Category: Uncategorized

No response from Verio, but e-mail is back up now. It doesn’t appear that everything got through from yesterday, though, so re-send if you don’t get a response.

Not sure what’s wrong with Verio right now, but my pencoyd.com e-mail is down for the count right now. Can’t send or receive. Filed support notes via two different methods, but the toll-free numbers just warns that only limited support is available due to Hurricane Wilma, especially if your servers are hosted in Boca Raton. My website is up, but my e-mail is not, so maybe they are hosted differently/separately. My original account was with Best Internet, back in 1996, but they were bought out by Verio long ago, and while I’ve severed the DNS ties and a few others, I haven’t left Verio for this main domain. This kind of incident doesn’t encourage me. If you sent me something at home and were expecting a reply, be patient… or send it to my work address, first name dot last name at cnet and then a dot com. Hope to update this entry with good news in the morning.

Update: Back up again on Tuesday morning, with no response from Verio.

After three months on the shelf, making money for Netflix, The Iron Giant DVD finally made it to the player on Saturday night. The final selling point on taking the film of the shelf was its length: the movie is less than 90 minutes. Perfect for this tired parent.

What I knew before watching: animated; good reviews; director is Brad Bird, recently more famous as director of The Incredibles

What I knew after watching: animated; fun for adults, but fine for kids, although not sure it’s worth it for a five-year-old; surprising folks do the voices (Vin Diesel (!) does the Iron Giant’s voice, Jennifer Aniston does the mother, etc.)

If you watch the DVD, make sure to check out the short feature on the making of the Duck and Cover short which appears in the film. Funny at the time, and even better to hear the whole song.

Metacritic score: 85 out of 100.

Three items which made it through my scan, click, read, close routine in the last 24 hours:

• Media: Mark Glaser probes media companies’ deep ambivalence about Yahoo. Make sure you read the first comment, where Glaser adds an after-deadline quote from Charlie Tillinghast of MSNBC.com. Tillinghast is the only one who comes right out and says, in essence, that news sites providing content to Yahoo are helping dig their own grave. I’ve never met Tillinghast, though we crossed email/phone paths back in the Snap.com days in 1998. (Hardly memorable exchange, but Tillinghast is a name you don’t confuse with others like, say, Roberts.) Now I really want to meet him.
• Media: Vin Crosbie sounds like Cassandra once more, doomed to be right but never believed (or maybe just not followed). But Vin, why no links to your earlier pieces on what should be done? Probably easier to link than repeat yourself.
• Management: Mike Kelly writes about making progress visible, and why that’s important both for the employee and the manager.

“Hey, today I turned five.” That’s the soundtrack from the boy to his sister this morning, even when they are still “sleeping.” You can’t beat the anticipation and excitement of a birthday at this age.

I appreciated reading the hardcover copy of The Cathedral & The Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revoluionary, even as I recognized some of the ironies of the act.

First, the hardcover book, published in 1999, is out of print. Second, Eric Raymond published every essay in the book for free online long ago… which may explain part of the first irony, although the paperback is still for sale. Third, at this point in time, many of the ideas he popularized in these essay have become almost background to the way the tech world works… which should be seen as a tribute. Fourth, I had read the title essay several years ago, so why in a time when I’m starving for deep distractions did I spend a few evenings several weeks ago flipping through this book rather than jumping into something entirely new to me?

Because while living the technology-media intersection/collision during the last decade-plus, I tend to find similarities between the tech world and the media world… especially those media which cover the tech world. There are more than one analog to be found, but I marked one when I was reading.

From this understanding, we can analyze the Lockean property customs of hackerdom as a means of maximizing reputation incentives; of ensuring that peer credit goes where it is due and does not go where it is not due. (page 104 of the hardcover print book)

I’m not so big on Mr. Locke, but the latter half of the quote was worth the first half.

Among reporters and editors, whereever they may work, a similar ethos of proper attribution of peer credit beats strongly. Otherwise, why would people fight so fiercely for credit and scoops? The side effect is fairly positive for the audience: a constant stream of news and “follow-the-leader,” with different people and publications playing the leader at different times. But it’s also a game that never ends. The rules are not written down, nor agreed to by all parties. Can you say… frustration?

Anyway, if you haven’t read any of the essays, or if you’ve read some but not all, find some time to acquaint yourself with the full essays, not the headline alone.

Side note: I’ll bet that ampersand in the title plays havoc with parsers. Why isn’t there a key on the keyboard that is guaranteed to NOT be used for anything but signaling “No, really, this is a character for computers, not people.” OK, that’s a foolish idea. (My son would tell me not to say “stupid.”) But I’ve seen ampersands foul up more publishing systems than I care to remember, and I’m neither terribly far along in years nor travelling in multiple content management system circles. But enough about the ampersand.

I’m not sure I get it. Via The RSS Weblog, I read about Blogarithm, which lets you know via e-mail that a blog you follow has updated.

Huh?

I do know RSS is not (yet!) for everyone, but I hadn’t thought there still was even a sliver of market opportunity for doing update notification via e-mail. But then I thought about my own behavior. I still sign up for e-mail alerts in certain circumstances, both because e-mail often demands action and because not all services yet offer RSS. So e-mail is definitely still lingua franca when it comes to information transmission. Still… for blogs, where RSS is a native tongue? Hmmm… didn’t we see this movie? Where’s Spyonit now?

Paul Ford, in Followup/Distraction, says there “at least” two kinds of distractions, wide and narrow. My abstracted definitions follow (though you’ll want to read the short essay):

• Wide = time wasted you will never get back.
• Narrow = time wisely spent chasing a thread whose unraveling may tie up a loose end.

Can you tell the difference at first? Probably, if you give the “look at the shiny new thing” impulse a half-second pause to consider the choice. As Ford says:

I’m smarter, then, with my computer on, but not much deeper.

Deep, to me, is the capability to focus on the goals, not the competition. Dick is talking about business, but competition rarely feels limited to the workplace. I don’t think blogging makes me deeper, but it is less shallow than simply consuming, which I do often enough. [Via 43 Folders]

I’m nearly caught up on the life I put on hold while News.com was re-introducing itself a short while ago. Carving pumpkins, reading feeds, exercising (a little bit), and thinking about various tidbits I want to blog. But not tonight.

Well, except for this Fortune article from Friday, where David Kirkpatrick tell readers about Big Media’s Challenge: Taking on the Tech Giants. In the article, he uses What’s Hot and Big Picture as two example of where CNET News.com is mixing technology with media to make a better experience.

In my first go-round at CNET (Snap, NBCi), I described the company as a media technology company trying to become a technology media company. I think it’s even more complicated than that now, but if Kirkpatrick is to be believed, that mixed heritage will serve CNET Networks well. I hope so… I love the intersection. Lots of crashes, but a pretty exciting place all the same!

What kind of day is it going to be when you wake up to find Slashdot comment on the possibility of The Princess Bride being made into a musical? I think a good day.

There are the usual posts about why this non-technical piece of rumor/news was posted on Slashdot, and one commenter called the kettle black, scoring 5 for insightful:

Erm, wouldn’t the story of a pretty girl who rewards with her devotion the poor and unlucky but hard-working and cleverly inventive young lad with a taste for ironic word-play be of significant interest to your generic young male geek?

Or have their mating habits changed?

With 165 comments so far, not the most striking thread on Slashbot, but works for me.