Still going after all these years.
In the category of ideas that sound horrid unless you consider the alternative: the Nosefrida, a nasal aspirator for kids that works on the same principle as the late-70s gas tank siphon. I don’t care how many filters are on that puppy, the thought of putting my mouth on a tube that is filled with preschooler snot is pretty revolting.
But it’s a great product name. (Via BoingBoing.)
Lore Sjöberg posits a future of hybrid websites in Wired’s Alt Text column: Let’s Make Website Mashups, Like Netflickr, Figg and BoingPress. BoingPress is pretty funny (“This blogging service provides all the functionality of WordPress, and in addition automatically links to stories about DRM, the Creative Commons, Disneyland and anything John Hodgman does ever”).
I clicked through thinking I was going to see something about SalonHerringWiredFool, probably the earliest automated content mashup (it combined RSS feeds from four sites, back in 1999). You can even see what it looked like back in 2000, apparently the last time it ran.
So I was looking at my website and wondering: why do I still have a blogroll? And does anyone care that I still have a blogroll?
Used to be that blogrolls were what everyone did. There were bitter discussions about being linked or unlinked. Now? It’s probably just a measure of my declining time spent in blogs, because I haven’t updated it in a long time. I’m lucky if I see one or two blogs (besides BoingBoing) on the blogroll that are actually updating in a 24 hour period.
So drop me a line if you still want to be on the blogroll, but I’ll be taking most of the items off in the next day or so. It’s time.
The State:
These ain’t no chuggin’ beers. I missed the report earlier this month (on BeerAdvocate, naturally) that the state finally repealed its misguided ban on beers stronger than 5%.
The question of course is how long it will take for Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia (the remaining states that have such a ban) to finally lift it. Well, these may be the “hell freezing over” states, given how legislators in Alabama responded to a similar proposal this year: “I don’t know what you said, but you’re wrong,” and “I don’t have to read the legislation to know how I am going to vote.” Oy.
Sad, really, considering that at least in Alabama’s case the legislators who are so concerned about underage drinking aren’t doing anything to restrict wine or hard liquor, and don’t recognize that a Belgian Trappist ale hardly constitutes a gateway to perdition. (To mussels in Brussels, yes, but that’s another story.)
The ironic part? South Carolinians were driving over the border to smuggle high-alcohol craft beer back… from Asheville, NC. Yes indeedy, my dad’s home burg has come a long way. I still remember how blown away I was when I visited for the first time after he retired back there and found a Newcastle truck in the streets; not to mention the Asheville Wine Market, where I found Old Engine Oil Stout, Radgie Gadgie, Workie Ticket, and Bluebird Bitter for the first time.
A note that a Massachusetts “castle” in the Berkshires is for sale caught my eye today. The Searles Castle is a bonafide antique, at least by Berkshires standards, having been built in 1915. It’s pretty, but there’s no real history there, and I can’t help but hope that some fabulously wealthy magnate picks it up. Great Barrington needs more eccentrics-in-residence.
I have sort of the opposite feeling about Carter’s Grove. When I was in high school, the plantation was still being run as a historical center by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; it was actually an extra credit trip for us in US History in high school, and I have a few halcyon memories of visits with classmates (hi Andrew, Unchu, Jim, Paul) and family. Of course it also houses one of the oldest graveyards of victims of conflict between Native Americans and English colonists, the remnants of the Martin’s Hundred settlement.
Which makes its being up for sale all the sadder. As of the end of last year, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation decided that defraying its deficit required selling the property. Yesterday I saw an ad in the UVA Alumni Magazine for the site. The sale includes a pretty restrictive covenant that protects the “site’s historic, architectural, visual, archeological and environmental resources.” And yet. It’s fairly horrifying thinking of this early gravesite passing into private hands and disappearing from public access.
I realized this morning driving into work that there is a structural reason for my blogging less (though much of the blame is because I have a very busy plate). The specific reason is that my best blogful time is the morning, over coffee, when my synapses are just waking up and my cross-connections are most fruitful. My morning routine has gotten much busier, because (among other reasons) I am doing a lot more work with our office in Munich these days. Because they are six hours behind, that means I basically have to be on the phone first thing to catch them.
Ah well.
In lieu of actual content, I present a phone that one of the carriers really should sell, which I’ve nicknamed the LOLPhone (courtesy Worth1000, linked from BoingBoing):
It’s interesting how “open declarations of war” in the blogosphere sometimes have a way of starting something big. From my experience, it took kicking the rhetoric up to the declaration-of-war level to get people talking honestly about the rights of customers not to be treated as criminals.
Now comes this: An Open Declaration of War Against The House Republican Leadership. It’s interesting enough to contemplate voters rebelling against the Republicans who continue to reward corrupt members of their ranks, but this is something else: this is RedState.com, the right-wing blogging site.
And while it’s fun to watch the good old-fashioned fragging going on, I have to wonder how many more of these events it will take before the GOP breaks ranks in a serious way and re-aligns without the dead weight that is currently dragging the party down.
I suppose it’s indicative of my circuitous route to product management (through software development, consulting, and business development) that I was unaware that there is a professional certification for product managers through the Product Development and Management Association. If any of my product manager friends are reading this, I’m curious about the value of the certification. When I was doing my job search, I don’t remember anyone ever asking about NPDP.
Great post on the Product Marketing Blog at Pragmatic Marketing about product naming. (Aside: Steve Johnson surely practices what he preaches: a good solid descriptive blog name for the B2B audience. But is it memorable?) As a company whose name violates the “letter name” rule, I’ll add another caution to the letter name issue: not only are there memorability issues, but phrases like “intelligent enterprise technology” don’t work that well in acronyms because they put two vowels next to each other. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard someone call us “IT Solutions” because they don’t hear the E.
Speaking of our company, I”d be curious to get people’s impressions of our new corporate website.
The new news cycle: water main breaks, employee in the building above takes camphone pictures… which are solicited for the evening news. As we’ve always said, the relationship between blogs and “official” news organizations is not one way.
I never thought I’d say this, but I think it’s too bad the Tanglewood Festival Chorus doesn’t get involved in the Pops season opening concerts. Then I could have been there for the big fight.
Most novel use of the DMCA: suing companies for not purchasing your supposedly superior DRM technology, claiming that failure to use the most effective DRM technology constitutes avoidance of a technological encryption measure. I suppose if you can’t sell it, you can always sue…
Thanks to a Slashdot poster, here’s a magnificent set of mistranslated subtitles for Revenge of the Sith, also known as The Backstroke of the West. Apparently the English to Chinese to English process turned out some fun translations, such as “the Presbyterian Church” for the Jedi Council. Which is, you know, pretty amazing.
As in, “the Presbyterian Church like enjoys you not.” Which, I believe, is how Amendment B was originally worded before it got into committee.
Down in New Jersey this weekend for Lisa’s dad’s birthday. Thirty-one guests in a small two bedroom condo on the shore = party.
Back in Massachusetts: warm springlike days and nights. In from the grill, I smell like a bratwurst. There are worse fates. Our lawn is about to bite me.
Via Smilin’ Tyler, Murdering Masonic Reptilian Shape-Shifters. Looks like fell asleep between the 6 o’clock news and reruns of V: The Final Battle and decided that they were being threatened by human-reptilian hybrids. Favorite line: “In the duration my brother Ken kept getting struck from behind in the skull by assailants using what appeared to be heavy boards or bats on the top of his skull, the attacks occurred when he went to get mail, go to his garage, walk to get a newspaper.” Reminiscent of Woody Allen’s line, “The creatures motioned to me to come forward, which I did, and they injected me with a fluid that caused me to smile and act like Bopeep.”
Right up there with my old friend VPAC, my friends the Vampire Piranha Arsonist Clown… Deer. No, I don’t know where the D went in that acronym, either. And the whole story behind VPAC will have to wait for another time.
From the perspective of having run the Sony Boycott Blog after seeing Sony’s heavy-handed attempts to preserve their IP, it’s pretty entertaining to watch the entire Internet seemingly up in arms over the DMCA takedown notices for the 16-byte hex key that unlocks the HD-DVD copy-protection scheme. Link roundup of some of my favorite bits:
Thanks to Macintouch, I just spent a virtual eternity (okay, five minutes, but these days that feels like an eternity) playing Asteroids. The original Asteroids. Tucked away inside Microsoft Office 2004.
Word was a while back that Microsoft had put a moratorium on Easter eggs. I wonder how the team slipped this one in. I wonder whether Rick Schaut would have anything to say on the topic, if we asked him nicely.
