Still going after all these years.
AnywhereCD: MP3 Albums and CDs. Kind of like the major label version of eMusic, without the rich metadata and recommendations features. Worth it? Well, if you wanted to get DRM-free recordings of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from Elektra, for instance …
UVA: Largest single gift to UVA funds new school. Alum Frank Batten Sr. gives $100 million for a school of leadership and public policy. Wow. That could have bought a lot of scholarships.
I got a Google alert today that I was on Real Networks’ Rhapsody—as an artist. It’s not me, of course. Apparently there’s a connection through Ted Jarrett, one of the first African-American record producers, who started some of the classic Nashville R&B labels (Champion, Calvert, Cherokee) and worked later with Poncello and other labels. Turns out there’s even a Poncello collection on eMusic. Makes me wonder how that Tim Jarrett, who is on that anthology, is connected to him—relative? Brother? The all-knowing Wikipedia is silent on the subject.
MemeCode: Undocumented command line parameters for WinZip32.exe. God only knows how old this document is; it references cc:Mail. But this works, in my testing, on WinZip 9.0. Note that Corel would like to get you to upgrade to the Pro version of WinZip 10 or later so that you can download an addin that accomplishes much the same thing.
MIT: Science Trivia Challenge. Would that I were younger I’d feel a little odd now fielding a trivia team, even if it was an “open division.”
If one feels schadenfreude when reading about the IRS’s problems with missing computers (or rage, for that matter), consider this: there is really no excuse today for laptops simply “going missing” and no one finding out about it for months or years. Any asset management technology worth its salt can scan for laptops and raise all sorts of alarms when they don’t check in.
Thinking about this sort of issue systematically is one of the benefits that process frameworks like ITIL bring. Once one gets beyond the basic service desk processes, and starts thinking seriously about configuration and change management, it becomes apparent that intelligent application of the tools in this market segment is important for so many more reasons than simple fixed asset management. Consider:
…and on, and on. Pretty soon the organizations that have not made the proper investments in configuration management processes and tools are going to get some very public black eyes—not just for embarrassing issues like this but also for their lack of management and foresight.
Today is CSS Naked Day 2007, a day when some thousand-plus web sites have cast off their styling to illustrate their semantically-beautiful bones beneath.
Which is why my site looks, um, weird. All the normal styling has been stripped out.
We do this to illustrate that the Web ain’t all pretty colors; at its root, it’s about markup that is easy to read and portable across multiple devices. It’s all about separating style from content, baby.
Hat tip to Zalm, who turned me on to this concept, and whose markup is just fine.
More to come…
Scripting News: A decade in a download. First, congrats to Dave—having recently hit a little brick wall in posting to my blog, my respect for anyone who can pull it off for ten years knows no bounds.
But I’ll confess: the quant analyst in me is slavering at the thought of a downloadable 10-year blog archive. Think of the stats that could be run:
Not to mention link frequency stats: who’s the all time outbound link champion of Scripting News? It could be Google or the New York Times, but my bet is that #1 on that list will be surprising.
It’s not every day that you hear about a new business plan, without a company around it.
Anyone want to work on RSS-I with me?
Because not everything can be serious all the time, I give you: Cute dog playing virtual soccer:
Because really, if I don’t share these viral videos with you, who will?
CNet: Cisco to buy WebEx for $3.2 billion. Cisco has been buying up into the services layer for a long time, and a service like WebEx, which depends on rock solid communications management, is a natural fit.
It would be interesting to know what this represents as a multiple of earnings. So many companies (my own included) depend on WebEx as a critical sales enabler that you could read that multiple as a prediction on the future growth of the technology sector.
Anyway, I hope that the acquisition means that WebEx sticks to its knitting. I haven’t been impressed with their scattered marketing focus recently (we’re a conference solution! a training aid! a tech support tool!) while their core conference delivery business still has wrinkles to work out.
I found Bruno in the first semester of my business school program, about a month into my first serious depression, during which I was confronting all my deepest fears about having uprooted my life and put myself into debt. It was good to find Bruno and realize that all the suffering had happened, much more definitively, before.
This was about six or seven years ago, a little over a third of the way through her absolutely ingenious run, during which she railed against the dying of the light, the conventional discomforts of life, and went through to reinvent everything in her life from first principles. Her end today has me feeling bittersweet. Yes, she appears to have finally accepted that she is worthy of happiness, that the love of her friends can be accepted without guilt, that life is sweet amidst the bitterness.
Or, as only Bruno could say, after her distant inamorata of many years proposes finding a place to live together,
Because, really, that’s the only way to get through life.
I couldn’t be happier to have been able to be a patron to Chris during the latter years of the strip. I also couldn’t be happier that he will focus his energies going forward on Little Dee, which already has some of the loony greatness of Pogo about it. Can you imagine a world where Chris Baldwin is in your morning paper? I for one can’t imagine a world without his work. As sad as I am to bid farewell to Bruno’s story, I look forward to the next chapter from Chris with eagerness.
The ever durable A List Apart had a great article on Paper Prototyping today. I have to second the recommendation. I had a tremendously productive prototyping discussion with one of our engineers recently using nothing but sticky notes on a whiteboard. Software is great but sometimes the physicality of being able to move stuff around makes a big difference to your creativity.
The practice reminds me of Voice of the Customer, the marketing practice by which customer utterances are written on Post Its and grouped to identify customer pain areas and requirements. Very low tech but very effective.
New post at the Boycott Sony blog, regarding Sony BMG’s position in PC World’s list of the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. I find interesting just how many “consumer” products are on this list—including such wonderful POSes as the CueCat, the Comet Cursor, the Lion King CD-ROM, and Microsoft BOB. The other theme, interestingly, is Apple products, with the Mac Portable and the Apple Pippin (the barely shipped Apple/Bandai game console) in the top 25 and the Newton, the Apple Puck Mouse that shipped with the original iMac, and the 20th Anniverary Mac in the (Dis)Honorable Mention category.
I’ve been playing with Vox, the new service from SixApart. So far it seems like a really slick Ajaxy blog site with some good features (Flickr integration is especially nice), one killer feature (per-post privacy settings), and some big glaring omissions, especially the lack of compatibility with Metaweblog API tools like MarsEdit.
However, I think the lack of tools won’t keep Vox from getting users. The friends-and-family concept is killer. The blog I’ve got set up on Vox is private, so my friends and family have to join the site to view it. My question for Six Apart is, what’s the ratio of people who join to people who actually post to their blogs?
Just in time for the holidays, a pair of BoingBoing links to some great gifts for that person who has everything. First, the OnDemand Action Figure Builder, which primarily seems to be about hair and face type generation and clothing choices — the available body type is essentially a GI Joe, limiting one’s ability to do really creative figures—but is still pretty cool. I can already see a big aftermarket in doll-sized custom t-shirts. Maybe this is a market opportunity for CafePress?
Second, of course, what everyone needs is a novelty USB memory stick, particularly one that draws a little power from the USB port to, um, go to town. Don’t miss the movie. Love ’em up!