as an informational corollary to the "open source" movement in software design, in which a whole is the outcome of many pieces of input. Those of us adding more bits and pieces to the flow, sometimes creating eddies and retracing currents of conversation, contribute to the benefits of those downstream, unimpeded by the gate-keepers, the old-school publishers, and the "certifiers" of "professional" expertise.
The ability to trace back through blogs (if notated with integrity) can serve as the change log of the insights and/or knowledge.
Now this is all assuming that I know even a little bit about what I'm talking about when I say "open source," but that, I must admit, is a huge assumption.
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Julian Bond - Re: Wednesday, January 29, 2003
1/29/2003; 7:19:45 PM (reads: 1061, responses: 0)
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Re Google. You might also ask "is RSS involved in how Google presents Google News, and if not why not". I don't want to have to support the Google News search to RSS code for ever. Come on Google, provide a feed.
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Michael Gold - Re: Blech Support
1/30/2003; 1:14:28 AM (reads: 621, responses: 0)
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We're needing to open some Peachtree files in some other accounting system, in either Linux or OS X. Any recommendations?
Hmm. I don't know of other accounting aps in those OS's that open Peachtree files.
I do know that Peachtree uses a Btrieve engine to read/write its data - maybe check with Pervasive to see if there is a Btrieve engine for Linux or OS X. But, sadly, its probably not as easy as using another Btrieve engine on another OS and opening the data file, but hey, who knows...even if this worked some coding would probably be necessary to drive the Btreive engine and then import to another accounting app...
Oh yeah, there is also a $400 COM interface that can read the Peachtree Btrieve data file, I think the people behind it have a way to export from Peachtree into Access. Maybe it can be done in multiple steps. This might be more effective than the 1st option above, but still requires some coding. I think the object is called Pawcom. A Google search will probably find it.
(sorry for the ramblin' answer!)
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Vincent Outlaw - Re: Wednesday, January 29, 2003
1/30/2003; 5:28:45 PM (reads: 563, responses: 0)
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