Blog

Adrian Holovaty shared the news on his blog that he and his wife were travelling to the West Coast, and he invited people to connect with him. I took him up on the invitation. Only had 25 minutes or so, in the middle of the workday, to welcome him at the office, but I enjoyed meeting a person behind a website I read regularly. It’s always informative to talk with others facing some of the same online news challenges. Lawrence.com and the other sites from World Online in Kansas are often cited as leaders in the space, and it’s impressive what a small team can do. There are advantages to size, of course, but nothing rocks like a small team all moving at the same fast pace. I don’t have any trips to Kansas planned in the near future, but at least Adrian and his wife got a sunny day here in San Francisco. Enjoy the rest of the vacation. I’ll also have to check out Simon Willison’s blog, as he’s on that World Online team, too.

The boy is alright, but we did have to go to the emergency room this evening. He sliced himself enough that we didn’t feel comfortable trying to handle it. He’ll be fine. As usual, the emergency room took some time… he wasn’t the most urgent case. Bumps in the road = being a parent.

I’m stealing the title from another blog (can’t remember which one), but here’s a host of links I’ve been meaning to record. This small bunch will clean out my inbox. I’ll leave my Safari bookmarks for another time.

• Tim Bray on OSCOM sessions, back in September, comments:
  

  The sessions (I thought) went well, and here’s a surprise: approximately two-thirds of the attendees, here at the world headquarters of publishing technology, were hearing about blogging and RSS for the first time. I obviously think that blogs and simple syndication are going to change the world; I hadn’t realized how early in the process we are.

• Metadata is nothing new, from Ned Batchelder (not sure where I got the link, since I’ve never read another word on his site), has a great overview, including this comment:
  

  Electronic data on the web has made metadata even more powerful: both the original data and the metadata about it are published in similar ways.

• Old column in Slate by Michael Lewis on why daddies don’t kill their babies, despite early, sleep-deprived inclinations that way. Part of an occasional series… I’ll have to go back and read the other columns.
• Megnut pulls out an interesting quote from an essay by a Berkeley professor about how political conservatives in the United States use language to control the conversation. Her comment at the end? “I guess if Republicans continue to relieve us of taxes, they’ll eventually relieve us of the infrastructure our taxes fund.”
• Before There Was Web, There Was ViewTron about one of the early online services. I remember my friend getting Prodigy back in the mid-1980s… his father worked for IBM, which was half-owner of the original service, with Sears (!), so almost a beta-tester. Blocky and slow. I also saw Minitel in France in 1991, for a few minutes, and the little I saw was more electronic directory than the ‘rose’ pages which were (I’ve read) more popular. Anyway, always good to know where you’ve been, as the author (Howard Finberg) points out at the end of his article with the inevitable Santayana quote.
• BBC article/interview with Jakob Nielsen on info pollution. “It is time to stop your computer deciding how your time is allocated.” But I like a clean in-box. 😉

I thought MyLastEmail.com sounded like a ridiculous idea. I beat Slashdot to this topic, where everyone except the original poster comes up with various reasons why this is a dumb idea. One area I hadn’t considered: how do you know the last email won’t be blocked as spam? Ouch.

Fun Flash presentation of Lego construction… the actual construction of the Legos themselves. [via Emergic, via Boing-Boing]

A friend gave me the Forgotten English calendar for 2003 last Christmas, and I’ve been enjoying several of the words. On Saturday September 28, the word of the day was nannick, which means “to play idly, to fidget.” However, I saved that day’s page not because of the word, but because of the tidbit about the date, as quoted in its entirety below.

On this date in 1801, Britain’s first census was begun. Eighty years later, a follow-up survey was conducted in which residents were asked to furnish their “rank, profession or occupation.” Verbatim responses, as preserved by the London Genealogical Society, included:

• Aritifical scone-maker
• Decayed publisher
• Emasculator
• Rust attendant at lavatory
• Proprietor of midgets
• Beef-twister
• Separated from head
• Fatuous pauper
• Fifty-two years an imbecile
• Examiner of underclothing
• Knocker-up of workpeople
• Supposed to be a lady
• Sampler of drugs
• Hand in Hartley’s Jam
• Turnip shepherd
• Gymnast to house painter

What do you tell people when they ask you what you do?

Was it THX or Dolby that first started running those short promotional clips before the movie started touting how incredible the sound system is? “The audience is listening” is my memory of one of the tag lines. (Per Google, it’s THX.) I still think my audience can be counted on two hands, but there’s at least one more reader in the ‘audience’… my father. Hello!

Who knew he was going to Google me? With a name like John Roberts, it’s close to Googling for John Doe, but it worked well enough, I guess. Not sure what terms he used, but he found me via my comments about Chuq Von Rospach’s note about a CNET.com review. Always good to get a reminder that anything you say is public if you put it on the web. I try and write that way most of the time, conscious of the possible misconceptions, but you can’t stop just because you’re worried. I stop — or, more accurately, don’t start — because it’s hard to justify the time for this against all the other things I’d like to be doing, or should be doing. Like updating my daughter’s website, for instance, rather than this journal.

But all the same… greetings to my father.

I also had lunch this week with a friend I haven’t seen for a few months, and we talked about blogs and business. I don’t connect those topics much in my writing here, but the appeal of making a blog work as a business (hint: not so simple) glitters like false gold, unless you’re going to work at it. Best of luck to Mark with HotelChatter.com, and to Vin with Sportscolumn.com, but micro-content is not micro-work. I’ve got a day job which gets me going, so I’ll just continue dabbling here, wandering about in the intersection of the personal, professional, and everything in between.

The adventure continues. Thanks to Comcast (no thanks), we’re back to 13 channels. So much for the Rugby World Cup and beyond. Too ridiculous a tale to tell right now… we’ll see if we have signal in the morning.

Dave Winer of UserLand created MailToTheFuture.com in 1998. Just something he did on a lark, seemingly, where you could set up an email to send to yourself (or others) in the future. I used it a few times to send myself an email as a reminder for a dentist appointment or small things like that. Since I use my inbox as a To Do list, and always email myself notes at home from work and vice versa, I like the idea, though I have not used it in years.

This morning, in an email newsletter from Marketwatch, I read the following:

E-mail that’s here after you’ve gone to the great hereafter

Mylastemail.com will deliver your parting thoughts after you’re dead. The $10 subscription e-mail service is based in Tampa, Fla. It is all about, “planning ahead and leaving positive last minute memories for family and friends,” according to Karen Peach of LifeTouch LLC. Account holders can log on and update their e-mails anytime, to keep “messages relevant, up-to-date and even more personal” she added, comparing it to the practice of leaving personal letters for relatives after one’s death. “It’s a bit of a strange subject,” Peach conceded, “but after thinking about it for some time, people say it’s a good idea.”

Aside from being morbid, how is this a business? More importantly, how do they know you are dead? That’s the only part the original MailToTheFuture.com cannot handle… unless you know a bit too much about when you’re going to die?

From reading the FAQ, it seems that you have to register (on paper) a formal request for your trustee to send a copy of the death certificate to the company. That sounds like more trouble than the $10. Couldn’t you just leave a note with your trustee? Another amusing point: for your $10, you get 5 emails (you can buy more, of course), for a three year period. If you’re still alive at the end of the three years, you have to pay again.

After thinking about it for a few lousy minutes, I don’t think it’s a good idea, despite Karen Peach’s citation of ‘people’. Let’s check back in three years and see if they are still with us.

All the channels beyond basic cable went kaput sometime on Thursday. I was running around during the interim, noticed the problem yesterday, but really had time to deal with it today. FYI, the TiVo provided the evidence of when the problem started, because a Premier League football match was recorded at 1am Thursday, but the Rugby World Cup game at 5pm was missed. Argh. Anyway, called Comcast this afternoon. As in prior calls, I was talking to a real person very quickly, and the person was friendly. Spent nearly 20 minutes on the phone, with the man on the phone trying different things on his end, without success. He was able to turn off my digital cable box from his end, but none of the other authorization or configurations he was trying from his end worked. So now we have to wait until Wednesday for someone to come to the house and see if they can untangle the problem. If it’s digital cable related, the visit is free. Otherwise, $20 expense. Could be worse, other than the wait. I know that Gene the stereo guy left everything in working order on Monday, since no problems until Thursday… but how they can turn the machine off remotely but still not fix the problem remotely?

Why did we get -more- involved in TV? I’m a huge fan of Fox Sports World, honestly, but it’s almost not worth the pain. Easy to understand why upgrading is such a slow industry-wide process.