Scripting News for 9/30/2006

NY Times: “Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret.” 

Newsweek has a lengthy excerpt from Bob Woodward’s new book on the war in Iraq. I bought a copy at Amazon for delivery next week.  

Google News articles about Idiocracy. 

Closing line from the narrator in Magnolia: “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” 

The Beatles sing Ticket to Ride when it was new and they (and we) were young. This is why YouTube is great, even if they don’t make a trillion dollars. What memories. And what value.  

Word is getting around about Idiocracy, a movie written and directed by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill), that opened only in a few cities at the beginning of the month. I heard a review of it this morning on NPR, they said it was great. I totally want to see it.  

Doc talks about a Vendor Management Systems, to balance the other side’s Customer Management Systems. I, of course, like. A prototype for this is a movie review system where I own and control my data. Today, I rate movies on Netflix and Yahoo, but I can’t get them to share the data with each other, so they make recommendations without info the other one has. If I had a place where I kept my movie ratings and gave each of them a pointer to it, they could read it and I would control the data. It would be very easy to set up, the technology is no trick at all. The hard part is getting enough users to do it this way to gain critical mass. This is also the idea behind Edgeio and Marc Canter’s People Aggregator. Open systems, users own the data, silos smell of sulfur. 

According to this (anonymous) guy, people like me are “destroying discourse in this country.” Or is it that I just know scripting and should stick to that? Or was yesterday’s political writing the best in a long time? 

Michael Markman: “History asks, ‘Where were the good Germans?’ I don’t want future history to ask, ‘Where were the good Americans?'” 

People are using this post of mine to say I support things that I don’t support. I was asking for an icon for validated OPML. An icon that would link to the validator. To link from HTML to an OPML version of the data behind the page, I generally use the white on orange XML icon, as I have for years, and I’m not going to change that. Hopefully that’s pretty clear.