Author: Tim Jarrett

Regressing

I’d love to know what happened to the 2-4 inches of snow we were promised for today. I have the day off for Presidents Day, and was looking forward to having the snow to wake up to.

I also note that the longer I stay in school, the more my personality regresses to something like middle school. Definitely time to get back out there into the workforce…

Old friends

Today at school I ran into Steven, an old friend from AMS, my pre-business school employer. He’s in his first year at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and through sheer coincidence was cross-registered in the same systems dynamics class that I’m taking. A strange feeling to see such a familiar face as we’re handing in homework assignments.

You know it’s bad…

…when your own mother says she’s stopped reading your blog because programming news is boring. 🙂 Ok, got the message. I’m finding more things to think and write about starting right now!

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Hmm. This could be harder than I thought.

RadioService.app

I’m looking at the source code for RadioService now. The author took an opposite approach to mine–most of the code is Objective C with just one AppleScript. But he did answer some of my questions about how to address the keychain and other tricks with Objective C. The answer is it looks really hairy and I’ll be figuring it out for a few days.

Now playing

Currently playing song: “Cold Turkey” by John Lennon on Lennon Legend.

I just went looking for the original album for this song and found to my surprise that it was from a single by the Plastic Ono Band, on which it was paired with the equally memorable “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mommy’s Just Looking For A Hand In the Snow”). The latter, needless to say, was a Yoko song.

Confessions of a referral junkie

Okay, so I admit it. I have become addicted to my referral logs.

In the beginning, they were mostly a curiosity–no one was referring to me. Then I did some minor punditry on something Apple was going to do with scripting and XML. And wrote to Macintouch and to Dave to tell them what I thought. I had no idea what I was in for; suppose I thought I was just showing off how clever I was.

By the end of that day I was at over 2500 reads of that one article. Today the high water mark stands at 3313. It is by far the most popular single story I ever wrote, at least before I made the shiftf to news items (which the Most Read Messages stat doesn’t track). I was hooked. If the Internet was ever an attention economy, it was making me an attention junkie. And it affected the way I write.

I would have written my scripts anyway, and Manila Envelope. But I think unconsciously I was adjusting my web writing to the stuff that had gotten me attention in the first place. And I’m not super happy about that.

So I’m going to try an experiment. I currently have a bookmark menu for my web site on the Personal Toolbar of my browser. It has a folder containing links to the reports that Manila provides me about who’s pointing to me. I’m going to delete that folder. And until I’m happy with my writing again it’s going to stay deleted. I’ll report here how my behavior modification is going.

Mostly better

I’ve been dragging for a few days, my energy level is still down, and I have a devastating cough, but I’m back at school and feeling about 200% better than I was. Now I just have to catch up. 🙂 First priority is email correspondence; second is classwork; third is Manila Envelope. I’ve let the app languish too long while I stumble around with figuring out how to call Cocoa methods, and it’s time to make some steps.

More of my former professors in the news

This article on CNET talks about the work of Loren Hitt, who co-taught my course on E-Business. I knew it was him even before I read the article; as he told us, “If you see anything about poaching, shirking and opportunistic renegotiation, you know it’s from Wharton and from me or one of my students.”

“Clemons and Hitt conclude that poaching offers new and formidable challenges as the global economy becomes more knowledge-intensive. According to Clemons, it is ‘a newly significant form of opportunism’ and it represents ‘the growth opportunity in e-commerce white-collar crime.’ Poaching requires different analytical models and remedies, many of which still need to be developed. Only partly in jest, he quips: ‘Maybe companies should actually encourage poaching of their own intellectual property–but figure out a way to get paid for it.'”

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A fuller context for that quotation

A more complete version and a citation for the quotation I just posted, courtesy the Bully Pulpit:

” The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”
“Lincoln and Free Speech” in The Great Adventure – vol. 19 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt New York: Scribner’s, 1926 Chapter 7, p.289


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That damned inconvenient history

Beautiful quotation from Theodore Roosevelt in today’s Doonesbury. It is perhaps noteworthy that Roosevelt said this in 1918, when he was an ordinary citizen. Are you listening, Mr. Ashcroft?:

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

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