Category Archives: Musings

We now have telephone numbers for our Ohio house, and a promise of DSL no later than 9/11. Things are starting to move along!

For some reason, our home phone stopped working. I called BellSouth. Did they play their usual crappy music-on-hold? They did not. Instead, I was treated to Van Halen’s Dance the Night Away.

I have no idea what this article is about. I mean, I understand the individual words, but the concept remains elusive. I guess it’s good to be reminded of my personal limitations from time to time.

Consider the following screenplay, coming soon to your local multiplex. It’s all true, at least mostly so.
SCENE: the IRS regional office, a rather tatty-looking office next to a hamburger stand near the public library.
ENTER: PAUL, a fairly young, casually dressed white male. He looks around and spots a window in one wall.

Continue reading →

I threw together a quick page listing some things that a newcomer to our area might want to know. It is in no wise comprehensive, but it’s a good start, and I’ll be adding to it until we move. If you’re not from around here (see? I didn’t use the word “ain’t”– I am ready to move to Ohio after all!), you might not find it very interesting.

The Financial Times has a special report out: “Barons of Bankruptcy.” It reveals that the top management of the 25 biggest recent US corporate collapses walked away with (or, more properly, stole) more than US$3.3 BILLION in compensation! Holy spit! That’s hard to imagine.
Lots of people find it fashionable to crack on CEOs like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs (particularly Gates, who is unfairly dammed even in the midst of huge charitable giving–“oh, $25m is just a drop in the bucket!”, they say)– but they never engaged in this kind of flagrant dishonesty (well, OK, Oracle did). Disgusting.

As long as I’m in the mood for making up new words, I hereby coin the term blogholing for stereotyping blog content based on one of the widely established categories of blogs: warblogs, techblogs, and so on. If you go to Google and plug in the search term of your choice, plus “+blog”, you’re probably going to find a blog on that topic. In trying to prove my point by finding and linking to some ham radio blogs, I found a fascinating essay by Tony Collen, “What is ham journalism?” In it, he says:

There’s something we bloggers have in common, regardless of whether we belong to the upper or lower castes (and cases) of Journalism. Or to both. We are all, each and every one of us, many things; but we are all writers. That’s what we do here. We write.

He goes on to liken blogging to ham radio: both are hobbies involving communication, and both represent opportunities to jump in, start conversations, and share information without having pre-established relationships. Sure, there are journalist bloggers like Dan Gillmor and ‘real’ author bloggers like Cory Doctorow, but most of us are just ordinary people (ranging from librarians to USAF mechanics to schoolteachers to, probably, garbagemen) writing about what interests us. Blogging is a pleasant cross between talking to a stranger at the airport or doctor’s office (since you can get trapped into receiving Too Much Information) and the ease of access and information content of Big Media.
I guess I’m halfway in between; I earn a living by writing, but it’s technical. On the other hand, my brother earns his living doing technical stuff, but he writes too. We can all do it. If you’re not blogging yourself, why not?
Update: Doc Searls has an explanation of what bloghole means.

There’s a lot of bloviating going on here in the blogosphere. (Free translation: there’s an unholy lot of self-referential navel-gazing going on among people who write weblogs). This isn’t new, of course; one of the first things that people used the then-new AltaVista engine for was to ego-surf to see how many times they could find their names listed. This always reminds me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. However, there’s precedent; after all, Google ranks pages in part by counting the number of links to particular pages, and academics have valued scholarly papers based on the number of following papers that cite them. Blogging just makes it easier to see who’s linking to whom (case in point: the truly cool Internet Ecosystem).

This leads to the development of what I call an egosystem, where the value of blogs is perceived to be related to how many links a blog has and where they come from. In the egosystem, if you get linked by a blog geek (and I mean that in a goodway) like Dave Winer or Tim O’Reilly , your blogcred goes up. If you get linked to by one of the uberbloggers– y’know, like Glenn Reynolds or Den Beste, well, you’re a star in the making.

The interesting thing to me about this particular egosystem (as opposed, say, to People Magazine or the Democratic National Commitee) is that it superficially seems to ignore the value of content in favor of link count and weight. Really, though, it does just the opposite– where a site like AmIHotOrNot presents context-free photos for you to rank, with a blog you get all the context you want– possibly more than you want, as in Eric & Dawn Olson’s continual blogged arguing. You can make decisions on whether something’s worthwhile or not by reading it! What a concept. (Of course, having said that, I shall be crushed if my BlogHotOrNot rating stays down near the 1.0 end of the scale.)

NZBear has an interesting discussion about the myopia of some parts of the egosystem. Most bloggers in a particular topic area– surprise– tend to stick together, so that warblogs, or blogs about technology, or blogs by garbage collectors, etc., have lots of back-and-forth, self-referential linking. He says “Bring on the blogs by ordinary people!” Amen to that.

Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is an editor for Tor Books. He also maintains a terrific weblog. However, so far I must say that I like his wife’s blog better, primarily because on the left-hand side there’s a list of other SF authors who blog! Some of my favorites include Steve Gould and James Patrick Kelly, not to mention Charlie Stross. Go there now.

Charlie Stross has become one of my favorite science-fiction authors. His short stories “A Colder War”, “Antibodies”, and “Lobsters” have all appeared in recent editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, quite deservedly so. I just found out that he has a weblog, including a collection of stories available on the web. If you like science fiction, go there now.

According to this AP story, a man drowned in a vat of chocolate. The accident happened at Kargher Chocolate, which already has had at least one product recall. Somehow I think this accidental death is going to be fodder for every morning radio show and late-night monologuist for the next few days…

Thomas and I made it to New Orleans last night. Our flight was uneventful, but we had about a one-hour runway hold in Atlanta because of bad weather to the west. Now I’m sitting in what must be the world’s most uncomfortable chair at the Morial Convention Center. The convention center boasts 1.1 million square feet, each one of which is air-conditioned to within an inch of its life. We’re here for Microsoft‘s MGB, working in the competitive lab area. So far, no Microsoft people have shown up, so John, Peter, Sam, and I are working on various other things. In my case, I’m finishing the third book chapter so I can get it back to MS before my end-of-the-month deadline.

I accidentally found Herb Yeates’ site. I have no idea who he is, but his site is beautifully laid out and has a wealth of interesting stuff (including a good layman’s description of how nuclear weapons work). I think my favorite section is the one on the “bizarre glowing minerals of Franklin-Sterling”

What comes around goes around. John Magaw, former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), just got fired as head of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Magaw took over the ATF in 1993, after the Waco debacles. His mission was to turn the agency around; in the six years of his tenure, he didn’t accomplish anything meaningful that I can detect. Naturally, his reward for his lack of competence was a promotion: he ended up as the TSA director in December 2001. Ever since then, passengers, airline employees, airline executives, and lawmakers have been united in their complaints about the TSA: too slow, too secretive, too inefficient, and too expensive. Now, barely six months after his appointment, he’s getting the boot. According to the Wall Street Journal (registration required), Magaw got the boot today. Yahoo’s story says that Magaw was fired for letting the agency spend too much money and for not working with lawmakers; according to the DoT inspector general:

of the 313 employees hired who were not passenger screeners, more than half were paid more than $100,000, including 31 of 39 lawyers and 18 of 30 criminal investigators.

Good riddance, John! Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

I am not a big fan of John Gilmore. That’s not because of his accomplishments, which are many (including being one of Sun’s early employees, founder of Cygnus, which was open source when open source wasn’t cool, and driving force behind the Free S/WAN security project.) In general, he strikes me as obnoxious and overly opinionated. However, I have to give him his props: he has consistently defended the liberties of American citizens. Now he’s suing the Attorney General. Why? He believes that the current requirement to show photo ID at airports is unconstitutional, since (in his opinion) it violates our constitutionally protected rights to travel within the US and to be secure in our persons and papers. It doesn’t help that the TSA rule that requires this ID check is secret. See his lawsuit here.