Author: Alan
The new face of crime: smalltown, female, anglo-saxon.
Logo
I don’t know why I feel like a logo is required but I messed around with a design last night and came up with this, which I have placed temporarily permanently to the right, scroll down.
I think I have visions of shelves of coffee mugs or a trucker’s cap on Justin Timberlake. I have heard it does not suck. I may tinker and I do reserve the right to have many logos….for my many moods. If Naomi Klein is coming after me it is going to be in a big, big way.
Discount Carnival
Michael in Atlanta has this week’s Carnival of Canucks up and Radio Steve leads the issue with the party tonight at Rob1’s barn making the top news from PEI. Rob has a keg, by the way, and is giving away beer. This guy is doing being the ex-banking-exec-country-drop-out thing in a big way.
By the way, the fact that this post won’t lead to a high school style kid invasion is an indictment of the supposed popularization of blogs. Best invite to mass teen party ever? 1980, Truro, Friday at 2:55 pm. Vice principal comes on the intercom to say “The girls volleyball team will be having tryouts at Black Rock this evening at 8 pm. Bring your own ball.” Black rock was a sand pit on the edge of town. 400 teens showed with their own balls of black rum. Cop car rolled around midnight.
Bizzare Call to Stop Innovating
The best way to ensure nothing new happens is to make that a principle, as Dave Winer has advocated:
Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly. Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it’s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.
Read Winers whole statement here.
As soon as rules outside of the marketplace of ideas are made which guard against innovation, advances stodge and we are stuck with innovations led only by those who advocate conservativism. We are witnessing an effort again now to control change on the web by a few as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s. There is an interesting analogy to a point in legal history in the 1800’s in which logical innovations such as negligence were held back by capitalists who did not want to be held accountable under civil law for the accidents caused by industrialization. The same theme is seen now in the rejection of criminal sanctions for industrial polluters.
A call to control of standards is foremost a call to “follow and pay me” to tell you what you what you can figure out yourselves.
If you want to be led, listen to self-appointed leaders aka “gurus” – a word which should be seen as a slander. If you want the best, unleash the innovative.
George F. Will: too busy with making deposits to notice conflicts.
Sledging
Crazy Carpets matting down the rough
When Rupert the Bear or Oor Wullie slid down hills in the hardcover cartoon annuals sent from Scotland when I was a kid it was “sledging” not “sledding”. Whatever it is called, for those of you worried that we sold the farm when we…sold the farm and moved to the city, this is the view from the from window of the family sleddging.
Earlier: I saw a Northern Harrier – a medium sized hawk identifiable by a white patch above its tail and its habit of flying slowly a few feet above the ground – tracking over ice next door at Elevator Bay this morning. I don’t know if this means the ice mice have moved south or if it had a hankering for fish.