Tag: Web, Blogging and Computers

Friday?…what do I do on Fridays?…hmmm

Friday. The last Friday of April as a matter of fact. I always run into May
with as much surprise as despiration as when March arrives. The magnolias are
coming into bloom here. Saw “mag-noooo-lias” like one of those Bugs Bunny
southern-gent-in-white-suit characters. Can’t do that in March. No sir.

  • Bye bye aggregation. Last summer, I was getting around 92% of visits through
    RSS. Now it is down to 76%. Comment spam is to blame I figure. Plus who the hell
    wants to read 250 feeds a day. I got an email from a pal asking me about the
    spam torrent on my comments but I had to tell him I never noticed as this blog’s
    format hides them from the front page pretty well automatically except that they
    show up on RSS. So for you aggregation readers, sorry. But there’s not much you
    can do given aggregation is going the way of usenet.

    Update: should this
    come to pass, kiss email goodbye, too.

  • Baseball is a game of failure and the Red Soxs are doing a good job the last
    week or so of proving that. Having the bazillion channel package just makes the
    down times worse – leaving me clicking back to find out that is it 0-6, 2-9,
    2-15…Good
    Lord    . But it brings perspective to my hollow shell of an inner life, right?
    That is why I follow them. Must be.

  • I am thinking of throwing my hat into the ring for the Liberal leadership
    race. Every single person in the country appears to be doing it so why not me?
    It is a largely uninspiring bunch. I am still backing Iggy from a distance but
    really only because I can call him Iggy. El Tigre makes a fairly good
    point about the vision-ettes
    of the Dryden and Kennedy candidacies     but I think Harper harkening to
    anything other than devolution is a bit off. No, it is all about planning the
    new social engineering of one localizing sort or another these days. Really, it
    is all about blandification as far as I see as so much as been shifted away from
    the Feds that they really have a small amount of effect on day to day life. You
    can’t harken back to the pre-60s without planning to reinstate the massive
    Federal presence as we were then a proud nation of the post office and the train
    system, bureaucracies like Health and Welfare Canada and the St. Lawrence
    Seaway. We always have been a nation of inspectors and the inspected. There has
    been and will be no great Canadian vision without the “national project” of one
    sort or another. Unless someone comes up with one, don’t expect any undoing of
    Grant’s Lament for A
    Nation     otherwise.

  • Chiz is my pal. Reading this, I feel very badly
    for Chiz as Chiz is a really good guy.

Now Returning You To Your Normal Programming

I’m still trying to think about what to do with this place. I thought about it a lot on the trip which is sort of odd but I spend a lot of my time writing away here and reading what you leave it is respectful I think to have a think. Despite the numbers, I think blogging is way past the stale date and, if activity on many of my favorites from when I started writing is anything to go by, so do a lot of other bloggers. Yet it still chugs on, eating up the work day, proving once again that the greatest product of time-saving devices will always be more slackery.

One think that is nice to see is the demise of the A-list. Except among techie geeks, there is not many now running to read what X or Y said about something as if they have special authority on a subject. Many of them have actually been assimilated in to the grown-up real money paying media. The rest have been gently, quietly discredited and no longer hold conventions about themselves. Similarly, the idea of corporate blogging has died a natural death. Just as there is no new law and definitely no new economy, no new race of men of enterprise has arisen willing to share business secrets openly, risking discrediting the firm through describing the downside. Nothing has really changed and that is good. While we hear words about business reaching out to customers in real time and providing an on demand product it is all the blah of IBM commercials and, when stripped, is no different than the purchase of a can on beans at the store. Note again as well that none of you buy your cans of beans anywhere but at the store. Because you like going to the store where the people are. You like to have a good look at the can first.

No, it has resolved itself nicely into a more genial hobby, sort of like group penpalsmanship. This is good. People should speak freely with each other in a medium that allows for speedy cross-referencing from an archive as well as easy participation from anyone interested. Even if you make a little money on the side, as I am happy to do now, no one has illusions anymore that there is a private career around the corner. I used to question those who spoke about making community but now I think that that is one of the few claims about blogging from, say, 2002 that has actually stuck. People like to chat about stuff. That is why parties have not stopped.

But it is not a collaborative community. This is something that has disappointed me. People really do not use blogs to write something together, to figure a problem out collectively. These spaces are only like light bulbs. Certainly light bulbs more than lighthouses, let alone factories. Your town is full of people relying on 27 cent light bulbs to get ahead in their day to day lives. But no one thinks it is a miracle anymore and few devise ways to make their millions off of them.

This Friday’s Friday Chat

What kind of week was it? It was hopefully the last glimpse of a skim of
snow. It has been a fairly optimistic week otherwise with lots of contact with
old friends over the internet, planning a summer reunion in Halifax at the end
of July. But what else has the internet done for me lately?

  • Update#2: Just remembered that I forgot to remember to post about hearing Perry F. Rockwood on “The People’s Gospel Hour” this week on 1170 AM WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia while I was hunting for baseball. It is a Nova Scotia produced radio evangelical program seemngly on every station everywhere on the Maritime Canadian AM dial when I was a kid. I thought I had blogged posted before the soft spot I have for Perry’s voice and his pronunciation of “Boston, Massachusetts” at the end of every broadcast but I cannot find that reference via a search. So much for the internet. Good news! Perry is 88 and going strong.

  • Update: Iggy
    might get me to vote Liberal for the first time ever.

  • Mr. Harper is having a first brush with reality, needing now to debate the
    Afghanistan
    mission, having to pull back a
    contract to an insider     on accountability policy of all things and generally
    having to put a decade worth of puffery to the test. He is doing reasonably well
    but any claims to sightings the second coming of anyone’s Messiah are
    pre-mature. His tendency to secrecy and making up reasons for the things he does
    out of the air are going to get to be as annoying as his love of junior
    micro-management. He is not the only clever guy in the sandbox but at least he
    is a change and a keener. There is much good in hiring a keener.

  • It’s been a hard week for the creationists and Biblical literalists among
    you so there will be a round on the progressive faithful at happy hour today –
    soda pops for thems that want them, the good stuff for thems that need it.
    First, a
    transitional fossil     has been found linking our fishy forefathers to our
    monkey-like ones. I’ve never had a big problem with the scaley and tail-y past
    we share and suspect God has a good giggle at the trashing about people do to
    figure out what is what. I think reference to The Book of Job is
    instructive wherein the Creator took one of us aside and said “Huh? You think I
    tell you all the good stuff?” Then there was the
    Book of Judas     finding. Seeing as the Deas Sea scrolls were found in some guy’s tinder pile as
    he was stoking the flames of another fire under the bubbling stew pot for his
    family ‘s dinner, it should come as no surprise that there are loads of
    alternate versions out there. So raise a glass in commisseration for the
    fundamentalists whose fundamentals got a little shifty this week. Pray hoist ye,
    bruvvers and sistahs!

  • Has anyone started podcasting lately? I am feeling more and more that as
    bloggy text is actually solidifying as a hobby, podcasts are going the way of
    ham radio – nerdy and little understood. But it is not in the nature of the web
    to analyze what it likes to call its lesser successes. What people may be
    realizing is simply the difference in effort required to control text as opposed
    to sound. And podcasting needs a public success. After all, all of bloggy
    legitimacy has centered on one event, the great whoop-tee-doo of the firing of
    Dan Rather. Podcasting needs its similar Jimmy’s-in-the-well moment. It has yet
    to come.

  • Finally, I know someone who has had a windfall. I won’t tell you who or what
    but it was a surprising sign of my late-arriving semi-maturity that I did not
    curse my lack of such luck. Maybe it is the return of baseball, the passing out
    of winter or the general state of good tidings that have been surrounding me and
    mine far and wide but there was none of the usual gnashing gut churning
    why-does-this-never-happen-to-me stuff. Why is that? Am I losing my
    touch?

Well that is it for today. Let us gather and chat about things
we really do not understand fully and allow the glory of the medium give us
credence far beyond the quality of our thoughts.

Unfamiliar But Familiar

I am actually apolitical. Sort of. I think for the most part most politicians are good people working hard, the whole thing about Tory financial planning capacity aside. I also pretty much think that it is a difficult thing to translate the experience of people in another country and try to align it with what is going on here. The detailed ground rules are too important but practically speaking unknowable. I may be happy to watch the UK’s Question Period from Westminster on CPAC for the spectacle in lucid wit but we don’t really understand the context. Yet there is more than a moments entertainment for me when reading what Ian writes in his fuming foaming moments:

…you all got what you wanted, and in the eyes of progressives, you got what you deserved. Now your President has an approval rating of 37%, even in the usually-more-conservative Time Magazine poll. Roughly translated from the 2004 election returns, that means 14.2 MILLION people who voted for Bush now disapprove of him. Well, fourteen-point-two-million, you have nobody but yourselves to blame, you pathetic boobs.

Yes, I called you “pathetic boobs”. You deserve it. You left us with this guy and only now bother to show righteous indignation? You make me sick. You had access to the same information as the rest of us. At least real conservatives stick by their guns, but you’re the worst kind of pusillanimous, wobbling imbeciles. I hope your stomach lining eats away what’s left of your digestive tract.

Oh my. When I read or hear commentary like that I am really happy that I live in a country with more than two parties. I think that the greater complexity of us versus them helps focus on actual policy more than platform, on action more than words. So it is not without some hope that I watch this week’s return of the minority in different form to Ottawa. If you think about it, the nation has been locked in a set of facts that have been around compared to where we were about 1990 with Chretien and Martin fighting for the Liberal leadership and Reform was well on its way on its share of the plan to break up the then somewhat squalid conservative movement with the NDP and Bloq holding their own but not breaking away. Now, in a reversal of fortunes, we have conservatives actually being the ones saying they are going to clean up government and a bunch of the untested are competing for the Liberal leadership, all the while the NDP support solidifying under a more acceptable platform and leadership than has existed for decades and the Bloq actually starting to wobble as the old guard get older. In one way this is a new start but in another it will be less than a change as the ideas being shuffled are largely the same and, mortality being what it is, it is all downhill from here.

Subtle Thoughts

I had no idea broad brushes came in this massive gauge:

The UK is steaming towards a “National Information Registry” — one big database of everyone’s personal information, tied to biometric IDs. This system won’t fight terrorism, but it will compromise the privacy of British people. What’s more, the system will be impossible to implement, resulting in widespread harm to people who get screwed by the errors it generates.

Bad. Bad, bad, bad and bad. Boing say BAD!!! So certain yet so disconnected from law and privacy policy…and stuff. Good thing Cory is hitting the beach to recover from whatever tensions a newly aging futurist might need to recover from.

Take My Junk Mail…Please

What do you notice?

Paul Lima had a vague feeling he wasn’t getting any mail. When his mother phoned wondering why he hadn’t cashed his birthday cheque, “the penny dropped,” the Toronto freelance writer says.

He called Canada Post, which said he had changed his address in person on Nov. 17.

“Not me,” he said.

I noticed how little the guy must have been getting in the mail. But how long was the person not noticing the daily junk mail and bills? There must be something that would have been noticed if two days went by. What do I get in the mail? Banks statements of sone sort or another. Bills. Magazines. The Child Tax Credit mailbox money. Yet – what a drag to have it happen.

Chat a la Friday

Once again it is the day before Saturday. It has been a good week around
here. No rocking out or anything but spring sprang and, really, that is half the
battle of the entire calendar:

  • Update: It must be a requirement that you can prove that you have
    been hit on the temple with a hammer recently to get to be a conservative
    columnist. It has to be. Look at Andrew
    Coyne’s shell game     in his column today:

    Of course, part of the reason the provinces are so
    loose with the coin is the benefactions of Uncle Ottawa, which Ontario and
    Quebec in particular have proved adept at squeezing in all the right places. The
    McGuinty government, which made the fictional “$23-billion gap” its war cry,
    quietly pocketed over $13.2-billion in federal cash last year, a 34% increase
    from just two years ago. Quebec, likewise, enjoyed an 8% increase in the last
    fiscal year.

    It is not surprising, given the fine fiscal
    understanding behind Tory-nomics, that he would not get the difference between
    gross and net in his stunning analysis of Ontario’s position but equating Saudi
    Albertia and Quebec as co-horts in economic solidity it dumbfounding. Compared
    to this, David Frum comes across as
    lucid.

  • Update: “…an eccentric old uncle who’s ignored…” Discuss.

  • Update: pause a moment for the
    250 year old tortoise     that passed away in India. Born around 1755.

  • The Flea has posted a link to the best hoax
    (unless the turtle story turns out to be one) that I have ever seen on the
    internet. I am a huge sucker and the use of a gesticulating professor was a
    brilliant diversion.

  • I was thinking about the bleating cry of the Boing Boing the other day when I read yet
    another rant about how the law of ownership should be amended because people
    have figured out a better way to steal…when it occurred to me that I have
    never seen a fair trade argument in relation to Digital Rights Management. How
    is it that we are so concerned about Juan Valdez and rightly seek out better
    coffee and other goods which are sold with fewer dollars going to the middle man
    and more to Juan but we do not use the same model for Juanita, his guitar
    playing cousin? Maybe because we would steal all Juan’s coffee if we could?

  • I gleefully watched LSU
    beat Duke     last night but realized quickly that no one in the pool
    saw the
    loss     coming so no one gets the big points on question #1. I hearby declare
    after 5837 have declared it before me that Glen “Big Baby” Davis is the new
    Shaq. I remember the, what, 1989 LSU March Madness and the side of beef that did
    ballet called Shaquille O’Neal. It was deja vu all over again.

  • Was Stevie always this chubby
    or has someone done this
    to him?

Portality

Ugh, a portal. That is apparently what Google does not want said of itself.

Although Google dislikes being described as a portal, Sullivan and industry analysts said its new finance section leaves little doubt where the company is headed. “They are being fairly careful about it, but they are walking very rapidly toward becoming a portal,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “They have a lot of other services gunning for them, so they have become most keen about building user loyalty so the users don’t have a reason to go someplace else.”

Am I loyal to Google? I use the mail, like Picasa and search through it. I map my travel with it. But am I loyal? I don’t look to it for innovations that will improve my web experience and think of this site and my browser as my portal. In the late 90s there was a urge to create portality, that control of the web. The Federal government had people shopping the idea back then holding meetings stakeholderly. One in PEI attracted millions in public money only to become a wasteland of tumblin’ tumbleweeds.

They seem to be a curse. But why? Are we all still a little Soylent Green about the internet? Do we think that anyone who wants to control us as a conduit must not have our interests in mind? I think it is more that the web is not apt for portals, that the whole thing is an annoyingly unindexed and disorganized playground of surf, idleness and interest and anything that thinks it can organize it for me bundle it all tied in a big bow is missing a point.

The Things You Wake Up To…

…from a Sunday nap. First, an unholy pool crashing upset…thought I am secretly happy some place called George Mason won…but I can’t tell you why. And then I see the goofiest whack across the temple of the English language by CBS sports when you try to check out what happened…they appear to have even registered “GLOG“ as a service mark.

What next? Good Lord, what next???

Craig Questions The Format

I’ve been wonding what this is all about for a long time so I am glad that Craig is wondering, too. Aside from the question of unauthoritative semi-fact, there is much good in the entertainment value of blogs but one simply can and should only devote so much time to being entertained. There are other things to be about in life. But the most interesting comment of his for me is this:

I am also finding old favourite blogs of less interest to me. More often than not, having a high noise to signal ratio. Many, seem to be evolving to a BBS sort of community (which is a good thing), but if you are not interested in the same types of topics that that community discusses, then interest in being part of that community wanes. Thus, I seem to be leaving the using computers and the Internet as a recreation to using same as a tool.

I think this is a very valid observation. One can only rant to oneself so long. And being cranky at the sites of others is only fun when there is mutual fun in the cranking. Things eventually have to settle down to a more honest personal diary-style of writing, writing for writing sake, topical writing, community discussion or even writing approaching what Eric Idle is quoted as saying about Monty Python: “it turns the focus back onto itself. That’s the Python key: to mock the form in which it lives.”

Conversely, there is little place for the type-A-list guru-iffic floggy fantasies as those that have taken that stance have just shown how the ego can get in the way of honest understanding. If I look now at what I thought two and half years ago about what would kill off the bloggy cacophony I would now go with RSS as being the fatal app at least in its present use of being author rather than content based. No one can reasonably be expected to pay attention to everything written by 100 or more individuals. It is too much. So then you read only those you knew or wrote well or were sharing and interest…and the A-heads. And then the futuristic A-heads proved their own dullness and showed their motives. Aggregation became the reductio ad absurdum. I thought this taggy stuff would be it but it only became another bulky impossible aggregation.

Once again, we need a topical tree to index this damn place to find the content, so you find what is actually interesting to you and not what is supposed to be (according to the blogsperts) interesting to all. Any chance of that happening?