Another "Giant Leap For Humankind": TV-B-Gone!

All it does is turn television sets off (and now, optionally, on).

Techies like to talk about designing simplified software or devices that only do one thing, really well, despite the fact that consumers evidently prefer to buy clumsy, uneven products that promise to do everything you’ll ever need (SUVs, the “cell phone/music player/camera/web browser/micro-movie theater/GPS tracker,” MS Office...) But here’s the device that fairly defines simplicity, and in an added Thoreavian kick, offers to return a little peace and quiet to your harried life:

“Your TV-B-Gone® universal remote control resembles other TV remote controls, but is different in two important ways. First, it only has a power button that allows you to switch a TV on or off.”

“You can use TV-B-Gone® to control access to television for philosophical or practical reasons, or simply to have fun!“

—Mitch Altman, Inventor of TV-B-Gone®

Ever turned off a television that no one around was watching, and noticed that nobody noticed? But you actually did those people a favor. Subtly but definitely you helped reduce the amount of noise in their environment, with its attendant stress and drain on their biophysical components.

You see, unlike even the most insistent conversationalists you know – the ones who never seem to stop – the television does not even have to pause for a quick breath; in fact, they even edit the breaths out of the announcers' spiels. A TV never needs to sleep, either; it requires only that lifeline of electrical connection to literally continue to yell at you, vocally and visually, 24/7/365.25 (accounting for leap years).

Stress, the professional health and medical fields agree, is the number one cause of physical malfunction in "advanced" societies. Television run wild is not merely a proven source of stress, it’s practically the poster child of stress-sources! So, by putting the TV-B-Gone to prudent use -- "Click Responsibly" – you may actually be doing a significant service towards promoting the general public health.

(And we’re only half kidding.)

~~~

Trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas this year? (This question is addressed to a very small of group of people, some of which I share a last name with.) This is it. A TV-B-Gone would let me feel like Robin Hood; it'd be my bow and arrow.

And I'll really find it handy for some of the restaurants I otherwise like.

Note on the title:
(We’ve tweaked an historic quote there, but are sure that if Neil Armstrong had first set foot up yonder in recent times, he’d have put it that way. Kudos and appreciations to Mr. Armstrong, btw, for realizing that was a hugely historical moment, and rising to the occasion. He could have just said, "Roger, Houston, that's a big 10-4, we have touch-down," or something equally dull and functional.)

Related, on Rosswriting.com:
"It's a Loud, Loud World"

Public Web Surfing Advisory

Since we're on the subject of personal digital security, here’s another tip to consider. The New York Times ran a piece on the wide open Web surfing that’s available at your local wireless hotspot. That is, all your communications and actions on the net wide are potentially open to whoever has the inclination and the equipment.

“Although obsessing about computer security is a bit like worrying about a toddler — potential hazards lurk everywhere and you can drive yourself crazy trying to avoid them — the fact is, business travelers take certain risks with the things they do on most trips.”

(Thought that was a great quote.)

“’Where I’d draw the line is putting in your bank account information or credit card number,’ said Robert Vamosi, a senior editor with CNET, adding that ‘checking e-mail messages probably is not that risky,' and you can always change your e-mail password later.

"Wireless networks at airports, hotels or cafes are not as secure as most people think. 'Someone may have software on their computer that allows them to look at all the wireless transactions going on around them, and capture packets floating between the laptop and wireless access point,' he said.

"Last fall, InfoWorld magazine published an article about a security researcher who managed to collect more than 100 passwords, per stay, at hotels with lax security (about half the hotels she tested).

"…Access to your corporate network through a V.P.N., or virtual private network, (is) safer than using public hot spots. There are services you can subscribe to for about $10 a month that do the same thing."

"Web Surfing in Public Places Is a Way to Court Trouble"
(This may require free registration to read)

By SUSAN STELLIN, NY Times
Published August 22, 2006
.

But in a show of faith in the medium, I am boldly posting this from a public wi-fi spot. Go, Tech!
===

A good little wireless hotspot locator – boston.jiwire.com

…although I chanced across a place yesterday that didn’t turn up in their listings, your traditional, Mom ‘n’ Pop Internet café along Fort Salonga Road. On balance, though, very useful.

===
(Editor's note: oh, how that headline yearned to be, “Web Surfing Naked in Public” or the like, but that would be a cheap shot, wouldn’t it? Just wanted to let you know what we didn’t do, so you could congratulate us on our great dignity and reserve.)

Getting Closer to Microsoft (for purely defensive purposes)

“Deluge of flaws” being found in Office

You are not going to see much in here that’s all warm and fuzzy on the subject of Microsoft, or even particularly friendly. But let’s be practical, everybody uses their stuff. And it’s because of that fact that this is bulletin is important, nay, crucial.

Ziff-Davis’s E-Week reports that:

"What started as an amusing eBay listing of an Excel vulnerability for sale has developed into an all-out hacker assault on Microsoft Office applications.

"Security researchers and malicious hackers have zeroed in on the desktop productivity suite, using specialized 'fuzzing' tools to find a wide range of critical vulnerabilities in Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats."

("Fuzzing tools”? You mean, marketing? No, eWeek explains,)

"Fuzzing, or fuzz testing, is an automated technique used by researchers to find software bugs."

The article points out that as Microsoft (belatedly) got serious about security vulnerabilities in Windows, hackers and hence security researchers have moved up the software ecosystem to go after “the low-hanging fruit” in applications. Well, there ain’t any bigger trees in the orchard than Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which were originally put together with the same oblivious attitude to security as the OS.

In short, what this means is that in order to keep our lives simple, we’d all better keep in touch with all the bug fixes, "service packs," etc., for Office from the E-Empire. (That “E-“ is for “electronic” – no, honest! ; - )


(…half an hour later:) Oooh, boy, is my head spinning. Well, try this, bravely found by starting at microsoft.com, Gawd help us:
Security and Office: Find out how to help protect your data

This page was obtained by clicking Office under Product Families in the navigation column at left, then typing “security” into the search box. (I’m specifying all this as a disclaimer, since there’s an awful lot of stuff there, and who knows what’s the most recent and comprehensive.) There are, naturally, thousands of rabbit holes there you could disappear down, so if you’re a masochist with a week or two to spare, have at it!

Here's a case where you really might be better off hiring a professional to at least get you set up with this. (No, we don't do that; this is not a subtle sales pitch.) It'll cost you, true, but it beats the hell out of having your computer taken over by zombies, spending long hours trying to get it exorcised, and losing all your data (because few are those who back theirs up).

Just a sec -- here we need to say, BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER! This weekend! At least just copy all your own files onto CDs, preferably rewritable CD-RWs. (There, now you can't say nobody warned you, okay? And we've done our duty as digital citizens.)

How much do I hear for a hole in Excel?

That Excel vulnerability for sale on eBay was indeed pretty funny. eWeek's story on that explains,

The seller openly taunts the software giant, poking fun at the company's delays in providing fixes for known security bugs. "It can be assumed that no patch addressing this vulnerability will be available within the next few months. So, since I was unable to find any use for this by-product of Microsoft developers, it is now available for you at the low starting price of $0.01 (a fair value estimation for any Microsoft product)," the listing read.

"Microsoft representatives get 10 percent off the final price. To qualify, you MUST provide @microsoft.com e-mail address and MUST mention discount code LINUXRULZ during checkout," it added.

Even More on 'More about Great Customer Service'

In the reader comments on Pogue's Post on Crutchfield we discussed yesterday/below, a number of people got in the spirit of it all to recommend other companies they found notable for their service and attention to customers -- which would be us.

Canon, for their cameras, IBM/Lenovo for the Thinkpad, Audible.com (downloadable audio books), and Apple Computer -- especially for the free, detailed advice at the Genius Bars at Apple Stores -- were applauded. And seemingly everyone who wrote chimed in affirmatively about Crutchfield.

I can echo the experience of Apple and their Genius Bar -- although, to be "fair and balanced" about the company overall, they were inexcusably slow to offer a replacement option for iPod batteries, and it's still an expensive pain, apparently. You can’t just go down to the drugstore or wherever and buy some batteries from the Bunny, like with pretty much everything else.

Then there's the whole question of DRM, or CRAP, or even DAM; but that's a subject for later -- or maybe earlier. (Since if it's later enough, in the odd, upside-down world of 'blogs, you've already been there. Just can't get used to that, at least so far. I'll stop now with that, since I can just hear someone saying, "Oh, get over it!" But as of this date, it's later, alright?)

But more to the point, I wanted to toss in a vote for MacConnection/PC Connection. In many years of dealing with them, they too deserve the gold star for responsiveness, patient help, sending you a replacement without waiting for the defective or wrong product to be returned, etc.

More on the crazy new concept called "Customer Service"

The witty and perceptive David Pogue, the New York Times’ personal technology columnist, has given us another excuse (Ding!) to write about the idea of really, truly focusing on taking care of your customers.

He had posed a question in his blog asking if any readers knew of a trusty website that catalogued third-party auto parts, and wrote last week that, “No fewer than 25 people… all responded the same way: ‘What you want is Crutchfield.’” He then goes on to detail the incredible attention to detail and eager helpfulness he encountered from Crutchfield, both on the Web and on the phone, since,

“When the package arrived, there was Crutchfield’s installation manual, with the company’s “we’re here to help you” toll-free number printed in 60-point type on the first page.

What are they, nuts!? They are actually *inviting* people to call them for free technical support? Don’t they have any idea how that idea will kill their revenue stream? Haven’t they learned anything from the computer industry?

I can't help wondering why nobody else has questioned the wisdom of the current "go away, customer" attitude that prevails in the penny-pinching computer and software industries. That attitude will never generate repeat customers, will never build a cult of fans and will never turn a company into the Crutchfield of its industry."
David Pogue:
A New Business Model
Business 101: Quality Customer Service Breeds Customer Loyalty

(“Pogue’s Posts” is only one corner of the far-flung Pogue publishing empire, which also includes being the creator of the Missing Manual series of computer books; this is one of those hyper-productive people who you figure there must actually be at least three or four of. )

"The New Type Writer" (ad circa 1860's)

(Just for fun, and perspective...)

"Weight 10 pounds. Price $60. First Class in Every Respect.
For Professors and Students the Type Writer is especially valuable as it saves drudgery and aids composition.
Send for Circulars."

(An ad from an issue of the Atlantic Monthly from the 1860's, the magazine that at that time was publishing Ralph Waldo Emerson and all the New England Transcendentalists.
Courtesy of the collection of Ted and Susan Sillars.)

No YouTube On Panera Bread’s Menu

I’ve just stumbled upon the strange fact that Panera Bread’s content filter will not let you see anything from YouTube, the homemade-video site, among other things. My laptop and I were having lunch there yesterday – I ordered their turkey artichoke sandwich, while Mac fed on the nutritious free WiFi -- and we noticed that what was supposed to be an embedded YouTube video on another site showed up as a blank space.

Well, shoot happens, and sometimes shoots don’t happen; the Internet is very much a work in progress, and video is still in the pre-standard phase. But with the URL available, curiousity drove us to slap it into the command line, and this rather creepy warning appeared:

“The SonicWALL Content Filter Has Blocked this site.
“Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category"

Sure enough, today we checked back from another i-café (this free wireless thing having freed us from our electronic cave at home), and bada-boom: there was the verboten yet entirely non-controversial video.

Panera is obviously keen on protecting their diners from any unappetizing content -- more likely, protecting themselves from lawsuits from parents whose teens might be tempted to go to there for a bagel and Suzy Creamcheese.

But all of YouTube?

SonicWall can be quite Church-Lady about the content they allow through. Some friends have a completely innocent site about "sound healing," which nonetheless was blocked in the Forbidden Category of "Cult/Occult," a classification which of course does not play in Peoria. To be fair, which I’m frankly not inspired to be in this case, they invite you to submit a rating review “if you feel this site has been blocked in error.” Just don't go to Panera expecting to find anything spicy.

A Fire-Breathing Radical!

Here’s a terrifying claim that has the potential to undermine our very (driven) way of life.

"Imperfections in the accounting system make quarterly earnings numbers meaningless, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson said Tuesday.
"'The real issue is to stop managing a company for the quarterly results. Thanks to assumptions allowed under accounting standards, quarterly earnings numbers 'are so vague,' Donaldson said.
"Instead of a quarterly earnings number, he suggested companies post a range representing their earnings and tell investors what assumptions they used to compute that number. 'There ought to be more qualitative reporting,' he said.
"Donaldson chaired the SEC from 2002 to 2005."

(By Ellen Simon, AP - July 25, 2006)

Forget about quarterly earnings!? Not a chance. Net, the wise men and women of the investment community will look right past this wild theorizing and keep flogging their portfolio companies for ever-increasing quarterly profit growth, mathematical impossibilities be damned.

I mean, take a big enough corporation and insist on steady double-digit growth every three months, and soon that company will need to have assets on the scale of China’s. By the next year they’ll need to look at the acquisition of some planets. So of course they've got to cook the books every so often; once your multiples really start mulitplying you’re looking at some b-i-g numbers, and the shareholders must be kept happy.

Of course, we all heard quite a while back that the Japanese weren't focused on quarterly results, but instead planned far ahead and were patient, and would soon own not just L.A. but the entire western half of the U.S. -- and look what happened to their economy. So let's dispense with this old-fashioned nonsense about long-term thinking, building a company on a solid value proposition and all that rot, shall we?

(Come to think of it, you used to hear a lot about "the patience of Persian rug weavers," too; don't hear much about that anymore, either. Maybe because Persia is now named "Iran." I've noticed that all those dealers now advertise only "Oriental" rugs.)

But don’t worry about society becoming destabilized by this anarchist’s ravings – soon we’ll no doubt hear that he suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack or something, like they took care of Dustin Hoffman’s character. (Don’t accept any lunch invitations from Secret Service guys, Mr. Donaldson!)

Last night's Web Innovators Group event; Swaptree

Back to the Web Innovators Group demo-and-networking event last night in Cambridge. Founder David Beisel has provided a growing forum that makes obvious the rising pitch of enthusiasm for new tech ventures -- for the first time in over five years. Wow; who'd have ever guessed?

The standout presentation to the SRO crowd of maybe almost 200 (wild estimate), from my point of view, was of Swaptree, which you could describe as an online marketplace for trading stuff, focused on books, CDs, and video games. They say they've been working on it for two years, and it shows: what made it look so good is the admirable thoroughness of their design and plans. It's currently in a private beta, which their site invites viewers to write and ask to join.

They seem to have thought of everything: you enter the ISBN number of the item you want to trade, and their database knows what it's worth, how much it weighs and will therefore cost to ship, and who is looking for one. You mail it to them using the shipping label provided on the site, just print it out, and mail it in the groovy, "like Netflix"-but-green logoed envelope they'll send you. They're working on a third-party deal to provide the postage, too.

Naturally, they've included a role for Google Maps (because if your business plan doesn't somehow include or at least refer to Google this year, then you "just don't get it"), but for the clever use of showing where the closest person is geographically who wants what you've got. "Then you can arrange to meet them at Starbucks," the presenter said -- very fast. Maybe he'd just been there, or it could have been from trying to shoehorn two years of development into the six minutes alloted each speed-talking entrepreneur.

You can even do trades involving three or four people: like when...

-- Tangent Alert! --
...the Celtics sent Antoine Walker to the Heat last year (good for you, 'Toine) in a five team deal, receiving in return a dizzying combination of players, draft picks and parking spaces from the Grizzlies, Jazz and Hornets.

That was in fact the largest trade in NBA history, with thirteen players, many of whom were "thrown in just to make the numbers work," given the salary cap. Just for the record, we would happily accept being thrown into any deal "just to make the numbers work" if the portion due us of those numbers ended with five or six zeroes, as it does for all those NBA ballers.

(Now, don't start in again about players' salaries -- how come nobody ever seems to complain equally about the owners' profits? And aren't the latter free to refuse to pay those salaries? ...Okay, we're done -- sorry.)

Oh, and Swaptree, yes... very cool. The next WebInno party is soft-scheduled for September.

The fellows over at the BostonWTF Web Technology Forum were there, too; here's their much more erudite take on it, with analysis of the business models, competition "in that space," etc. (But guys, do you have to make your logo look like Dunkin' Donuts'? It's cute, yeah, but somehow it gives me that faint reminder of indigestion, like...)

Techjots covered it, too, with a similarly healthy dose of VC-speak.

But does it require a high tech solution?

Another example of the tendency to look for a “promising new technology” to solve a problem that, it turns out, is already solved but simply lacks funding.

Granted this story is in CNet's news.com, a tech news site, where it wouldn't appear without an e-angle. So the headline is,

"High tech's slow march in land mine campaign
- The humble metal detector is finally getting an upgrade...”

But when you get into the story, you find this telling quote:

"We need more of what we know works, rather than new technologies," said Noel Mulliner, technology coordinator for the U.N. Mine Action Service. "New technology is not going to get into the field fast enough. We want more of the simple stuff."

"The best estimate” is that between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured each year; "in the 2004-2005 reporting period, those injuries occurred in 58 countries." But they’re in countries both poor and recovering from wars, not exactly your "attractive investment opportunities" or "emerging markets" with hot quarterly growth prospects.

Quoted again on Boston Globe's site, on 'Web 2.0' & American Idol

We are right pleased to have been quoted again in the Business Filter, the Boston Globe's online business blog. Columnist Maura Welch wrote:

Bill Ross admits he's a 'wicked music snob,' and writes with a great little rant about my post about Bix, the soon to launch site that will let advertisers sponsor contests like American Idol online.
"The 'Web 2.0 version of American Idol' says it perfectly about where, IMHO, all the social networking sites are ultimately headed. And that's to the place called 'The Lowest Common Denominator,' a plane where I have seldom if ever found anything of value."

(Ooh -- sure does sound like a wicked snob, hm?) I'd written her about the Bix post, and since I'd recently written the lengthy rant you see below (7/20) on the same general subject, it enabled me to "repurpose" a little of it.

(Here's the rest of what I wrote to Maura, for that extra bit of context:)

Now, I'm speaking solely as a Consumer of Content here; maybe somebody can indeed make big bucks off this. But if I was starting a venture, I'd want to base it on something that I felt had inherent quality, as opposed to starting out knowing I was going to be creating and living with a junk generator.

Caveat
Let me admit that I've yet to watch more than one minute of AI (there's an overused acronym for you: Artificial Intelligence, Allen Iverson, neither of whom I look forward to seeing play for the Celtics,), because it immediately seemed evident that,

a) it was just "Star Search" reborn, with all these people who had obviously been painfully coached to act like stars, with all the old gestures and cheap tricks,

b) most of what I heard about Idol was about the nasty things that guy Simon would say to those poor contestants. Like the bumper sticker tells us, "Mean People S(tin)k." Plus, I'd be shocked to discover that it wasn't fixed.

The Thing About "User-Generated' Sites - YGWYPF?

You hear an awful lot these days about the miracle of User-Generated Content on the Web, from all these startups and companies who believe they’ve found a way to create content-rich sites in no time, and at no cost.

You put up a wall, thousands of people presumably throw, uh, “material” up on it, and presto! You’ve got a bona fide content-driven website that attracts millions of visitors – mostly the immediate friends and family of the ones who threw all that compost up there – and you sell billions of dollars worth of contextual ads.

And it’s Free; it costs you mothing to create all those pages of what-all. It’s hard to argue with that… except by invoking YGWYPF, the timeless axiom that holds, “You Get What You Pay For.”

It reminds me of the pre-Internet, AOL days, when “chat rooms” were all the rage. But when I first joined, all I found was what I've heard people say MySpace is now full of: teens, or the teen-like, just mindlessly blabbing away. After a few visits, I was outta there.

CNET's Download.com Music section recently went through a redesign that now emphasizes commercially promoted bands over the user contributed music that they established the site with, because, as one of the staffers confided in their artists’ forum, 'Let’s be honest, most of it is awful.'

That's who usually shows up for these parties. If you’re lucky, you attract the kind of Early Adopters who enthusiastically add stuff that people do want to look at or listen to. But with success and increased visibility come the unseen throngs of those who, and how to put this gently, have less to offer.

Some have not yet developed their talent, let’s say, but either no one’s told them or they’re just not listening. Then there are the poor souls whose level of enjoyment is so limited that they can only delight in trashing things.

They’ll all dive in there and fill your site with junk, Because It’s There, and they can. There’s an old saying that, some people have nothing to say – but it takes a long time to find that out. So user-built sites may have a decent shot at a run, but it’s usually relatively short-term, and many such ventures wind up as ghost sites where the visitor soon realizes nobody's home anymore, it's all on auto-pilot, and they leave.

Not that there haven't been big successes, and it is pretty cool that you can throw some software out there and thousands of people will fill it up, potentially creating a new community from like-minded but widely distributed people who wouldn't have connected any other way. (See? We're not being totally Grinchy here.) But it ain't as easy at it looks to maintain and react to a site like that; it requires some strong editorial input and management, too, unless you're fine with site whose between-the-lines motto is, "The Lowest Common Denominator!"

"A Working Simple System"

(orig. posted 7/6/06)

(About our concept of "news"...)

One thing I'm not going to do is limit the subjects of this inverted column to "news," in the sense of only throwing items in here that relate to what happened or was published within the last 24 hours. Especially when we only plan to update this maybe a couple times a week.

Like with this following bit -- what is timely about this is, however, is that I remembered it today; which technically makes it news, doesn't it?

= = =

"A Working Simple System"

Here's an idea so profound, so fundamental, that I can't tell you how many times I've quoted it; even before the time I had it on my old site ( in "the Serious Part," now enshrined here, along with everything else in the Internet Archive). A lot of system designers of all kinds would do well to contemplate this principle.

It's from a book by John Gall, famously named "Systemantics, The Underground Text of Systems Lore." (With the typical feverishness of Web publishing, I'm going to slap this up here now, then do some searching later to see if I can find anything about it online, or in print, or at least a bread crumb trail. Originally found this in print, in the old Whole Earth Review when I believe Kevin Kelly was editing it, before he went on to Wired.)

Some essential statements:

"Complex systems exhibit unexpected behavior.

"The system always kicks back - systems get in the way - or, in slightly more elegant language: Systems tend to oppose their own functions.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

"The parallel proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

General Systemantics Press, Pub. Date 2nd Ed.: November 1990

---

(Shortly afterwards:)

...Sure enough, there are ample references to Mr. Gall's book all over the Web.

"General Systemantics Press was established in the 1970s to publish Dr. John Gall's book, 'Systemantics™ - How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail.'
This was the First Edition of what is now 'The Systems Bible™,' which they proclaim includes, "three new chapters, new AXIOMS, THEOREMS AND RULES OF THUMB, and many new Horrible Examples..."

Of course there are a number of entries about it in the Wikipedia;
the main page for Systemantics contains these additional, comforting Laws:

"The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.):
In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.

"Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being."

The “Do the Right Thing” Business People: Craig(slist) Newmark

(orig. posted 6/29/06)

Craig Newmark of Craigslist
from CNET News.com, June 28, 2006, by Greg Sandoval

"Considered by many to be one of the most benign of Silicon Valley's top innovators, Newmark has shown a feistier side recently. When he's not verbally jousting with knights, the mastermind behind the Web's top classifieds publication can be found beating a drum for Net neutrality or defending his namesake network of sites against claims that it allows people to post discriminatory housing ads."

"'If you want to be successful, try to do the right thing,' he said. 'In the short term you can succeed by screwing people, but it doesn't work too well long term.'"

"Few companies have fostered as much customer loyalty. That's largely due to Newmark's almost fanatical attention to customers. He started the list in 1995 as a way to inform friends about special events... the list grew into a company, and Newmark found that he enjoyed working with the public more than overseeing day-to-day operations.

Thus, he turned those duties over to someone else, and now carries the unusual dual titles of chairman and customer service representative."

Pre-Blogger Blog entries, March-July '06

Like we said earlier, except you haven't seen it yet -- this "latest is first and earlier is later" characteristic of blogs can be kind of odd -- we've had this blog going for several months now. So here's a linky index to all those already-archival bits:

(6/28/06)
How About an iTunes "Pro"?

(6/19/06)
Ding! (at Trader Joe's)

(6/16/06)
Quoted again on Boston.com

(6/12/06)
"The whole problem with the world..."

Quoted in WebInno Podcast

(5/30/06)
iTunesTrick

(5/12/06)
We're quoted on Boston.com

(5/9/06)
Web Innovators Group "WebInno" event

(3/23/06)
Pogue's Favorite Tools

1st Let's Get Web 1.0 Right

Dean Kamen's Energy Inventions

Award for Best Green Invention?

= = = = = = =

the "Pre-Blog"
(For all those great ideas from before we started.)

1st post on Blogger

Greetings. I've already been at this for a few months now, posting items "manually" to my site (seems funny to use that word to describe computer coding, but those were my hands on the keyboard and moose).

I think what we'll do here is start with this intro from when I first started to (we)blog in March, and add a few of most recent items to get things started. Then I'll start adding the new items here. If anyone's interested enough, you can click over to today's other post to read the previous opinions and what-all.

(Yes, that was "moose" -- which, looking at it now, seems a lost naming opportunity. Phonetically speaking, wouldn't that one have been better used for cows?)

But here's the original introduction, so everything sorta begins at the same beginning:
= = = = = = =

(3/23/06)

We begin...

Alright, I give up, I'll blog, already! Having a weblog on a site has moved from accepted to expected. (Plus, it just occurred to us, it's a demonstration of commitment to the site -- it shows it's not a Ghost Site, that there's somebody home, always tinkering away and adding to it.)
I just had to figure out the subject and the mode: which is, as of this writing, an awkward, maybe slightly schizophrenic blend of light, Cool Electronic/Internet Stuff links with the somewhat heavier topics, like What's Going On, and we don't just mean Marvin Gaye's musical plea.

Things like the present and near-future implications of our lives becoming so thoroughly digitized, and the preservation of the natural world against the mass destructiveness, both made possible at that scale by technology.

However, we believe it's best to focus on solutions, even just building blocks, because there're already enough other people ringing the four-alarm bells, aren't there? Please tell me something I can do about it... or at least tell me about people who are.

=O=

I'll tell you the truth, I find most blogs to be blah, a big, unending deposit of unedited blah, blah, blah. But it is a medium that has its appeal and advantages -- it's a conversation, isn't it? And we're all attuned to that, and people kind of expect it of a site these days, so why not? It's just pouring the same juice into a different shaped glass.

It's not like I have any shortage of opinions on what's interesting and worthy of attention, of all the phenomena that stream by in the e-news and the real world. So, I'll occasionally pitch in paragraphs and links here to Cool, Crucial, or Useful Stuff that catches my eye.