Scripting News for 10/4/2006

Three years ago today: Day 1 of BloggerCon I. 

Okay, my MacBook is still hosed. So what do I do? I buy a Mac Mini, of course. It was delivered today.  

Of course archive.org has the backup for Trade Secrets that I was looking for. I’m going to download copies here. Even the feed for the site is missing lots of stuff. Thank heavens for archive.org. (Postscript: The archive.org links to the MP3s are junk. Fortunately Raymond Poort, the magic man from the Netherlands, has them all. Whew.) 

Today there are 107 members of the Facebook group for Scripting News. 

On backing up 

Jeremy Zawodny does the math and figures that S3 is cheaper than backing up on a local computer. It also has the advantage of surviving a hurricane or earthquake (knock wood) and also, like a safe deposit box, will likely survive you (or in my case, me).

That reminds me to tell a story I’ve been meaning to tell. Naturally, as a new home owner, I wanted to rent a safe deposit box, so I went to the local branch of my bank and asked to rent one, and was told they don’t have any. I could get on the waiting list, but it’s got hundreds of names on it. Hmmm. So I went down the street to another bank, asked the same question, got the same answer. Why are all your boxes rented? They looked at me as if I were from a strange planet, where you could actually rent the damn things. I scratched my head, it seems as if I was able to rent them fairly easily in the past. Finally I found a bank that had one, I opened a checking account, deposited the minimum required, paid the first month’s rent and then asked why they had boxes when their competitors didn’t. Answer, after the Oakland Hills fire of 1991, the hill-dwellers in the East Bay rushed out to get safe deposit boxes. This bank was built a few years after that, so they missed the rush. It’s often a good idea to ask why, sometimes you get an interesting story that reveals something useful about human nature. People get safe deposit boxes when they see their neighbors lives turned upside down when whole neighborhoods go up in smoke.

And that reminds me that I have to decide whether to get earthquake insurance. When I lived in Woodside I paid the extra $3K per year, not really sure why, but I did it, because I didn’t want to be the only one on my block left homeless after The Big One (assuming I survive, knock wood, praise Murphy). But after visiting New Orleans in December and hearing the the tales of woe from people who bought flood insurance, only to find the industry didn’t honor their commitments, I wondered if it was actually worth the money. I asked a few friends and got mixed answers. Some people have earthquake insurance, others don’t. Right now, I don’t. I have a month to decide.

Speaking of insurance, I notice that some of the Trade Secrets podcasts I did with Adam Curry in late 2004 are gone. I’m going to try to assemble an archive of these ancient conversations, I remember them being fairly interesting and somewhat visionary. If you have copies, please let me know.

Whatever it takes 

David Weinberger: “Congress voting to authorize torture is a bigger scandal than Republican leadership covering up a Congressman molesting his aides.”

Whatever it takes to get Republicans to realize that the people they elected as leaders are not who they think they are. BTW, we suffer from the same disconnects in the tech industry. You make compromises too, kissing up to people who would exclude you, dissing people who welcome you.

The Zen Master teaches that we are the change we seek. Perhaps we should clean up our own act before we call others hypocrites.

Drilling down, here’s the issue I think David and I share. We’ve had no say in how our country works for the last six years. The Republicans have shut us out. We think we have something to contribute. Now we may have a chance to have some influence again, if we do everything right. So I suggest we focus on that, not on moral discussions about right and wrong. That’s all we’ve been able to do since the war started in Iraq. Let’s aim for something better.

Now David’s been told to “just ignore” me — and that’s exactly what he’s been doing. Ironically, he was told that by someone whose politics are very similiar to his, as mine are to both of theirs. This is terrible. It probably has something to do with why liberals are so ineffective. Differences should not cut off discourse. That’s the lesson of the last six years. The Republican leadership have raped our country, all of us equally, while we squandered every opportunity to work together. That must become our new party, The Working Together to Make America Better Party.