Guess what’s back in the shop? Yes, my new computer has gone back to its birthplace yet again.

Yesterday I discovered that the machine was crashing to a cold boot – no blue screen of death, no hanging in hyperspace – because one of the two HyperX 512MB RAM chips is defective. At least that seemed to be the problem: when I left chip A in and ran a diagnostic, the system crashed, but B completed the diagnostics fine.

So, I was feeling pretty good until a few minutes later I realized that I was off line because the built-in ethernet card was no longer functioning. So, back it all goes to my local computer shop where they’re watching whatever profit they made get eaten by the labor they’re putting. They’re nice guys, but I do sort of want to have a working PC at the end of this…

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Halley retells the history of business, blogging, voice and truth with a woman as the heroine. It’s a compelling story.

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Voice is truth’s body.

Maybe.

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My efriend and very funny guy Gary Stock writes about the Nexcerpt service he provides:

Nexcerpt now scans over 35,000 brand new articles every day — and more folks should be taking advantage of all that data! If anyone would like to clip or publish with Nexcerpt — up to ten queries of any complexity, excerpts are automatic — they could take a quick guided tour: …and sign up for a free trial account.

It works real good for me.

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In the new version of Dreamweaver, if you want to change the default extension from .htm to .html, the configuration panel explains: You can change the default extension in the document type XML file.”

Yes, you have to learn XML to change the default extension. In the next version, I hear that changing the font size will be a simple 3 step process:

1. Download the source code.
2. Type in the octal representing the new value.
3. Recompile.

Voila!

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I’m probably not going to have a lot of time for blogging today. I’m reinstalling software for the 3rd or 97th time; I’ve lost track.

Except for one gigantic crash-to-black yesterday that dimmed the neighborhood’s lights, the new PC is doing well.

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Here’s something blindingly obvious, really just a spin on what has been said elsewhere:

Most (?) ordering schemes apply an externally-devised order to the stuff to be ordered: alphabetic order is not something built into the books on your shelf. Or, in the case of Trevor Bechtel, while the color of a book’s binding is clearly part of the book, the idea of ordering them on a shelf by color comes purely from Trevor.

Hyperlinks aren’t like that. They build into the page itself its place in the webby universe.

Is there something interesting about this other than it’s how web spaces construct themselves?

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The Boston Globe today runs an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week:

Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You’ve mapped your workers’ brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who’s been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars — just the thing when you’re trying to sell something to an avid collector of ’64 Mustangs. The company’s hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm’s institutional memory gets an upgrade.

By the way, the link above will decay in a day or two. And, in any case, you won’t get to see the big photo in the paper version of me and Doc.

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Marc Canter explains the vision behind Broadband Mechanics.
This is from the end of his essay:

The idea is that all of us together can equal what Microsoft is working on – which they call Longhorn.

It’s possible that an inter-connecting world of micro-content servers and RSS aware tools can create a distributed, open source, web services based People’s Mesh.

Longhorn and Apple’s iLife will be the litmus we will compare our ‘People’s Mesh to. The goal would be to equal their functionality, but have it free and open for us all to use.

You can see part of that vision instantiated in a WebOutliner demo. (The WebOutliner will be one of the first apps to support threadsML, by the way.)

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Here the autobiographical paragraph from a book proposal Betsy Devine is circulating:

Betsy Devine has parlayed a master’s degree in engineering from Princeton into a high-powered 30-year sabbatical. She is the C++ programming genius behind “Funny Bits From Your Talking Chips,” whose free shareware version delighted Mac users worldwide and whose $25 version has sold exactly one copy. Her enormous collection of jokes, barely tapped by this book, is founded on years of nerd symbiosis in Princeton, Cambridge, and on the World Wide Web. Other distinctions include making microwave popcorn in Einstein’s kitchen and two years as captain of the Princeton Eulers—the world’s most mathematical softball team, and probably one of the few teams in history to have a Fields Medalist playing second base and a MacArthur Prize winner at shortstop (Betsy was worse than either.) Her weblog “Funny Ha-Ha Or Funny Peculiar?” is universally granted to be both.

Man, I admire that paragraph as a piece of writing.

It comes from Frank Paynter’s interview with the devine Ms. Betsy. Frank’s interview is, as always, funny haha and funny peculiar…and peculiarly revelatory.

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