Bad Hair Day

Took advantage of the cold, wet weather to go to the movies today. I wanted to shop for some new headphones, so I went to B&H on 34th and 9th, which left me near a megaplex on 34th, so it was a matter of what movie was playing when I finished with the audio shopping, and it was Eat Pray Love. It didn't get great reviews, but sometimes it's relaxing to go to a movie with low expectations. This one was okay, because it had a message that was simple, one that I was familiar with from my mid-life crisis a number of years ago. It goes like this. Your mind plays tricks on you, and makes you think other people are your problem, and that getting them to do something or be a certain way will unlock some part of your future. The inverse also seems true, their unwillingness to change is holding you back from being the great person you could be if only they would change. It's a trick because it seldom is true. It's a trick because it allows you not to change to become great and happy because...

I got a lot of snarky comments yesterday when I asked a couple of questions on my blog. This was after posting a proposal for a new kind of commenting system. Most people who commented simply objected to my proposal, liked nothing about it, and told me why they like the current form of commenting. A few people chose this time to make a personal attack, mostly ageist, the one ism you're not supposed to call people on. There wasn't much (if any) discussion of the idea. Nor would there have been if I had open comments on that post. Pretty sure it would have been the same. Some people would say they like it, others would say they don't. Others would write comments that had nothing to do with the post. I'd moderate-out the abuse. Most would be cries for attention. That's what Internet discourse is like in 2010. However, the best posts for comments are the ones that ask specific questions, like how long does it take for alcohol to reach the brain, or where's the missing spacebar on the...

Been reading comments by Dennis Crowley of Foursquare about Facebook's new check-in feature, and I think he could play it much much better. So this is a friendly open letter to my fellow New Yorker, urging him to learn about and practice positioning. To develop a clear difference between 4SQ and FB, one that makes sense to users, and allows both products to exist side-by-side. After all, there is Toyota and there is BMW. And there are trucks and nimble sports cars and bikes and motorcycles, that all more or less do the same thing. They all have wheels and transport people and things. But they're used very differently for very different purposes. There's lots of room for differentiation, and the products are already differentiated. But to summarily dismiss your huge competitor as "boring" -- well we understand why you would like us to think of them that way, but I don't think people do. You have to explain your product in a way that makes sense to the prospect. Craft a position that...

Rode up to 94th St on the HRGW and back. It's been a 10 mile ride the other two times I've taken it, but this time the GPS got whacked and came up with something pretty crazy. I rode straight through with only one break at the turnaround point. Took yesterday off because of rain. Had a very positive effect on my biking today. Rest is an important part of a workout. And this time it was a headwind going up and tailwind coming back. That's the way I like it! Riding time: 52 minutes. Couple of videos: 1. The river was choppy today. 2. This is my favorite stretch of the greenway. You're riding over water, very smooth path, perfectly level.

Hey I don't know why it took me so long to think to do this. http://links.scripting.com/ What it is -- Every link I've pushed to Twitter since April 2009. How it works -- I don't call Twitter to get these links, so when Oauthcalypse Day comes, this little app might survive. I store all these links in a database on one of my servers. I have a bookmarklet I use to create each link, even ones I create on my iPad, and because it needs to record info about the link to maintain the Top 40 list, the data is around, and I never delete it. So it was there. What's interesting is how much it looks like the early days of Scripting News. Lots of links to stuff with snarky comments. We go so far just to come back to where we began! The earth is round, so is time. Big wheel keep turning. Etc etc. It gets built at least once a night. I might have it rebuild every time I add a link.

I wanted to search for "alcohol metabolism rate" on my iPhone, but where is the spacebar? It isn't on any of the alternate screens. What am I missing?

I'm at lunch with Arikia at Cafe Tasia on 8th St. She ordered a strawberry mojito and offered me a sip, which I took. Less than 30 seconds later I already felt a buzz. She said that's not possible, that alcohol couldn't make it through the stomach to the blood and to the brain in that short a time. She thinks it's a placebo effect. I think it's the real thing. Who's right? (Please cite your source.)

I was sitting around eating food and working my way through Season 2 of Breaking Bad and got itchy for some bike action. Looked out the window and saw it wasn't raining. Looked at the street and saw people walking by normally. So I put on the helmet, started my Cyclemeter and hit the road! Short ride, great energy -- down to the Battery. Stop, take a picture of the harbor in storm mode, when big fat drops start pinging my helmet. Ping. Ping. Ping. Strap up and head out. No problem. It's summer heat and summer rain, so we all get soaked, everyone, but who cares. A short ride, up and back. Here's the map and the stats: 4.6 miles, 27 minutes. Here's the song.

I'm almost 100 percent sure that scripting.com was the first blog to have comments. And I'm equally sure that it was the first to have its comments flame out. The flameout was a good thing, although it didn't feel like it at the time, because it created the first wave of blogs. And when their comments flamed out, there were subsequent waves of new blogs. Once the blogosphere had grown sufficiently that the central role scripting.com played was largely forgotten, I brought comments back. I've been mostly satisfied with them, but certain subjects evoke predictable and futile "arguments" in response and unless moderation is applied, they will spiral into a flamy back and forth that you can find in any of thousands of different places in the blogosphere. So I moderate according to a few basic guidelines. 1. Keep your responses focused on the piece you're responding to. 2. No ad hominem attacks. 3. Add value, a new idea, perspective, point of view. Simply saying "I disagree" is not helpful...

Here's how it was explained to me by someone who says they understand what I saw at the 5th Ave Apple store this morning. 1. The people lined up there were employees of resellers, companies who buy iPhones and resell them overseas and online at higher prices. 2. They line up there every day, in case there are any they can buy. Most days there aren't. 3. They come back the next day, because there's money to be made. These people aren't there to buy phones for themselves. 4. The line went round the corner and down the block. 5. This would be a good story for a business reporter to dig into. Imho. Click on the pic below for a blowup. Sorry for the lack of clarity in the picture. I might ride by there tomorrow morning to see if I can find out more about what's going on.

And Christians and Jews, athiests, agnostics. Men, women, boys, girls. Bike riders, walkers, runners. Tourists. No one seemed offended. Or in any hurry to get anyone away from anywhere in particular. It was a sweet, relatively quiet summer morning in NY. I rode past the Fifth Avenue Apple Store and saw a huge number of people lined up. I asked what they were lined up for. iPhones. They were almost all, if not all, Asian. Many did not speak English. I asked why, now, after all this time -- they're lined up. I was told it's been this way ever since the product launched. I took pictures. The map. 13.5 miles, 1.5 hours.

And Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Send them to overseas to a country where they don't have our Constitution and tradtiion of tolerance for diversity and freedom of religion. Where they can learn the lessons of history on their own dime. Make them wear yellow stars, as my ancestors did, as a show of good sense and courtesy. So everyone can know they are Americans who weren't good enough to live in America. I was thinking deportation might be the final solution for the problem, when Karen Hughes wrote a positively Nazi rationale for "moving" the Park51 community center, as a show of national unity. Like so many Americans who have spoken out on this, she needs a refresher course in civics. Or a lesson in 20th century history. You can't single out people who practice a specific religion to be persecuted, just because a majority thinks it's sensible to persecute them. What other rights would you like to deprive them of? Due process? Habeas corpus? Maybe we should just...

When my Windows servers reboot I'd like them to go all the way, to log on and run the startup apps. This happens all the time, when they automatically update themselves, which is a good thing. Unless I'm awake and around when it happens it means my servers are off the air for a while. Sometimes hours. There must be a setting somewhere?

I'm having no luck getting through to the web admin interface for the new cable modem Time-Warner installed here. I need to get in there to adjust the config so I can get to my desktop remotely using a dynamic DNS address. It worked fine with the old modem. It's a pretty simple matter to program the routing table so things work properly. But you have to be able to get through to manage the configuration, and I can't get to the login screen. The instructions in the manual are pretty clear. They say to connect to http://192.168.0.1/ and enter cusadmin and password as the username and password. But when I go to that address, it says it's connecting, then sits there for a while and times out. Here's a photo of the plate on the back of the modem with the MAC addresses blocked. Any ideas?

I read this review of Pogoplug and then the reviews on Amazon. Sounds really cool. Not quite sure what it is. Do you have one? Do you like it? Should I get one?

Couple of items. 1. Logged into Twitter for the 187th time this morning, and was greeted with the message: Sorry, that page doesn't exist! Problem is the page that doesn't exist is http://twitter.com/. Don't get all existential on me now. 2. I had to log into my pharmacy's voicemail system to renew a bunch of prescriptions. After the second presscription, the voice seemed very familiar. By the third I knew who it was! It was the male voice from the "I don't care" viral iPhone 4 video. Made the rest of the experience a lot more fun. As a sidebar, I can't hear the name iPhone 4 without thinking of the idiot customer.

I'm on the east coast, with a car and a bike, and a week to spare starting on Tuesday next. Looking for a place with (here's the kicker) with 1-week rentals available, relatively flat (for biking), and good swimming. Doesn't have to be salt water. I want to bike on country roads, do some writing and reading, maybe have a couple of friends join me from elsewhere on the east coast. Got any ideas?

For some reason I decided to re-watch There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. I didn't care for it the first time, but the second time, wow I really did. Especially the music. And he's a great actor, and the movie is more like a painting than a plot. A few scenes, a few characters, they interact, there's a little drama here and there. But mostly it's the music and the scenery and the sets and the acting. Especially the music. So the title of this piece is a play on the title of that movie. Another title that would have worked: No Country For Old Software. What am I talking about? Twitter's Oauthcalypse, of course! I promised that I would not convert my Twitter software. I plan to keep that promise. But now I can see how much I'll be giving up. I have lots of little systems that depend on Twitter, here and there. You hardly notice them, but they will be noticed, when they're gone. I suppose I could convert them. But then they have promised to rip up the pavement again when the...

Interesting piece with a simple point by Marco. He shows how the smartphone market was transformed in 2007 by the introduction of the iPhone. He's right that the lack of a removable battery and slots did not hinder the adoption of the iPhone. But I don't recall people saying it would be a failure because of its lack of expandability in hardware. However I do remember criticism for its lack of expandability in software. Marco then extrapolates that the same is about to happen in netbooks. I agree with his conclusion, but I don't agree with the reason. And as with the iPhone, we're losing something important if the transition we agree is happening actually happens. The key difference: There was no bottleneck for software in the pre-iPad netbooks. It matters. I just read an article about the Republican party running sexist TV ads, on my iPad, but had to get up and look at the same page on my Mac so I could watch the video. I uploaded a video to Flickr from my iPhone 4, looks fine on my...

Every time I head north on the Hudson River Greenway, I go a little further. All the while my eye was on the huge milestone looming in the distance. The George Washington Bridge. Well, today it looms no more. It has been acquired. I ownz the GWB! Me and my Giant blue bike. I knew great things were up when I mounted the bike and warmed up between the Village and the Intrepid. Then I paced myself through Riverside Park, and felt strong as I approached 125th St. I knew I would go all the way. And I did. Then I turned around and man did it get tough. The funny thing about a good tailwind is it makes you feel macho and all the while you aren't aware that there's a tailwind at all. But when you retrace your steps the tailwind turns into a headwind, and there's no mistaking that. What was free and fun on the way up becomes arduous and painful hard work on the way back. But I survived. And now that it's over, I feel grrrrreat! Here's the map and the stats: 1 hour 58 minutes. 18.56 miles round...

I was in the middle of watching the first episode of The Big C, the new Showtime series starring Laura Linney and Oliver Platt when I saw that I could watch The Zuckerberg Show on Facebook. Things were all flipped around, because Zuckerberg was a rerun. On so many levels. It was a rerun in that here was a huge tech company doing something that was interesting only because of their hugeness. And it was a rerun because it had all been done before, by Foursquare. It was also a rerun because it's just another loop around the tech circle. Every feature shows up in everyone's product. You can see there are three companies, Apple, Google and Facebook, at least, that are largely cloning each other. And to the extent the Facebook announcement was interesting, it was equally sad that Yahoo and Microsoft, two passed-over tech giants, couldn't put something like this together now, if their corporate lives depended on it. And they do. So after about 15 minutes of nauseating product annoucement...

Asus says the iPad is cutting into netbook sales. I'm not surprised. Asus's response to the iPad has been to stop improving their netbooks. The product they're shipping now is in no way different from the one they were shipping six months before the iPad shipped. It isn't even cheaper. Maybe the battery lasts longer, but they maxed out that spec when they hit 7 hours use per charge. They knew the iPad was coming, and they had nothing in the pipe. That sales are dropping is no surprise. What possible reason would anyone who has one have for buying a new one? Meanwhile this leak re a Google/Chrome OS/Verizon tablet shipping in November sounds like just what the doctor ordered. I'll buy one for sure if it's less than $500. I love buying new cool gadgets. Too bad Asus isn't offering any. Update: Lots of interesting comments on Hacker News.

Makes sense that I have to cut back a bit the day after pushing to a new limit. Today's ride: south to the Battery, turn around, north to the Intrepid, and back to the West Village. 9.73 miles. 1 hour exactly. Feel good, but not so much energy as yesterday. I'll get some good programming work done this afternoon.

What a mess, but it has a happy ending. I now have an Apache sub-folder of my Dropbox folder that contains sub-folders whose names are domains. When I create a new folder and point that domain at the machine running Apache, it automatically is configured to host that domain out of that folder. And I can copy files into that folder from any of my machines on my Dropbox network. I was finally able to create a NTFS junction using an Explorer add-in that Samir Talwar gave me a pointer to. Bravo Samir! As always the Scripting News braintrust not only has a myriad of answers, but has the right one, and we get there quickly in good spirits. You guys are the best!!!

Oh how the Bay Area culture loves to make technology a life-and-death struggle. Things that were never alive in the first place, like the web and RSS are said to be "dead." I think it's hubris and bad karma to be in the business of pronouncing things dead. That's the province of a higher being . Us mortals, well we do die. I'd hate to have my last words be that something or someone else is dead. Anyway, to paraphrase the famous fictitious Met, Chico Escuela, "The web been berry berry good to me." So rather than say bad things about Wired and magazines, I thought I'd start a list of nice things about the web. If you'd like to make a contribution, leave a comment, or link to a blog post of your own that says something nice about the web. 1. The web is where I read about the web being dead. 2. I can write what I want on the web and Steve Jobs doesn't have a say in it. 3. NakedJen is called NakedJen on the web, where on Facebook she's called "Jennifer Neal," which I find both confusing...

Recorded at 7PM Pacific. Marshall was off tonight. We had two guests -- Doug Kaye of spokenword.org and Joseph Scott of Automattic. Doug is working on a podcast aggregator that supports rssCloud. Doug also founded IT Conversations that was a focal point in the podcasting bootstrap at the beginning of the decade. Joseph developed the plugin for Wordpress that shipped at the beginning of the week.

Wish someone would invent some sort of cloud for RSS that would make things realtime. - Rich

:) Thanks, Dave. - Jon Ursenbach