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Archive: March 5, 2025
Archive: March 5, 2024
Archive: March 5, 2023
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 Here's an idea: what if it were possible to resurrect dead links automatically, using the awesome Internet Archive?
Frequent readers know, I like going back and reading old blog posts; in fact clicking Flight while having my first cup of coffee has become a daily ritual, and often inspires me to keep blogging.
Many of those old posts are great, but many of those old links are dead! Either sites are gone entirely, or the URL scheme has changed, or the specific content I linked is no longer online. But many times the old site and old pages are in the Internet Archive.
Hmm, what if a simple background process runs and gardens the old links? Try to retrieve the content, and if you get a 404 or the content is missing*, then try to find the corresponding content on the Internet Archive, and if successful, substitute the archive link for the original. Maybe a little popup could warn the user this is what happened when the hover over the link.
Seems doable, right? And something which would be generally useful, not just for me and my blog, but for everyone and their blogs, and for the Internet in general.
Stay tuned :)
PS thought: this would be a nice service to embed in a link-shortener...
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Archive: March 5, 2022
Archive: March 5, 2021
Archive: March 1, 2020
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 Yay, I'm back! Yes, it was a great trip* - thank you for asking - and no, I am not that thrilled to be back yet. They say a good vacation is one which you're glad when you're gone and also glad when you're back, so perhaps this one wasn't long enough :) Already planning the next one ...
* many pictures on FB
Meanwhile, it's all happening...
 So, do you think the Economist editors like Trump? No, they do not. But also they are committed libertarians and they do not like Bernie Sanders. A Trump/Sanders election would be a nightmare for them. Kind of like Boris Johnson running against Jeremy Corbyn... But somehow they have to rationalize their dislike of Trump (and Johnson) with their popularity (and results).
Wired: A tribute to Wikipedia, "one of the few remaining places that retain the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web". Wikipedia is the best, a beautiful thing based on user-generated content which somehow evolved to keep itself from being corrupted by its users.
 This is great: Construction of the Forth Railway Bridge. "Spanning 541 meters over the Firth of Forth, Edinburgh's Forth Railway Bridge became the longest cantilever bridge in the world when the future King Edward VII drove its final 'golden' rivet on March 4, 1890." Yes, there are pictures, and yes, you must click through to see them. Isn't it amazing what people were able to do before computers?
 Can we say this is cool? Solar Orbiter heads to the sun in mission to unravel its mysteries. "The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft is traveling through the cosmos. Its destination: the inner solar system. The 3,900-lb. (1,800-kg) spacecraft will work in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to unravel solar mysteries that have puzzled scientists for decades." Excellent.
 Yeah, so whatever happened to flying boats? At first it seems obvious that airplanes should land on land, but then, when you think about it, maybe landing on water is more logical ... nothing to build, water all over the place, and easy emergency landings on long flights.
 So this is amazing ... the true size of Africa. It's ginormous! I knew Mercator projections distorted relative sizes, but this is pretty dramatic. {I have to say, the Visual Capitalist is one of my favorite new sites, so much great stuff...}
 OMG: ELP's classic Karn Evil 9 to be made into a movie. Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside!
And I'll leave you with this MUST READ think piece from Peter Thiel: Back to the Future. Of all the people I've ever worked with, I find Peter to be consistently the most thought-provoking. So great...
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Archive: March 5, 2019
Archive: March 5, 2018
Archive: March 5, 2017
Archive: March 5, 2016
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Today I watched the 2016 Iditarod's Ceremonial Start, a slow procession of each musher down 4th Avenue in Anchorage, accompanied by their Iditarider (a passenger who's paid for the privilege of riding along at the start). The "live" coverage on Iditarod.com was great; charming, relatively low tech, and pretty informative. I especially liked the little vignette interviews with each musher; you can learn a lot overall by picking out the little pieces here and there.
Tomorrow of course is the Restart, when the actual racing begins. This year is even, so the Iditarod is taking the Northern Route, shown in purple on the map below:
The Idita-route ... click to enbiggen. In 2016 the race will follow the Northern (purple) route.
For those of you who are Iditarod rookies, welcome! It's an amazing event. Here are some of the key facts:
- The race is about 1,000 miles, from Willow to Nome. There are 21 checkpoints.
- There are 86 teams in the race. Each team has a musher (human) and sixteen dogs. Each team must finish with at least five dogs. If desired, a musher may "drop" a dog at any checkpoint, either because they are tired, injured, or for strategic reasons. Most teams finish with 10-16 dogs.
- Each team can rest or run whenever or however they please, but they must take one 24-hour rest (usually at McGrath or Takotna), then one 8-hour rest somewhere along the Yukon river (Cripple, Ruby, or Galena), and one final 8-hour rest at White Mountain. There is considerable strategy in where to rest and for how long.
- Dog sleds can run at 9-14mph. A team can run for 6-8 hours before it needs rest. The dogs need less rest than the mushers... and burn about 10,000 calories each day! A good time for the race is 10 days, and 8 days will probably win it. This year is expected to be a little slow due to ice and wind.
- Teams must carry [at least] a sleeping bag, ax, snowshoes, eight booties for each dog (to protect their feet from ice), an operational cooker and pot, and a veterinary notebook.
- No communication with the outside is allowed, other than conversation between mushers at checkpoints.
- The teams each carry GPS trackers. So we know where they all are, even though they do not!
I am rooting for DeeDee Jonrowe to win, she's the reason I became a fan in the first place, and is am amazing person. Not only a 34-time competitor, but a cancer survivor and someone who has worked tirelessly to raise money for cancer research and cancer treatment "in the wild". This year was especially tough for her, she lost her Mom and then her home in the horrible Sockeye Fire. But she started and she's going to be competitive... here's a picture of her team at today's start:
Go DeeDee!
[All Iditarod 2016 posts]
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Archive: March 5, 2015
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Wow, this is so cool: American shopping malls in 1989:
Aside from minor differences in dress and style, not that different, right? Except no cell phones, no internet, no online anything. Hard to believe...
What do you think would be most surprising to people from 1989 if you put them in a mall today?
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Archive: March 5, 2014
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 Day four of the Iditarod ... and it's getting hard to follow the leaders.
There's a pack of leaders heading out of Ohfir, led by Jeff King and Sonny Lindner (at 64, the oldest musher in the face), and another pack of would-be leaders resting in Takotna, including favorites Aliy Zirkle and Robert Sorlie. And then there's Martin Buser, who is way behind on the trail but moving again out of Rohn after having taken his 24-hour break already. On paper he's now the one to beat, as he'll keep moving while the others rest, but only time will tell whether he'll be caught back before the finish by fresher teams.
Tomorrow will be interesting, as the teams in Takotna hit the trail again, and we can start to see how much fresher / faster they are than Buser, who will be ahead of them. And the day after we'll see the same with Jeff King and Sonny Lindner. At that point everyone will have taken their break, and it will be head-to-head racing... except for the 8-hour break everyone has to take along the Yukon River :)
(All Iditarod 2014 posts)
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 (Yawn) Whew a long day, starting with a breakfast presentation to investors and finishing with a nice Chardonnay, with a four-hour meeting about JSON APIs in between. Meanwhile, it's all happening...
So, who is the reclusive billionaire creator of Bitcoin? Turns out he's apparently been found, his name *is* Satoshi Nakamoto, and he's not a billionaire, except perhaps "on paper". Excellent.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica have created Arscoin, their own custom cybercurrency, and the Winklevii have paid for a trip into space using Bitcoin. Is this a great time to be alive, or what?
 NASA says it wants to go to Jupiter's crazy moon, Europa. No word yet on whether you can hitch a ride if you pay in Bitcoin, but nothing would surprise me anymore :)
Don't you love Salon? Just kidding. Over the years they've gone from being an interesting source of liberal points of view to a sad shadow of their former selves. I find the difference is that now their writers are ill-informed and stupid, where before they were just ... wrong :)
Speaking of wrong: Los Angeles becomes the latest city to ban e-cigarettes. Seriously? I live in a nanny state, and I don't like it.
 From GigaOm: Lit Motors is awesome, but let's be realistic. In which a new entrant in the electric vehicle market is celebrated and counted out all at the same time. Obviously there's a steep ramp to success and many have failed, but let's root for them and not predestine their failure. They will have to raise a little more than $1M to succeed, however...
 Inhabitat: Mind-blowing photographs of Earth taken from space. Way cool.
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Archive: March 5, 2013
Archive: March 5, 2012
Archive: March 5, 2011
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Huh; today I fell somewhat back to normal, or at least what passes for normal with me. For months we've been working toward our sales meeting a week ago and the USCAP conference this week; and now both are past, everything went great, we can take a deep breath, and ... back to normal. Yay. Time to find new mountains to climb! And in the meantime, to blog...
 Wow, cool, the space shuttle launch, viewed from an airplane. Amazing.
Tim Bray on making money in mobile. The unit volumes can be high, but the unit revenue is undoubtedly low. Fortunately your overhead can be low, too.
Great article: why payments are hard, even for Apple and Google. As a PayPal vet I can affirm, yeah, payments are hard. Without customer service and anti-fraud technology, payments are impossible. And neither Google nor Apple have either one.
 I have to love this: another badass bull charges out of Lamborghini. Yeah, I know I know, I'm supposed to be rooting against them (as a diehard Maserati aficionado), but Lambos are cool. Rrrraaaarrrr!
And so Himpmunk have added hotels! Yay. The key visual feature is locating available hotels on a map, which *is* the way most people want to find them. Just like locating airplane flights in time. These guys are thinking.
Awesome! Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7. Nostalgia aplenty, I have run every single one of these versions, and many more besides. Remember Windows 386? Oh yeah.
So .. apparently [according to slashdot] Facebook boosts your self-esteem. No wonder I like it so much :)
It's Apple's post-PC world, and we're just living in it. I think this is right; the iPad has announced a new category which will ultimately replace a lot of PC sales. I think of my Mom, who is entirely typical and who never wanted a computer, but now happily uses her iPad for email and surfing.
 Among the cool things announced with the iPad 2 was the iPad 2 "smart cover", which seems to be, um, smart.
John Gruber liked Wednesday's announcement; as he noted, even the chair was the same. And what was different? Apple and we all knew the iPad was massively successful. Also different: Mr. Jobs; he himself was 30% thinner than for the original iPad, too bad.
Angelist is giving some VCs heartburn. Hey, the Internet will ultimately disintermediate everything, including the funding sources that make innovation upon it possible :)
Awesome! Researchers turn mice into wine snobs. See, mice are smarter than you might think :)
 This is way cool: Horsetail Falls in Yosemite looks like it is on fire. Just a trick of the light, my friends, but wow.
Interesting idea from Dave Winer: using DNS as a thin ID system. I don't know it this is the solution - too few people control a domain, I think - but he's on the right track; someone is going to figure out a global ID system, and when they do it will be huge.
A successful computer rock-paper-scissors algorithm, based on predicting what you will do. Wonder how it does against itself?
 The best rare bird photos of 2011 from the National Geographic. Wow, just wow.
 ZooBorns: A baby octopus explosion! Excellent.
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Did a little 55 miler with my CVC friends this morning, the Red Ride was led by the CVC race team. Yikes, pace! Was punishing as always, and I feel tired and great, as always.
the route: through Hidden Valley down Potrero, blast along PCH, climb back up Mulholland
pacing through Hidden Valley: too bad we have to live here
descent down Potrero: yikes!
blasting along PCH with a sea breeze on a beautiful day
hanging out with my feathered friends
All in all a great ride. And now I have the rest of the weekend left... what shall I do with it?
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Archive: March 5, 2010
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Greetings y'all, made it through another busy week with only a confused ego and a cold. Could have been much worse :) And so now I look forward to a weekend off - recovery time for both :) - and then off to New York for week of visits with customers and prospects... but first, this!
9.8 Trillion. I'm with Ann Althouse, this number IS seriously incomprehensible. Yet no less alarming for being so... we are definitely entering uncharted territory with this administration, and who knows what will happen.
 This is seriously cool... find your computer's location with Windows 7 and Geosense. This FREE software let's your computer triangulate your location from relative WiFi signal strengths just like some cellphones (the ones that don't have "real" GPS built in). I downloaded and tried this and it really works. I mean really really; when I was in a hotel in Vista it nailed by location exactly, and in my house at home it actually reported my street address. Spooky but cool.
PS also I love the irreverent tone of the dialog boxes, check out the installation at right - "I authorize you to slap me if I violate the terms above" - I love it :)
[ Update: also works perfectly in New York, even when I'm not connected to a WiFi network! How the heck can it do that? But it does... ]
 Fully agree with this: Andreessen's advice to old media: burn the boats. "...he points out, that the iPad will have a 'fantastic browser.' No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. 'There are 2 billion people on the Web,' he says. 'The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.'" They won't take his advice - it is a classic innovator's dilemma scenario - but taking it would be the only thing that could save them. On any device, even on the iPad, there will always be a web interface with more content then the local app environment.
Good move: Palm introduces WebOS plugin development kit. "They call it a 'plugin development kit', but what it really means is that developers can write compiled C/C++ apps for WebOS now." The more Palm can do to encourage app development, the better; this seems like their biggest weakness...
See you in the air - flying Virgin to New York Sunday...
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Archive: March 5, 2009
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 Non-cycling fans might not know the name Johan Bruyneel, but in cycling circles he's a legend; not only was he a great professional rider himself, but as the Team Director for Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador he's won eight Tours de France in nine years. As a Coach/Manager this puts him in John Wooden / Vince Lombardi / Joe Torre territory. So he wrote a book called We Might as Well Win, and being a cycling fan and owning a Kindle, I figured I might as well read it.
Last night I downloaded it, sort of as an impulse buy, and idly started reading it. Wow. What a great book.
I had pretty low expectations, I guess I thought it would be your usual run-of-the-mill athlete memoir, but the philosophy and approach is fascinating. Within five pages you can see why he's been so successful, and why he's been able to help a world-class athlete like Lance become a universe-class athlete. It is really well written, interesting, and useful; I honestly felt myself putting some of what he writes about into practice today. (Interestingly, some of it ties closely to the Tyranny Antidote stuff, like focusing on what's important and eliminating distractions.)
I've only gotten about 1/3 of the way through it so far and am pretty excited about going to bed tonight just so I can continue. Stay tuned for more...
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I have a good friend whose sister delivered a baby girl today (congratulations!). She emailed pictures, and as I'm looking at this teeny little being I was overcome by emotion. There is something amazingly powerful about babies. Of course we are all hardwired for reacting to babies; evolution has seen to it that we think they're cute and want to care for them. Babies hit us at a deep level.
But the emotion I felt wasn't just about the baby girl, it was about the parents, and my friend, and me, and everyone whose lives were touched by this event. (Maybe about you, too, reading this blog post!) It brings us all back to what's important. These are weird times, wherein it's been possible to lose all the material things you've worked hard to gain over ten+ years in six months. Which makes you wonder, what's the point? And then you consider this baby girl, and you think about the paths that led to her existence, and the road ahead for her - paved with the unknown, as Tolkein says - and you realize what's really important, and it isn't your big house or your fancy car, it's your family and your friends.
This ties in pretty nicely with the philosophy of Johan Bruyneel, who advocates focusing relentlessly on the things which matter, and with the tongue-in-cheek-but-really-good Tyranny Antidote, which includes pruning away the things which don't. I think I'm going to go spend a few minutes with my daughter :)
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Today was a day of deep work, immersed in coding, on negative time trying to fix some bugs and ship something. I tried to practice the Tyranny Antidote, eliminate all distractions, focus. I was somewhat successful at this, but somewhat unsuccessful at the debugging. A tough slog remains, and I'm traveling to Boston tomorrow for a conference. Whew.
Okay; I haven't made a filter pass in a couple of days, and it's all happening...
 Obama claims he's not worrying about the "gyrations" in the stock market. Riight. The chart at right shows what has happened to the Dow since the stimulus package was announced. The markets are clearly pissed off.
David Brooks: This is not the Obama I thought I knew.
Glenn Reynolds: Actually, it's the same Obama it always was.
Bill Quick: Same thing, same results. "California spends far more than it takes in, despite having some of the highest taxes in the United States. It is hostile to business, and the middle class is fleeing in droves... Does any of this sound familiar? It’s what Obama and the Democrats have in mind as a 'solution' for the rest of the country." I hope not.
Oh, and meanwhile 8 million mortgage holders are now under water. California lost $1.2T in real estate value last year, accounting for about half of those mortgages.
The WSJ considers the boutique banks which thrived taking dot-com businesses public, and wonders will the four horsemen ride again? I sure hope so; an IPO market for venture-backed companies is a good thing for innovation, the economy, and everyone...
 Cool green building of the day: the StatoilHydro headquarters in Norway.
Thou shalt not text until Easter. When 21st century technology meets 1st century religion, weirdness results.
Michael Arrington thinks it is time to start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. I think it is time to start thinking of Michael Arrington as a koolaid drinking fool. I could be wrong but I still think the Twitter emperor is not wearing any clothes.
 Robots! The Boston Globe's Big Picture delivers again. As many of you know my daughter Megan had open-heart surgery performed via robotic arm seven years ago, when she was four. That technology was incredible, but it has become even more amazing since...
This makes me happy: VB 6 supported in Win 7. The ice age has been postponed and the dinosaur lives on :) This was almost a given considering how many of Microsoft’s customers continue to use VB 6 because of difficulties and incompatibilities with migrating to VB.NET; not little companies like Aperio but little companies like Texaco and GE and Nabisco and State Farm and Walmart, where most of the internal applications are written in VB. Still it is good to have it confirmed...
 ZooBorn of the day: a baby Wombat.
Josh Newman: remember when I used to blog? I, too have found blogging about not blogging to be a great way to start blogging again :) Welcome back!
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Archive: march 5, 2008
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A morning coffee post, as I prepare to return from Denver... I am in recovery mode from Sangria, Stout, and Stoli, so please calibrate this post accordingly. (Note: if you find yourself in Denver and want a great Tapas restaurant, open the 9th Door. You will not be disappointed :)
So Hillary Clinton is still alive! Wow, good for her, and - dare I say - good for John McCain. Somehow the Barack Obama bandwagon's music is turning flat for me, I actually, actually found myself thinking I might prefer Clinton to Obama. (Slaps self in face.) I still wish there was a Democratic candidate I could support, but it is what it is.
Ann Althouse foresaw: "I don't see how this doesn't send us into a six-week-long battle for Pennsylvania." I don't see how it doesn't, either.
Megan McCardle on Obama: "Well, I certainly hope he's lying, because I think he's going to be the next president of the United States. But of course, as I've said before, I do not like it that politicians seem to feel the need to lie shamelessly to the electorate." [ via Glenn Reynolds, who comments: "Generally, you have to hope that most of what most candidates say is a lie. Fortunately, it usually is..." ]
LGF reports Wilders film to air, Dutch government terrified. This is such a good thing. They should be terrified of an environment in which any film terrifies a government.
 Picture of the day: The Earth and the Moon, as seen from Mars. Wow. This brought tears to my eye in a "pale blue dot" sort of way. Imagine all the crap stuff going on here, and it is all contained on that little ball...
Badness: the historic Paris-Nice cycling race starts Sunday, and it is still up in the air who will compete in it. This race is run by the ASO, the same organization which runs the Tour de France in July, and they are at loggerheads with the UCI, pro cycling's international federation. Both are threatening teams and riders with suspensions. The whole thing sucks.
Randall Parker: Low testosterone boosts depression risk. Wow, that would be depressing :) I must say this does not seem to be one of my problems...
Blog title of the year (so far): Cory Doctorow says Toxic waste gets birds laid. Yeah, go ahead, read it, but don't forget to savor the multiple meanings.
Jeff Atwood posted a fascinating dissection of the difference between Actual Performance and Perceived Performance (in software applications :) Inevitably the discussion shifts to Vista: "Don't make the same mistake the Vista development team did. Think more holistically than mere benchmarks alone. Consider the user's perception of the process, too." I totally believe this; Aperio's ImageScope viewer is carefully designed to appear as fast as possible (well, it is designed to perform as fast as possible, too, within the limits of bandwidth etc.)
I always knew Airborne was a fake, and now they've shown it. But you knew that already, right?
Perhaps it would have worked even better if it was more expensive?
Finally, coat hangers sound just as good as Monster cables. But you knew that already, right? Riight?
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A lot of times on blogs you read about bad customer service. This is not one of those times.
My Treo has a nifty feature; when you're in another timezone, it not only reports the local time, but it converts everything on your calendar to the local time, too. I started the day in Denver, with all my times off by an hour. I had a plane flight at 11:00, which the Treo helpfully converted to 12:00. I realized this at 9:30, while in my hotel room. Yeah.
 I packed in 5 minutes, dashed to the airport (of course Denver's airport is way outside the city), returned the car (of course the Avis lot is way outside the airport), impatiently waited my way through security, ran through the airport (of course my gate was in Outer Mongolia), and barely got there just to watch them close the door. Crap :( But an angel disguised as a United Express agent talked the pilot into reopening the door and they let me on! Even reopened the cargo hold to throw my bag in there. How golden was that?
I know airlines don't get a lot of credit for customer service, but it all comes down to individual people and whether they care. And one person caring sure changed my life today. Thank you unknown United Express angel!
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For my friends with iPhones :)
Update: I just felt the need to add, this is all very funny, but truly not being able to type one-thumbed on the iPhone is a deal-killer for me. Over the years I've become really good at typing on the teeny little Treo keyboard with my thumb(s); I can text and email without any problem. I love many things about the iPhone - almost everything - but I do not love the keyboard. And that's such a big part of how I use my phone, that I would not consider replacing my Treo with an iPhone.
I know a lot of people agree with me, so it might be fruitful to speculate what Apple is going to do about this. Clearly they are committed to a non-hardware keyboard, but if they could just provide some kind of tactile feedback, that would be great. When your thumb is 5x larger than the button it is trying to push, you need tactile feedback to center on the key; visual feedback does not do it. (Not to mention, it especially doesn't do it when you're watching the road :) I suppose they could try audio feedback - a beep that rises in pitch as you center on the key - but that seems klunky. Any technology that dynamically gave tactile feedback would be tricky and expensive, but how about just lightly etching some dots on the iPhone screen where the keys are?
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Archive: March 5, 2007
Archive: March 1, 2006
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From my friend Diane Simons:
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like many others her age, she considered herself to be a liberal Democrat, and was in favor of the redistribution of wealth.
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the addition of more government welfare programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school. Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party. She didn't have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, "How is you friend Audrey doing?" She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus, college for her is a blast. She's always invited to parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over."
Her father asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That wouldn't be fair! I have worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!"
The father said, "Welcome to the Republican Party".
Perfect.
Of course, Audrey was a minority, it wasn’t her fault that she played all day and got poor grades, it was discrimination and cultural bias. So the GPA system was “rebalanced” such that Audrey got a 4.0.
P.S. The average GPA at Harvard is now 3.5. No wonder Larry Summers quit.
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Tonight is going to be serious. I'm in a feisty mood. Sure there were some Apple announcements today, but there's other stuff happening too. The Ole filter makes a pass...
Can I just say, once again, publicly, how great Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs is? Okay; it's great. I link it pretty often, but I read it every day. This is important stuff, real stuff. Check it out. Subscribe to it.
I read Daily Kos, too, I don't just read what I agree with. To me the difference in tone, the difference in logic, the difference in maturity is obvious. Your mileage may vary, but if you aren't getting news from sites like these, you aren't getting news. TV "news" is entertainment, not news. And Newspapers are going the same way, unfortunately.
 I received this video from my colleague Mark Wrenn, entitled "German engineering vs. Arab technology". I have no idea if it is a real VW ad - I hope so, but I doubt it - but it sure is food for thought. When did it become commonplace that people would blow themselves up to make a point? Weird.
Scott Adams on Strange Laws. "There are a lot of laws that don’t make sense to me. For example, if I were king, I’d make attempted suicide punishable by death. That’s a win-win scenario." Scott is like George Carlin.
Douglas Murray: We Should Fear Holland's Silence. [ via Instapundit ] Indeed.
Gerard Vanderleun: Saddam Lied on Tape. Somewhat less reported in the MSM than Dick Cheney's hunting accident, but somewhat more important, don't you think?
Eric Raymond: Media Analysts Sound Pessimistic as Iraq Civil War Fails to Materialize. "Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in Iraq had been averted. 'The prospects for regime change in Washington seem increasingly remote,' said one senior White House reporter who spoke on condition of anonymity." Zing.
David B on GNXP: The Evolution of Cooperation. "The existence of cooperation is one of the major problems in human evolution. Among non-human animals, cooperation is rare except among individuals who are closely related. Among humans, in contrast, it is common. The problem is to explain this in view of the temptation to 'defect' from cooperation, obtaining its benefits without its costs." I think the key to this is the evolution of intelligence, which is one reason why Unnatural Selection is such a problem. (And if you doubt this is really happening, you don't read LGF or Daily Kos.)
Bill Taylor about Paul English, writing in the NYTimes: Your call should be important to us, but it's not. I worked with Paul at Intuit, he's a smart guy. His effort Get Human is important. "This month, Mr. English transformed his righteous indignation into a full-blown crusade. He started Get Human, which he calls a grass-roots movement to 'change the face of customer service.' The accompanying Web site sets out principles for the right ways for companies to interact with customers, encourages visitors to rate their experiences, and publishes many more secret codes unearthed by members of the movement. As of last week, the ever-expanding cheat sheet offered cut-through-the-automation tips for nearly 400 companies." I'm a big believer in this; everyone at Aperio has heard me express many times that when people call us, they should immediately be able to talk to a live person.
Ann Coulter previews the Oscars. [ via Powerline ] "I shall grant my awards based on the same criteria Hollywood studio executives now use to green-light movies: political correctness. Also, judging by most of the nominees this year, the awards committee prefers movies that are wildly unpopular with audiences." It would be funnier if it wasn't so true.
 Cybele on blogging.la: The Meeting of the Marys. "At Noon today, Long Beach received a royal visitor, the Queen Mary 2, here to greet the city’s own royal resident, the R.M.S. Queen Mary." Great photo...
 Congratulations to Floyd Landis, who won the inaugural Tour of California (together with his team, Phonak). By all accounts the race was a huge success. "The week of racing couldn't have ended better for AEG Sports, the sports marketing company that owns and operates the tour. With estimates of over 100,000 spectators in attendance in Redondo Beach, AEG estimates that over one million fans lined the roads of California to experience the event." Wow. I watched the stages on ESPN2, and the crowds looked like European crowds, with people ten deep all along the course. Bike racing hits the big time in the U.S. - finally.
This was also an interesting preview of some of the big American names in cycling; in addition to Landis, George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer also won stages. With Lance Armstrong retired it is going to be a wide-open season of bike racing this year, with Americans among the top contenders.
 So, what did you think of the Olympics? Good? Bad? Indifferent? I liked them. A lot. A lot more than I thought I would. As CNN reports Olympics ends in a Circus, as they should - it is after all entertainment. But it is unstaged entertainment; sports are the ultimate reality show. The uncertainty and finality are what makes it great. I'm looking forward to Vancouver 2010 already.
Isn't Sam Sullivan awesome? The mayor of Vancouver, he's been a quadriplegic since breaking his neck skiing when he was 19. What an inspiring guy.
Dave Winer reruns an Ole and Lena joke. I don't know Lena. Do I?
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The Hubble telescope recently captured the highest resolution view of a spiral galaxy, Messier 101. So you know what that means; yep, I downloaded it and posted it for interactive viewing:
(After clicking, hit F11 to maximize your browser's window.)
Stunning, isn't it? Galactic art.
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Archive: March 5, 2005
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I've been blogging for a little over two years now. When I started, on January 1, 2003, I started slow. My posts were short, with few pictures. I had very few regular readers (hi Mom!) and very little traffic. Then exactly two years ago I did something very few bloggers have done. I wrote a "popular" article. That one little article, The Tyranny of Email, transformed my blog presence.
Suddenly I was on the map. Dave Winer linked it, and the rest, as they say, was history. I'd only been blogging three months, but there I was on the home page of slashdot, and my traffic hasn't dropped much since. That article remains by far my most popular page, and periodically someone new discovers it, links it, and poof! I get a bunch of traffic. (This just happened, Omar Shahine, "yet another Microsoft blogger", posted a link two days ago, and I've had a flood of traffic since. Thanks, Omar :)
I could probably stop blogging altogether and I'd still get a bunch of traffic from that one page alone. Don't worry, I won't.
I've posted a bunch of articles and notes and pictures and all sorts of stuff in the past two years - if you're new around here, please check out my greatest hits over there on the right, which are the posts which have received the most hits - but actually I'm just a onetrick pony :)
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The Ole filter makes a pass...
I have to say, Bittorrent is the coolest thing ever. Tonight I wanted to download xCode v1.5, the latest version of Apple's Developer Tools. So I'm a member of Apple's Developer Connection, and I find the link on their website, and I click on it, and I start the download of the 300MB disk image. I'm getting 100KB/s, not bad, but this is going to take hours... Okay stop that. I launch Shareaza, find a torrent for xCode v1.5 on eDonkey in, like, five seconds, and crank up the download. In no time I'm downloading at 350KB/s. Fifteen minutes later I had the image. Oh, and yes I did leave it running for a while to donate some upload bandwidth. We care and give back :)
WritTorrent: Drag & Drop .torrent creation. Excellent. This is going to be IP TV. Really.
Steven Den Beste pokes his head out of retirement for brief post: Victory is never cheap. I'd kept U.S.S.Clueless in my aggregator in the faint hope this would happen, and it did.
I like this - the bathroom wall principle. "If you write a poem on a bathroom wall, the owner of the restaurant isn’t obliged to erase it at your whim. Nor should he have to let you back into the bathroom to edit it yourself. He can stick a neon Guinness sign in the bathroom next to your poem. If he happens to hoist his double-wide restaurant onto the back of a trailer and move it to another city (or country), then the bathroom goes with him and he’s still not obliged to do anything about your poem." So be it. [ via Sam Ruby ]
Jamie Zaworsky, ex-Netscape coder and current nightclub owner: Groupware Bad. "So I said, narrow the focus. Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" Not coincidentally, everyone thinks Google is going to announce a calendar soon. So be it. [ via Tim Bray ]
Chris Anderson: In Defense of Endism. "You have to realize that there are three kind of people:
A) Position People
B) Velocity People (first derivative)
C) Acceleration People (second derivative)
Category A people think: "4 million subscribers is a lot. Consumer Reports must be doing something right."
Category B people think: "It used to be 4.2 million. Consumer Reports is in decline."
Category C people think: "They lost 200,000 readers in three years! Consumer Reports is dead."
The jump from "their growth has slowed" to "they're dead" seems to be instant, doesn't it?
 Yahoo! turned ten recently! Wow. Anyway they've posted a cool netrospective, 100 moments from the last 10 years, a la 10x10. Check it out. [ via Napsterization ]
What's really interesting is how many things came and went. Sure there was Netscape and eBay and Google, but do you remember Excite? Pointcast? Webvan? And Napster? They were BIG. And now they're gone.
 Do you read Tom's Hardware? It's a cool site, they're sort of a Consumer Reports for computer hardware. Plus they've got a dry and nasty sense of humor. Anyway they just reported on the Ultimate LAN party in Texas. You know it's going to be good when people show up with liquid nitrogen to cool their overclocked systems :)
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Archive: March 3, 2004
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Yeah, I'm back. Unbelievably, except for a brief post a month ago to say I was alive, I have now not posted for six weeks. But I'm back...
So the big big news, in an otherwise big news day, was yesterday's announcement by NASA engineers that Opportunity has found "strong evidence" that Meridiani Planum was wet. And not just damp; "Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry." To me this is not surprising, but it is amazing, on several levels.
 First, if we go on to discover that Mars held (or indeed holds!) life, this will be seen as the first harbinger. That would be amazing. Unbelievably amazing, actually. But even if we don't discover such evidence, what's amazing also is our ability to detect and interpret this evidence. The Earth is roughly 5 billion years old. Homo Sapiens are roughly 150,000 years old, a mere blip. But only in the last twenty years or so have we had the technology to send robots to another planet which can probe for this kind of information, and transmit it back. That's amazing. And the geological knowledge that enables scientists to interpret this information, with confidence, is amazing as well.
What a great time to be alive!
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Archive: March 4, 2003
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Interesting... Apparently [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Anan has had plans drawn up for a post-war U.N. government in Iraq. Of course the U.S. has plans for a U.S.-led government. That will be the next U.S. pissing contest with France.
Quick thought: There are certainly serious people with well-reasoned objections to America's pending war against Iraq. But most of the anti-war protesting going on is not about this war. Instead the issues include: 1) opposition to war in general, 2) anti-American-ism, 3) anti-Israeli-ism, 4) pro-Muslim-ism, 5) anti-Republican-ism, 6) pro-Democrat-ism, 7) anti-Bush-ism, 8) French / European hand-wringing over their reduced role, 9) worldwide hand-wringing over America's increased role, 10) a general urge to protest. That's ten, you can probably think of more... I think the anti-war agenda would be far better served by some specific objections to this war, combined with constructive suggestions for dealing with Iraq. (And that would not include illogical platitudes like "give inspections a chance".) What we have here is a wealthy power-hungry dictator desperately trying to acquire or build WMDs. So what would you do?
RSS aggregators continue to generate interest. I must not get it. You know what I think...
Apple is launching a service to sell music online, tied into iTunes. Excellent idea, IMHO. [Later, others agree...]
XLNT+LOL.
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