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  • 1 min read

Orkut’s back up: “I’m up

Orkut's back up: "I 'm up to 193 friends - and counting." Continuing the amusing fascination with what's apparently a buggy new service duplicating several other existing services. Are we allowing software to help us with our self-realization? Wild!

  • 1 min read

Getting Your R�sum� Read –

Getting Your R©sum© Read- From Joel Spolsky. Joel writes a good and amusing article with some brain-dead-obvious tips (that apparently aren't so obvious) about resumes. One of the rants though:

_" OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Attention, the entire population of India: whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it's always after the comma and never before it. Thank you." _

While still amusing (but perhaps somewhat culturally insensitive) this particular point stands out because I've had this debate/argument more than once. In particular the old typewriter -induced habit of placing TWO spaces after a period , which in my book is incorrect. But apparently this is not universal - there are up to date style guides which insist on the old monospace font two spaces after a period. (Via Dave Winer and everyone else too!)

Afterword (1) Apparently everyone liked Joel 's posting because it's shot up to the top of Blogdex. Geez, it's so hard to be original!
Afterword (2) The At-signs in the word R©sum© are an artifact of the accents in the word in Joel 's original posting. Amusing because it had the effect of getting me to read the resume!

  • 1 min read

What’s up with Orkut? There’s

What 's up with Orkut? There's this new "online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends" that's causing quite a bit of comment here and there, in blogs and other newsgroups. After all the badmouthing that I've seen of services like LinkedIn and Plaxo, it's funny to see the degree of interest.

Their secret ingredient, it would seem, is that you can 't sign up! What a clever marketing scheme,exclusivity, has built up quite a lot of attention. Anyone who knows a two year old knows that there's no better way to generate interest than in denying access! Their other secret ingredient is that apparently they have been acquired or backed by Google, which is always a way to get attention.

And the beat goes on:Tim Bray on Orkut; Even AKMA wants in! And here's Don Park!

  • 1 min read

The two Howards: Dean and

The two Howards: Dean and Stern. Everyone is wringing their hands about the way Howard Dean acted out on the night of the Iowa Caucuses. I heard well known pundits talk about ' the defining moment of Dean's campaign.' What a bunch of nonsense. This was a non-event, a crazy moment at the end of a long day with a huge crowd of revved up supporters. And indeed some of my friends who support Dean have commented, more eloquently than this, in his defense as well.

Forgive me to mention the other Howard in the same breath, but the best came on Howard Stern's show, who by the way, was making fun of the commentators and siding with Dean. A caller said that it was a classic 'Rocky' moment and that all you needed was to hear the theme from Rocky playing in the background and it would just 'bring a tear to your eye.' I can't play it for you here, but either use your imagination, or take my word for it: it was one of the all time funiest moments on Radio.

  • 1 min read

Channel Dean: “An RSS feed

Channel Dean: "An RSS feedthat 's like a clipping service for people interested in US politics." Dave Winer and some co- conspiritors have created something really cool: a new feed which brings together a series of feeds that all relate to US Politics. As I've said before, hats off to these kinds of innovation. I 'm just loving it! Here's the RSS (XML) link if you want to try it.This development raises some interesting questions/ideas:

  • What is the Dean-bias of this feed? Is it in fact a feed for people interested in US politics or one for Dean Supporters interested in US Politics. And with the subtlety of marketing and political campaigns these days, how do I even tell the difference?

  • It's pretty cool to see CNN articles right next to BBC, Salon, AP and NYT articles. For me, as a reader, it's exactly what I want. How do the content providers feel about it? Is this anything new with respect to intellectual property and copyright?

Keep 'em coming. This is what makes this space ("this" = RSS, Blogging, Syndication, etc.) so exciting.

  • 1 min read

Microsoft Money 2004. Disappointing. I

Microsoft Money 2004. Disappointing. I started preparing my taxes and so I thought I might upgrade my Microsoft Money to the 2004 from 2003. I am a fairly comprehensive user of Microsoft Money, and so every year I do this, and frankly almost every year I am disappointed.

There are almost no new features , enhancements, simplifications or whatever. Am I a sucker? Every year, I probably wait 2 to 3 months after the upgrade comes out to order it… I am well aware of their tack to extract yet another $50 from me (less the $20 rebate which) but I still fall for it, in the hope that even if nothing visible changes, bugs are fixed that will save me time even though I never am aware of it. Still I'd say if you are thinking of upgrading to 2004, you can safely skip it.

  • 1 min read

Did you hear this one?

Did you hear this one?(via some talkshow.) "President George Bush, trying to lay to rest concerns about our supply of beef: 'Our beef supply is safe. I tell you, do not be concerned about eating beef. If we see a reduction in the consumption of beef in this country, then, the cows have won! ' "

  • 2 min read

I want RSS to disappear.

I want RSS to disappear. The question was posed, "What do users want from RSS"? I thought long and hard about this and here's where I come out.

Speaking strictly as a user, what I care about are RSS applications. I care about reading, scanning, writing, absorbing, learning from, contributing, and sharing. So what I want from RSS is to disappear into the plumbing , and in every way possible enable and encourage great applications to be designed and built.

All kinds of wonderful new stuff that is yet to be invented. Authoring tools, reading tools, syndication applications, content applications, distribution servers, mass political blogging platforms, search engines and indexes, rating systems, and zagat's guides, catalogs and taxonomies, categorizations schemes and services, content crawling services - summarizers - delegators, translators, linkers, transmitters and receivers. This is still just the beginning, in my opinion.

So while I could list (and I will) a set of more prosaic wishes for the protocols and technologies which will enable these wonderful applications, I think at the core, I wish that the users never had the need to know the word Are-Ess-Ess.

By the way, lest anyone misunderstand. I think RSS has been and is an absolutely seminal invention and has enabled and will continue to enable a whole new class of communication with an impact that we can still not fully measure. It's just that, like TCP/IP and SS7 and Jet Engines and GPS Satelites, the people who use it don't want to know that it even exists.)

(More prosaic list follows: I wish trackback worked reliably; I wish permalinks always worked; I wish that when I moved my blog from one home to another, all my hard won traffic didn't get lost because no-one knew where I had gone; I wish I could use a richer editor to create my posts; I wish… I wish …; I wish)