“flawlessness is not the goal. a compulsive habit of creation matched with an editorial mindset is a far more viable goal.”
Page 70 of 181
Maria is going to be incensed
Neil Gaiman gets vicious about Disney’s plans to replace Christopher Robin. I wonder if he ever read Checkerboard Nightmare.
Adkins Anglophilia
My sister is home safe from England, and my mother–budding NewsBruiser hacker–is using the import feature to document her own trip from last July.
Sly
Post-sweeps, Arrested Development reappears tonight, and it’s on the front page of Wikipedia today.
As seen camwise, we have a really awesome Advent calendar, of which a couple friends and relatives have copies. Maria found it at a German Yahoo! store, along with several other varieties, all of which she bought and gave away. Last night we glued and folded the little houses by twinkly lights while we watched Rudolph and Veronica Mars. This afternoon I opened the first house and ate the chocolate inside it.
Sometimes I talk about technology and copyright too much, and not enough about how happy I am. I am very happy.
BellSouth–among many other providers of broadband pipe–wants to be allowed to charge for discrimination. That’s not how they’re selling it, of course; they make reasonable-sounding analogies like “If I go to the airport” and “I can get two-day air [shipping] or six-day ground.” It almost works.
But bandwidth isn’t a service–it’s a resource, closer in application to electricity or water. Can you charge more money for people who use more of those? Sure. Can you charge more to guarantee that when other people lose access to electricity or water, you’ll still have it? Nope. Telcos build over and under public and private land to run their wires, which means they’re doing it under public license. That in turn means they must provide equal priority to all uses, public and private alike.
Google is on the right side of this fight, predictably, as are Amazon, eBay, et cetera. Seeing Google’s name attached to this discussion makes me think, though: how long until search is a resource rather than a service? Until they stop being good at it, is my guess, or until it stops being a top-layer application (ie shipping uses roads; roads are a bottom-layer resource, shipping is a top-layer service; roads are regulated and shipping isn’t).
I’ve said before that I think Google will end up under government control, but their diversification over the last couple of years (and their reputation, at least, for business ethics) might forestall that. Then again, Microsoft almost got split into Ops and Apps. I wonder if Google will end up facing a choice between Search and Labs.
Ian has been and gone, leaving giggles and makeouts in his wake. Thank you very, very much to Deb Core, Sumana Harihareswara, Joan Wood, Sharon Calhoun, Lisa Brown, Scott Stauble, Kyle Neumann, Angel Brooks, Ken Moore, Monica Willett, Sean Hoban, and especially Maria, whose idea this was in the first place. You guys are the champions of friendship!
Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.
I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.
So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.