Scripting News for 3/31/2007

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American power 

Shelley Powers: “To the Chinese, freedom is a threat. To the right wingers, criticism of the Catholic Church was a threat. To some folks in Missouri, the fact that I continually bring up issues related to Johnson’s shut-ins is a threat. Exactly how do we define a level of ‘threat’ in this new Gestapo? Is it in the eye of the beholder? Kathy feels afraid, and therefore it is our duty to hunt down this perpetrator and bring him or her to justice.”

In the last week I’ve defended three people who made a hobby of humiliating me, and I did it with pride, like Nixon going to China, I oozed credibility, as they deserved protection from a mob that was angry, justifiably, at humiliation, and not knowing where to direct the anger, aimed at three reasonably pathetic and defenseless people. I called this a Chorus of Cowardice, and I stand by that description.

Shelley Powers, someone who treats me poorly in her tirades and taunts about the evils of powerful men, whose caricature of me might be the little suited capitalist in the Monopoly board game, tears to shreds Tim O’Reilly’s poorly thought out call for more mob justice. I totally agree with everything she says in this piece (assuming she doesn’t edit it to spite me). It’s what being American is about, tolerating all kinds of speech, especially stuff we don’t agree with and don’t like.

Parallels, day 2 

When I started installing XP, foolishly I thought “How cool is this, I get to use my Mac, and put the PC in a little window, even hide it if I want. And it all runs at native speeds!”

I was happy, until I hit the first stumbling block, a dead-end, deal-stopper, brick wall.

Joe Cicinelli says it took 10 tries to get XP to install. Gulp.

11:53AM Pacific: Well, I got past the first hurdle, or so it seems. I didn’t know you had to click in the window to get it to recognize keystrokes. Once I did that, it recognized the old Windows CD and asked me to put back in the new Home Edition CD. It continued the installation, rebooted the virtual machine, and now it’s “finishing setup” with 36 minutes left to go. I did the cmd-tab thing to get back into my blog outliner, so I could write this post while it’s doing its thing. The disk is whirring happily or so it seems. Here’s a screen shot. Praise Murphy, I may just have Windows running here soon. Fingers crossed!

12:05PM Pacific: It worked! Amazing. I’ve got Windows running on my MacBook. Exciting!!

12:37PM Pacific: It seems my computer should be heavier now that it has a Windows machine inside it, but it feels just about the same. I have Firefox and the OPML Editor installed in the virtual environment. Next — get a copy of WinZip.

iRobot Scooba 

Movie of my floor washing robot, Scooba, a gift from Chris and Ponzi, doing its thing.

Time to buy 

Mike Arrington announces that TechCrunch is acquiring FuckedCompany, doubling his readership and covering the decline of Web 2.0 companies as fully as they cover the incline.

My own two cents, when thinking about declining tech markets, something I’ve seen four or five times — when a boom is tailing off is the best time to invest in truly new ideas. People’s thinking has been going in one direction for a long time, so long that all the big or obvious ideas have been tried, many times, and people are creatively exhausted. It’s a good time to change your assumptions, head off in a different direction. Everyone’s been zigging, so now it’s time to zag.

Revisit early ideas that spawned the current boom that have been discarded, and continue the evolution by going in a different direction. Start with a blank screen and put someting interesting and simple on it.

Aside to Mike: A domain you might want to grab. 🙂

PS: Apparently Mike’s post was an early April Fool’s joke which I fell for. Oh well. What I said still stands, ironically, whether or not Mike is joking. Have a nice day (no joke).