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Today's blog
Clean shores 
| | After I privately gave Eric Norlin shit for running a blog that didn't work quite right on my browser (or this blog, since I couldn't discover the unique URL for any of his individual items), he not only fixed the thing but gave it a pixel job. Looks real good. |
| | By the way, neither his pointer to the No Logo piece in the Financial Times, nor that piece itself, mentioned the source of the "No Logo" line: Naomi Klein's book No Logo and NoLogo.org, the No Logo Movement's Slashdot-like Web(log) site. Since that site hadn't taken notice of the FT piece, I just submitted a pointer to it. I imagine it'll show up pretty soon. |
Time out to gloat
Now just think what they'd do with your baggage
| | How's this for creating a brand image: America West is now known for repeatedly putting unaccompanied kids on the wrong flight |
One less mouth to reed
| | I was just out doing errands when heard on NPR that Larry Adler died. Although the guy was 87, it still made me wince. Far as I knew he was still putting out music. |
| | Adler was the greatest harmonica player who ever lived. He also hated calling his instrument a harmonica. His preference was "mouth organ" (which always sounded dirty to me). |
| | He was a shameless name-dropper, and he had a vast collection of them. How many musicians can claim friendship with both George Gershwin and Sting? The way he played Rhapsody in Blue made me think Gerschwin had written it for Adler personally. |
| | It was Larry Adler who made me pick up the harmonica. And if he had ever heard me play it, I'm sure he would have told me to put it down again. |
A slightly more free Dmitry
Bet that's one story Linux Today won't pick up
| | Linux Journal just broke Paul Ferris' story about Linux Today astroturfing on its own pages. It took guts for Paul to write the piece and for LJ to publish it. Hm. Think Linux Today will pick up any more Linux Journal stories? |
Outa site:
| | I'm on the phone with Grady Hannah of Linuxcare, trying to get some quotes together to run in Linux Journal, and out of the blue he just called a company (that we'll kindly leave nameless) the next dead thing. Far as I know you heard it here first. |
The final stage of delusion is when you think your customers want to be kept in that box
| | Here's Craig on what went wrong with Novell and Netscape: |
| | Where both companies faltered is when their respective leaders failed to maintain the vision of freedom zero and succumbed to the temptation of euphoric success and shifted from a strategy based on "freedom of choice" to one of "customer lock down." |
| | Context: Craig brought the freedom zero vision to Novell when he came there (at its inception, roughly) and took it with him when he left. |
Demonstrating another meaning of the word "shot"
| | We're still new in our neighborhood. There seem to be a lot of kids around, but Jeffrey doesn't know any yet. So yesterday after preschool he stood in the front yard and yelled "Neighbors! You can come over and play! I have a swing here! I have a play structure!" There was nobody around, but that didn't stop him. |
| | After a while a couple of little girls strolled by with their sitter, and we made introductions. Jeffrey, who likes girls and shows off shamelessly at every opportunity, stood on the lower rung of our essentially decorative front yard fence and shook it to show how strong he was. It wobbled so wildly that he lost his balance and flopped down on the ground, all but disappearing in the ivy. "I'm fine," he said, dusting himself off and climbing back up the fence for a second try before I told him to climb down before he wrecked the thing. |
| | It turned out they were headed to the school yard down the street, where Jeffrey will start kindergarten this Fall. So after they disappeared Jeffrey and I came inside, changed into better shoes and headed up the street with a couple basketballs, to shoot hoops and see if the girls might be interested in getting to know Jeffrey better. I counseled him about not coming on too strong, not that it made any difference. |
| | We had a good time. The older girl explained that kindergarten here was a lot of fun, and the younger girl explained that she had only recently turned four and wasn't really in the same chronological class as Jeffrey, who will turn five in October. Mostly I think she was afraid of competing with him on the jungle gym (excuse me: "play structure"), where he swung around like a monkey on amphetamines. |
| | After they left I taught Jeffrey a thing or two about soccer, which he had never played before. He immediately started bragging about how good he was, so I put some moves on him, dribbled the length of the field and nailed a goal from about 40 yards out. He was impressed. So was I, actually. It felt great. |
| | Background: the full extent of my athletic career consisted of a week on the varsity soccer team at Guilford College in 1966. It was the school's first attempt to put a team together, and we consisted of guys who mostly played intramural ball in high school. My high school was a German Lutheran establishment where soccer was a bit of an obsession, so I had some experience, if not much skill. We were led by the football team's assistant coach, who had a paunch even bigger than the wad of chaw stuffed in his cheek and knew approximately nothing about soccer. My fondest memory from that week was taking the ball away from that dude every time he tried do anything with it. He was awful. It's too bad I didn't stick with the program, or I might have gotten into shape for the first and only time in my life. But somehow the coach — who was smarter than he looked — discovered that my grades sucked and kicked me off the team. |
| | But basketball was my favorite sport anyway. I sucked at that, too; but at least I had one skill: I could shoot from the outside if nobody guarded me. That was it. I couldn't dribble, pass, rebound or ply any of those other skills one usually expects of a skinny 5'9" white guy who shoots a lot from out where people don't knock each other down too often. But having one shot meant I wasn't chosen last when we picked sides in a gym or a playground. Those of us for whom sports consists primarily of humiation avoidance know what I'm talking about when I call this an achievement. |
| | But that was thirty years ago. Now I'm a skinny white guy with my own paunch and the endurance of a soufflé. But I can still hit about 20 percent from 3-point range, which impresses Jeffrey. |
| | And he's starting to get into hoops too. Since he's clearly going to be a tall guy, he should be kicking my ass in two or three years, tops. Maybe by then I'll be in shape. |
Bad news for what's-their-names
| | Says here that branding is starting to suck wind. Got that one (like so many) from Eric Norlin. |
| | Speaking of which, Eric yesterday observed that The Standard is also taking air through the aft orifice. Mostly I just notice that they're a lot thinner, which makes it easier to find Larry Lessig and James Fallows. They also have a new look that resembles something off a European newsstand, but maybe that's the idea. |
Smelling an Erratum
| | Alert readers JD Lasica and Deborah Branscum teamed up to observe the effects of both bad URL tagging and bad copy editing in yesterday's blog. Because I had a ' where a " was required, the HTML parsed in a way that made the text say Blogdex is Deborah's, which is not true. Blogdex belongs to MIT, an preposition that belongs to both German and Yiddish. |
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