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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Bloggercon Pre-con Shakedown 
| | Never mind. It's over now. But we want you to tune in tomorrow, so I'll |
'wich half
Which is why they should call it the Chevy Similar
| | "Crank Windows", Steve Gillmor and I agree, is a great name for the lead singer in a failing band. Crank Windows, whose raspy tenor is the familiar signature of Corduroy Barfwash, was found unconcious today... |
| | The subject came up when I reported that Searls 1st Law of Car Rental (No matter what car you want to rent, you'll end up with a Chevy Cavalier Cobalt.) applied when I didn't get the Ford Focus ("or similar", in tiny type) that Budget said I'd rented online. |
| | Specifically, I told Steve that the shitty Chevy I'd rented came with crank windows. |
Bloating to death
| | Mike Taht points to the stalled Stevens bill in the Senate. When I was at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York last month, one of the technowonks there told me this was exactly the idea. Because, deep down, Stevens doesn't want anything to happen, and to preserve the current status quo. He can appear to side with the carriers, while pursuing this hidden agenda, by encumbering the legislative cart with so much baggage that it simply breaks down. |
| | I have no idea if this is true, but it seems plausible. |
| | Meanwhile, I think Jamie Lewis nailed the situation with yesterday's quote du jour. His point, restated: We need to incent the world we want rather than regulate the world we fear. |
The first coming of outlining
| | I first met Dave at a Comdex in Atlanta sometime in the eary 80s, hulstling a new product called Think Tank. His company (was it Living Videotext at that point? dunno) called it a "thought processor". I don't think there's ever been a better description. |
| | Outlining was made for me. Even though I hated outlining back when they forced us to learn it in English class, I loved what I could do with it on a computer. |
| | MORE was Think Tank's successor on the Mac; and I did almost all of my Mac-native writing (and later, presenting) in MORE, even after I could only use it in Classic mode after OS X came out. |
| | Why did I think outlining was so cool? |
| | See, most of us don't think in the linear or hierarchical ways that outlines work on paper. Instead, we think in the ways outlines work on computers. We jump or drift from topic to topic, elarging one point, orphaning another. We expand and collapse topics and subtopics as they move in and out of our immediate attention. A good outliner helps us record and keep track of all that, with simple keyboard commands. If you're a writer like I am, an outliner like MORE is a godsend. With it I could write sections of an essay (or a book), organizing and re-organizing my prose at any number of ways and levels. |
| | And it worked for groups, too. Keeping group notes — what we called technography — was made extremely easy and flexible by a good outliner. |
| | That's what Dave and his comrades invented with Think Tank and expanded with MORE. |
| | I don't know why MORE didn't do better in the marketplace after its early success (it had many outstanding reviews, and a devoted following). Maybe it was the sale of the company to Symantec. Maybe it was flawed PR (some of which I handled when I worked on MORE's case for Symantec). Or maybe it was the fact that Microsoft included outlining in Word. I never could figure out Microsoft's outlining. In fact I hated it so much that I never bothered trying to learn it at all (or much else about Word, either). |
| | Mostly I came to the conclusion that outlining was ahead of its time. Outlining, I've lately been thinking, is something best suited to the writing environment we call the Web. In particular, the Live Web that's syndicated and followed in something close to real time. (I write this blog, in fact, in an outliner that leverages much of what I used to have in MORE.) |
| | I'm hoping that we'll bring outlining into full presence at Bloggercon IV. That's The Plan, anyway. I'll tell you more after Dave and I get together and plot things out this afternoon. |
Best driving songs
| | I've been getting more and more annoyed by how loud Starbucks stores play the music they also sell at the counter. So much so, in fact, that I've taken to avoiding Starbucks if I need to spend more than a few minutes online. |
| | In fact, I've come to the provisional conclusion that this is Starbucks' idea. More "turns" that way, no? |
| | That said, the Starbucks where I'm sitting now is playing a collection of Motown classics that includes Junior Walker's Roadrunner, which is my second-favorite pound-on-the-steering-wheel driving song of all time. |
| | My favorite is Danny Gatton's Cruisin' Deuces, which I heard one day on KPIG while driving down Highway 17 into Santa Cruz, and dug so much that I went straight to a record store and bought the CD. This is also the instrumental I'd love to make a theme song if I can ever "clear rights", much less get my act together enough to actually podcast with any consistency. |
| | So, since I'll be driving my customary 350 miles down to Santa Barbara late Saturday or early Sunday, I thought I'd put together the provisionally definitive list of potsw (pound on the steering wheel) driving songs, starting with those two. |
| | There are great non-potsw driving tunes, of course. One of the best is Nelson Riddle's Route 66. Problem is, you might drive off the road while it puts you to sleep. |
| | POTSW tunes get you into Full Driving Groove. They're cocaine that doesn't leave traces in your pee. |
| | No need to put your entries here. Just use the potsw tag, and I'll point to them here, if not here. |
Dept. of Corrections
| | Boy, did I get a bunch of stuff wrong. Not only did I forget lots of stuff I needed to remember for this trip (and remember some things I needed to forget too, I'm sure). |
| | Back when Dave was recruiting me to come participate in Bloggercon IV, I somehow got the idea that it ran Thursday-Friday, not Friday-Saturday. It wasn't until I got online at a friend's house at 3:30 in the morning, after taking red-eyes from Boston (though Chicago and waits at SFO baggage claim and the Budget "FastBreak" booth that lasted from 1:00 to 2:15am) that saw the real schedule. |
| | The bummer is, I'll miss the Solstice Parade in Santa Barbara, which I highly recommend if you're anywhere near the area. Imagine Burning Man as a parade and you've got the idea. |
| | But it's cool. This is going to be a remarkable conference. I'll be getting together with Dave in a few minutes to plan what I'll be doing though the course of the event. I'll be writing more about that shortly. |
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