I just watched the 17-minute opening of last night's Rachel Maddow show.
It's her job to stretch out a simple idea into 17 minutes, but it's painful to watch.
Let me save you some time...
Synopsis
The crazy shutdown of the GWB had nothing to do with the endorsement of the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey.
It was about the NJ State Supreme Court and the State Senate and Christie of course.
The NY Times ran an editorial.
The NJ State Senate was livid.
They refused to approve of Christie's appointments to replace him.
He refuses to re-appoint a Republican member of the court, the wife of a member of his administration, not wanting to put her through the approval process by "animals."
The Democratic leader of the Senate represents (drumroll please) Fort Lee.
All this came to a head on August 12, the day before of the famous email saying it was time for Fort Lee to have "some traffic problems."
Sidebar
Fort Lee was a punchline in a standard SNL skit in the early years.
Roseanne Rosannadanna, played by Gilda Radner, would always respond to letters from "Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey."
I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the Christie scandal.
Scott Knaster clipped this from the first issue of MacWorld, 1/24/84.
We had chutzpah then. And something new that we were proud of, but kind of at a loss to explain it in words. It's true to this day, outlining is still hard to explain. But it's still pretty damn useful!
Update: My mom, inspired by this archeological find, went digging for her own ThinkTank relics. She found a small quilt she did back then of the ThinkTank logo. It used to hang on the wall in my office at Living Videotext back in the old days in the 2432 Charleston Rd, Mountain View, CA.
Until late last year (2013, Happy New Year) when I needed to write a little utility script that would do a housekeeping task on the net for me, I would write it in Frontier.
But then something changed. I realized I could write them in JavaScript to run in the browser on a local machine or even one of my server machines. It really doesn't matter where they run. I didn't think too much about it when I was writing them, but just realized that what made it possible was the HTML 5 idea, localStorage. Without it, a bit of code running on the desktop would need a server to remember its state. Now the local machine has that ability, and why not, disk space is super cheap, at least relative to what it used to cost.
The most useful utilities so far have acted as a bridge between RSS and Twitter. It's how my linkblogging tool connects with it now. And it is still relying on a server for the final step.
My old friend Jeff Sandquist, who used to be the lead developer guy at Microsoft, is now doing that at Twitter. I keep telling Jeff I have no interest in doing anything on top of Twitter, but then I keep doing things on top of Twitter. Oy! Yes, they could make it better. I shouldn't need a proxy to talk to their server. My desktop JS should be able to talk directly to their server.
Where do I think this will go? Well, there's no question you could write a full RSS aggregator to run on the desktop in the browser, even on a tablet or a phone. Decentralization is now much much easier than it ever has been, and it's coming at a good time, with all the michegas from the NSA.
We got our taste of the bitter cold the rest of the country has been experiencing. According to the weather forecast, it'll start warming up tomorrow, and by Sunday it'll be 50. So we got just the minimum. I understand this has been going on for weeks in the Midwest.
I forgot how cold 5 degrees can be. I went out wearing two layers over my whole body and still I was freezing cold, until I had been walking for about a half-hour, which is when it started being fun.
But I'm glad it'll be in the 20s tomorrow. And I feel quite differently about the cold weather now.
As you may know I'm working on a new CMS.
I've been talking about its existence fairly openly since the project started, I guess it was in October? I'll have to go back and look.
Up till now, I've been "using" it, but not for anything the public can read. However, with this post, that has changed.
The text you're reading here is flowing out to the web in a new way.
It's a milestone, an achievement, an ending, in a sense. Because this CMS is what I was trying to develop many many years ago, when I started blogging.
To me, the two things, the software development and the blogging, are one and the same. That's why my site is called Scripting News. It's about scripting, and it is the result of scripting. It's news, and it's the thing used to build news.
Now, let's see if it worked! :-0
PS: It did!
First, I am sorry for posting this tweet. I screwed up. In the tweet, I said that the only thing transparent about Glenn Greenwald is his stonewalling. The article which I was linking to, on the New York Magazine website, provided quotes from a Greenwald piece, without reporting the substance. In the piece they were citing, Greenwald answered the most important question I had been calling on him to answer. I had not read the Greenwald piece when I wrote that tweet. That was a mistake.
In his post, he said, unequivocally, that he owns no stock in either of the Omidyar ventures, one which is a non-profit for journalism and the other a for-profit tech company. Not that there would be anything wrong with owning stock, but it is something that needed disclosure, something that I have explained over and over in a series of posts late last year, none of which got this response from Greenwald or any of the other principals in the new company.
There are still other issues. Why the delay in saying he had no stock? And by item #4 in the Greenwald post, we're back to the normal Greenwald approach, over-stating his critics' concerns. At best, this is his lawyerly alter-ego popping up. At worst it makes me think he's still hiding important stuff. Not everyone is out to get him. I was a Greenwald defender and fan until I was introduced to Greenwald the Stone Wall.
An important point, the Snowden documents don't belong to him or the Omidyar ventures. They don't belong to Snowden. They belong to the people of the United States. We have a huge stake in what's done with them. In normal times we'd trust the government to look out for the people's interest, but this is about the government abusing that trust. Greenwald is dancing with high charge explosives. We deserve his full devotion to this story. Why is now a good time for him to be involved in a startup? Why not wait until the Snowden disclosures are complete? Or if he must be involved in a startup, which I know from experience is a hugely time-consuming thing, why not pass the torch to another reporter, or group of reporters? Greenwald's newest response is that we're asking for a complete and immediate dump of the documents. I'm not asking for that! I don't know anyone else who is. What I do want to see is an honest, fair, complete, expedient and urgent disclosure of that information. Perhaps he should start a new venture just to disclose the information in those documents. These are the questions behind the questions about Greenwald's ownership position in the Omidyar companies.
Transparency is not easy, but when you are occupying a seat of historic importance, with our future at stake, we insist that you take that responsibility seriously. And saying you are, when your actions don't indicate that you are, is not a good answer.
If I tweet that my butt hurts, and some company thinks that helps them sell their product, they can say "Dave Winer says his butt hurts," and on what grounds could I object?
If someone says something, and someone else says they said it, I'm sorry but you don't have any recourse, if you're the Pope, the President or nobody in particular.
I think we cross a line on Facebook however, when they imply that someone likes a product because they clicked on Like in relation to it. We all know, including the people at Facebook, that there are many other reasons to click Like even if "Like!" isn't what you had in mind. They're being hypocritical and expedient by equating the two, and earning negative goodwill, that may well haunt Mr. Zuckerberg in the afterlife.
And, if a NY Times movie critic says he likes the music of Llewyn Davis on Twitter, the movie company can say he said so.
And it's ridiculous to think that Twitter, a company, for crying out loud, has any standing here! They can put whatever they want in their Terms of Service, this is speech. They don't get to make rules about speech that happens outside their network.
I don't think I'm out on a limb here at all. I'm not a lawyer, but I think I understand the basic rules about speech.
Software burns brain cells when it does something different from what you expected, and before you realize your thoughts are going the wrong way, you go too far, and going back hurts your head.
The pain comes from brain cells that are committing suicide because they're so frustrated, all they can think to do is end it all.
It's like lurching at the end of a rope when it breaks while you're playing tug of war, except it turns out it wasn't a rope at all, it was a bar fight.
Using a computer always puts you at the edge of a haze, managing more complexity than your poor brain can handle. An overload caused by a misdirection == burning brain cells.
Nothing new. Software has been doing it since Day One, I'm sure. I mention it because it happens all the time on Facebook. You're reading a message from a friend and then your brain slams shut because it realizes it's actually an ad!
It's good I suppose for the advertiser and Facebook, but it's not good for my poor brain. Or yours either. And maybe ultimately it'll be bad for Zuck when we all get to the afterlife and get to tell him what we think about it.
Thanks for listening.
I went for a walk, of course, in the fantastic cold and brilliantly clear post-snow Central Park today. Here's a picture that gives you an idea of the glory of the day.
Now here's a contrasting picture, of a popular sledding hill, in the shadow of 157 W 57th St, the first of the new skyscrapers to go up on the south end of the park.
You can see how dramatic the difference is on a sunny day.
I read Tim Bray's piece about the word content, and I agree. It betrays a point of view. If you're a writer, and someone refers to your work as "content" -- well that's like telling a painter his work is wall-covering. Yes technically, it's accurate -- your painting does cover the wall, Mr Rembrandt and Ms O'Keeffe. But there's also the inspiration. The joy. The dread, the lessons learned, the life lived, the gains and losses. The feeling. All that can be used to cover a wall, or provide a surface for ads to run. But calling it wall-covering doesn't capture its fullness.
Yet there are times when you have to think of a painting as wall-covering -- if you're implementing a wall management system, and you need to account for people hanging all kinds of content on it, paintings, frescoes, posters, quilts, light -- incandescent and candles. Even chairs are wall-covering of a sort. Chandeliers, while they don't hang on a wall do provide light. Viewed that way all art is a wall-covering. It's the engineering view, while it does subtract the art from the art, it's a valid and useful point of view too.
I've spent a good part of my career working on Content Management software, and I'm also a writer, so I see it from both sides. Should I say the C in CMS stands for Creativity? Does that help you understand what it does, or make writers feel better for producing fungible slurry of ad-supporting letters, numbers and punctuation? It doesn't mean a thing to this writer.
There is lots of duality in human language. There's the mother who is also a sister and a daughter. A car that is both a method of transportation and a source of revenue for mechanics and car dealers.
So in some contexts, my writing is art. And in others, it's content.
One of the commenters on yesterday's piece asked if Storify would be up to helping Twitter be a "public notepad." At first I thought no -- it's not about curating your own posts, but then I took another look and the answer is -- yes, you can use it to gather and publish your own ideas, you just have to be determined to find the way to do it.
How to
Go to storify.com and log in using your Twitter account.
Click on the big green Create Story button.
Click on the Twitter icon at the top of the right panel.
Click on User.
Enter your Twitter handle.
Now your tweets are in the right panel. Screen shot.
You can drag your "notepad" posts from the right panel into the left.
You can even change the order (you'll likely have to if you want them to be in chronological order).
Give it a title, and publish and you're ready to go.
It's a lot of steps
Here's the "story" I created.
But -- it's easier than doing it manually, which makes it worth doing.
However -- I would prefer if it were more compact, if it didn't make such a big deal of wrapping my words in the Twitter-approved envelope. It makes it even harder to follow the flow than it is in my timeline, which is hard to do because it's in the wrong order in the timeline!
This is not Storify's fault. Twitter's terms of use force them to do it. Not optimal for the writer, however.
First question of the new year.
Yesterday I wrote about using Twitter as a "public notepad."
Sure, the note-putting part of it was great. One item after another in rapid-fire, with the ability of people to add or comment. Most of it was pretty civil because.. Well I don't know why.
But when it came time to gather it all up and present it as a matter of record, that was a lot of hard work, and the result wasn't very satisfying.
So how would it work?
I don't know what came over me this morning, but I got an idea after watching a speech by Elizabeth Warren on YouTube. I was in tears, the ideas were so simple and compelling, and so rarely talked about. We are a country of people, not corporations -- but we've lost track of that, and we're stacking the deck against the people. But then I remembered, she hasn't said anything about the NSA spying on the American people. One idea led to another, and people responded, and I kept going. I wanted to get all of it down here in one place, before moving on into 2014.
The tweets
I read a long post this morning about what it's like to be a nurse, and found it incredibly interesting. It filled in a perspective that I had not heard. And yet I spent lots of time talking with nurses during my father's long hospital stay in 2002, and my own -- the same year.
Back then, I had an epiphany about people who work in hospitals, who work in conditions most of us find incomprehensible, helping people in unimaginable pain, unimaginable until it's time for you to deal with it. The epiphany is that it must be wonderful to see the good you do, so clearly. In my own field, software development, it can be hard to feel how you're helping. In fact you get a lot of people sharing pain with you they can't find other outlets for. I learned in reading the post that it's the same in nursing.
While their work is gratifying and grounding, it's also grueling and abusive. She told the story so well, so personally. Yet in the comments people found many things to complain about. She just shared her point of view, wrote a blog post, and it was good, and of course the trolls gave her hell for it.
It's important to feel free to tell your story even if it cues up other people's permission to be jerks. Oh this person is showing vulnerability. Let's make her pay! I get it all the time. I've been getting it since I started blogging in 1994. I still do it, because it's what I do. I couldn't stop, even though I've tried, any more than I could stop breathing.
I don't have a solution, other than to say it helps to stand beside people who put themselves out there. The world is rough. That doesn't mean you can't share what you see. It just means it's important to feel the support. I want to provide what little of that I can, through this post.
What bloggers are guilty of -- always -- is telling their story imperfectly. It's the imperfections that make it interesting, and human -- and worth it.
Keep on truckin!
It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.
This year's BOTY choice was such a big hit, the idea crossed my mind that I have a couple of products that distinguished themselves in my life in 2013, and what the heck, why not have a POTY to go with the BOTY!
The thought came to me while I was on a walk today in Central Park, listening to Grateful Dead music through one of the products, and played by the other one.
I said man, I finally have this figured out after many years of walking and listening, I have a rig that's worth talking about it's so good.
First the headphones. I like to say I buy headphones the way some women I've known buy shoes. I have a closet shelf full of them. Most of them I tried out for a few days or maybe a week or two and put them away, still in search of the ideal set.
But after I bought the Velodyne vFree headphones I not only stopped buying new phones, I starting giving the old ones away to friends. And these were some great listening devices. But none of them put it all together like the Velodyne.
First, they are wireless Bluetooth headphones. You wouldn't believe how much of a mess those wires are for me. Always getting tangled and knotted. Limiting movement. Pulling on my ears and the device. Now I look at people listening on their iPods on the subway and think that in two years the wires will all be gone. Once you try it this way there's no going back.
Also, they're loud enough, and the sound quality is great. A lot of good headphones need an amplifier when used with a mobile device. Not sure why, but it's observable. I guess these headphones, because they have their own power source, have their own amp. Regardless, you don't miss anything with these guys, and music has the feel it's supposed to. And it's a clean sound, maybe a little heavy on the bass, but I like that way. But not so much as some others.
Another thing that's great about wireless is you can wear them around the house without carrying the player with you.
Now there are problems with wireless. You have to remember to keep it charged. But that's a discipline we've all learned by now. It's just one more device. It takes the same kind of USB cable that Kindles and Google phones do. You probably already have a few. And the Bluetooth connection sometimes drops, but for some reason for me now not so much as it did in the beginning. It feels like my devices have learned to find each other. I know that can't be true, but...
Product #2
Now the other device is the new iPad Mini. I got one with 64GB and LTE. I used Verizon because I already have a T-Mobile device (my Nexus 5), and this gives me a bit of redundancy that may come in handy. Both devices tether. Glad we got over that argument!
I bought an iPad Air when it came out and loved it, but that got handed down, because I very much wanted to try an iPad that fits in my jacket pocket, which the Mini most definitely does. I miss the larger screen sometimes, but I love the portability. With a few tweaks, I can see not carrying a phone. But remember, it's winter and cold, so I'm pretty much always wearing a jacket. We'll see how it works in summer, when I'm back doing daily bike rides in summer clothes.
But the iPad Air is as rational and lovely a product as the Velodyne, and of course the two go together perfectly, and connect over an open standard, so it's a religion-conformant combination. At the end of the year, it's clear that these two products made the most difference to me, and appeal to my tastes and lifestyle almost perfectly.
It might get better in 2014, I hope so, but it was worth noting that near-perfection has been achieved this year.
BTW, when I bought the Velodyne in April I paid $299. They're selling on Amazon now for $119. Wow.
PS: As I am working on the transition to a new CMS, I'm producing some blog posts in both environments, to get experience, and get a sense of what features are needed. Here's the new version of this post, in case you're interested in such things.
GitHub's Pages service seems ready-made for Fargo, so we're hooking them up. Here's how and why. In November I asked for a simple web server connected to Dropbox. I needed this for the upcoming version of Fargo. Until a couple of days ago we didn't have an answer.
The Pages service works does what we need. It means that users will have to learn how to use GitHub. Yes, it's technical, and will be hard for some users. But it's a beginning. We'll make it easier.
It's good. A place to start building.
PS: Just for fun I put a version of this announcement on my GitHub-hosted site.
Just read a piece in ComputerWorld about the success of Google's Chromebooks and how that's bad news for Microsoft. This is where I say "I told you so."
Microsoft had this market zipped up, with the netbooks, tiny inexpensive notebooks that ran Windows XP, had lots of USB ports, wifi, a camera, long battery life. These were incredible computers. I bought three of them over the course of the craze, bought one for my mom, and urged everyone else to get one. Meanwhile, Microsoft was making noises that they didn't approve. I couldn't believe it. Here they were getting lifted up by a gift from god, and they were saying it wasn't good enough. This is a company that had killed its own laptop business by not caring about malware.
When Vista came out, an awful operating system, they forced the netbooks to use it, when they should have dropped the price on XP to $0 to own the whole market instead of sharing it with Linux. They should have ran a victory lap. Fixed the bugs in XP, downsized their OS development group, and paid a huge dividend to shareholders.
Netbooks were wonderful, but they weren't good enough for Microsoft. Now the Google Chromebook is cleaning up the market that Microsoft should own.
We all lost here. Because the new netbooks, from Google and Apple, are closed systems, where the netbooks were wide open. I could access my file server from my netbook. I could put any software on it, or take it off, same with music and movies. Apple and Google are running gulags, the netbooks were Woodstock. That probably was the back-channel reason why Microsoft struggled so mightily to kill them. They were more interested in pleasing the entertainment industry than users.
PS: I have two iPads, and buy them for my friends and family. I gave a friend a Chromebook because I thought it was perfect for what she was doing, reading books and watching Netflix. I just wish netbooks hadn't been so badly treated by the tech industry, because they were great promising products.
Justin Hall of links.net asked me to do an audio recording about blogging.
I answered some of his questions, but as usual, talked mostly about what I wanted to.
Which is a big part of the blogging story imho.
Here's the audio, 24 minutes, hope you enjoy.
PS: This also adds to the thread started by Walter Isaacson about the origins of the Internet.
I spend the last month of each year thinking about who I want to honor as the person who best embodies the spirit of blogging. I always want to do something unusual, something that makes you think, that stretches the boundaries of blogging, but illustrates something about blogging that's essential, and perhaps not fully appreciated. And -- this year -- celebrates success!
This year's Blogger of the Year writes for the NY Times. In the past I would not have so easily thought you could both be a blogger and work at a mainstream publication. But this year our guy did something remarkable. He used his platform, his pulpit, to change the world in a measurable, significant way.
Nick Bilton decided that it was time to ask a question that the FAA didn't want to deal with, or had no way to deal with, or couldn't deal with for some reason. Political organizations often get stuck. The individuals inside may know it's time to act, but they can't pull it together.
Bilton asked a simple question that all of us who fly have asked. Would the plane crash if I kept reading a book on my iPad while the plane takes off? If not, why do I have to turn it off?
He asked this question for the first time in a post in November 2011, and the decision was made late this year, and now we're all flying with this one inconvenience removed. Sure, it's not like solving global warming, or avoiding the next banking crisis, or even getting good connectivity in Manhattan, but it's progress! And it shows the power of an individual and of a news organization to create change, to act as instigator, a provocateur, a problem-solver.
Thank you Nick Bilton for making our lives a little better, and using your blogging voice to accomplish it.
Don't kick a man when he's down.
If that were the rule. If kicking a person when they're down was considered as awful as the things you knock people down for, that would end it.
Make the punishment fit the crime, and stop there. And maybe if we wanted to be fair, adopt a rule like innocent until proven guilty, or try to see it from their side, or we understand that sometimes people tweet when they're: 1. Drunk. 2. Tired. 3. Lonely. 4. Feeling unloved. 5. Or neurotic. 6. Being human.
I once saw a pundit with hundreds of thousands of followers call a mob victim an asshole and people who I thought well of (before this) praised him as being a saint.
As Worf might say, sir you have no honor.
There must be a New Year's resolution in here somewhere.
Happy Holidays!
"Be a man" are the three most destructive words you can say to a boy or a man.
Because it really means: Die inside. Betray yourself. Fuck off.
Men Stay Silent in 1998 was all about this idea. It has been a consistent theme of my blogging going all the way back to the beginning.
Please watch this video. It's important.
I'm working on the next CMS for Scripting News and then for Fargo.
Here's a blog post created using the new system, it'll give you an idea what's coming.
Happy holidays everyone!
Dave
Impossible scenario: The Twitter mob chooses someone to make an example of. They go after that person's job. The company says "We're standing behind our employee." It'll never happen. Companies have to make the right business decision. And that means firing the radioactive person and replacing them with someone who is not radioactive.
- Standing behind the employee would just fuel the rage, and cause the company itself to become the target of the mob, probably even more than the employee. Boycott. The management would be fired, and replaced by people who will do the right thing for the business. Which is why no company will stand up to the mob.
A few weeks ago one of the maintainers of node.js was fired because he didn't accept a check-in that would have made language in the code be gender neutral (at least that was my read of it as an outside observer). There was some question whether he understood what was being asked of him because English wasn't his native language. What an ugly scene, for so little, from someone who was so generous!
I have been surrounded like this myself, many times, over the years. Believe me, the mob has tried to get me fired. If I had had a real job I'm sure they would have. When I was the CEO of a company, the mob went after our families. These are not principled acts. Don't kid yourself. If they think they can get you fired for having the wrong political opinion, they will.
I've been told that "Free speech has consequences." Everything has consequences, like hounding people for practicing free speech. The consequence is that people won't speak. Great. What a cruel joke if the greatest communication medium ever invented was used to stifle communication.
I don't know anything for sure, and maybe the people who live in working class neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay are the only ones who have a gripe with the people of tech, but my gut says this is just the start.
I think the busses are incredibly good symbols of the problem with tech. They have these big windows, that you can see out of, but I don't think the people inside spend much time thinking about what's on the other side of them. The people of tech have an abstract and incorrect idea of what it's like to be outside their bubble.
I first encountered this in a town hall meeting I went to at Apple in the late 80s. I was one of several speakers, and I went last. I had been asked to tell what it was like to be a developer for Apple's products. I had been an Apple developer for a long time, then. I worked with their first developer relations guy in 1980.
I had very much idealized what it must be like to work at Apple. I imagined it was great! And I knew that my life sucked. Now here was the surprise, they felt the same way. Being a developer must be wonderful! Everything is taken care of for you. All you have to do is put up some dialogs, use our code, and in a few weeks you get rich! And you don't have to deal with the asshole execs. And whatever other grief comes from working in a large organization (which I now understand much better, but still from a distance). Of course none of this has anything to do with what it's like to be a developer. Our paychecks are iffy. We don't have health insurance. You always break our stuff because you don't care or understand. Most of us go out of business leaving the founders unemployed and broken. Etc etc.
Now tech is much bigger today than it was then, and much more pervasive -- and it affects far more people's lives. And people read the news, and they know that the companies are helping the government spy on us. Those busses are such excellent symbols. When are they going to come out of the busses and find out what it's like for the rest of us. Not their idealized view of who we are, but who we really are.
Sadly, all that's really needed here is some public relations pablum. Some feel-good ads on the Superbowl that glorify the users, not the products. Have your employees show up at charity events, and make sure there are reporters there too. With a little time and money, the problem could be "solved" in a superficial way.
I don't know what the real answer is. It's impossible for everyone to understand everyone else's perspective. But the people who live in SF and Oakland who are being driven out of their homes have a real gripe. They probably like to live where they live, like you they have friends and family nearby, a job perhaps, and moving to Walnut Creek or Petaluma isn't what they want to do. And the rest of us who use your stuff, and don't like to be pushed around either, are feeling a little sympathy for the protesters.