Or at least it has for us for the past eight years. I proposed to Lisa eight years ago after a meal of duck and angel-food cake. This year the variation was in the sauce, and the source of the duck. The duck breasts were from Wilson Farm (I think technically from Maple Leaf Farms), and the sauce was a blood orange sauce courtesy of the Boston Globe. I think the blackberry and maple sauce was better, but Lisa really liked the blood orange sauce. So now we have options. And, once again, we learned that angel food cake from scratch, while romantic, loses something compared to the kind out of the box.
Day: February 14, 2005
Now I remember why I moved back to Boston
Joho the Blog: Web of Ideas: Netty Friends. Nothing like free gatherings of Net thinkers at Harvard to really get the ideas flowing. Also see the (perhaps over-dramatically named) Genius Workshop, which on Wednesday debuts exactly as Doc Weinberger’s Web of Ideas session ends.
Popping the Bubbler
Five Across, which is headed by the guy that headed the teams that created iPhoto and iMovie, launched a new blogging system today, called bubbler™. It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows.
I took it for a spin. You can read my Bubbler test blog to see my discoveries, but the bottom line:
- No permalinks (at least, not ones that are exposed)
- No good way to create hyperlinks (other than pasting the naked URL into the post)
- No ability to add an image inside a post
- No RSS feeds. Or Atom feeds. No syndication feeds at all
Summary: This isn’t a blogging tool. It’s a nice home page builder.
That said, I do like the reporter feature, a streamlined UI to create postings that are automatically datestamped—awfully handy if you liveblog. And of course, this is beta one. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
Chairman Dean
I’ve been pleased to see Howard Dean step up to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Like him or laugh at him, he’s espoused some solid stands on things that matter, not centrist waffling, and has proven that he can energize at least some of the base. Of course, I also note that the media continues to replay the Scream clip every time they talk about this, no matter how long it’s been debunked. Oliver Willis is also keeping an ear out for bias in the way the coverage is handled, including a less-than-up-and-up blind quote question in the press conference.
Too bad about the parade
Boston.com: Zeta-Jones acts up at Harvard. I was around Harvard Square on Thursday. It would have been fun to see this Hasty Pudding gig in person; too bad the parade got cancelled.
You are tearing me apart
This has been sitting as an open tab in NetNewsWire for so long, it’s got a new design since the first time I opened it. What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies List is a listing of all the apparent goofs, flubbed notes, patches, studio chatter, etc. that can be heard in every recorded Beatles song. Nice place to come check if you’re losing your hearing, or that really is someone belching during “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”
Link roundup
More stuff:
- New York TimesTrade Secrets: A Bibliophile, 3,600 Friends and a System. As someone whose library is categorized as fiction, graphic novels, poetry, US history, music, business, religion, travel, house stuff, and philosophy, I have a lot of respect for a library that has to be categorized with “country of origin.”
- So does the new Churchill museum say anything about his black dog?
- Got gadget lust? Not at the DEMO conference? Now you can read all about it.
- Forget to watch the Grammys? Salon blogged it, and is making me sorry I didn’t check in—though this appears to be the only year in living memory it would have been worth my time to do so. Loretta Lynn rocks!!
- Boston blogs aggregated and commented on by Adamg at Universal Hub (used to be at Boston Common, which is a much better name, but UH is a better looking site).
- About that Hampton Roads Ghost Fleet—and the nuclear ship that’s there. (Fortunately all the fissionable material is removed; unfortunately the hold still glows a bit…)
- Need to send an Apollo rocket to the moon? This guy, and his working replica of the Apollo guidance computer system, can help.
- I like the looks of OnFolio, the new product from JJ Allaire’s new startup, but haven’t got a PC to try it out on. (Via the Boston Globe.)
Happy intergalactic Valentine’s Day
Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Rosette Nebula. Such a cool photo:
Hating your customers: customers hate back
Boing Boing: Angry remix of “You can click, but you can’t hide”. This is what happens when you take heavy handed legal action against customers who are doing something that may or may not be illegal—you embolden customers to go out even further on a legal limb.
Update: Why do we object so much when copyright enforcement gets heavy handed? Take a look at this story about confiscation of private property, including data files and work material, in a Manila airport in the name of “stopping piracy.”
Newsburst day 2
Got a very nice comment from John Roberts at CNet on the last post, responding to a few points I made about NewsSource and pointing out an important omission. First, the easy one: import OPML is in the “Add Source” tab of the application, and it supports importing from a local file or a public URL. Which is cool. My 347 subscriptions got imported—even preserving my groups!—though there were a few time-outs, which manifested as 404s, along the way. The latter is perhaps unsurprising given the number of sources I asked NewsSource to handle. (I fed it my full OPML list.)
Second, and more importantly, I did what I often do, which is to fail to pause and reflect on how cool NewsSource is before I start making grand points about what it says about the marketplace. It speaks extraordinary things about CNet that they are making this investment, and preserves their place both as early proponents of linking out and as innovators in syndication. (They were among the first “big media” guys to get RSS.) It also says good things about them that they are setting the bar for other news sites in this way, saying, “You want transparency and the news from a dozen different perspectives? Here it is. Go get it.” Bravos.