Category: observations

remembering rebecca: 03.03

Other words I’m hearing over and over again: an attack ‘unlike any other in history’, ‘shock, surprise, flexibility,’ and munitions on a ‘scale never before seen.’ From this, I gather that the United States hopes this war will serve as a cautionary tale to any other country — or group of terrorists — who might consider attacking the US. This war is intended, among other things, as a demonstration of our power. We are in Iraq to illustrate, in no uncertain terms, that no one can prevail against us. Will this cow the terrorists? Personally, I don’t think so. But apparently the Bush administration thinks it’s worth a try.

I’m surprised Rebecca isn’t making the connection between “shock and awe/a war unlike any other” and the muy borracho theory. It seems to be getting a lot of play.

J-Log | Kevin Sites Asked to Stop Blog | New Media

I have to wonder if CNN was worried his site (that loaded fast and had no ads) would soon start to out perform some of their own coverage on the graphics laden CNN.com.

I find it laughable that anyone thinks a weblog — any weblog — is competing on volume with CNN.com. 3+ years ago, CNN.com was doing 20 million page views a day, and that was before 9-11.

James Britt

Doc Seals and David Weinberger have an article, titled “What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else,” that discusses what they call Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is the tendency for some people or organizations to see a new thing as being “just like” some old thing, even when the comparison is tenuous or misses the essential nature of what is being compared.

For example, cinema was initially seen as radio with pictures, or as stage plays but projected on a big screen. TV suffered a similar fate (though there was a rare exception), and it was no surprise that when people started making Web sites the pages were all formulated on principle derived from print. (Hell, why do we call them “pages” anyway?)

There are too many who see the Web as being just another form of TV or some other form of one-way communication. More generally, bad analogies abound; anyone who speaks of the Net as being a highway, super information or not, just doesn’t understand.

Every medium goes through this: the internet has penetrated more markets and homes more quickly than radio or television, too fast to be understood for what it is. Like the story of the five blind men and the elephant, perhaps its all perception or how you use it: perhaps its a mistake to try and understand what it is when what we should do is try to see that everyone’s relationship to it may be, will be, different and unique.

Mirror.co.uk – COMMANDER WARNS SOLDIERS MAY NOT RETURN

Excerpted from Lt Col Tim Collins’, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish, address to his men before the start of their campaign:

“It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly. I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.[ . . . ]

“If someone surrenders to you, remember they have that right in international law. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please. If you harm the regiment or its history by over enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer.
[ . . . ]
“You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.”

Shades of “we happy few, we band of brothers . . . . ” from Henry V.

McGee’s Musings

Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work.

Turner Jabs AOL Time Warner

Mr. Turner said that he and Fay Vincent, former commissioner of baseball and former head of Columbia Pictures, were the only two directors with experience in media and entertainment — AOL Time Warner’s principal focus. He noted that the company’s chief executive, Richard D. Parsons, spent most of his career in law, politics, and banking, joining Time Warner’s board less than a decade ago.

“I think it is good to know something about what they are doing,” Mr. Turner said.

Ouch . . .

“Particle Man in the Middle” – SoundtrackNet – February 14, 2002

John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants on alternate distribution channels:
There is a dimension to the MP3 situation that I feel is actually very complicated and supercharged that actually doesn’t directly apply to us, but, as a person with great respect for the profession of songwriters, I feel I should speak to. (One thing I have noticed about the whole MP3 debate is that speakers tend to feel they can only use themselves as examples, and there is a tremendous amount of oversimplifying of the real issues in play here.) I speak to many people about this, and am always surprised how many pundits only have the vaguest grasp of what a music publisher does, what BMI does, or how performance royalties, or licenses work—some of the cornerstones of how working songwriters are compensated—and yet they have highly evolved and elaborate ideas about how the music industry is a sham, and needs to be entirely re-rigged to “free the music” all the while ignoring the most basic concerns of the people who really create it.

Many of the loudest voices in the Napster/MP3 debate are either extremely wealthy artists who have no realistic financial concerns for themselves (or any one else), artists who are decidedly non-professional and are happy to have an outlet for their songs, or non-musicians who are simply using this issue to grandstand for essentially ill-considered political views that do nothing to address the practical concerns of artists. The search to find equity for song writers in the impending digital future is not particularly well served by any of these groups. I also feel strongly that songwriters deserve a system of compensation free of the cross-interests of recording labels, who are once again, and unfortunately, the strange bedfellows for songwriters in this discussion.

It’s also unfortunate that the perceptions people have of the music business are so often formed by wildly misleading gossip and the purely imagined tall tales of “Behind the Music”. I find if you substitute the phrase “pampered rock star” with “struggling blues journeyman” there is a surprising reverse spin to many of these discussions. In the music business, like in many other things in life, a little bit of information can be a very dangerous thing.

More questions than answers here: perhaps he’s alluding to why I don’t hear much from the musicians in this debate, except on the anti-piracy side. Is it fear or retribution that silences them?

MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP

To be honest, I don’t know too much about Perl. However, to make the best weblog system work – Movable Type, I installed Perl onto my Windows XP machine from scratch.

Well, I got nowhere with this. I apparently need to install Berkeley DB or the perl library that enables that functionality (DB_File) but can’t do it. ActiveState has a library management tool (ppm) that works for some libraries — every one but this one, as far as I can tell. I even downgraded from 5.8 to 5.6.1, as I read someone suggest would work. No joy.

So I guess I’ll do this on OS X instead. I already have a name for my work weblog or knowledge log: administrivia. It will likely be UW only, though.

How easy is this?

I was getting all kinds of backtalk from DreamWeaver when I tried to synchronize a website this evening: lots of grousing about filenames/paths being too long (wha? I thought the limit was something like 1,024 chars?). So it occured to me, I should be able to mount a webdav store as a volume and then just copy the files. And yes, I could do just that (see the image linked above to see how). And all the whining about pathnames went away.

This suggests the limit is in DreamWeaver, not the OS. To be fair, I expect this is possible in the Leading Brand, but I haven’t needed it there. For what it’s worth the machine doing the sharing is a WIN2K machine, but not running IIS (natch).

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
— Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953