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June 8, 2004
According to my dream last night, there truly are objects that bring good luck to their possessors. Unfortunately, the pool of objects changes rapidly, so that whether any particular object brings one luck is itself a matter of luck.
(No, I don’t believe in lucky charms or placating the local woodland gods, although tipping heavily does seem to work.)
June 7, 2004
A newsweekly in San Diego is running thirty days of Brian Dear’s blog as a feature story. He’s got the cover, no less. Plus, they’re paying honest-to-goodness money. Sweet!
Stonyfield Farms, the yogurt company, has launched 5 company blogs. (I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet.)
I’m spending the day blogging the Boston Globe’s Ideas Conference. Over the course of two days, we’re promised 32 ideas…
(Good conference, but am I the only one here with a laptop? It’s not like the conferences I usually go to!)
June 6, 2004
Our old Philips TiVo box (hacked so it has an extra HD in it) is showing every sign of imminent disk meltdown. Playback frequently freezes, requiring a hard boot.
Any Tivo or Linux hackers out there who know how to get the TiVo software to do some disk maintenance, blocking bad sectors, etc.?
Thanks!
From RageBoy to Krautgrrl to Darren Barefoot who praises the Cowboy Junkies for talking to their fans, links to a Flash whack-a-mole-y (guacamole?) game, and recommends a list of Top 10 Internet fads, some of which I missed entirely.
Dear Rob,
I heard your talk at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum about the importance of getting the defaults right, so it’s with rueful irony that I spent five minutes this morning trying to figure out how to keep your product, the Real player, from auto-loading every time I start Windows.
I must have pressed some well-disguised button in my previous session because when I restarted XP this morning, the first thing to load was your AOL-wannabe entertainment center. “All” it takes to keep it from auto-starting is: Go to Tools-> Options and then Auto services->Message Center->Configure Message Center. Then uncheck everything. And even then I’m not at all sure I turned off “Launch at start up” because there’s no box with a label like that. I may have only turned off the Message Center and I don’t kinow what the Message Center is although I’m sure Real doesn’t have enough to say to me that it requires its own special messaging client.
I use Real because there are streams encoded only for the Real player. I don’t want Real at the center of my entertainment universe. I don’t even want Real in the middle of my screen.
So, Rob, please get the defaults right. And no matter how right you get the defaults, please make it dead easy for us to change them. The whole experience makes your product look sleazy.
PS: Please don’t tell me that Real has hijacked my file associations. Again.
Your pal,
The David Weinberger Message Center
June 5, 2004
I am now getting 2,000+ spams a day.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day
The rate of incoming spams is therefore getting close to the interval it takes me to check my email and dispose of a single spam: By the time I’m done checking, more spam has arrived. That is the point at which the spam droplets form a continuous stream.
And that is the point at which no interval of my life will ever be spam-free again.
June 4, 2004
Amy Wohl, whose newsletter is required reading, has started a blog on food. (From Wohl’s Opinions to Wohl’s Onions?)
In response to Jeneane‘s observation that I’ve been slighting women, and at the risk of being slightly obsessive, here’s a list of every mention I’ve made of a blog since May 1.
1 Wireless blog starts – all men
2 I’m going to blog a conference — Neutral
3 Democratic Convention blog — All guys so far
4 AP writes up Joi Ito, male blogger
5 Halley interviews Andre — female blogger
6 Tool for turning your blog into a book — I credit a guy for the link
7 BlogCritics mention — mixed gender blog
8 Cluetrain writeup — Passing reference to Steve Johnson with a link to his blog.
9 Sudan blog — group blog, no indication of genders
10 Response to a blog entry by a guy at Worthwhile, a mixed-gender group blog
11 Link to BuzzMachine’s list of people blogging a political conference — BuzzMachine is a male blogger
12 List of the bloggers sitting next to me at a conference – 4 male bloggers
13 Plea for money for RageBoy, male blogger
14 Joi wants to know where to go next – male blogger
15 Link to the blog of a political author — Male
16 Gay supreme court justice — link to AKMA, male blogger
17 Storage prices falling — link to a male blogger who tracks prices
18 Link to a woman who maintains a blog for her 2nd grade class
19 Link to my own blog over at Worthwhile, a mixed-gender blog
20 The Berg murder as PR event — Link to a woman blogger’s comment
21 Link to Frank Paynter’s reaction to a blog of mine
What this list tells me is that in the period covered, not only aren’t there many women bloggers, there aren’t many substantial discussions of blogs at all: I only responded substantially to a single blog, lightly disagreeing with David Batstone at Worthwhile. It seems I wasn’t very engaged in the blogosphere.
In fact, listing the blog-mentions doesn’t accurately represent what I’ve been blogging about, another sign of disengagement from the blogosphere. I wrote a whole bunch of entries celbrating gay marriage, a bigger bunch of entries about various aspects of the Abu Ghraib horrors, many entries on political issues (including assorted snipes at the current administration), scattered entries about spam remedies, a handful of semi-nerdy tech entries, and a couple of days of blogging from a political conference. By a rough count, about 27 of the 88 entries in this period were responses to items in the mainstream media. While that isn’t so many more than the 21 blog mentions, the responses to mainstream items tended to be longer and far more substantial. In short, for the past few weeks I’ve been in “conversation” with the mainstream media much more than with other bloggers.
But, why the gender imbalance? And, for that matter, why the racial imbalance? The answer has to be complex, like asking why I have so few African-American friends: Well, in part it’s because my neighborhood is too white and the conferences I hang out tend to be too white (for which there are complex reasons), and in part it’s because I’ve been complacent, and there’s undoubtedly an element of unconscious racism in it. Likewise, women have been under-represented in Joho for reasons just as complex.
What to do about it? Establish a quota? Nah, no one is suggesting that. But it seems to me that intelligent people — by which I mean everyone — constantly and continuously struggle against the limits of their experience, knowledge, interests, and sympathies. As a species, we’re curious. We want to know what we don’t know. We want to experience life as others experience it. That’s why we talk and fall in love. We do this naturally and easily when the world engages us in ways we hadn’t expected. But there is a tyrannical aspect to our interests as well. We have to remind ourselves that not just our knowledge but our interests themselves are limited. The first step is to recognize ways our interests have unwittingly ensnared us. That’s why I appreciate Jeneane’s observation and the comments that followed. I think my response can only be in terms of awareness and support.
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