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March 31, 2006

...it's typing.

Good thing about blogs: no editors.

Bad thing about blogs: no editors.

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Posted by John at 10:02 AM | | Comments (3)

March 30, 2006

Ad guys are stickin' it to the MAN!

Adrants » T-Shirts Says 'Drop Shadows, Not Bombs':

Now here's a t-shirt any peace-loving art director would feel comfortable wearing to work, especially to that meeting with the right-wing, highly conservative, Republican client.
a-pah-TAY that bourgeois, righteous ad dude!

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Posted by John at 7:45 AM |

March 25, 2006

Web 3.0 launches in 10 minutes.

Caterina.net: It's a bad time to start a company:
Web 2.0 isn't all that. Hello?. I don't think there's a rising tide lifting all boats here. I don't think Web 2.0 is the magic bullet some people seem to think it is either. It ain't the features, it's that AND the business. Tagging was a great feature, no doubt. But Flickr was at break even -- about to tip into the black -- when we were acquired.

Man, them webkids grow up so fast nowadays. Here you have one of the early beneficiaries of the Web 2.0 hype already saying that the 2.0 webblet is over and that these kids today don't know nuthin' bout starting a bidness. While I am certainly skeptical as regards Web 2.0 and its marketroids (remember, kids, a marketer -- cluetrain or no -- is just a liar with a degree,) it's interesting to have someone from what was once a scrappy lil' startup (where is Game Neverending? Pyra? Bueller? Bueller?) suddenly acting like a, ahem, BigCo. Or maybe the overproductivity of the careerist Web is even more endemic than I initially thought. And what is that whole "it's so hard to find good help" spiel in there?

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Posted by John at 1:18 PM |

March 23, 2006

The upgrade.

Well. As you can probably tell from the defaulty look of things around here, I have indeed upgraded. And after some thought, and having given some consideration to Anil's comments, I decided that I wanted to give MT another shot. mph has stuck with it, and I have a great deal of respect for his opinion. This weblog has remained at v 2.62 since the paid releases came out; oddly enough, I do actually qualify for a free personal license - this is my only MT weblog and I'm the sole author. I do my own tech support, so I don't need that.

So. Here I am. A lot of stuff I'd stuck in the template - most notably the Gooooogle ads template, which I think I have made 5¢ from so far - will probably get added back over time. (Maybe even Google Analytics, which I think I've looked at twice since I set it up. I don't pay very much attention to my traffic, since there isn't much of it except for the damn panda obsessives. No link, find it yourself.)

To 6A's credit, the upgrade was completely painless if still geeky, and so far, everything seems to be working well. Onward...

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Posted by John at 8:32 PM | | Comments (4)

March 22, 2006

Evolve or die.

Analysis: What's eating Bill Gates? | TG Daily:
The question was literally shouted at him, will you open your API the way Google does? The answer is no. And yet, by choosing "no," and letting a few thousand intelligent people hear that "no" loud and clear, Microsoft takes a huge gamble. Mix '06 is the company's best opportunity to make new friends and allies in a market where, Microsoft concedes, it has a lot of catching up to do. For the first time in years, other players are setting the rules, and Microsoft is choosing not to play by those rules. All of a sudden, Microsoft finds itself the outsider, the holdout, the would-be up-and-coming player, and Bill Gates finds himself playing the role of the conservative stalwart, resistant to change, impervious to the winds of history.
I don't know that it's a calculated risk so much as it is just obstinacy. It's a very good article, read it.

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Posted by John at 7:47 AM |

And a floor topping.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Windows Vista delayed:

But we have been through product slips before (before I was a Microsoft employee I was a beta tester on Windows 2000 which slipped years after the first test CDs arrived) and I’d rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.

Hey, with Microsoft you get both a slipped date AND a cruddy product. That's real value for money.

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Posted by John at 6:52 AM |

March 20, 2006

Man of the (Some) People.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » McHack:

Here’s a wonderful thread with fast-food workers sharing their recipe hacks (and if you doubt they’re real, check the spelling).

The next time Jeffy "Citizen Populist" Jarvis goes off on his "TV is too culture, you elitist snobs" hissy fit, this should serve to remind you what he really thinks of the "people." Hypocritical fool.

Posted by John at 9:04 AM | | Comments (4)

March 19, 2006

When you have snatched the Kool-aid from my hand.

l.m.orchard's OPML blog: Saturday, March 18, 2006:

Ever notice that most of the same people who have a grouse with OPML and RSS have a hard time with PHP, too? (This includes me, historically.) All successful technologies, all a bit dirty. I have a hunch about why this is so, but I've not yet had spare brain cycles to articulate it. But, just think: Why don't we have a Xanadu web run on Lisp serving up perfect, crystalline RDF?

Ah, the new minion begins the long inexorable slide towards his vewwy own lawyers' letter someday.

Posted by John at 7:45 AM | | Comments (1)

March 14, 2006

Tonstant Bwogger Fwowed Up

From the Middlebrow 2.0 department:
Eight (kottke.org)

As an eight year-old, kottke.org will be starting the third grade this year and tackling such subjects as fractions, cursive writing, the 50 states, photosynthesis, and the Dewey Decimal System. It will also be taking the bus for the first time and is quite excited about that.

This might have overjumped twee so far that it landed in cunnin'.

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Posted by John at 9:57 AM |

March 9, 2006

Bloggy Ponytails are Job One

Six Apart - News and Events: Using Blogs to Build Your Business:

The bottom line? The ability for companies to communicate easily to the audiences that matter using blogs isn't just something we talk about here at Six Apart, it's how we've built our own business. We believe in business blogging, and we want to make it as easy and rewarding as possible. Most of all, we can't wait to see how the next wave of businesses and enterprises makes smart use of blogs.

Right, that'd be it then. The weekend project is importing this site into WordPress. This level of corpobabble is unbearable.

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Posted by John at 9:06 AM | | Comments (7)

March 6, 2006

Mail? Jail? Huh?

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Better mail than jail:

Regarding my skills as a technologist. I’ve done more than 500 video interviews that are all in the public eye and mostly unedited and filmed in one take — most of which are an hour long and have a lot of back and forth and I NEVER prepare, so all the questions are off the top of my head (except for the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer ones, where I went in with a list of questions and then went impromptu halfway through each of those interviews). With diverse subjects and interviewees from Kernel architects to Xbox game developers to hardware designers to beer makers.

You try doing that many interviews with that diverse a set of technologists without knowing the difference between my ass and my face. But, just proves the old adage that you can’t please everyone all of the time no matter what you do.

This makes you a journalist, not a technologist. Using the standard you've set for yourself here, John Markoff is as much of a technologist as you are.

One other thing. How do you reconcile

That said, no, I don’t write software so if we’re gonna get into that kind of pissing match, I’ll lose. Doesn’t mean I don’t know enough to at least know the issues.

with the "where's your file format?" line you've been using on critics of RSS? Isn't that a pretty similar pissing match?

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Posted by John at 8:42 AM |

March 4, 2006

2:00-2:15: goof off.

Boing Boing: Games to subvert post-industrial capitalism:


Molle Industria makes subversive mini-games aimed at undermining post-industrial capitalism

Cause as we all know, Web 2.0 is all about undermining productivity, as evidenced by its state religion, Getting Things Done. In the real version of the game, you fire the slacker and hire 3 twenty-something white guys who live at the factory in order to get iCrunch 2.0 out the door on time.

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Posted by John at 11:03 AM | | Comments (1)

March 3, 2006

Magnadoodle.

Dave’s Wordpress Blog » Under the Radar Notes:

We’re hearing a pitch from a company named Dabble DB, a name that looks pretty innocuous on the page, but just try saying it out loud quickly without breaking out in laughter.

This is the sum total of "reporting" on the conference. Informative, isn't it? The rest is complaining about how MS doesn't have every port in the firewall open, two irrelevant updates to previous posts made elsewhere, and a link to an egoboo quote. And this is linked from the Duddership as real-time notes from yet another conference. More like "doodles." What a waste of time.

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Posted by John at 11:18 AM |