Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Tire kickage
Jonathan Peterson grooves on the major action he's been getting off his annotated rebuttal of Fox/News Corp. honcho Peter Chernin's speech after the transcript appeared at Declan McCullagh's Politechbot. Jonathan explains:
But what is really somewhat exciting is that a Google search for "Peter Chernin" now turns up my breakdown of his keynote speech as the third item. A search for "Peter Chernin comdex" returns my piece first.
Chernin's speech was heard by hundreds of people in the hall, and was fairly widely reported by both technology and mainstream press. But Google's link weighting algorithms and blogs have pushed my commentary above the mainstream press. Part of the reason people linked to my piece was because it was both contrarian and researched (unlike any of the "journalistic" articles), but I think part of why Google works in such a democratizing fashion is that we are more likely to link to something written with a human voice, instead of just another pre-digested speech summary.
Hm.
I'm writing about Comdex while the site is apparently down. Not handy for putting Comdex links in the piece. [Later...] ah, now it's back up... without any of the old
Wanted: money to equal the RIAA's
Says here there's a certain group of people who should be helping us (and them) fight Hollywood for the hearts & votes of Congress.
Got names? Send 'em to me.
Busting the laws
RageBoy is managing to continue breaking to small pieces what's left of The Rules while casually provoking alpha lawblogger Donna Wentworth, who is now on the top of his blogroll — right next to the red-eyed fish that channels her text.
[Later...] Donna collects the clues: I don't think I've laughed this hard in months...
Back in the straddle again
Paul Boutin says I'm always impressed with Doc Searls' ability to break any computer he uses. I'm a distant second in that department. Really, companies should pay us to carry their prototypes around and stress-test them.
In just the last year the list of damaged or destroyed hardware includes: two Titanium Powerbooks, three external keyboards, one external trackball, one Handspring Visor, two cell phones, and a countless variety of power boxes and connectors of various kinds. I've also done my best to kill several radios and the Sony PC-110 camcorder that was responsible for destroying one of the TiBooks in a fall (they were both in the same bag, from which the Sony emerged unharmed while the TiBook was bent into a V-shaped thing).
I should add that Happy, my ancient Linux Pentium 133 box with the huge IBM keyboard, has never failed.
I'm close to recovery from my latest act of destruction: erasing all my email going back for years, during a backup fuckup.
Norton Utilities identified over 211,000 erased messages to one of my two addresses, over 65,000 erased messages to the other address, plus over 35,000 erased messages sent from the first address. But only the third pile was small enough for the program to recover (as a pile of individual 35k files). But the program was able to find 200 or so fragments of identifiable mailbox files. Dave Sifry has kindly put those together in one great big box of about 112,000 messages. We'll deal with the outbox next. Oh, and I managed to recover my address book too, although I'll need to finish hacking the data into a form Eudora can read. Looks do-able, but it'll take time I don't have. Still, I can look at it as a text file and find stuff.
Meanwhile, I've decided to close the salvage operation and go back to using the computer nornally again, which means overwriting whatever I've failed to recover. eLife must go on. I do have backups on CD of mail from 1999 and earlier, so I believe I have some of the missing stuff covered.
At the moment I've still only got working mail that dates back a couple of weeks. Bear with me until we finish fixing the rest of the mess.
Thanks again to everybody for all the good advice. Just one more question for the limited remainder of time I continue to use Eudora (which won't be long... I'll be doing mail entirely in a Linux mode soon): Do any of you know how to make the Eudora auto-mark fresh messages as unread? It does that, for some reason.
Frontiers of value subtraction
It appears from this story that certain Time Warner periodicals are thinking of joining their adoptive parent, AOL, in a suicide pact.
Grassed
An application by Oxford students for a broadcast license has been rejected because its acronym is ARSE.
In an unrelated story from the same news service, a Croatian radio host was confronted by a listener with a gun saying "have sex with me or die."
Failing stars
While this is unfortunate, you can use this to follow it across the sky.
Other than it kinda sucks there right now
I can't even begin to figure out what's going on in Nigeria.
