Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Pictures: Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. 

Here's the official guide for today's hike. 

Today's podcast is a story about Google and News.Com and Mexican kids who might make Eric Schmidt crack a smile, maybe even laugh!  

My favorite sandwich these days. Go to a Subway. Six inch, whole wheat, ham and cheese. Go for swiss if they have it, pepper jack otherwise. Mayo and mustard on both sides. Cucumbers, spinach, hot, sweet and bell peppers, sweet onion sauce, salt and pepper. Perfecto! Leaves a nice hot burning taste from the peppers, and a satisfying veggie workout for the stomach. Not too full. Ready for action! 

This is the kind of advice I've been getting from Mac users. Good stuff. You know, based on the rah-rah's from developers who are probably too scared of Apple to say what they really think, I thought everyone else thought Apple was the perfect company and the perfect computer. That's the downside of people being too scared to speak up, we get shitty information. How can we change this system, so that people aren't so scared? Or can we get Apple to thicken up their skin a bit, and learn to not punish people who have the nerve to criticize them. Blogs were supposed to fix all this. Frankly I think it hurts Apple to just have rah-rah public discourse and commentary.  

In my experience the leading companies with super-thin skin: Apple, Google, and by far the worst -- O'Reilly. It's so funny people think they're so cool and not-evil. These are the biggest control freaks in the computer industry, again, in my experience. We were joking about Google at dinner the other night, with their policy of not talking to CNET because they had the nerve to print some public information about their CEO. We really need to do something about this. It's a gross ugly disease. Compared to these companies, Microsoft is positively laid-back. You can quote me on that. (And Google used to be the best. One person made all the diff.) 

At this point there's a 87.6 percent probability that I'll spend the rest of the year and the first part of next in the Bay Area. I've found a nice apartment in Berkeley, right in the middle of things, in an area they call The Gourmet Ghetto. That means I'll be part of the Bay Area tech community again, but from a different geographic perspective. Berkeley is a People's Republic, just like Cambridge, Mass. It's near a big airport, that's a big difference from the beach in Florida which is three hours from Orlando, and two from Jacksonville. I'll be more mobile here. I've got quite a network here, ready-to-go. Will this be good for the OPML project, good for podcasting and RSS? Without a doubt.  

I've been working with my father putting his book, The MBA Toolbox, on the web. He wrote it as a business school professor at Pace University in NY. He's retired now, but has experienced a creative renaissance in his work on the web. I'm really happy with the way the book came out and was happy to work with my dad on this project.  

Scott Rosenberg: Google's Windows-only world. 

Google's Instant Messenger. Big Yawn. Why should anyone care? 

Wow, it seems I'm not alone in hating Safari, and nowhere near as alone as I thought in my dislike of Apple. Everyone says IE on Mac sucks too, and to get Firefox. So that's what I'll do. Report to come soon. Thanks everybody! (Wish I had known this when I ran into Steve Jobs on the street in SF. I would have told him to shove his arrogant superior attitude where the sun don't shine. Oh well.) 

Tim O'Reilly explains why they put search engine spam on their tech sites. "Rome Hotels, Phuket Hotels, Jack Daniels, Cuban Cigars. Not terribly relevant to programmers, but certainly not completely irrelevant." 

Meanwhile the O'Reilly guys are giving Phil Ringnalda grief (or trying to) for not checking with O'Reilly first before running the piece about their search engine spam. Apparently there's an "ethical discussion" to be had about this. Classic Republican neocon tactic -- change the subject, point the accusing finger at the source of your pain, and get everyone to talk about what a nasty mofo he is. Sometimes they even use a proxy like a former author who's embarassed because he criticized the boss. It's so utterly obvious what happened. Some random ad sales guy down in the bowels of oreilly.com got over-zealous in an effort to make his quarterly or monthly numbers books a few extra bucks from a seedy search engine spammer. All it would prove is that O'Reilly doesn't walk on water. I'm sure Tim still hopes he can pin this on Phil, or even better, me. (No I didn't call him to verify.) Heh. It'll be interesting to see how this thing winds down. Having caused me a bunch of grief in the past, it's actually fun now to watch the shoe on the other foot. Tim, hope you're enjoying it too.  

Rogers Cadenhead: Pimping Your PageRank for Profit. 

I just spent a few minutes playing with the Mac. Our OPML Editor needs a bunch of work, I can see that right away. I really dislike Safari, I so don't care for their choice of sites to feature and the feeds they chose are all the predictable ones. Where's the Home icon. I would love to be surprised and see some blogs in their default choices, geez, I mean they did get all this free IP from us, but they're so into big companies. I really really dislike Apple. Sorry if you love them -- I don't. Steve Jobs has a lot of nerve telling Dean that they're copying them, when they're doing such a poor job of copying us. Maybe I'll come around, but I kind of doubt it. Do they have a version of IE for this thing? I'd much rather use that than Apple's browser.  

On the other hand the Airport Express that I bought is pretty cool. No installation. The hotel I'm in has Ethernet, and it allows me to connect both my Sony and Mac to the net at the same time.