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Update, update, update.
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“The point is this is one of the most important irrevokable economic decisions we will ever make. Let’s make it in a state of panic.” — Steven Colbert.
Grab bag: Google Android, free Wilco, astroturf, more
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Some valid counterpoint to the Agile drumbeat.
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You didn’t think astroturf wrote itself, did you?
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You know, if you have to bet consumer against industry, I’m pretty sure consumer is going to win. Every single time.
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Pledge to vote on Wilco’s website, get a free download of Wilco and the Fleet Foxes covering Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” Sweet!
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McCain’s ties to Freddie and Fannie are now down to one degree of separation. So why does he keep insisting that Rick Davis has no connection with them?
Grab bag: Bailout, continued
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PDF exploit toolkits spotted in the wild. Update your browser plugins, kids, it’s going to be a fun ride. Better yet, if you’re on Mac OS X, uninstall Acrobat Reader entirely.
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Hysterically funny and very pointed at the same time.
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The proper solution to the dilemma is, of course, taking an equity stake in exchange for purchasing the distressed assets.
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No way that my tax dollars will go to buy distressed mortgage debt at above market value. I might as well just flush the money directly down the toilet; at least that way it would be entertaining and I’d have a small chance of getting the money back.
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I’ve long thought that a good statistical mechanics analysis was going to be necessary to fix the Boston roads; I might be right.
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Hard to believe that the administration tried to make the bailout non-reviewable, but here it is: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. “
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Levine was in New York for the Met premiere to conduct Renee. He’ll be in Boston this week for the BSO season premiere. Nothing like hitting the ground running.
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Beta story-sharing feature on the New York Times. Nice UI. Don’t know if they have enough readers online who are into this sort of thing to build a real network.
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Alex Ross receives a Genius Grant. Right on.
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Wil Shipley has common sense about the Apple Store. I don’t want to read any more stories about Apple pulling apps that compete with its own. Ever.
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Inspirational listening: MLK speech about civil disobedience. “Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
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I have a couple bags full of VHS tapes that are worth BILLIONS.
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Heh. The bailout letter as Nigeriam spam. Brilliant.
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Real time commentary on the bailout bill. Go nuts.
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The source of that Bernie Sanders quotation (below). Yes, it’s very left-wing stuff, but it’s also thought provoking. How much of the risk taking was enabled by the thought that senior government officials like Paulson would be there to bail them out?
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I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”
David Byrne visits Newport News
David Byrne Journal: 09.21.2008: On the Road Again. I know that this post was primarily about the new show and not about David Byrne’s Life in the Bush of Hampton Roads, but I can’t resist the pointer:
In Newport News, a group of us biked to the beach on the banks of the James River — a long trip, mostly on local highways, passing chain restaurants, industrial parks, gas stations and a steak joint offering square dancing. The residential areas are tucked in behind these strips, I guess, as there were none visible from these connecting roads. There’s an airbase nearby as well. Fighter jets streaked overhead now and then. There’s no town visible in any direction, just endless sprawl. At one point we reached a crossroads, which appeared to be the remnants of a small town, now mostly converted to a row of antique stores, but still pretty quaint. Eventually we found a small beach next to a massive bridge beyond which lay a huge naval station and port. A few of us waded in the water as a film crew set up nearby to shoot a girl in Goth makeup for a TV commercial.
Having grown up in the residential areas tucked behind the strips, I would say, yes, he got it about right. I’d love to see a street map of where he went–Hilton Village, which was built to house sailors shipping out during WWI? It sounds as though he made it all the way over to the 664 bridge.
Very cool. I will say that performing with James Levine and other opera superstars, you get applause inbetween the classical reserve and the pop mania that’s described here. I’ve never been blown back by applause at one of our concerts, though.
The decentralization of publishing
Lately it seems I spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than on the blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it just reminds me that I need to make an effort occasionally to write longer form content, as fun and entertaining as it is to write bite-sized summaries of links on Delicious.
But when I think about how user-created content has changed in the last seven or eight years, it’s kind of amazing. We’ve gone from monolithic content management systems like Manila, Radio, and Blogger to what can only be characterized as swarms of lightweight, single-purpose applications: Delicious, Flickr, Twitter. The CMSes are still there–WordPress being, as far as I can tell, the leading personal CMS right now. But what’s changed is the assumed ability to suck content out of multiple services and put it into one place. Or multiple places: my posts to Delicious are picked up nightly by my blog and then syndicated into Facebook posts, for instance. Twitter content can appear in my sidebar. Flickr photos can be syndicated or blogged from within the application.
And then there’s Facebook. It manages, by virtue of its application ecosystem, to be all of the above: a swarm of lightweight apps, a walled garden… and an Outlook replacement. It’s astonishing how many people that I know now communicate with their friends primarily, if not exclusively, on Facebook. If they made their app sync events to the iPhone calendar, it would pretty much completely replace the traditional mail/calendar/address book troika for most purposes. Not all, and I certainly think that the platform has a long way to go before it replaces email. For starters, allowing us to download our inbox from the service would be a good idea; I don’t like anyone holding all my data and not letting me move it. But I bet someone’s working on an app to do that, if it doesn’t already exist.
On data portability: back in 2004, I insisted to a meeting of the Berkman Bloggers’ Group that there was a tradeoff between having all your content resident on your own server and using these decentralized apps. At the time it was a native photo management system vs. Flickr. What I didn’t take into consideration was how much harder it is to move content that’s resident in a CMS vs. decentralized in the cloud. When I switched this blog over from Manila to WordPress, it wasn’t the images that were in Flickr (and even on .Mac) that were the problem; it was all the image content in Manila.
We’re in a golden age for personal publishing right now. Which makes it all the more ironic that people are still fighting the blogging vs. journalism battle (previously linked here). While you’re doing that, folks, it’s turned into blogging and Twittering and Facebooking and Deliciousing and and and and. Never has it been so easy for people to share what they want to say with …
And that’s the other interesting part. Part of it is, of course, communicating with your closest friends, a la Facebook. Part of it is communicating with people who subscribe to my blog via RSS (all twelve of you, for whom I am very grateful). But a big part of it, for me, continues to be communicating with people who might find the site through a Google search (what I’ve called my time-delayed audience). And writing just keeps getting easier, because formats like Delicious and Twitter provide a proper channel for bite sized content, while WordPress provides a fantastic way to write longer form stuff.
Grab bag: Bailout edition
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I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”
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Great article by Steven Weinberg on the ongoing collision of religion and science.
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The investor in me agrees with the administration’s request for full speed ahead on the mortgage bailout. The citizen in me says that should be “all deliberate haste” and particularly thinks that the request not to weigh down the leglislation with “provisions that would undermine” the bailout–i.e. provisions to ensure the money is spent correctly and that individual mortgage holders get some relief too–is disingenous at best, crap at worst.
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Cisco buys Jabber; much concern about the future of Jabber as an open source platform. These guys were among the first to help leverage standard blogging APIs, so Mazel Tov.
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An aircraft carrier, apparently built to minifig scale. We’re gonna need more gray pieces.
Grab bag: end of the week
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Of the massive bailouts, Matthew says: “I hereby propose that, from now on, any banker who disparages government arts funding as unfairly rewarding organizations that can’t make it in the free market gets the business end of a broken beer bottle.” Yep.
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Levine is back, and better. Can’t wait to work with him next week on the Brahms Requiem.
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Um. Nothing I can say about this post could possibly be taken the right way.
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OMFG. The look inside Barack Obama’s email inbox is funny, but his deleted mail is even funnier.
Grab bag: How many more weeks until November 4?
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Free lightweight BitTorrent client for MacOSX.
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Obama seizes the attack, sharpens his criticism of McCain’s economic policies: “The ‘old boys network’? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.”
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David Weinberger summarizes McCain’s interview in which he apparently confuses the Prime Minister of Spain with a leftist Latin American official, then stands by the position when he’s corrected.
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Did SEC rules exemptions lead directly to the collapse of Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al?
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Incisive thoughts about the ethics of blogging vs. the ethics of journalism, boiling down to closed vs. open means of production for the written word.
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Clear, calm articulation of the Obama plan for the economy. Spread the news.
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Interesting list of WordPress plugins that speak Twitter.
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Interesting perspective: “I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.”
Grab bag: Why govt email on private accounts is dumb
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…and here’s how they could have done it. Not every hack requires the knowledge of exploiting buffer overflows and SQL injections… sometimes there’s just plain bad design at work.
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From the same twisted impulse (though probably not the same people) who brought you “HillaryIsMomJeans.com”.
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There is, of course, a web application security spin to this story, but I would guess that social engineering is involved in the hack. The real question is, how much light does it shine on Palin’s governing style and on the whole shady practice of using personal email for government business?
JohnMcCainInventedTheBlackberry.com
Sheer brilliance from my good friend Greg Greene: http://johnmccaininventedtheblackberry.com. Feed it suggestions on Twitter via #invented.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, btw: you can now follow me on Twitter too. Just don’t expect any deep thoughts.
Aglianico, aglianico
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Nice summary of aglianicos on the market. I’m with Eric–I’ll happily drink any aglianico I find on a wine list, which isn’t many.
Instant karma
There are some moments of karma that are just too good not to post. This is one of them: GOP delegate’s hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing. An attendee of the RNC convention who argued that the US should “bomb the hell” out of Iran and seize its resources to pay for the invasion picks up a woman in the hotel bar, who … makes him drinks, gets him bombed, and seizes his resources:
In an interview filmed the afternoon of Sept. 3 and posted on the Web site LinkTV.org, Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.
“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.
Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.
“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”
A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.
Heh.
Via.
WordPress gives a window into user experience design
With the WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey, the fine folks at WordPress.org have opened the kimono on one of the trickiest product management tasks: user experience design. The context: the administrative interface of WordPress. The UI was famously redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog studios, who applied a rigorous information architecture along with a highly readable visual style. So why redesign now?
Well, it appears that users didn’t like the way the dashboard used screen real estate. While the WordPress team doesn’t describe what the users complained about, the key navigation options are currently along the top, and I would guess that users who have widescreen monitors are pointing out that horizontal screen real estate is less precious than vertical. So the team has created a survey to get user feedback about some design options.
This is a tricky task, and it could have been made a little easier by some better user requirements gathering. For instance, what the team is fundamentally trying to do in identifying top-level command categories is classically served by “card sorting,” a classic usability design exercise. They might get better feedback by doing a card-sort study, either offline or with a software package like WebSort.
Second, the presentation of the choices doesn’t include a control. It assumes that all users prefer the vertical menu and presents variations on that option. Adding an option for the existing horizontal menu might present some valuable information on how users feel about the existing option.
My opinion may be tainted by my personal preferences; I’m one who finds the current administrative interface design preferable to what I’ve seen so far of the new direction. But regardless of my personal feelings, there’s something to be said for rigorous user centered design in determining the next direction.
Grab bag: bank disaster, elections, BusinessWeek hacked
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Be careful on BusinessWeek.com.
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Interesting discussion of how to get children to eat healthy: keep them in the kitchen, don’t diet in front of them, avoid “forbidden fruit.”
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Just out of curiosity, how DOES an ACC team like Virginia get beaten like an old carpet by Connecticut?
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New Obama ad using press coverage of McCain’s dishonest campaign against him.
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Hmm, a ratings system for web applications! What a great idea!! Seriously, with a market like Facebook’s, a reputation system is a really critical thing to get in place.
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As usual, trenchant observation from Gruber: “Perhaps this will refocus presidential campaign coverage on the economy rather than bullshit.”
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Oh crap.
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Man, the Japanese cellphone market is weird.
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A surprisingly concise and cogent peom by Bob Dylan in th!s week’s New Yorker.
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Katie Couric starts to get some respect, and got a killer quote from Mike Dukakis, of all people: “Look, I owe the American people an apology. If I had beaten the old man, you would never have heard of the kid and then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
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“Epic fail,” indeed.
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The first official release of the Common Weakness Enumeration, a standard way of classifying and describing software flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities.
Meta campaigning: what to do when the other guy won’t talk straight
American representative democracy is based on some non-intuitive principles–that we the people should care enough about how we are governed that we develop an informed opinion on it, that power is best when dispersed and checked–and on some non-obvious assumptions. The one assumption that is absolutely key is that the people will have access to enough information on the candidates to make an informed decision.
This election is testing that assumption. With one side, we had a bitterly fought primary that lasted almost eighteen months and went right down to the wire, a candidate who has written two books and multiple detailed position papers about his views and policy proposals, who has said all along that he wanted to get above politics as usual to address core issues. On the other side, we have a ticket that has played fast and loose with the truth about themselves, particularly about Palin, and about their opponent. In this environment, there’s information asymmetry and the voter loses.
So how do you get back to the point where a balanced and fair exchange of views is possible? Well, maybe you run an ad that calls the other candidate on the lies he’s been telling, and you do it by summing up all the independent press coverage across the political spectrum that’s been written about it. An ad something like this:
Will it move the base, who are hoping against hope that McCain and Palin, against all odds, will actually embody the small government principles they want to see in Washington? I don’t know. I just hope it moves some independent voters. But I’m happy to see the campaign going on the attack about this.