Steve Ogden's Radio Weblog
So close, and yet so far away...

Friday, May 10, 2002

Declan McCullagh Wired News article on CBDTPA, "What Hollings' Bill Would Do": http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51275,00.html 7:39:07 PM

Silicon Valley | 05/10/2002 | Judge Denies Fair Use, Free Speech "Given the lack of public outcry about these shameful laws and rulings, I'm beginning to wonder if very many of you care about your rights. Do you?" Yes. Write your representatives in Congress and complain.  If you live in California, complain loudly to Dianne Feinstein who is on the wrong side on this issue. 4:45:51 PM

Lance Knobel: "Step away from the horror of the killing and look at Fortuyn's declared policies: halt immigration, integrate existing immigrants, re-erect Dutch border controls, sack 25% of civil servants, reduce Dutch payments to the EU, end the system of consensus politics. This is idiosyncratic, reactionary politics. And however he dressed up his immigration policy, it appealed in part to some of the worst sentiments in the populace. " [via DaveNet] An interesting counterpoint to the Adam Curry piece. 12:18:52 PM

Valley of the Geeks - Site Information: "Finally, if you're really a complete geek, you can get an RSS syndicated content news feed of this site at http://www.valleyofthegeeks.com/rss.xml. This will enable you to use NewzCrawler or other tools to automatically get updates every time we post them to the site and view them along side other news channels like Wired, ZDNet and Slashdot. If you don't know about news channels, weblogs and all that, don't worry about it. If you do know, you may want to consider getting out a bit more." 9:29:41 AM

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

The Big Lie: "Monday's killing of historian and politician Pim Fortuyn brought an entire nation to its feet. After the initial shockwave that was felt throughout all communities in this tiny trading nation near the North Sea, the public showed its true colors. That of a peaceful, tolerant society." An interesting perspective from Adam Curry. The pervasiveness of misinformation is staggering.  It is coming at us from all sides.  Satellite feeds of video, carefully selected by someone with an ax to grind, supported by the web where you can find some site to support anyone's version of the truth. It is beginning to make the people who suggest that NASA's Apollo Program was all executed on a back lot in Hollywood seem not quite so goofy.  12:43:14 PM

Monday, May 06, 2002

Ordering Groceries in Aisle 'www'. Despite recent notable failures, Internet grocery shopping is quietly making a comeback. This time, however, the online grocer is likely to have the name of the local supermarket. By Terry Pristin. [New York Times: Technology] I order groceries on-line from Safeway last week.  Took longer than driving to the store, but I got free delivery and two things I didn't order. 1:12:25 AM

Monday, April 29, 2002

20010624 Finished marking the exams and rewrote the proposal. Out of the blue, I wanted to know if monkeybutter.net was a registered domain. It's not, but disturbingly monkeybutter.com is registered to a finanical consultancy group. Go figure.  [http://vfd.ii.net/self/drivel/2001archive.shtml] 9:58:25 PM

Sometimes it is important to buck the trend.... Renewals Plunge a 'Veri' Bad Sign. The latest financial results from VeriSign confirm a long-suspected truth: People who buy stupid domain names don't pay to keep them. VeriSign shares drop 46 percent on Friday. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 9:53:26 PM

Friday, April 26, 2002

Post, Link and Annotate. Proaction. Reaction. Interaction. That's my theory. Radio offers the best support out there for the annotation piece, by far. Thanks, Scott, for starting me off on this. [Russ Lipton Documents Radio] 12:16:41 PM

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Life used to be so much easier. You sat down at a VT100, you got a VMS logon screen, and after LOGON.COM had run and set all of your symbols and logicals, you got a friendly ‘$’ prompt. You fired up EDT (or LSE the Language Sensitive Editor, if you were progressive) and wrote some code, compiled it. Life was good. Microsoft makes me crazy. Does anyone actually use the depth and breadth of the MS Word object model? Who? And for what? I guess I’d rather have too much than too little, but I have never aspired to be a Word programmer. I just want to automate a couple of repetitive tasks. I guess I’m getting old. Nostalgic anyway. Truth be told, I never could remember Runoff ‘dot commands’ without looking them up either. I am mostly kidding of course, but these times sure make it tough to be a generalist. There are so many nuances to every technology and platform that you really have to pick one or two and go with them. I wish I didn’t have to choose between Microsoft and everybody else. Besides, I’ll bet VMS would scream on a 1.4 GHz Pentium. 12:39:53 PM

Saturday, April 13, 2002

Posting from Word is only interesting if you do it. I am going to try to get back in the habit of posting every day. Today politics… Arafat and Sharon are both fanatics. The Israelis and the Palestinians ought to go back to the huddle, pick new captains, and start again. There. While I am on the subject of the Middle East, why in the recent did the subject of US dependence on foreign oil, take a back seat to ‘soccer moms’? “Congress Is Giving Carmakers a Free Ride” was the headline in that bastion of lefty-radicalism, Business Week. They went on. “A hike in standards could have a big effect: Existing CAFE rules have cut U.S. gasoline consumption by one-third over the past quarter-century, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Even so, U.S. use of foreign oil has soared. According to the Energy Dept., the country imports 51% of its oil, up from 31% in the 1970s. The percentage is expected to leap to 64% by 2020.” Sheesh. Short of digging a big hole and pushing half the US Senate into I have no answer… Wait a minute. I have it. The Democrats and the Republicans ought to go back to the huddle, pick new captains, and start again. There. Okay, I feel better now. I’ll go back to working on the MetaWeblog API. 7:31:14 PM