Saturday, July 17, 2004
Tag, you're IT
Several worthy IT links. First, an anonymous reply to this post at IT Garage:
User-installed apps are verboten, but... The reason Salesforce.com is so successful it that it gets around the IS department. Are dictatorial IS managers going to block port 443 as departmental managers switch from locally-hosted apps to web-based services to get some work done?
Good question.
Next at Linux Journal, Looking For Answers asks, Are there non-evil reasons why customers continue to like Microsoft products? by YT.
Also at LJ, GNU/Linux Clears Procurement Hurdles, by Tom Adelstein.
Maybe the surviving lawyers can sue them to death
Techdirt: After the lawyers, can we kill all PR people?
Here's my challenge to Tech PR folks:
Just get me useful and interesting information.
DON'T start by trying to get me to interview somebody. I'd say about 90% of the personal PR pitches I get are for interviews with CEOs. Not very creative. Or effective.
Bonus links: Public Relations that are neither, Dan Gillmor's Letter to Public Relations People and his interview with Steve Rubel.
Medianation
Fuel for the pro-war blogs is Tim Rutten's latest Regarding Media column in the L.A. Times. It was one of two blog pieces in the paper this morning. I forget the other one, and looking it up behind the Times' UI (confusing in every respect other than its intention to get you to pay for yesterday's birdcage liner) is too big a PITA. In fact, I want to thank Kevin Roderick of LA Observed for helping me find the Rutten piece at all. Obviously Kevin knows the tricks.
Anyway, Tim says this about the warbloggersphere, and its hyperfisking of the Wilson/Plame Affair:
Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report documenting the catastrophic failure of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. When the U.S. and its allies attacked his regime, Saddam Hussein had no stores of poison gas, biotoxins or covert nuclear program. This week, a British inquiry into prewar intelligence failures reached similar conclusions, though it continued to assert that Britain had "credible" intelligence that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger as recently as 1999. No support was offered.
Taken together, though, these reports were enough to kindle a fury among the politically minded Internet bloggers, who have become a major presence on the Net's freewheeling fringes. To them, Wilson — who has a flair for self-promotion — is the poster boy for a nearly traitorous opposition to the war.
The bloggers, whose rhetoric gains heat and velocity as it ricochets from one site to another through a chain of self-referential links, basically formulated a two-count indictment: First, Wilson lied by saying he was not recruited for the mission by his wife and about the conclusiveness of what he had found once in Niger. (The former charge is crucial in certain conspiratorial quarters because many neo-conservative bloggers believe the CIA, Plame's employer, was soft on Saddam and against the war.) Second, major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, were alleged to be suppressing the story of Wilson's mendacity. In other words, why won't the media tell us the truth?...
Something of the flavor of the invective could be found in this description by Roger L. Simon, the screenwriter and novelist turned pro-war blogger: "Wilson is no ordinary rat, the likes of which have abounded in virtually every political party since time immemorial," Simon wrote on his site, www.rogerlsimon.com. "He is a deeply evil human being willing to lie and obfuscate for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator's search for weapon's grade uranium."
Roger, indirectly, responds. One of the links there goes to a positive response to the quoted section, by Mark Steyn.
One Rung in the ladder
Just got the picture above (a bit larger, in sepiatone) from my cousin Martin Burns, with whom I share these great-great grandparents: Jacobina Rung and Christian Englert. Their son, Henry Roman Englert, fathered four sisters — Regina, Loretta, Ethel and Florence — who were a set of loving, tough, fine women, all of whom lived into their nineties. Ethel was my grandmother (who lived to 107), and Florence was Martin's.
Martin's mom, Catherine Burns, is quite the genealogist. Maybe putting up the picture and names here on the blog will help other genealogists in the (by now very) extended family to find a pair of common ancestors.
Seems a fitting gesture on my father's birthday.
Happy Birthday, Pop
Today is my father's 25th birthday since he died, in April 1979. He was 70 then, and would have been 71 that Summer. So today is his 96th birthday.
Hard to imagine the old man as that old, except that his sister is 92 and his mother lived to 107.
I've written about Pop before, most notably here. One of these days I'll make a more complete site for the guy, like the one I made for Mom after she died last August.
My sister Jan will be here next week. Maybe we can do it then.
Meanwhile, the headline.