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Saturday, April 17, 2004
And now I can throw it away 
| | Ran across a card from La Taverne de Ripaille at the Park Hotel in Grenoble, France. Must have been from 1994. Spring. |
| | I was having dinner alone that evening. The place was empty when two young, well dressed French men came in with a tall American who looked familiar, somehow. He was an older guy. Sixties or seventies. A politician. Democrat. Stuart Symington? Pretty sure Symington was dead. Somewhow the guy reminded me of Pat Brown, but I could visualize Brown, and this guy was too tall and skinny. Even a bit lanky, like Lyndon Johnson. |
| | The man spoke no French, but his companions spoke English. They were terribly curious about President Bill Clinton, who was still somewhat new at the time. The old guy spoke frankly, unaware that I was also an American. For all he knew, I was just another French guy. Nobody to worry about. Furniture. |
| | I don't remember what the guy said verbatim, but the following is close enough. |
| | "The thing you have to remember about Clinton," he said, "is that he's a liar." |
| | "But isn't lying something that politicians often do?" one of his companions asked, somewhat sheepishly. |
| | "Yes," the guy said. "But Clinton is different. Clinton lies all the time. He can't be trusted. That's his biggest problem. Other than that, he's very good." |
| | "How do you deal with that?" |
| | "You just have to remember that he lies." |
| | Ever since then I've hoped to run into a picture of this guy, so I could match the words with the man. But I haven't. In fact, I'd pretty much forgotten the whole thing until I found this card in a box of crap from an old office drawer. |
Saying no to Uh oh
| | Yesterday I needed to connect a Linux laptop to the Net by Ethernet rather than Wi-Fi. The unit lacks a light that says ethernet is connected, and I didn't know if the ethernet wall outlet was live. So Mitch, Linux Journal's tech guy in Costa Rica, gave me an idea over a Jabber IM session: plug a hub into the outlet and watch the lights. |
| | Turns out I had an extra hub I'd bought for $1.98 from a thrift shop downtown. It has bright green lights. So I plugged it into the outlet, pointed the lights to the closet where the wiring patch panel lives, and patched a cable from the hub there to various ethernet sockets on the board that fed all the rooms in the house, until a little green light came on the hub and I was in business. Later, when the connection to the printer in another room went down, I did the same thing, with my wife watching the little hub substituting for the printer in the outlet in the printer's room. Now the laptop and the printer are rocking and all's okay with the world. |
| | I say all this because I've reported on so many damn things going wrong over the years. It's just nice to note when something goes right. In this case, two things. Or three if you count the work that went into thinking through the wiring closet, which I did with our electrician about six months ago. |
Amen, sister
| | Journalism and blogs are the karass and the granfalloon. They need each other, but can we please please please stop talking about either/or or and or but or if? As if? Really. I've had it. Get over it. Now. |
| | ...The real issues are what does media -- any media -- look like, how does it rethink it's role? Cause you still gotta get the city council meeting documented even if ten bloggers write up their opinions on Mayor Bob. Bloggers may or may not get it all out there, though the city council may post the transcript and that too is disintermediating as hell. Though the argument is also that the press documentation is sometimes as skewed or worse than many strictly opinion blogs. So fine, have both. Can the J be the organizers of our new chaos, one of many professional moderators? Who cares if the press has perspective? So do bloggers. |
| | The International session is going on now. The RealAudio link on the Webcast page is old, RealPlayer tells me. But there's a live video coming from here. Found that out by IMing with Loïc, who's in Spain. |
| | Listening to the beginning of Jeff Jarvis' session here: |
| | The Webcast sounds good. And Jeff is an outstanding moderator. |
| | To be fair, BloggerCon isn't a produced by a big conference company (most of those feeds have problems too, in my experience). What we get is provided by volunteers doing the best they can with limited time and resources. The IRC appeared to work fine. I was also in touch with folks there over other forms of IM. Those are robust and simple low-bandwidth systems that do a good-enough job, considering. |
Most understated blogger award goes to:
| | Of course, his work speaks for itself. |
Money talks
Where new?
A dessert wax AND a floor topping
| | I agree bloggers are improving journalism -- and greatly improving news distribution -- but I don't agree journalism is a "closed profession." |
| | Some nice grist for the BloggerCon mill, there. (Also nice to be missed.) |
There are responses to this message:Re: Saturday, April 17, 2004, David Eaton, 4/19/04; 10:52:58 PM Re: Saturday, April 17, 2004, DC Stultz, 4/17/04; 5:43:16 PM Re: Saturday, April 17, 2004, lou josephs, 4/17/04; 1:06:03 PM
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