Category: blows against the empire

And as if I didn’t have enough problems today, now all comments in WordPress are blithely ignored. I get the contents emailed to me, but they never make it into the database.

Feh.

Since my NaNoWriMo adventure was done almost as soon as it started, I found this to be interesting and very sensible.

Wolf Music:

Neil, As Nov. 30 quickly approaches and National Novel Writing Month comes to a close I realize that a good chunk of my 50,000 words is utter crap. So I was wondering if you could comment a bit on your rewriting process. Do you just start from the beginning of the book and go through it page by page? Or do you skip around fixing things at random? Any tips of advice you can give would be great. Especially since I wrote this without any type of outline or without much thought before starting. So, I’m not talking about a little tweak here or there, but major overhauls to large sections. Like I said any kind of advice you can offer, things that make it seem less painful, would be great.Thanks,Steve Stanis

What I try and do is:

1) Finish it.

2) Put it away. Drawers are good. Don’t look at it for a week or so.

3) Read the whole thing, doing my best to pretend that I’ve never read it before.

4) Fix the big things. (These tend to be things that pop out at you when you read it, like noticing that you’ve led up to the prison escape, and then meeting the prisoners after they’ve escaped, and realising that it might really have been a good idea to write the escape. Or that the first chapter would really work better as chapter 5.)

5) Read it through page by page and fix the line by line things. Notice that Omar mysteriously becomes Mustapha on page 50 and stays Mustapha until page 90 when he becomes Mustafa. Pick one and make it consistent. Wonder whether anyone will notice that you’ve put Paris in Belgium. Decide to leave it there, on the basis that no-one will notice.

6) Get up in the middle of the night and move Paris back to France.

Does that help?

If you’ve doubted he was anything other than a smirking frat boy, this should put it to rest.

So I note that one of my local TV stations offers a podcast stream . . .

komo 4 news | komo 1000 news – podcast:

KOMO 1000 News is pleased to now offer our listeners a Podcast stream.

Interesting: if I was still a bus commuter, I could see a real use for this.
So I check out the iPodder website, and note an endorsement by Robert Scoble.

So why is he, a very public employee of a company that hates the GPL (the terms of which cover iPodder’s release) and that loves DRM (how is this different from using TiVo or similar device to time-shift or repurpose TV shows? Isn’t MSFT in the forefront of limiting end-users/viewers capability to consume media in favor of enforcing how media companies sell it?) touting this?

I realize the Scobleizer is part of a charm offensive, an attempt to put a human face on the company everyone loves to hate. (What, you thought all the eager bloggers were just doing it for fun? I won’t say they aren’t having fun but there is an underlying reason that has little to do with the joy of self-expression.) And perhaps I’m venting my spleen at the wrong guy but his comments seem disconnected from reality sometimes. I’m aware that people are not the company, but if there are so many people who are so engaging and sincere, why has the company’s attitude and execution changed so little?

When you have someone like Bruce Schneier saying that “it’s just foolish to use IE”, yet there are no plans to make the necessary improvements, how serious can take all that sincerity? Considering how little time it took to get IE out the door, in the wake of the Internet Tidal Wave memo, why is it taking so long to relaunch it properly? When there was so much press about the re-design and attention to detail in Windows XP, what is there to convince us that it isn’t just a big ball of mud?

Now playing:Distant Sun by Crowded House from the album “Recurring Dream” | Buy it

Too many freaks,
not enough circuses

(seen on the back of an aging VW microbus, natch).

Now playing:The American by Simple Minds from the album “Themes for Great Cities” | Buy it
Continue reading “big brother”

“The new thinking is that bin Laden’s fortune didn’t really enter into al Qaeda that much, or wasn’t the driving force in al Qaeda.”

The report from the September 11 commission concluded that al Qaeda has many financing avenues and could easily find new sources, particularly given the attack’s price tag of just $400,000 to $500,000 over two years.

While the report said the government has been unable to determine the source of the attack’s financing, the commission said it appears al Qaeda’s financial support doesn’t come from bin Laden personally.

“The CIA now estimates that it costs al Qaeda about $30 million per year to sustain its activities before 9/11 and that this money was raised almost entirely through donations,” the report said.
[ . . . ]
By February 2002, Katzman had updated the estimate, indicating that bin Laden may be worth anywhere from $50 million to $300 million, but that the group had apparently become self-sustaining. The change got little notice.
[ . . . ]
“When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fund-raising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s.”

Responding to an inquiry from a Senate panel late last year, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the overstated estimates about bin Laden’s wealth and his financial backing of al Qaeda actually trivialized the threat posed by his group.

Perhaps even more dangerous, bin Laden’s benefit to radical Islam is that he — “coming from a wealthy and influential family” — was considered a trusted person and had the ability to receive and dispose of charitable money, the office wrote in a memo, obtained by The Associated Press in April.

So not only is he on the loose, he’s just as or more dangerous than before, and his principal source of income is wealthy Saudis. And not only is Saudi Arabia a US client state (though I’m not sure the relationship really works out that way) but the Bush family has ties to the House of Saud going back three generations. I wonder if Dennis Hastert is going to show the same intensity about others who profit from the sale of addictive substances.

Information routing

It’s hard to cry a river for a company like Microsoft, but sometimes they’re damned if they don’t (“Microsoft never innovates”) and damned if they do (“Microsoft never ships”).

[Jon’s Radio]

How about “Microsoft only ships when it doesn’t innovate?” Think of a dominant MSFT product: is it innovative or imitative?

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Book extract: How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson:

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together. I have a dream. It is called love, anarchy, freedom. It is called being idle.

A lively look at the connection between unstructured time and creativity, even genius. Next time they tell you to stop looking out the window and get back to work, tell ’em you are working.

Only available in the UK, at this writing: How To Be Idle