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Too smart to live The Street has a nice interview with our pal David Isenberg, which David was glad to point out for us in his latest SmartLetter, for which he does not yet provide a link. (Just keep checking here.) The interview is about Prophesy regarding the inevitable breakup of AT&T, which perhaps began with David's essay, The Rise of the Stupid Network, which is posted on David Weinberger's site. Since I'm also a David (yes, just ask my wife & Mom) and so is Dave, maybe it's time finally to admit the conspiracy. Highway Rob A thousand years ago, somewhere in the late '70s, when I lived near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rob Breszny and I both wrote for The Sun. The magazine was a lot more scruffy and wacky then. So were all of its writers. I think Rob still is. I'm like, just... old, which is scruffy enough. Anyway, somewhere in there, Rob suddenly moved to California. I learned about this by reading a piece he wrote in The Sun called Californicated, Santa Crucified. In it he talks about how Santa Cruz and Chapel Hill are two of the seven navels of the Earth or something like that. So fast forward to the late 80s. Rob is the very popular syndicated source of Real Astrology in countless local alternative weeklies. He's also the Televisionary (now also a novel by the same name) in a local band called World Entertainment War, which is not only good but funny as shit. By now I've long since moved with my rather adultlike kids to Palo Alto. It's sumer and I'm at my daughter's house on Myrtle Street in Santa Cruz, talking about the remarkable coincidence that Rob and I both ended up kind of in the same place. Then one of my daughter's housemates says, "Yeah, that's so cool. He lives right next door." We walk out on a small deck and there he is, sitting in the back yard below, having delicious sexual fun with a young woman. "That would be him," I said. (Forgive the Amazon link, but I want to support the dude and treat you to the book description there.) Later we had a couple of brief conversations about getting all of California's ex-Carolinians together or something. It never happened. But it was a delight today to discover a piece by Rob that I missed in an August Salon. The guy is a total treat. Dig it. Devolution I'm moving my computing life to Linux as far and as fast as I can — which so far isn't very, in either case. But the commitment is there. Meanwhile I decided to go one more upgrade round with Microsoft Office for Macintosh. I had no serious complaints about Office 98, frankly, and found much to like. But so far, Office 2001 is such a pisser that I'm thinking of bagging it completely. First, I was looking forward to group calendaring in Outlook. But Microsoft decided that, since Macintosh users all work alone (?!?), they'd leave group calendaring out. Oh, and they renamed Outlook "Entourage." Why? I mean, "Outlook" didn't mean anything, but why Entourage? Especially if you use it alone? But worst of all, they dumbed up Excel. Since Excel was born, back in personal computing's paleozoic era, Command-D meant Fill Down and Command-B meant Clear (or, as I thought of it, "blank" — as a verb). Both are gone. Now you have to use the @#$% mouse. Using the new Excel delivers so many more a what-the-hell-is-this experiences that I'm just ... amazed. Is Office 2000 for Windows this bad, I wonder? Can somebody please buy Corel and start to compete with these people? Especially since, for the past two years, 2much marketing=2much web site design Chris Macrae points us to a very well-researched and -written story in Soundbitten. Chris writes, "I don't quite know when verde.com - a sort of greenpeace portal gave up the ghost but the examination of Scient's role in verde's downfall has got to be read to be believed (at least from this viewer's eyes) ... I wonder whether other dotcoms have become hostage to their web builder in all the ways outlined...." I wonder too, but to me the story is about two other things. One is the excellent Soundbitten, which I had never heard of before. The other is about usability design, and it comes from Jakob Nielsen, who is quoted in a Tom Peters talk Chris also points us to. You can download here (it's a 184kb .ppt file):
Witch slapping Don Marti responds to Leonardo Chiariglione's response to Don's response to Leonardo's response to Don's response to Leonardo's challenge to hackers.
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