Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Lunch With Tara Grubb Sushi at Osaka's on High Point Road. Tara is serious about individual liberty, but she is not a doctrinaire Libertarian. "Political ideals carried to an extreme are utopian, and that doesn't work," she said. She sees the P2P bill co-sponsored by her opponent, Howard Coble, as an example of a politician putting corporate interests above individual rights. Her ability to expand that message of individual liberty to other issues in the next ten weeks will be critical. Can she beat Howard Coble? I don't think any Libertarian could beat any Republican (or Democrat) in the NC 6th district. Tara is bright, quick, and sincere. She is also young, lacks focus, and doesn't have a sufficient campaign organization in place. If she can hone her message and put herself in front of enough voters, she could make some noise and inspire future challenges. Already, she is the first candidate for US Congress to have a Weblog, and that alone is noteworthy. 4:05:25 PM   comment []

Things I Want From Radio An improved word processor, better remote access, and clear instructions. Radio (the software used to create this weblog) is a good product, cheap and reliable and easy to use for the very basic jobs of publishing directly onto the Web. These are some ways I as a user think it could be better. Beefed-up word processing would be nice. One missing essential is a spell-checker. Another thing I'd like is better control over fonts--I have trouble matching my blog text with common fonts and sizes that appear in Windows and email apps. In terms of remote access, the current email system requires the user to be running Radio on another computer. This has severe limitations for people without an always-on Internet connection. I would be willing to pay for an add-on service that let me update from any computer at any time. And I would really appreciate instructions that were in much plainer English. There is a lot of stuff that I just don't understand, and I'm probably ahead of the mass-market curve in terms of comfort with geekspeak. The folks at UserLand, the maker of Radio, know about some and probably all of these issues. No doubt there are technical tradeoffs and other reasons some of the stuff I want isn't here yet--for one thing, we are still in the early days of this medium. But that's my wish list for today. Summer's End The kids go back to school tomorrow. We are all bitter. As the morning cook, it's not getting up early that bugs me; I tend to get up earlier in the summer so I can run before it's too hot. It's the hurry, the mad dash to meet someone else's schedule. I composed a poem for the children this morning: The end of summer/such a bummer/you could load a truck/with how much this sucks. LOTR Revisited We rented Fellowship of the Ring last night. First time Lisa and Syd had seen it, fourth for Elijah and me. Syd liked it and so, to my mild surprise, did Lisa. Frodo is still 20 years too young, and the Balrog on the bridge is still not as good on film as it always was in my head, but it still rocked. I am looking forward to The Two Towers. 11:21:30 AM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Ed Cone.