Friday, February 8, 2002

Just wondering

Every so often Macs seem to feel a need to spin up the CD-ROM drive eve when there's nothing in there, or it's irrelevant anyway. And they stop everything else while they're doing that. It still happens on OS X, though not as often. I was hoping it wouldn't. I have more serious hopes, but I thought I'd share that one little kvetch.

Let's go get cold

Dave wants to ski. Me too. But I am soooo booked for the rest of the Winter. North Carolina, Austin, San Francisco, maybe even CeBit in Germany. Oy.

By the way, I only learned how to ski in my forties, at my wife's insistence (she taught well, too, considering). Now I am living proof that it is possible, with a negleged body and little athletic skill (at anything other than shooting a basketball against no defense) that it's possible for a raw beginner to learn how to get down an intermediate slope without falling down, repeatedly.

So if you don't think you can do it, believe me, you can.

Perpective

An old friend writes about another an old friend I didn't know he had: Susannah McCorckle. It's one thing to regret losing somebody you liked but never knew; but another to know somebody for whom the separation was just one degree. It's the difference between regret and pain.

I remember hearing Susannah often on NPR. Those programs are archived here.

Black and Red, White and Blue

Safely in London, Norman Mailer says "America is too patriotic," it says here in a Yahoo/Reuters story. The story calls Mailer "influential," which might be wishful writing on the reporter's part. Thanks to Andreas for the pointer.

Tickling Pink

Hey cool: Dan Pink has a blog. I like his purpose with it: to zig where others zag. Thanks to RageBoy for the link.

iLike it

Some nice ink in the Chicago Tribune for Robert Grosshandler and iGive.

Untangling the Wireless Web

Here's Kevin on Mesh Networks and Wireless hotspots in Asia.

A continuing setback for Daves everywhere

Like me (a Dave), Dave Ely (another Dave) has a humor dependency on Dave Barry — much as we all also depend on that other modern pillar of levity, Scott Adams.

The difference, link-wise, is that Scott works more or less for himself, while Dave (Barry) works for the Miami Herald, sister paper to the San Jose Mercury News. Both papers have recently decided, as papers often do, to 404 the shit out of everything (as Dan, our blogging Merc columnist and friend, explains here).

Having encountered the Herald's link-shredding apparatus (which manages to match in annoyance the call center voice that tells you "Listen closely! Our menu has changed!") Dave (Ely) reports that "Dave Barry has a muffler." He (Dave Ely) seems to assume, as at first did I, that the Herald's barely hidden agenda is to scroll Dave (Barry) straight into pay-per-view.

But no. Sort of.

I see here that Dave Barry is now archived here. For three months. At the bottom of the page is this headline — "What happened to the Dave Barry Archive?" — over this text:

The recent redesign of Miami.com and Broward.com does not allow us to post more than three months of past columns by Herald Columnist Dave Barry. Please excuse the inconvenience.

Thank you.

Earth to Herald (or Knight-Ridder, or whatever is behind all this): You've just given your usefulness a shelf-life of three months. You're also bullshitting those of us who know there is nothing about any Web redesign worthy of the noun that requires you to scroll anything to oblivion after any period of time. You want feedback? Stop it.

Fortuately, we don't see the same notice at the bottom of Dan's new blog page. But we also don't see anything older than late January.

Anyway, let's hope this really is just "serious growing pains." Otherwise "muffler" will be the right word.

Neoblogism

Buzz coins "blog rot."

Fresh air

Finally got a replacement for my fritzed Airport base station, and at last the whole house is covered again. Also the deck, the back yard and the roof, which is whre I'm writing this right now. No kidding. It's warm out here tonight. The stars sparkle overhead. I can't see the keys, but I'm a touch typist anyway. Doesn't suck.