Cleveland Crowd is Pathetic

You could hear a pin drop in that place. The arena is playing MC hammer and all sorts of other soundtracks just to make sure there is some kind of background noise.

Granted, most American sports have no culture or charisma or songs or much in the way of tradition, but still - Cleveland is horrible.

During the playoffs. Nothing. Zilch. Cleveland Cavaliers about to close out DC in the first round of the playoffs.

Terrible.

I'm Sorry

Bloggers need an "I'm Sorry" button or something that they can use after they scare off a reader.

Obviously, this only applies in cases where a blogger actually has or wants readers. My ego could potentially help me qualify in the 'wants' category a bit.

So, blogger posts something outrageous, and the reader freaks and unsubscribes from the feed. That's fine, but what if the blogger just made a mistake and wants to apologize? The blogger can apologize, and the former reader will never know. That doesn't seem to be a logical way of doing things.

Also, there can be misunderstandings, or typos, or whatever.

I unsubscribe from blogs all the time. For instance, one blog I had been reading for a while now just celebrated torture - pretty explicitly. So I unsubscribed. No biggie.

But what if it was a misunderstanding? Or what if a hacker got in and managed to push something out on the feed?

I'll never know.

So, how can we accomplish this functionality, technically?

We need a "I'm leaving you because of this post" button. Google Reader already has the 'unsubcribe' button - why not add a bit more functionality that allows for a comment?

Some mailing lists already have this functionality.

...should have mentioned, you can already achieve this functionality in a way - you can comment on the blog that you think the post sucks, and why, and then you can unsubscribe, but that can be a pita. We need something quick. There is, of course, lots of follow-on functionality.

Can all NBA players stop crying now?

Just stop talking to the refs. Stop crying. Stop the stares of disbelief. Just stop.

Play basketball.

I like Avery Johnson

Some dudes, you just like. They seem decent. Like decent people.

So, it kinda sucks that Johnson will get fired after his team loses tonight.


p.s. have they always described a player's height by referring to their 'length'? Like, "he's long" and "he used his length" and "he's so much longer than the guy who is covering him" and "once again, his length is just too much for so-and-so".

Sorry. Your search failed.

Welcome to Yahoo Mail.


I've gotten this message about 50% of the time I used the 'Search' function on Yahoo Mail for about the last year or so.

Thanks, Brad Garlinghouse, for doing such a good job on your product area - Yahoo Communications, which includes Yahoo Mail.

Good-sized cubes

That's apparently one of the pluses for some tech company I'm interviewing with here in Austin.

:)

Rogers Clemens - Sex Offender

Hey, I'm just sayin, if you want to get into the Hall of Fame, then you might not want to be having sex with 15-year old girls when you're 28.

And if you do decide that you want to cheat on your wife with a teenage girl who is just about half your age, then you might not want to legally accuse anyone of defamation, because details of your ten-year affair with an underage girl-turned-druggie might just become public.

There really is no more detestable person on the face of the earth than Roger Clemens - save maybe for Bush and Clinton and the usual suspects, and I felt that way even before finding out that Roger Clemens was a sex offender. He tried to use his fame and money and power to get his former trainer, and friend, to lie under oath, and did it in the absolute sleaziest ways. The words 'slimeball' and 'sleazebucket' and things like that are not really ever appropriate when referring to another human being, but if anyone comes close, it's Roger Clemens.

If Bush is out of office before Clemens gets convicted of perjury, Clemens could be locked up right next to Barry Bonds.

Old people's software

I need some old people's software to give to my mom.

She keeps crashing her computer. Or I blow it up when trying to get all the viruses off it (remotely).

Does any exist? I want something that essentially looks like something you'd give to a five year old - something even simpler than an iPhone interface. We'll give them a locked-down browser, too. If they want office apps, they can use Google Docs.

Maybe it's just a locked-down version of MacOS.

I think my mom is not alone. There are lots of old folks who will want to get on the net. We should make it easy and safe for them.

...M$ thinks like me. Scary.

Cruelty to animals

What do you do with a teenage boy who has been arrested twice for cruelty to animals?

Why, you set him loose on his unsuspecting neighbors, of course.

Josh Howard is evil

Etc. etc.

But someone's got good sense.

Alonzo Mourning and Charles Chuck Barkley were on tv saying, "My brother was a druggie" and "What about the kids?" - idiots. Ask them why some drugs are ok (beer, wine, liquor) and others are bad (pot), and you'll only get the same pinheaded response:

Drugs are bad, m'kay?

When will we get past this stuff? Seriously.

Gregg Poppovich, Spurs win without honor

They're employing the Hack-a-Shaq strategy. Pathetic.

Poppovich and the Spurs have created their legacy. Cheaters - if not by law, then by subverting the integrity of the game in any way possible to get the W - much the same as the Italian national soccer team.

Free software projects can die overnight

It happens all the time. It's practically the primary definition of 'free software' and any honest free software advocate will tell you that straight up. It's why most people are smart enough to avoid free software.

"Free software? You mean, the stuff that kind of exists today and is gone tomorrow?"

Exactly.

Take Lyceum, for instance. Their last blog post happened 5 months ago.

Why did it die? Who knows? Who cares? William Hurley sums up open source software nicely when talking about a project he's been involved with lately ('Ozomoto'?), when he says (2:25):

So, it's a ruby on rails project that is, uh, basically, hopefully going to be one of the ruby on blogs that sticks around more than...after it works after nobody maintains it anymore, as soon as a developer gets a job or a girlfriend, then the project is dead.

Here's the thing - he's not kidding. Whether these two particular reasons are the most popular reasons for the death of projects or not is besides the point - anything can make a project go kaput in the night. Every free software project has a bum ticker.

In response, the host, Thomas Tucker, says:

It's dead. Totally dead. That tends to be the case sometimes which is not so great.

I praise them both for their honesty.

Of course, 'Ozomoto' appears to be dead and gone, if it ever really was.

What's the lesson, here?

Well, don't use open source software, of course.

The problem is that open source software is so conflated with free software that the two are virtually the same. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is.

So, if you want to build a website for yourself or your customers, and you want to be taken seriously, don't use free open source software - it'll end in disaster. There is open source, 'free' software you can use - stuff like WordPress that is subsidized by a corporate sponsor, but projects without a corporate backer are almost always doomed to fail, and fail hard when you most need them.

One topic we'd like to revisit, here, in the near future is the centrality of elitism, arrogance, ignorance, and selfishness to the free software movement.

New job site idea

So i'm looking for a job again, and most jobs suck, and most job sites still suck.

Everything I give out my email address I start getting spammed by more people - so why not provide job seekers with their very own 'job seeker' email address, so they can turn it on and off whenever they want? They can choose to keep their old address, or they can choose to get a new one whenever they want. All contact between the job seeker and potential employers is done through this email address, so the job seeker's personal email address is not compromised.

Companies like Emurse showed great promise, I thought, but then they seemed to just fade away. I wonder if I can convince them to make a go of it on their own, again - with my help, maybe. :)

Seriously -- that Monster and Dice and Taleo and these types of sites actually still exist is just an incredible failure of the market.

Most job sites are stuck in the stone age, and things are actually getting much worse for everyone involved. It's an incredibly inefficient process for myriad reasons, but I believe that technology can help make the process more enjoyable (read: less dehumanizing) for everyone.

Plant trees in Haiti

Everyone rips on Haiti for being deforested. They never mention how the U.S. government overthrew the democratic government of Haiti so that U.S. corporations could run roughshod over the country and its people. They don't mention the incredible history of exploitation of the Haitian people by the governments of the U.S., France, Canada, multinational corporations, etc. We're supposed to be a bunch of racists and just say, "Oh, those dumb Haitians - they're all black - they're all stupid - they knew they were deforesting the country and they didn't even care."

Don't be a racist.

We have enviros running around like crazy trying to plant trees all over the world, but none that I know of have ever suggested planting trees in the very country that the U.S. government destroyed. Sure, multinational corporations - some based in the U.S. - can be blamed for various forms of deforestation in Brazil and Africa and even Haiti, but the case in Haiti is clearcut - the U.S. government is responsible for overthrowing at least one democratic government that was showing real promise in the areas of social justice, including limiting deforestation. The U.S. government could not tolerate the 'threat of a bad example' - so Haiti is now in a bad way - not only deforested, but experience food riots.

If you want to do something that ends up planting trees in some foreign country - and you want to feel good about donating your time/money to such a cause - stop - think - and then start sending your money to projects that can help reforest Haiti. And if you are a citizen of the U.S. or France or Canada or any other country that fucked the Haitian people, then beg forgiveness while you hand over your money.

$1 for Wikipedia?

If every one of us who use Wikipedia regularly donated $1 per year to its continued, non-advertising funded existence, is that enough? Could Wikipedia get by on that?

If we each donated $25 for a 'lifetime membership/supporter' designation, would that be enough? Maybe the money goes into a big interest-earning foundation/trust thingy - virtually gauranteeing it's continued existence forever?

I'll be back with some calcs.

Google to save OLPC?

That's what i'd like to see. OLPC is a disaster, due in no small part to the fact that Nicholas Negroponte is a criminal just like his brother.

So, what company could both save and directly benefit from the project - thus making it possible?

Google, of course.

The primary work Google could provide? An operating system.

We've already speculated on the possibility of Android replacing Windows on the desktop. And, if need be, Google.org could pay for the development.

Also, Google could make sure the project stays in the spotlight and open to scrutiny - starting with the replacement of Negroponte as the leader of the project.

p.s. I think providing computers to Africans and small villages and all that might be a dubious proposition. I'd like to see more on the supposed benefits of the program.

What is Mozilla?

Some people now know what Firefox is - some - but nobody knows what Mozilla is. Even if you asked me, my answer would be something like:

uhhh, it's some kind of foundation-type thing, it's kind of like the remnants/leftovers of what Netscape was, but now it's kind of different, they release all this software - like mail and whatever - and some of it is half decent. or, actually, Mozilla actually is Netscape, and vice-versa, but not really. Mozilla's best-known software is Firefox, the browser, which you may have heard of. and they release all of this other software, a lot of which is kind of a duplicate of each other, and none of it is very good. it's kind of a meandering, direction-less organization. they did force Microsoft to support tabs, which is good. but the foundation itself - mozilla or whatever - it's kind of a nothing. It exists mainly because the only other game in town is Internet Explorer, and everyone is forced to use IE, so people resent it, and try to use something else - anything else. That's where Firefox comes in. Nobody really knows what Mozilla is, or who controls it, or where it gets its money. They get some money from Google, so they're kinda like a subsidiary of Google, but not really. they're kind of like these hangers-on - way past their prime. They need to just hang it up. Every time they gain a touch of market share from IE - a horrendous browser - they congratulate themselves and convince themselves it has something to do with Firefox being a good browser, when in fact is it because it is the only other browser.

Branding matters.

Now, all the rage is RIA - rich internet apps. Flash-based desktop apps. Because people like to install and maintain buggy desktop software, apparently.

But we have to have someone to blame. And that someone is Firefox/Mozilla/whatever-it-or-they-are-called. If they bothered to actually provide a real API for Firefox, then Firefox addons would have taken off, people would have started using Firefox, Opera would have been left in the dust, RIA would have been dead in the water, and we would have a real chance at using some decent software for a change - software called 'Firefox'. Instead, we're left with a mish-mash of non-standard technologies that lead to the current situation - a plethora of non-standard addons that are not good enough because they take forever to develop and maintain. No amount of creativity and determination can overcome the incredible technological roadblocks that the Firefox team have put in place.

It's a very high profile example of how free software has failed us yet again.

Tentative recommendation for this blog, which is generally more intelligent than most other tech blogs in the web2.0 world.

And here's a good presentation on free software from the Ruby dude - also a good blog, in general, and one that may very well piss you off.

...unsurprisingly, Maxthon is still terrible. With so much bad software out there, it makes you wonder why there aren't more millionaire software engineers. Well, in any case, I have found some software recently that appears to be decent. It's not perfect, but it does a lot of things competently. Wild Apricot. I'm not actually using it commercially yet, but I woudln't doubt if that happens soon.

So, now there are exactly three entities in the world which produce software that does not completely suck:

1. Google.com
2. Highrise (37Signals)
   
3. Wild Apricot

You're welcome. :)

p.s. The list above is correct. It is not a popularity contest between droves of developers who love to install and fix plugins in their spare time. The list above can be counted on. It is reliable. The choices - legitimate. They will help you, not hinder you. They will make you a more productive, healthier, happier, better person and lover.

Unstructured wikis not useful

Just gonna spit the obvious - a blank page where a bunch of people just come in and write a bunch of text on a page - almost completely useless.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is highly structured - and with each incremental step of structure it's added, it's usefulness and popularity have skyrocketed.

Wikis also need a tremendous amount of process - much of which can be inferred from the wiki's design, if the design is done correctly.

So, for all the individuals/organizations/companies that continue to release wiki projects/pages/sites that do not include a lot of structure/contstraints/process - just stop. It's a waste of time.

OpenID is a Disaster; Seriously

It's actually much worse than you could possibly imagine. If you think we had security problems up until now, you ain't seen nothing yet.

OpenID was already the most confusing thing about surfing the web (help us Common Craft!), and now that I've actually successfully used it twice, I'm absolutely convinced that security experts the world over are going to shit a collective brick when they see what a disaster the actual implementation of this 'technology' looks like.

You start at some site - click a button - then you get sent to some other site - which doesn't look like any site you've ever been to, before - then you get asked some more questions - some of which seems to be semi-required to proceed - then you check a few more boxes and click a few more buttons, and 15 minutes later you end up back where you started - and the action that you performed 15 minutes ago is now magically completed. Or you get an error message like the one in the screenshot at top.

It's difficult to know who to blame in this catastrophe. Really, there is far too much blame to go around - no one corporation can possibly withstand the onslaught of criticism (and litigation) that we're about to see. This 'technology' is good enough to bring down entire economies.

OK, more realistically, this technology is such a strong contender for 'Worst Invention of the Century' that we don't have to worry about it getting any legs - not in the next decade, anyways.

Sometimes you just wish the grown-ups were in charge.

Lacrosse is a stupid sport

Yes - I like to make highly-intelligent, succinct pronouncements on this blog.

Lacrosse has always irked me. It's a lame attempt at being useless. It's boring. The 'twirling of the stick' routine, while obviously the most annoying aspect of the game, also appears to be the only potentially-enjoyable part of the game. Centripetal force? Wow. Pretty exciting. When you're five.

But, since it was invented by the victims of genocide, we'll let it stick around for a while longer.

Save the Children

I wonder if there is a Web2.0-style 'Save the Children' campaign?

So, we know all about those creepy tv commercials where some child-molesting church leader gets on tv and pleads for our money - then they zoom in on some bloated, dying African child who has flies all over their face - and then the child-molesting church leader says, "Please.....little Jonah needs your money now or else he'll suffer a brutal death than you can possibly imagine". We now know that these churches spend the money on their fancy cars and private jets and their private hookers and cocaine habits, so most of us don't pay attention to those ads anymore.

My question is, do we have any legitimate organizations that can do this 'sponsor a child' stuff, now? New, non-church-based organizations that aren't led by criminals and child molesters?

There are lots of companies out there now doing 'social giving' stuff, and they're certainly more transparent than any of these criminal church organizations ever were. So maybe it's time we can look at this again?

I'm all for giving money to 'social entrepreneurs' to build water irrigation projects and all that, but sometimes it can be helpful to think of helping one child.

But, thinking about it a bit more, now - it may just be a bit too anti-human to give money to just one child. So, maybe that idea does deserve to go away.

The potential transparency of giving today, with feedback from the people who are actually using the money, is definitely a good thing.

One thing I'd like to see more of, is helping people right here in America - in particular, African Americans. So that's one part. The other part is picking the right kinds of projects, the right kind of help. If you watch some TED talks on aid to Africa, you'll see how destructive aid can be. We have to be smart about it.

Google Docs Still Sucks

I dunno - I guess I just find it interesting that Google can do all this crazy stuff - like their search engine, but then the produce 'products' like Blogger and Google Docs.

Docs doesn't even pretend to work.

Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but interesting.

So, you have to wonder, if Docs is still so bad, even after having been released for months/years now - when will it ever get up to the level of, say, Wordpad, or something similarly functional?

My guess is that they should just scrap the word processor completely and go to a Flash-based app that actually works.

Cornel West on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera is cranking out like 10 videos a day, but I'll be darned if I have any way to get notified of any of them. YouTube says I'm supposed to get one email a week. WTF? And YouTube offers no useful RSS feeds.

Every time I start watching Al Jazeera again, I feel like I've been living in a cave. Of course, they're only on YouTube because American 'free market' companies won't carry the channel.

Man - I love Brother Cornel. And I've seen him do a bunch of speeches and a few interviews, and I think he just kills this one - just totally crushes it - couldn't have been better.

Just posted this directly from YouTube. It kinda sorta seemed to work, almost. You lose all ability to format. Anyways, be sure to watch Part 2, also.

But seriously, though, how could Blogger exist for what, now, ten years or something? and still not be able to update a blog post with a simple <embed> object without getting an error that you have to fix manually? Seriously - blogger has been the biggest piece of shit for how long now - years? How is that possible? It's not like I want it to be reliable or anything, I just want it to work at the most basic level. Too much to ask? Google? I've been thinking of dropping this blog on WordPress. I just got one step closer.

...here is the Al Jazeera RSS feed!

Facebook is ugly

As are all the other successful social networks.

Facebook. Orkut. Friendster. MySpace. They're all ugly as sin.

Why?

Everything is completely boxy, and rigid. In short, it's just not pleasing to the eye. It's not easy to look at.

Well, it seems Bebo put at least a modicum of design into their site. Props, mates!

Does 'bad design' ==> 'relative social networking success'?

I'd been messing around in Facebook for a day or two, now - trying to figure out their wacky APIs - and it's pretty terrible to have to look at that thing for any extended amount of time. I don't think I can take much more.

Will anyone take up the challenge and design a social networking website with a Web2.0 visual appeal?

Only 40 hours? Yeah, right

I've been talking to potential employers. I'm looking for a bicycle advocacy gig, but I'm keeping my options open - looking at customer support engineer roles, too.

Talked to a couple of companies in the past couple of days on the engineer front. I'll spare you the details, but they both expect copious amounts of overtime. They actually act shocked when I ask them what the hours are like.

"Don't you know? This is modern-day America, son - there will always be people looking for work - looking to take your job. You want to ask me that question again, now?"

That's the sentiment.

I told the first crew to go stuff it, but I'm holding onto the second set as a backup. Felt kinda bad about the first one because the guy was real nice, the company is here in Austin, and the work seemed like it could be very interesting - but I knew that once I started working there - with full time+ hours, I wouldn't have the time or energy to do anything that was actually useful to society, so I had to bag it. My last company was very good - get your work done, and be out if you like. Or, if you wanted to be a superstar and spend your life shuffling papers at the office - you could do it. It was totally up to me. I chose to do the best I could in 40 hours a week, and I think it worked out very well for everyone.

In this day and age, companies expect someone to work more than 40 hours a week. I don't know what kind of crack you have to be smoking to ask me to do something like that. Don't these fools know I'm trying to do no more than 30 hours a week of industrial work?

I may get desperate enough to take a job and then have to quit it. We all need to eat. This 40+ hour work week stuff has to stop. People need to have time to do useful things like take care of their kids and plant some food at the local community garden and volunteer and create music and art. That stuff can't happen if we're all stuck on freeways and behind computer screens - killing what's left of the planet's ecosystem.

MLS Quality Sucks

It's orders of magnitude worse than EPL. Scottish soccer sucks, too. Why would anyone pay to see this?

I don't expect to see something good. But I don't expect to see something amateurish and pathetic, either.

That is all.

Google.com does *not* suck

Google.com is ostensibly free - that is, there's essentially nothing out of pocket for me to use this search engine.

I just realized how good this software is - it almost always finds what I want, when I want, and faster - really - than I ever would have expected - faster than I ever imagined or thought possible.

I just did like 20 searches over the last five minutes. Type. Search. Found. Type. Search. Type. Search. Type. Search. Found. It's so fast.

Each 'Found' is 'Found exactly what I was looking for'. Google search results, as you know, are almost instantaneous. They're ridiculously fast.

Google.com is ridiculously good software. Ridiculously good free software. Ostensibly free.

Android to replace Windows on the desktop, too?

Android (wiki) is going to be using the 2.6 Linux kernel. The only reason Windows hasn't been replaced in desktop computers yet is that free software sucks - and part of what has sucked so bad about Linux for....forever...has been the Linux desktop - or, lack of Linux desktop. Don't even say 'Ubuntu'.

I don't know what all Android can do yet, but it does a lot - and basically seems to include everything you could ever want in a desktop operating system - well, minus some print drivers.

We could have been rid of Windows a decade ago if Apple had decided to license their OS to other hardware manufacturers, but Apple sucks.

So, can Google do what no free software has been able to do yet - provide a real alternative to Windows?

Technically, I guess Android is an 'open' platform that could be licensed to the likes of Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, etc.

I'm partially kidding about the 'free software sucks' stuff. Obviously it doesn't all suck. Really, I would just rather pay something for software that is less buggy, supported, etc., than go with free. I spend so much time writing, re-writing, configuring, and fixing free software, but I'd rather it just worked. Take Firefox, for instance. 'Awesome', right? No - 'not awesome'. It's difficult to say 'completely sucks' when it's free and it's better than the alternatives, but that seems to be where the market is at right now. I have to restart Firefox - and always have - every hour or so. Open 20 tabs and you're s.o.l. - restart city. Folks like Apple and 37Signals and SmugMug continue to pump out decent or better software - they can do this because they charge for their software - i.e. their developers can afford to eat.

Would anyone want to support Android on the desktop? Could someone commercialize Android? Will Android be a quality product when it is absolutely free to the end consumer? Or will it be absolutely free to the end consumer?

...Android on the desktop? Google says no. But with the rise of computers like the eee, you really have to wonder. Why run Android on an iPhone-like computer, but not an eee?

Get out of Yahoo now?

I'm actually very worried about Microsoft getting my email. I'm wondering if I can and/or should decommission my Yahoo email before Microsoft is able to scoop up Yahoo. I really don't want to do it if I don't have to, and really, I'm not sure I can - I just have too much tied up to my yahoo email account. Not just all of those contacts, but my email address is used to get into any number of online services, bank accounts, etc.

Not a good situation.

All Your Data Are Belong to Microsoft

That's right - if Microsoft manages to buy Yahoo - they get all of that information you have trusted to Yahoo for the past several years. All of your email. All of your contacts. All of your bookmarks and photos and comments and contacts and notes. All of it:

We transfer information about you if Yahoo! is acquired by or merged with another company. In this event, Yahoo! will notify you before information about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

I know this is America and we're only supposed to care about stockholders, not stakeholders, but the thought of Microsoft having all of my data is not something I take lightly.

Until we see tears in her eyes

Watching LSU vs. Tennessee, 2008 women's college basketball semi-final. Candace Parker, who plays for Tennessee, has an injured left shoulder, but she's still playing.

The female sports announcer just let us know the strategy that LSU should employ - run Candace Parker through pick-and-rolls (which bangs the defensive player's shoulder) "until we see tears in her eyes".

...what a game. Feel bad for LSU.

Free software sucks

That's been my contention for a while, now. There are exceptions to the rule. For instance, there are very simple, commodity pieces of software that have evolved over years that do a decent job - like Apache web server. But there are myriad other pieces of free software - that is free of charge, free to use - that just suck.

Take Drupal or the myriad other free content management systems in existence. Take Firefox extensions. Or Open Office. Or Linux - which is only now making inroads into the enterprise because of the massive amounts of money that corporations have poured into it - paying for development and infrastructure. And Linux on the desktop continues to be a catastrophic failure, or worse - a never-was. The list goes on and on. They suffer in quality and lack of features because everyone who works on them is only a volunteer - they don't charge for their software - and this has included me.

Granted, most software sucks, including non-free software, but I think the best model is one in which people can do good work and be able to feed themselves - and nobody deserves to be exploited like most Silicon Valley tech workers are - working countless hours of overtime for free.

37Signals started charging for their software, and people started to think differently. Developers started to realize that an honest living was possible if they started charging for their software. And users appreciated having full-featured software that actually worked.

I don't believe that VCs are soley to blame, but they play a big part. So, on that part, Hank Williams is right.

People with money, like Mike Arrington, love VCs and the VC mentality - which is 'those with money should be able to exploit those without money' - it's the Ayn Randian view of the world. If you grow up relatively-privileged, then you should feel free to own and control everybody else - in fact, it's your moral responsibility to own, control, and exploit as many people and things as possible. So, to Arrington and Objectivists everywhere, the free software model is great.

I'm not suggesting that we should do away with good will and charity and the like - just the opposite. By charging a fee for your software, non-profits and non-commercial users can get the quality software they deserve, and they don't have to spend their limited resources - time and money - fixing crappy software. And commercial users can get quality software, too. And you can build great software and still be able to eat. Everybody wins.

...bounties are a good idea. i rediscovered Express Engine yet again. there were a few things that kept me from buying in the past, but i'm def going to check it out this time. thankfully, it's not free. :D

"It's bigger than the personal computer"

So said this guy at the recent Apple Developer get-together on March 6th, 2008.

I really fell for the iPhone when I was outside a bar and was chatting to some dude, and asked him where another cool bar was. He took out his iPhone and pulled up Google Maps - it looked awesome - just like on the web - but it was better, in that it geolocated us on the map, and it even seemed faster. He then got directions to this other bar he was telling me about. I was floored. Too easy. Too fast. Too cool.

Then I saw that video above. It's incredible. A 3-axis accelerometer? You've got to be kidding me.

Next - I just want a barcode-reader built into the iPhone - that will be so legit.

It's Official: April Fool's Day Is Dead

And it's about time.

This holiday used to be OK when we were kids - it seemed harmless enough - make a few people cry, whatever. But now it's out of hand. It's nothing more than an excuse to be cruel to people just to be able to say, "Ha! I got you!". It's cruel people trying to be more sinister than their cruel neighbors. Everyone wants to be Ashton Kutcher, it seems. It's all an ego trip - nothing more.

April Fool's Day is based on cruelty - not humor.

You want to have fun? Have fun. Drink a beer. Have some crazy sex. Do whatever - having fun does not require cruelty - I promise.

The past day and a half has seen the blogosphere filled with April Fool's jokes - so much so that nobody knows what is true and what is false. GM buys a bicycle company? Home defibrillators are useless? What's true and what's false? Where does the ridiculousness end? It's as if the world doesn't constantly produce ridiculous headlines of its own. Greenwashing? Never heard of it. GM buys streetcar companies? Of course, not - never happened - you can't prove it - unless you can.

Next year - if the annoying and evil April Fools' Day should rise from the dead - I will set a hopefully-capable Google Reader to start ignoring all new posts made from March 31 through April 2. I'll resort to Google News and serious news sources to get my news and information.

April Fool's Day is dead. Good riddance.