I've wanted what BingeWorthy for Movies does for a long time, and especially for this time of year, when the Oscar-worthy movies come out, all at once, in December, with a final flourish with the ones the studios think are best on Christmas Day. Each year we have what's called the NakedJen Film Festival, to see how many movies we can watch on the big day. This idea was of course originated by NakedJen, in Santa Cruz, many years ago. I am a relatively recent convert. So we have to know which ones are the best. We've gone by very loose word of mouth, and reviewers' opinions. I always wanted to find a way to involve my blogging community. Hence BingeWorthy for Movies. 🚀#I finished The Crown season 2 last night. Very nice. It's a little confusing as new characters are introduced without explanation. Feels like it's just getting started. So many characters to develop yet. And the Queen herself. Her majesty Claire Foy is just amazing, and the queen's husband, played by Matt Smith, is revealed to be complex as well. I love this show. Almost ready to give it a 5. #
Does Fox News tell their viewers that the Repubs lost the Alabama senate seat?#
There might be a silver lining to the end of net neutrality. A hacker culture might emerge, as it did in the early days of the PC. the Mac and the web. We are stagnant now in tech. BigCo's control everything. More limits on the official net might force new channels to develop. #
I'm always looking for people I can work with on news projects. Like David Beard. He's leading a project to make a news river for news people. I'm just providing the technical assistance, as needed. It's running pretty smoothly, I'm happy to report. 🎈#
A notepad for me to write little stuff in GitHub as I do in other writing environments. Key is that it's super easy for me to post and edit notes from my desktop. Just write and Save. Here's a screen shot.#
Overview: the movies in BingeWorthy are the ones currently in theaters. New movies will be added over the coming weeks. The big day of release of course is Christmas Day. Not sure how it will evolve after that. The immediate goal is to find out what people think of movies in almost realtime, as they roll out through the theaters. Also included are new releases on Netflix and other streaming services as well as featured releases from previous years. I wanted to be sure people had something to rate on their first visit. #With this release, the first site is now repositioned as BingeWorthy for TV. It has been moved to a sub-folder. The home page still is the TV version, but I plan to redirect from there to one of the sub-sites. Not doing that immediately. #
There are a bunch of changes and new features. There's a link icon in the upper left corner of the program box. This is the permalink to the page for that program. Previously there was no easy way to get a permalink. Also there's a menu bar at the top of the screen. The links below the program box have been moved there. I expect there will be more things to link to over time, and we needed an approach that would have some ability to extend. #
I have these sexy new headphones. Great sound. But I keep accidentally hitting the controls, which are not labeled. I have no idea what they do, other than they turn the music off, and I can't figure out how to turn it back on. This gets inconvenient when I'm out and about and it's fucking cold outside. They should user-test these things in the conditions people really use them in. #Another thing. The Music app on the iPhone doesn't let you search your own library. You can only search their library, the one that costs money or shares all your prefs who god-knows-who. #
Fact: Donald Trump, president of the United States has a weird as yet undetermined relationship with Russia. He probably owes them a lot of money. We need to know about this. Since the president hasn't been forthcoming, we're using the FBI.#
There's been a change in criteria for inclusion. We now also include movies featured on Netflix. Still getting a feel for what works here. #
Storify is shutting down. I wanted to learn about the export formats so I started this thread, and linked to an exported story in XML and JSON. #
It's Mueller vs Moore for the heart of the Republican Party. That's the choice should Moore win today.#
Dems are more likely imho to become a majority in Congress when the Republican Party splits in two because Mueller and Moore can't fit in the same party, Repubs will have to choose. If they all go with Moore, then the election will probably be meaningless, sadly.#
Let's run a hologram of FDR for president in 2020. FDR gave the best campaign speeches. We need someone who can fire up a crowd like he could. If there aren't any living Democrats who are up to it, we can fall back to technology, need-be.#
If Moore loses then Repubs may feel encouraged that there is a bottom below which they won't sink.#
I expect to have BingeWorthy for Movies ready to go tomorrow. It's the same codebase as the TV version, but there are differences. I only include movies currently playing in theaters, and new movies on the streaming services. So if a movie opens on Dec 25, it's not in the initial database, but will be there as soon as it's in theaters. I don't know if movies will age-out of the list. We'll see how it goes. I'm using Google for search because they include showtimes in their listing and DuckDuckGo does not. Utility wins out. No strategy tax. And there are a bunch of tweaks and little improvements of course. 🚀#Be sure to swallow any coffee in your mouth and take a deep breath before watching this video. Trust me. You're going to be laughing, hard, for quite some time. 💥#
Idea. When the president attacks a reporter we all follow that reporter. So @daveweigel would have as many followers as @barackobama for example. Double what El Presidentè Trump has. It's like the Streisand Effect applied to ranting authoritarian politicians on Twitter.#Another idea. An outliner you use to gather all the tweets you don't want to lose.#
Highly recommended: This Politico survey re the #metoo moment by Emily Yoffee. I learned a lot reading it. #
Hillary's mistake was thinking all she had to do is remind voters how awful Trump is. I saw the ads as evidence she had nothing to offer, no passion. Over and over. I wouldn't bother pointing this out now if the Dems weren't repeating this approach. #
Reporters and pundits seem to think we're reliving Watergate. I don't think so. In Watergate you didn't have ex-presidents warning that if we don't do something, we're going to wind up in Nazi Germany. I wonder how many times we'll hear that warning, or if you only get it once, and if the next thing is that the ex-president goes into hiding. How much are the Repubs in Congress backing Trump because they like the politics or they fear for their lives? There probably won't be a point where you get a choice, go this way for salvation and the other way for hell. It may be that by the time you realize there was a choice, there no longer is a choice. A year ago we were trying to convince electors to do the sane thing and not vote for Trump. Now look where we are. If Roy Moore makes it into Congress, how many Roy Moores will follow? #I'm working my way through The Crown, season 2. It's every bit as good as the first season. No John Lithgow, unfortunately. But still plenty of politics and intrigue and British mannerisms to keep you entertained. Stiff upper lip. Cheerio. Quite right.#
Rectify is a favorite of the BingeWorthy crowd, although with not a lot of votes, so I gave it a try. I watched two seasons. It had some good moments. And the premise is fascinating. A man on death row is given a reprieve and sent back to the town where he supposedly committed his crime. But the show drags on and on. It's a soap opera. Lots of meetings between characters where they sigh and struggle, in soap operaish ways. I guess most shows are just that, even The Wire or The Sopranos. But they have variety and surprises and humor. I'm not sure what makes a great binge, but for me, Rectify is not it. #After getting lots of advice from the braintrust, the consensus was get a Roku. So I did. It hasn't arrived yet. It was supposed to be here yesterday, ordered from Amazon, but it's late. Can't wait to try it. I was going to use it to watch season 2 of The Crown, but I'm going to go ahead with my ancient Apple TV. #
- If so, please rate it at BingeWorthy.#
- It should probably be in the top 10, but hasn't received enough ratings yet to qualify.#
- Thanks! 🚀#
Last year's election was a real drain. I remember as we were coming up to Election Day thinking maybe this will all be over soon. In my heart I kind of knew that it wouldn't. Though I wished it would. I'm a programmer, so I'm pretty fatalistic about bugs like Trump. You can't wish them away. You have to roll up your sleeves, address the problem, fix it. That's the school of programming I belong to. There is no moving forward until you fully understand the problem. #- The biggest drain was the utter stupidity of all the anger on the social nets, when people should have been pulling together, to avoid the catastrophe that is Trump. People bashing Hillary or Bernie, or each other. So much hate. Even bashing Trump is pointless. We need to see each other as real people just like ourselves. The media was pushing us apart, not bringing us together.#
- Well it didn't get better. My Facebook world gets smaller and smaller because I have a rule to not engage with people practicing hate. I don't try to talk them out of it. I have a simple gentle way of dealing with it. Instead of objecting I silently unfriend and unfollow the person. It keeps conflict to a minimum, and I get to preserve my self-respect. Watching friends rant about how this group or that group is responsible, often a group I belong to, takes its toll. People I couldn't stand to say goodbye to got second and third chances. But ultimately once we lost them to hate they really are gone. They don't seem to come back.#
- So rather than fight I withdraw. The circle gets smaller. Eventually Facebook might just disappear, at least my version of it. I think about where I can move to withdraw from all of it. I dream of somewhere in the Rockies. Where the mornings are cold and the air is clear. Maybe start skiing again. But then I realize there really is no escape. That's America too. The hate follows you everywhere.#
- Last year when the music stars were dying, Prince and Bowie, and this year -- Tom Petty and Walter Becker, I would joke, well at least they don't have to live through Trump. Like all jokes it was funny because it was true. I keep wondering when the suicides will start, as people give up hope. I think that is the logical conclusion of my thought process. The way to make the world disappear is to make yourself disappear.#
- Don't worry dear reader, I have no intention of doing away with myself. That'll happen soon enough through the natural progression of things. But if I were a young person today I'd be angry and in the streets, shaking every person saying what the fuck are you doing to put a stop to this lunacy?#
- There's a nice thread on Twitter, started by @anildash. He asks you to name people who opened doors for you and made new things possible. I got a few very sweet testimonials from old friends. It's nice to have your good work appreciated. Opening doors for other people is a big deal for me. #
- Brent Simmons said it was simple. I gave him a chance as a programmer working with me, on projects in the 90s that had pretty great results. So obviously I made the right call. I want to say why I chose Brent over more experienced educated people. It's simple. He showed up. #
- You can learn how to program, and your help might be very helpful, but if you aren't there, you aren't willing to take a chance, don't have the innate skills, the foundation, the whatever-it-is that made you show up, if you aren't all those things which amount to showing up, then well I'm going to go with the person who showed up. It's a decent algorithm. Empirically, it works. (Not a joke, though it might sound like it is.)#
- Same with Chris Lydon. Many if not most things about Chris infuriate me. I have to get that out of the way. I love him, but most of the time, in the ways I care about, he does not show up. But I worked with him, and the work, like the projects I did with Brent, proved to be significant. It produced results that could be built on. I know this because things were built on it. Because in the end, for whatever reason, he showed up.#
- When I made my list of people who opened doors for me, that's the criteria I used. People who worked with me, trusted me, took a chance on me, because flipped around that's exactly what Brent and Chris did. There are
probablycertainly things about me that infuriate them. But I showed up, they showed up, and something happened.#
- Yesterday I tweeted that Yamiche Alcindor, a reporter at the NY Times, should get her own show. Here's why I said that. #
- At the moment I wrote that tweet she was a guest on MTP Daily on MSNBC. They were talking about Al Franken. There were three reporters on a panel moderated by Chuck Todd, the host. #
- She was the only one who said what actually happened. Franken did not admit guilt, did not apologize, and there was a rush to get him out of the Senate, no process was used. So we don't know anything more than Franken was accused of something that he denies. #
- I had heard her earlier on Friday as a guest on the Daily podcast, where she said the same thing, in more detail without interruption, so I knew what she was trying to say on MTP.#
- With one exception, Masha Gessen writing in the New Yorker, every other report seems to have missed this very basic point. Franken could have, guilty or innocent, helped establish a process for a #metoo case, at least for politicians. The process is going to be different in private corporations. But the senators that forced Franken out had no authority to do so. He isn't anyone's employee. He represents the people of Minnesota, and as was pointed out in the New Yorker piece, they were not consulted. #
- I have written about this twice. I expressed the same ideas Alcindor was expressing. I added that I didn't see what the rush was. A thorough and deliberative process would say that we're trying to be fair. A rush to judgment is exactly the kind of thing the Democratic Party was against, as far as I know. It's against the basic values of our country. If we want to maintain the rule of law (we do!) how does it help to circumvent it? I think it's great that a reporter thinks the facts are more important than an insider's view of optics, which is what the other panelists focused on. #
For the movie version of BingeWorthy, coming soon, I want to start with movies that are in theaters now, and add new movies as they come out. I want to know about shows you've already seen or want to see. Also interested in movies as they show up in rentals and on DVD (or Apple TV or Netflix, etc). Post a note here, or on Facebook, or in response to this post on Twitter. Let's have fun! 🚀 #- This is a very lightly edited version of a series of tweets I posted yesterday after the Franken resignation, and after there had been some time to absorb its implications.#
- Earlier today I wrote that Al Franken should not resign. My concern is we'd be without a process should any other senators be accused of abuse. It should have taken time to decide Franken's fate. Now we have a very flawed process. Not a good place to be.#
- People who say the Dems took the high ground are wrong. The high ground would have been to resist the impulse to act quickly, and let the ethics probe proceed. Franken promised to cooperate. This would have been the constructive example for the country, imho the high ground.#
- The Sam Seder situation was a warning. There are trolls at work here. Have we already forgotten the debacle of the 2016 election? How easily we can be manipulated. This truth goes along with all the other truths being exposed now.#
- His judges, his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, were angry, involved, not dispassionate. Franken maintains that the stories don't add up to what the senators implied (but didn't say). When they write the history, all anyone will be able to say was that Franken was accused.#
- It wasn't deliberative. It didn't reach a conclusion. His speech was defiant. Maybe there's truth there. This isn't the way it should be in the United States.#
- My main point is there are trolls among us. I'm not just thinking about Franken, but where we go from here. How easily lives will be destroyed (have been destroyed). We are too vulnerable, and the senate could have taken that into account too.#
- The key word is deliberate. Which means slow and careful. The way Mueller is pursuing the president. Why were we in such a rush to get rid of Franken and Conyers. We should have been careful. That's the mistake.#
- So if you go back to the beginning of the thread. All I claimed was the Dems did not take the high ground. I think they should have.#
The server behind the English app is released. MIT license. It's good to have a simple example of an editor that uses the GitHub API. #Braintrust query: I'm looking for a good website with ski area weather forecasts for the Rockies. Lots of sites have conditions at the ski areas. I want to know where the weather is. Mainly just a question of the storm track and what's coming. I suppose I could look at weather forecasts for each ski area, but that's pretty labor intensive. What I want is the overview. Any suggestions?#
I am beginning to think we're seeing people exiting the dollar as the reserve currency. Wondering when the panic is going to start, or if it already has.#
Unfortunately we're going to have to watch Trump dentures at war with Trump brain many more times, bigly, but it's necessary to make America great again.#
Jonathan Chait points out that the press has never considered the claims of the Steele dossier credible. I have the opposite take. I think they're obviously true, are the simplest explanation of Trump's behavior. Trump goes to Moscow, flattered and bribed, gets in bed with Russians, it fits his lifestyle. I don't see why people don't believe it. #
An old joke. Human goes into doctor's office. Doctor says I have good news and bad news. Give me bad news first. You have cancer, you'll be dead in 2 weeks. Geez what's the good news? I just won the lottery! 💥#
- I understand why other Democratic senators want Franken to resign, but they aren't the whole universe. They may believe the women, always, 100 percent, but the world isn't that simple. Remember all the fake trolls who threw the 2016 election and the aftermath we're dealing with now. Let the dust settle. Develop a process for dealing with this kind of situation, so next time there won't be a precedent of the man just leaving in disgrace. Franken may be guilty, or not. We have principles in this country to uphold. Just walking away makes it that much more of a problem for the next man who is accused. Don't make a cliché out of the presumption of innocence. It's an important principle. The Democratic senators have said their piece. Now let's have a process, and let's examine the facts. #
- Update: Franken resigned. #
I have a new app for you to try out. It's called English. It's an editor that runs in the browser that can create and edit a Markdown document in a GitHub repository. It's designed for editing docs and readmes, and to make it possible for less-technical writers to participate in GitHub-hosted open source projects. #Disclaimer: I know it is missing most of the features you'd want in an editor. I explained that in the readme. #
The point of real estate porn, if there is one, is to get all the enjoyment there is to be got from fantastic homes without having to pay for them, or live in them. #
New technology is adopted bottom-up, never top-down. And of course the big mucky-mucks can't admit that. Which creates problems.#
- The other day, I got an email from a friend suggesting that we try to get people to stop using Facebook. This idea comes up a lot. I don't support the idea, for a variety of reasons.#
- I like Facebook. I use it to keep in touch with friends. I have made new friends there. I would miss it. I don't want to quit. #
- It's hopeless. Facebook is an addiction. Try telling a smoker to stop smoking. It's bad for you! Yes yes I know. But people have to want to quit, a lot, to overcome the addiction. A well-intentioned friend is not helping by insisting they stop. (An aside, much better, when they decide it's time to quit, tell them it makes you happy. Offer to help, to go for a walk with them when the urge is overwhelming.)#
- And there's something more direct that will do much more good. See the next section.#
- Here's the better idea..#
- Instead of getting people to quit Facebook, let's get proactive in rescuing great writing from Facebook. #
- There should be a process. I see something great on Facebook. I then open a page on some alt-Facebook, or bizarro-Facebook, or whatever you want to call it, and create a copy outside the silo. A place where search engines will find it. Where it can have a life on the open web.#
- Yes yes I know people might not like it. You can ask first if you want, but until the rescue site gets famous people won't know wtf you're talking about. Better to make it a guerilla thing at first. Ask for forgiveness instead of permission. ;-)#
- That's what I think. You could even write a bookmarklet to automate much of it. #
I'm using the new editor to edit the readme file for the repo. It's really more of a todo list right now for this project. But when it's done, probably tomorrow or the day after, it'll be for the actual readme. #
Speaking of convolution. I'm trying out the idea of a wizzy editor for GitHub readmes. A simple editor, based on Medium-Editor, so you get styling, lists, heads. I found a plug-in that generates Markdown code. So what I push up to GitHub is Markdown, which is the only style that GH renders as HTML as far as I know. It works. Now the question is how to save the text locally between edits. Ideally it would be in Markdown, but the plug-in can't turn Markdown into HTML to initialize the editor. There was a thread on the repo for the project where people asked for this but it appears not to have happened. I tried a hack. Use another MD processor to do the initial conversion, and go from there. Hey Markdown is enough of a standard that it appears to work. I love it. PS: I started a thread on my repo for this project if you have questions or opinions. #My eyes are playing weird tricks on me. I have to wear reading glasses for computer work, because of the weird arrangement of lenses in my eyes. Long story, have been told before. I've been trying out different prescriptions, but today I'm back to the lens I've been using for a year. But my eyesight on the computer has reverted to where it was two years ago. Virtually impossible for me to read. I make typing mistakes because I literally can't see what the characters are on the screen. Then I thought, let's just take off the glasses and see what happens. Amazingly I can read the screen without them. A little double vision, but that's nothing compared to what I was dealing with before. #This piece gives you a very small idea of the hell that men live with, now that we're getting educated on the hell women deal with. You know the grass always looks greener on the other side. I don't think most women would like to be in a man's body in this world. We are human too, believe it or not, and when you carry on about how we're all evil or scum, you're not being fair, kind or even in the ballpark of truth. We all need love and support. Men too. Thanks for listening. #
If the world is going to end I might as well have some nice headphones. Bowers & Wilkins PX. They sound pretty good. But I haven't found music (yet) that sounds that much better than the much cheaper and lighter and less confining wireless headphones I was using previously. I may still return the new ones. #My poll about 280 character tweets got exactly 280 votes. 33 percent said it was bad, the rest said good, some good some bad, or not sure.#
I stopped going to tech conferences when I realized there was no way to win as a voice in the "audience." Then I started a conference that didn't have the concept of an audience. Our goal was to draw the crowd in the hallway back into the conference room. It worked. People loved BloggerCon. I saw some of this at Newsgeist in November. The quality of the session depends on how committed the discussion leader is to hearing from everyone, and following through on interesting and different ideas. I found that teachers and reporters often made excellent discussion leaders. A conference about news should be great. If the reporters are committed to getting the story. But reporters sometimes have a narrow field of vision. And teachers sometimes aren't interested in dialog with students.#
Oddly, I found I could be more influential at conferences, if I wasn't there, and just blogged on the topic of the conference from home. So many people in tech read my blog that this turned out to be effective. The only problem was I didn't get the benefit of their thinking. The best balance is to give everyone an equal voice, to the extent that's possible. To really be fierce about not allowing some people to be better than others. #
At the second BloggerCon I was invited to an elite dinner the night before. Just the good people. I smashed it. Threatened to out them. I said you guys don't understand this conference. You are not better than anyone else. We had a great inclusive dinner that night at the Durgin Park restaurant in Faneuil Hall in Boston. Open to everyone. Lots of food and drink and lack of civility. #
I wrote this piece in 1996 after going to Stewart Alsop's conference in Phoenix. So much fear from the podium. Larry Ellison and Scott McNeally said they will crush us, in different ways. Ellison more honestly. McNealy with cute metaphors. They were both full of shit. But people in the room might not have realized that. "The future's not ours to see," one might have said to Larry and Scott. Even if you're worth a hundred million billion. #
I got an invite this morning to attend a panel discussion in NYC about how to combat fake news with technology. The panelists all have excellent job titles. No one could be fired for choosing them. The solution is obvious, imho, but it requires them to change. First you have to commit to competing with Facebook and Twitter in news distribution. Which means joining feeds into one superfeed (a term I just coined for what FB/TW do), and only including news orgs that try to write accurately and informatively and respond to feedback that they got it wrong. #- Think of that as white hat journalism, a term borrowed from tech. I proposed this at one of the first sessions at Newsgeist in November. All kinds of well-titled people there. I was asked if Breitbart would be included the superfeed. No, of course not, I said. But, there would be no single superfeed. There would be competiton, so no one has the power to exclude. There was no discussion. I brought it up a couple more times at this future-of-news conference and no one was willing to discuss. #
- The news industry solution is for Facebook to give them money. I see these two approaches as diametrically opposed. Either compete, or be subservient. #
- Anyway, that's why I'm pretty sure there will be no attempt to solve the problem at this panel. How could I go and support this, when they don't have the courage to change? #
The Mueller investigation, esp when it's working, works in Trump's favor, in a perverse way. It lulls us into believing it's all going to be over maybe soon -- but we don't know what happens if Mueller presents an airtight case. It could be nothing happens.#I keep saying this too: "It is utter denial is to keep repeating that Trump has been able to get little or nothing done. His Fed agencies have decimated this country."#
I'm tired of my AppleTV. What to get in its place? Amazon, Google, Roku, or a new AppleTV? The one I have is over five years old. And it's pretty sucky. What do you like?#
Based on ratings on BingeWorthy I started watching Rectify. It's the story of a man who is released from death row into a small Georgia town, and all the shit that happens. I liked the first season, but now I'm getting into the middle of the second, and it's more cringe worthy than binge worthy. What gives? Does it get better?? Also it's got one of the worst names ever. I figured by now I might know what it means, but noooo.#Update: I've now finished season 2. It gets better. It's still fairly cringe worthy. But it's also a little thought provoking, pitiful and a teeny bit sexy. I'm going to start season 3. #
43 percent of the people were represented in last night's Republican tax vote in the Senate. Here's the spreadsheet. #Number one thing that pisses me off, no joke, are people who think they're better than other people.#
Trump tweets racist video to his 43 million followers. I now see why some want his Twitter account suspended. Twitter's official excuses ring hollow. Where is the line? #
As you may know, I write Scripting News using an outliner. I've been archiving the JSON and HTML versions. Today I started archiving the OPML version too. This one I do by hand, on a monthly basis. I have the archive for May-November of this year in the GitHub repo. #
Bernie Sanders had the best campaign song ever. Watch it. See if it doesn't make your heart swell with love for America. All that love is transferred to the most unlikely character. It works. Best commercial ever. Here's another song that should be the theme of a new political party, that originates with regular everyday Americans. We learned in 2017 how much we depend on each other. Let's connect on that level. People like us. #Dan Rather: "I've seen kids spill out their piggy banks and plan their allowance budget with more care than the Republicans in Congress are planning for the future of the U.S economy."#
I don't think the Repub tax cut will feed growth. It probably will cause a recession because of cuts to programs like Medicare, Social Security. Money from those programs goes into the economy where tax cuts for the wealthy go into their bank accounts.#
Around this time every year, Michael Gartenberg looks for my famous latkes recipe, pretends he can't find it, so I do, and post it to my blog and to Twitter, and we're okay for another year. It's a ritual like Groundhog Day. #I wonder if Andrew Baron reads my blog. Last time I saw him was in Boulder a few years ago. I think about him whenever I end one of my posts with two very cool emoji that work well together. A rocket 🚀 followed by a boom 💥. This was the name of his videoblog, a pioneering effort, it was pretty famous in the early days of YouTube. It's so cool that those are the names of two emoji and they go so well together. 🚀 💥#
- I try to begin each email with one of two sentiments: Thanks or sorry. Or find a way to praise the person I'm writing to. Start with something positive or show empathy. I've found, over years of experience, that people will likely stop reading after the first sentence, even if you are being nice. If you show appreciation or sincere regret up front, the chances that they'll read beyond the beginning seem to go up significantly. #
- A book author begins with a question, have you had a chance to read my book and write about it on your blog? Another rule kicks in here. No bad news. I could tell the truth, that I find it difficult to read printed books, esp ones with small type, because I have a disability. Not something that limits much of what I can do, but it does affect my reading ability. I had eye surgery a number of years ago and it left me with bad vision in one eye, and made it impossible for me to wear glasses, yadda yadda yadda. No one is interested in this other than me (very!) and my eye doctor (not much she can do unfortunately, other than surgery on the other eye, something I'm not willing to risk). #
- If I told the author all this, he would probably react negatively. Tell people I was difficult (this has actually happened) or otherwise defame me. But if I simply don't respond there are no negative consequences. So that's what I do. I don't like it. It isn't in my nature to leave people hanging. I want to give them a chance to fix the bug. An electronic copy can help. But honestly I didn't find the subject of the book so compelling, so I don't want to create the expectation that if he jumps through this hoop I will read the book. I probably won't. #
- And the idea that I owe anyone space on my blog is a huge turnoff for me. That isn't how it works. Once someone gets territorial about my space, that's usually the end of that. Which is why this is a blog post instead of an email. A rather long one, I might add. 🚀 💥#
- Reminds me of a story I don't think I've ever told.#
- There was a famous reporter at the WSJ many many years ago. #
- I had been a source for him before I started blogging, and he had reciprocated by writing nice stuff about me in some of his stories (that's how it works, btw in case you don't know). He had written a book, and sent me a blurb I should put on my blog. He didn't offer to send me a review copy. So I responded by saying he should send me a review copy and if I was interested I would write about it.#
- He got extremely nasty about how I will run the blurb he wrote and there's no need to send me a review copy. I said no, and he got even nastier.#
- I got a glimpse into how that part of the business works. I had much more respect for my blog and my readers than he did. And I'm guessing I had more respect for my readers than he did for his. And I also guess that this is the common practice, though I would rather not have known that. #
- An ad guy for a major PC pub comes to visit. I was an advertiser, so this is normal. What wasn't normal is that he brought the Editor in Chief of the pub with him. I didn't know what to make of it.#
- The editor excuses himself to go to the bathroom, then the ad guy mentions that they're planning to run editorial about my product (a good thing, and not unusual or improper for an ad guy to know this) and if I commit to a big buy, they'll add more space about my product to this upcoming issue. Now that crossed the line. He connected ad purchases with editorial coverage. There's supposed to be a wall separating editorial and advertising. He just told me that there is no wall at this publication.#
- When the editor came back I told him what the ad guy said. He shrugged as if geez what's the problem. Yes I bought some ads, the amount we were going to buy before the meeting. But I never again read any of their editorial without thinking that it was all advertising. #
Being President of the United States means something different now than it used to. If we survive Trump it won't snap back to what it was before. The next president will inherit a vastly different normal with different guardrails. It's good that The West Wing archive is around to preserve the idea of what the presidency used to be.#How do the ancestry DNA products find relatives? Are they silos? Do you only find relatives who used the product you used?#
One thing's for sure all future presidents are going to have to razzle dazzle the electorate. No more boring campaign speeches, too many details, or too much truth. #
One of the news channels could be more fluid with personalities. I would like, for example, a half-hour at least once a week with David Frum, Julia Ioffe, Luis Gutiérrez and Barney Frank. As the focus of news shifts, other experts are swapped in. Also Al Sharpton.#
JY found another Erik Sandberg-Diment review of one of my products, Ready!, which was a TSR outliner shipped in 1986. We were so busy with a growing company at the time, I probably saw the review when it came out, but I was in the middle of a tornado then. Not many memories. I remember the first review, of course, always will, because it was the one that made the startup actually start up.#Idea for the WP or NYT: Hire a psychologist to report on Trump. Develop a profile, explain each tweet in context. I'm not in any way competent, but I suspect a lot of what he does and says is trying to win the approval and love of his father.#
- I'm working with David Beard on an experiment. We want to teach editorial organizations how to run their own news "superfeeds," so they can invest in news resources for their editorial people and for their readers. But first we had to do it ourselves, with David in the editorial role and me as his system developer.#
- In this setup, I'm running River5 on my one of my AWS servers. It's generating my news sites, the NYT river, podcasts, MLB, NBA, politics, bloggers, and the one I do for the readers of my blog, and more. We're going to set it up so it generates David's river along with mine. #
- David needs to create and update a list of feeds for his river. He's not a programmer. I decided to give GitHub a try. #
- I created a new repository and invited him to be a collaborator.#
- I created a folder called lists, and a file called beard1.txt. I set it up initially with some of the example feeds included with River5. #
- I told him where the list was, and said he should edit it, to add or remove feeds, and to let me know when it was ready. #
- Then I created a script on the server that reads the GitHub file every five minutes and saves it into the lists folder on my River5 system. #
- From there, River5 does what it does with all lists. It creates a new river file, with the same name, and reads all the feeds in the list that it isn't already reading. When an item comes in from a feed he's subscribed to, it's added at the top of his river. #
- Then I created a tiny HTML shell that uses the RiverBrowser module to display the river. I pointed it at his river.js file. It all worked! #
- The most important thing is we have a workflow that allows him to change the contents of his river whenever he wants, without any tech support. That's the kind of system we all like. 💥#
New BingeWorthy feature. Now you can suggest a new program. It's very low-tech and the ultimate list that's rated is an editorial thing, it's curated. The docs are on the howto page. #
A quick demo showing how increasing the limit on tweet size to 280 chars made a big difference in my blogging. These systems all interconnect, and when the limits are erased, good things happen. Watch the demo to see how.#
Why did the Kochs want to buy Time? Possibly because they saw Fox becoming Trump TV and buying CNN and Sinclair taking over local broadcasters. It's an insurance policy. They may need to have a way to speak that's independent of their competitors.#
We want to keep the rule of law, the Constitution, the norms established over 241 years of American continuity. We need to organize around this principle. People who used to be thought of as liberal are now conservatives. Let's start talking about organizing.#
Lots of trolls, not just O'Keefe, will take advantage of the #metoo movement. On the net you can't tell who's pulling the strings. It could be an abused woman, or it could be a political cause or Russian oligarchs. America has an exposed surface that's vulnerable to trolling. Gender is a huge wedge, and people who play on divisions will use this, are using this this, to reduce us, to get us to hurt ourselves. Keep your eyes and ears, and most important, your mind, open. #
Of course Trump works for Russia. There's the evidence of connections, meetings, emails, visits to Moscow by aides, and then there's the actions, such as the gutting of the State Dept. Why would a president, who was loyal to his country, do that? Has anyone asked? Doubtful. If it were asked, would there be an answer? Of course not. The answer is obvious according to the Occam News Service. Don was compromised in the 80s, and learned to love working for Russia. #JY Stervinou found the article in the NYT archive on the web. And a followup with the author of the review, Erik Sandberg-Diment, to see how his predictions turned out. #
Barney Frank was on Lawrence O'Donnell's show this evening, explaining what Trump is up to in financial regulation in a clear way that you never hear on cable news. O'Donnell interrupted when he was just about to nail it. He kept talking and was almost going to pull it all together when O'Donnell interrupted again and said "We have to leave it there." What was so urgent? A complete rehash of the Access Hollywood thing. So frustrating. Would someone please get Barney Frank on a podcast and let him talk for an hour. He has something to say that no one else is saying.#Trump is an actor who plays a reality TV version of a president.#
The plan outlined below failed miserably. You simply can't walk in Manhattan without territorial strategies or people just walk into you. I had a Fresh Direct delivery guy force me into a wall with his cart. That's when I realized this couldn't work, and I pushed his cart away. The working hypothesis: Give an inch and they take a mile. Eye contact must never be made or all hope is lost. Walking in NYC is a contact sport. I don't know how really old people do it without getting crushed. #
Yesterday I was shopping at the local Whole Foods. On the way out the crowd slows to get on an escalator. A guy cuts in front of me and a few others, just shoving us out of his way. This kind of pissed me off. It happens a lot in NYC. Walking is very competitive. So right then I decided to do the opposite. There was a person on my right about a half-step behind. I stopped, and said after you, with a gesture of my hand. They said thanks. Then I did it again and again. People mostly didn't notice, but I thought this is a good thing in the end of year rush in NY. It's crazy time here. So I'm going to step back and let other people in ahead of me. See where that goes. #When I'm looking for right margin pictures, I often search on my own blog using a key concept from the post. So I just searched for food. There are lots of great images that go with food on my blog. There's a great picture of Nick Denton from 17 years ago. I hardly recognized him, he's so young. We were at Jing Jing, the spicy noodles place in Palo Alto. This is before Gawker, when he was starting up Moreover, an RSS-based venture, which he sold to Verisign at the same time I sold them Weblogs.com.#
I'm doing I'd like to see a Sunday news show that never invited people from the following categories: members of Congress, people who work in the current administration, reporters who cover politics, celebrities with political opinions. There might be other exclusions. But I am fed up with all the self-serving lies. I couldn't bring myself to listen to a single political podcast this Sunday. #
I'd like to try What The Fox, a fictional web browser that reverses the strategies of Mozilla, Google and the EFF. For example, instead of complaining about HTTP sites, it would complain about HTTPS sites as being a silly waste of resources. Instead of making it virtually impossible to see the source of an RSS feed, it would make everything but RSS feeds virtually impossible to see the source of. Or maybe it would show the source of everything by default, and make it virtually impossible to see the rendered HTML. That might impact the usefulness of the web however, so should possibly be reconsidered.#
Can we use a GitHub repo as if it were an Amazon S3 bucket? It seems the answer is yes. The two are remarkably similar. Here's the writeup.. #- Long-term readers of this site know that I like Amazon S3 for storing public-facing web sites, and for object storage for web apps. I have support for S3 baked into a lot of my projects. I like it because it performs well, is inexpensive, and they worry about keeping the server running, so I don't have to. The more I can offload the more I can create and manage.#
- So, when I did the Public Folder project, without even thinking, I used S3 as the place where the publicly-accessible content was stored. Andrew Shell wrote to ask if I had considered using GitHub as the public-facing store. I didn't even understand what he meant. He said that GitHub does what S3 does. Think of a respository as a bucket. We usually use it for storing program code and maybe some HTML and JSON, which also happens to be what we use S3 for. (Can you store an MP3 there? Yes. Verified.)#
- So I put it on my to-do list, and finally got around to it this weekend. I wanted to see if I could write to a repo directly from a Node app using their API. According to the docs, you should be able to. #
- A couple of days later, I have something working, a test app to see how reliable the connection is. Every night at midnight it uploads the previous day's Scripting News to the blog folder in the Scripting-News repo. It seems to work. I'm going to leave it running and come back to it after a time, to see if it's a dependable way to store and serve content. In the meantime, if you want to build something that uses this data, please do. That would be one of the reasons to use GitHub for this kind of application. #
- I started a thread on the repo, seems appropriate, if there are questions, comments. I also explain what the data is that we're storing in the blog folder. Could prove useful if you want to do some experiments. #
- PS: There are limits on file size and total size of a repository. #
I finished Godless, and I liked it. 3.5 out of 5. It started off something like Deadwood, but in the end it was more of a Disney show with a bit of Hallmark, not nearly as depraved as Deadwood, which was truly depraved. Not that I'm opposed to lovely stories and gorgeous western scenery. I'm not sure whether I'll give it a 3 or a 4 on BingeWorthy. I'll sleep on it. In the meantime I think Rectify, based on the superb rating it has gotten from BW users, will be the next program I try. It's on Netflix. And it should be noted that this is my first binge in the BingeWorthy era. As with Podcatch.com, one of the reasons I do these projects is to keep me better informed and entertained. #One simple reform in news would make a huge difference. If you know someone is going to lie when interviewed, you can't put them on your show. Make the broadcaster responsible for the lies they carry, just as some would make Facebook responsible.#
Checked on the BingeWorthy hotlist. Interesting to see Rectify at #3, but only with the minumum 5 votes to make it on the list. Freaks and Geeks which I had never even heard of, is in the top 10. It has 35 votes, which is more significant than 5. The really low-rated shows no longer get on the hotlist. Maybe I should increase it to the top 250, or increase the minimum number of votes to 10? Thinking about what's next. Have to figure out how we'll add new programs. I have some ideas. #An idea for map websites. How about a mode that let me drive a virtual car anywhere I want. I don't have to stop for traffic lights, and I can't have an accident. No speed limit. I an go the wrong way down a one-way street. I can look all around while I move through the virtual space. #
Good morning. I just did a switchover of my CMS. Hopefully all the pieces still fit together as they did before. #
I'm working my way through Godless. It's nice, but so far, three episodes in, it's not as great as the reviews say. I'd say it's about 3/5th of Deadwood, which came first, was more depraved, and more entertaining. That said I was just in the part of the country that it's about, southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. I think it was filmed there too. And this gives me a clear picture of what's next for BingeWorthy, a diary, a place where I can take notes about programs as I work through them. #Godless may not be a masterpiece, but it is bingeable. Not all shows are. I find myself looking for excuses to stop working so I can get to the next chapter of Godless. They got me to care about the characters. That's the basic thing about bingeable shows. They get you to care. #
Lovely. A neighbor is doing construction in a nearby apartment. It sounds exactly like a dentist's drill. And it's intermittent. At least when you're at the dentist you know when the drilling is going to start. (Update: I found that putting on my Bose headphones helps a lot. Hard to believe the noise cancelling function is working. The drilling seems very far away. Only downside is I can't hear my fingers on the keyboard.) #
Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving to all the turkeys who read this blog! I see a trend. Bloggers making their Twitter name the URL of their blog. It says something. I may post here, but I live there.#
Yogi Berra: "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."#
I told my massage friends from Europe about Yogi Berra and the things he said. They thought he was their kind of Yogi, not the baseball kind. The cultures are connected I guess. #
Another great Yogi saying: You can observe a lot by watching. #
Now to what's really important, basketball. Thanks to Phil Jackson and Carmelo Anthony for leaving the Knicks. I didn't know we needed the space so badly. What a great team the 2017 Knicks are. So entertaining and hopeful. I have a theory about basketball. Once teams win two championships they should disband, because there's no reason to win a third. But teams like this year's Knicks, so full of naive optimism and the joy of youth, they are the reason we watch all sport. Al Pacino's character said it so well at the end of Any Given Sunday. Sport, like life, is about creating together. It's the friendship, teamwork, that's why we play, that's why we live. We are a social species, not designed to go it alone. Yet the myth is of the Great Man. That's Melo. And Jackson. But KP has a different ethic. He leaves room for his friends to shine. So you get a dozen characters instead of one. I could be wrong. It could be KP is upset at all the individuality, but I sure hope not. Anyway, that's the story that is this year's Knicks. #I couldn't find Pacino's end-of-movie speech, but his inch-by-inch speech is the classic, and there are lots of clips of that on YouTube. #
This year I am thankful for all my friends, near and far, new and old, all genders, races, political persuasions, from red states and blue states. All we have really are each other. People who want more or think they have more are on a fool's mission. We start out as stardust and that's where we end up. In between, we hope there's time enough for fun and love and great ideas and helping each other. #
I'm thankful this year for women friends, all of whom have #metoo stories, though not all have been told publicly. Especially women friends who tell me, with love, that they know I'm a good man, not because I needed to hear that to know it, but because it helps me feel somewhat safer. I am afraid about where we're headed, how our strings are being pulled, how men's voices are silenced in this huge debate about what it means to be a man, and where leadership will come from, and if it will be kind, and wise. #
People are getting more vocal about net neutrality because there's a PR campaign to get people to rally behind the cause of the tech companies, which is ridiculous. People would never fall for it if it were Exxon or the NFL intead of Google or Facebook. The tech industry is every bit an American industry, meaning they'll take whatever they want until some entity with more power stops them. #- One of the ideas circulating is that your ISP has a monopoly, owns the only way for you to get to the Internet, but that's an old idea, it's no longer true. Where I live the wireless vendors are just as fast as the wired ISP. The cost is still prohibitive, I still need wifi, but given an economic incentive to replace Comcast and Spectrum et al, some wireless vendor is going to step in, probably the smaller ones who aren't yet owned by one of the big ISPs. Google could buy Sprint for example, and provide a route-around. #
- In other words if a market develops for neutral Internet access, there's no reason a service can't rise to meet the demand. And remember Google and Facebook have already kicked the legs out from under the web. It's on the floor screaming for mercy. These are not cuddly cute baby squirrels, they're unregulated robber barons with the best PR ever, for now at least. #
Good morning bingewatching fans!#
A simple JavaScript demo app, running in Node, creates a new file in a repo on GitHub using the REST API.#
Net neutrality is already broken. When you see a mobile service offer free Netflix or no bandwidth charges when watching Youtube, those are violations of the principle of neutrality. They predate Trump and the new FCC.#
I just added Godless, the new Netflix show, to BingeWorthy. Once it gets 5 ratings it will be eligible for the hotlist. A highly-rated Netflix program is pretty much an automatic add. #
Plot for a scifi book. An alien race from a faraway galaxy visits earth. We know they're coming and where they'll land like Close Encounters. When they show up, they walk right by the humans and greet the dogs. Turns out dogs are the master species of planet earth. And of course the aliens are canines as well. #
The new version of BingeWorthy is released, v0.5.11. The docs have been updated to show you how to create your own public ratings page. If you want tweet a link to your page, cc to @davewiner. I'll be RTing them so people can see what's up. #
Also there's a JSON version of the ratings page, so it can plug into other apps, if that's interesting. Here's the JSON version of the ratings on my page. To find yours, there's a link at the bottom of your ratings page or just add ratings.json to the URL for your HTML page. #
There are also fixes and tweaks in the new version. One of the most consequential is that the browser's Find command now works in BingeWorthy. With a long list of programs that scrolls off the bottom of the screen, having a Find command that works is pretty essential. #
Thanks to: NakedJen for putting together the initial list of programs with help from her friends in Salt Lake City. To JY Stervinou for lots of coaching on SQL and tireless testing and feedback on the initial design and all through development. Also bad French humor. And Scott Hanson and Andrew Shell for testing help. It's so important to have people who care and pitch in as software is developed. Thank you all so much! 💥 #
Ted Nelson: "The Four Horsemen of Respectability — Shallowness, Conventionality, Pomposity and Smugness."#