Category: obscure pursuits

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 28, 2004 – April 03, 2004 Archives:

Now in a front page piece in Thursday’s Washington Post we learn that on September 11th, 2001 Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver a major foreign policy address on missile defense as the centerpiece of a new strategy to combat “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.”

Then reality intruded.

What if the attacks had come later in the day, after or during the speech?

Mena’s Corner: Where did those 22 other people come from?

Last week it finally sunk in that we’ve done an extremely poor job communicating about the growth of Six Apart to our users and to the weblogging community. This silence can be partly attributed to the sort of confidentiality that’s required when working with partners or brokering deals.

This will be worth following: it’s always refreshing to have someone learn from their mistakes and be open about it all.

I’ve been down on SixApart for this very thing: they haven’t communicated well or much with their installed base. Making an effort like this will go along way to bringing those of us who have become disenchanted back into the fold. Admittedly, the emergence of TypePad, the work going into MT Pro, and the firestorm around TypeKey has probably taken up a lot of their time. Let’s hope this channel stays open . . . .

Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts: Every Signal Starts Out As Noise

This is an insightful, if long (for a weblog), examination of what knowledge management and the world of weblogs (unfiltered/unedited, self-published notes and observations) can bring to the workplace or enterprise.

There’s nothing about ROI or the bottomline in here. At least not directly: the underlying point is that you can’t always isolate what might be valuable.

The hope is that by examining everything and trying to understand the seething welter of ideas that exist in any workspace, you learn more about what goes on there. Can you learn too much about what your organization does? Are you sure everyone has the same understanding? Do you know where your work practices overlap a colleague’s? Or perhaps where they don’t quite meet?

But rather than address the more esoteric, I have a simpler example.

I’m reluctant to repeat the old buzzwords about flattening hierarchies and re-engineering the enterprise, but one of the more important lessons to learn in any any organization is finding out who can say “yes,” who can make things happen. It’s not always someone with a corner office — it often isn’t — but learning who these folks are and how to work with them can be essential. This is an area where weblogs or other internal communication tools can really help.
Continue reading “weblogs as early warning systems? canaries in the coal mine?”

TypeKey?! :: hebig.org/blog:

With regards to scalability: we’ve now implemented one of the major scalability improvements in TypePad into Movable Type–speeding up the archive list generation by using the MySQL or PostgreSQL processing engine rather than MT.

That’s good news, and I’m glad to see that the heavy lifting has been offloaded to MySQL and PostgreSQL.

There still seems to be some skepticism about TypeKey and what it does/who it benefits (weblog owners or SixApart and it’s constellation of plugin authors).
Continue reading “finally, some hope for MovableType 3”

John & Belle Have A Blog: E-Z Duz It

Here is a recipe for the easiest cake ever.

Belle is quite right, this is the easiest cake ever, the kind of thing you can make after dinner and still have for a dessert.

I first saw this in Moosewood Cooks at Home as the 6 minute chocokate cake, and they have reprinted it in the their latest book, Moosewood Restaurant: New Classics. I posted a variation on it here.

It really is amazingly good, and it works for muffins/cupcakes as well (good for school parties where allergies may be a factor: no eggs or groundnuts to worry about).

Here’s one that will never work, more’s the pity.

I want to see a movement toward fewer jobs, fewer working people: I want to see an increase in single-income households.
Continue reading “an idea that will never take off”

T & G Blog: :

And whenever you go somewhere that has free Wi-Fi, you see nothing but Mac laptops for some reason (truth be told, there was one PC laptop) even though they have a much smaller percentage of the market. Why is that?

Interesting question. The only thing I can come up with is that Macs are more likely to survive being away from AC power than PCs. My ThinkPad has a battery life of 30 minutes (down from 2 hours when new): my iBook is at 4 hours. Which would you rather take out to use on an unstructured (ie, you don’t where you’ll be or for how long) outing?