Thursday, November 7, 2002

Cool: Vectoring Blogs Based on Books. Jon Udell pointed me to this All-Consuming site where you can vector in on peoples' sites via the books they mention. 7:08:08 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Fantastic Car. Check out this BBC story about a car that runs on compressed air and costs 1.5 Euros to run for 200 miles. If it works.... 6:42:59 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Me, Too, Dan. Dan Gillmor, in his Election Night, USA piece from Hong Kong says he voted for a third-party candidate for Governor of California. So did I, Dan, but not for the first time.[Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 5:48:13 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

But It's Still too Slow NY Times: Tablets Mightier Than the Keyboard? It's the latest expression of a long-running Microsoft fantasy: a future world in which you'll write directly on the screen of your PC with a plastic-tipped pen. You'll take handwritten notes, mark up documents right on the screen and capture doodles on the digital equivalent of cocktail napkins. [Tomalak's Realm] The problem I have is still simple. The times it would make the most sense for me to be able to use handwriting to enter information into my computer are decidedly not times when I can slow down to do the "careful cursive" or, worse yet, "block letter printing" it will take for these dogs to recognize my handwriting. You gotta get to the place where when I scribble as I take notes during a meeting or am trying to record thoughts on the fly, the system doesn't slow me down. 5:44:17 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

So is OS X Slow for You? Slashdot has a piece on the flurries of complaints about OS X slowness that crop up from time to time. My experience is that this is almost exclusively app-dependent, although some screen and system settings appear to be able to have inordinate impact on screen refresh which can make the system seem much slower than it actually is. What do you think? 5:40:36 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

An Undervalued Web Site. I was reminded again this morning how wonderfully helpful the sub-sites over at About.com can be. I fall out of the habit of using them but when I remember, I get a very nearly 100% success rate out of the experience. This morning I was wondering about sucking some audio off a cassette into my Windows box. (I plan to move this whole audio production effort to my Mac and Jaguar soon, but for now it runs on Windows using CoolEdit2000 and works just fine for what i need.) Swoop over to about.com, type in "digitize cassette" (or something like that), and 5 seconds later I'm reading a page that tells me the simplest and most straight-forward way to go about this. I always liked the about.com model. (They started out called something like MiningCo, as I recall. I did a profile on the CEO and a story on their business plan about three liftimes ago.) Now I know why it works. 3:41:34 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

MacAddict Teaches Blogging. The November issue of MacAddict has an article on using PHP, MySQL, and someting called pMachineFree to create a blog and serve it up using Apache on OS X. I may give this a try. I learned PHP a couple of years ago and thought it was pretty cool for what it did and I'm comfortable with MySQL. Always looking at new techniques and technologies for blogging. Anyone else know about this combo or have others to suggest? 12:56:36 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Baker's Gone, More's the Pity. The San Francisco Giants, proving that owners' egos can be and usually are, bigger than those of players and managers who actually are the product, fired Dusty Baker yesterday. The move was not unexepcted. And contrary to the stupid spin put on the move by majority owner Peter Magowan, it was a firing, not a "failure to renew an agreement." Dusty has an ego. Big deal. You expect anyone to be a successful major league manager -- let alone of the five most successful of the past decade -- without an ego? Most owners (notably excepting George Steinbrenner) swallow their pride and work for the good fo the team. Not Magowan. He was pissed off at Baker and he wasn't going to hire him back no matter what. The only guy to win NL Manager of the Year three times. Manager of the team with the best cumulative record in baseball over the last 10 years, a team that finished first or second in eight of those 10 years. Nice move, Pete! Some of my friends are happy Dusty is gone. They didn't agree with some of his on-field decisions. I guess winning is less important to that crowd than that their manager make decisions they agree with. And on the flip side, San Jose Mercury-News columnist Skip Bayless in his column this morning said letting Baker go was good for the team and all Dusty deserved. What a jerk Bayless is. A team takes a guy like Baker, who's been the heart and soul (if not the arms) of the team for the past 10 years, a guy who's been with the club 15 years, and tosses one of the finest managers in the history of baseball on the scrap heap because he finally demands what he's been worth for some time. Forgetting that he agreed two years ago to a much smaller deal than he almost certainly could have gotten elsewhere, the Giants demonstrate their loyalty. And we wonder why players jump ship for millions of dollars. Exhibit A. I think I'm done with the Giants. Great ballpark. Great superhero. Great GM, in fact. Shitty ownership. I'm not sure I'm not done with baseball altogether. That would be hard for me to do. I guess I'll look around for another team I can support. Maybe the A's (though I have serious reservations). I started out this piece prepared to comment on who I thought Baker's successor should be. Changed my mind. I don't give a crap. The mystique of the Giants is gone for me. It may not be recoverable. Bastards. 12:50:08 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.