The Old Mac That Went to Pot:

""The IBM PC was created by people who drank alcohol. The Mac was created by people who smoked pot.""

i have lived the Abilene Paradox on so many occasions and in so many contexts that it's pathetic:

"Four adults are sitting on a porch in 104-degree heat in the small town of Coleman, Texas, some 53 miles from Abilene. They are engaging in as little motion as possible, drinking lemonade, watching the fan spin lazily, and occasionally playing the odd game of dominoes. The characters are a married couple and the wife’s parents. At some point, the wife’s father suggests they drive to Abilene to eat at a cafeteria there. The son-in-law thinks this is a crazy idea but doesn’t see any need to upset the apple cart, so he goes along with it, as do the two women. They get in their unair-conditioned Buick and drive through a dust storm to Abilene. They eat a mediocre lunch at the cafeteria and return to Coleman exhausted, hot, and generally unhappy with the experience. It is not until they return home that it is revealed that none of them really wanted to go to Abilene–they were just going along because they thought the others were eager to go. Naturally, everyone sees this miss in communication as someone else’s problem!"

but now i've got a name and a pithy little story, which i'm going to use whenever i start to see the danger signs. i look forward to screaming, "abilene paradox!" and launching into the parable about driving to coleman, texas. indeed, i'm sure friends family and co-workers will benefit greatly from me shouting "abilene paradox!" as much as possible.

i've got a backlog of mozilla links that are begging to get dumped into the annotated bookmark bin .

mozilla 0.9.9 was released a bit behind schedule, but hey it's got support for mathml , so who's complaining . ahem. anyway, say you're stuck on a windows machine and you're really hankering to view some por...er..newsclip with windows media player, but you don't want to open up explorer - well, now you can :

"A few nights ago I ran into this problem, and copied np*.dll from Program Files\Windows Media Player into my plugins directory. After that I seem to recall having a working plugin."

and if you're not happy about that, maybe andrew leonard can pick up your spirits with mozilla's revenge :

"As I write these words, I've been running Mozilla for Windows for almost five hours. While that's obviously not enough time to make a detailed technical appraisal, I can say that Mozilla has already become my default browser and that it is as fast and slick and full-featured as I want. It may not be perfect, but there's no denying that it is for real. What's more, Mozilla isn't just a usable browser -- it's a powerful reminder of why free software engenders excitement and passion from both its users and its creators."

and lo' there's yet more evidence that aol is thinking about waiving mozilla's gecko in microsoft's face:

""We've been testing Netscape's Gecko on CompuServe since fall, and AOL is just beginning to test now," AOL spokesman Jim Whitney said. "We've invested significant resources in continuing to develop Gecko, and it is great technology.""

and lastly, but certainly not leastly, there's experimental bloggerapi support for mozilla composer, which compliments the great stuff that mike is putting together with mozBlog

maybe soon cory will be writing an article entitled, "how much ass does mozilla kick? all of it."

there's been alot of discussion lately on weblogs and social networks and microcontent news does a fine job of illustrating the point nicely with The Tipping Blog :

"Simply put, Connectors know people. Lots of people. Connectors may not always know about the hot new restaurant... but they always know at least five people who do. And once a Connector finds about the restaurant, you can forget about ever getting a reservation: they'll spread the word to their hundreds of friends, it will be reviewed in the Times, and you'll end waiting at the bar for an hour, drinking cocktails on an empty stomach."

sounds all fancy-schmancy, but maybe blogging is just a hopped-up version of strategic gossiping [i'm not touching the gender generalizations with a 10 foot pole]:

"Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that reputation was an important mediator of access to resources in ancestral human environments. Reputations were built and maintained by the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about the actions and capabilities of group members-that is, by gossiping. Strategic gossiping would have been an excellent strategy for manipulating reputations and thereby competing effectively for resources and for cooperative relationships with group members who could best provide such resources. Coalitions (cliques) may have increased members' abilities to manipulate reputations by gossiping. Because, over evolutionary time, women may have experienced more within-group competition than men, and because female reputations may have been more vulnerable than male reputations to gossip, gossiping may have been a more important strategy for women than men. Consequently, women may have evolved specializations for gossiping alone and in coalitions. We develop and partially test this theory."

i don't know about you, but "strategic gossiping" sounds alot like manufactured serendipity :

"Jon Udell labels this phenomenon, manufactured serendipity. Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can't automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur."

"So why do I blog? Because it works. It finds worthwhile things for me to read. It helps me refine and focus my thoughts and be more productive too. And most of all, creates the opportunity to interact with more interesting people. That's what's in it for me."

matt invents the blogdar:

"I noticed from surfing around a few sites mentioning "sxsw" at daypop, there are a lot of people here I haven't met yet. I kind of wish there was some sort of wireless application to solve this problem. I have my bookmarks stored on my laptop. Many of those bookmarked people are here but I don't know what they look like. What if we could send out little pings of our url, and whenever someone within your list was within 50 feet of you, you hear a beep. Getting closer to them, the beeps would begin repeating at an increasing rate. Then you'd find those people."

in certain cities blogdar would probably be useful at the bar too.

funny, in retrospect, doc comes close to seeing the need for blogdar:

"What I want to say anyway is: I run into friends I don't recognize until I read their name badges."

the new first monday is out and i'm amazed at its uncanny ability to remind me of college lit crit classes:

"The Internet, initially established by scholars and scientists to freely share information, is being transformed into a source of profit for entrepreneurs and corporations. Commodification, the process of developing things and concepts and even people into saleable products, calls for a representation of the foundational mythology on the Web and its manifestation as symbolic language. This study posits a textual analysis of Wired for the purpose of measuring this transformation on a mythic continuum (connectivity-location-being)."

via jon udell i found a great quote from jim mcgee on bootstrapping the knowledge network :

"In the first stage, the tools encourage a degree of commentary and reaction to what you find or create (in k-logging mode). However, it also encourages a degree of stream of consciousness style. Progress, in that it can represent a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues that were top of mind. Problematic, in creating new content that eventually needs to be revisited and processed at a level once removed from the moment."

i could be radically misinterpreting the intent of the quote, but i think it's getting at why i started the vast wasteland over two years ago.

i've often wondered how many people see a "mere" newsfeed when they visit conflux or {bio,medical} informatics . more than a newsfeed, the sections represent a structured forum for me to "revisit and process" a "a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues" in a "stream of consciousness style". the fact that it looks like a newsfeed is merely coincidental and a distraction really.

i happened to catch the 9/11 show last night and despite my inital reservations based on the fact that robert de niro was the host, i kept watching. i'm glad i did. cbs had to walk a fine line between commemoration and commercialization, and i think they did a fine job of telling a much larger story within the smaller story of documentary filmakers portraying firehouse life.

i was caught off guard by the frightenly loud and final sound of jumpers landing on the pavement. rightly so, it was deemed so disturbing that cbs actually edited the footage:

"Zirinsky explained that crashes came every 20 seconds or so in the footage, but that most were edited out because their cumulative effect was overwhelming. Several were left in, however, to reflect conditions the firefighters faced. "Some disturbing sounds you can't run away from," Zirinsky said. "You need to know that's the reality that existed.""

this little glimpse into the sensory overload that occured on ground zero highlights the incomprehensible and staggering heroism and sheer will needed by everyone, first responders and civilians alike, on 9/11.

i went to the mall today.

odds are that you don't know me, so you're probably not aware just how remarkable the previous sentence is. and don't get me wrong - i'm not passing judgement on anybody who likes shopping, because i wholeheartedly admit that it's my own bit of wierdness. i've settled on a loose explanatory structure for my mall hatred, which involves equal parts mild agoraphobia, disgust at the flagrant displays of rudeness perpetrated by otherwise ordinary sububanites, and the irritating fact that mass market retailers don't exactly cater to my, um, proportions. yup, that's right. i'm large. i'd like to think that it's not really a case of frightening obesity. rather, it has more to do with the fact that i'm just over six foot four and i do a pretty good job of filling out the frame that the good lord provided me. so, i'm a big man who hates large, rude crowds and i'm badly in need of pants and shoes.

indeed, the "pants situation" has gotten so bad that i've considered only wearing one pair of pants and telling anyone who asks that i've actually got sixteen pairs of that the same pants so i don't have to decide what to wear in the morning. of course, the problem is that i don't actually have sixteen pairs, which means i'd be forced to wash the one frequently worn pair more often, which means i'd just be decreasing the life of the pants, which means i'd end up having to go to the mall more often. so, after six months of procrastination, i decide today was the day that i'd muster the strength to get some pants and maybe, just maybe, some shoes.

today, i'm lucky on the pants front and set new land speed records in marshall field's . in less than 5 minutes, i found 3 pairs of gabardine slacks, which are 36 length and on sale. invigorated by the quick success, i decide that i should venture out and see if i can pick up some shoes. this is tricky, because trying to buy a pair of size thirteen shoes quickly is next to impossible. shoe stores really usually only have one pair of size thirteen shoes in stock, and the salespeople like to make you guess which brand it is, thinking that somehow they can upsell you on the really expensive pair of eleven-and-a-halfs, which "run large. honest." in any case, today i'm up for the challenge and enter the mall and round then bend when it catches my eye.

a large backlit apple logo.

shit. the mall has an apple store. and with that realization, i feel something i haven't felt since making the mistake of going into powell's bookstore . fear. fear that i won't make it out without spending an obnoxious amount of money in an ecstatic orgy of consumerism.

regular readers will know that i've been linking to more and more os x articles, and that i certainly haven't hidden my prediliction for goodies like the titanium laptop , but the actual exhange of money was supposed take place at some indeterminate point in the future. but no, the universe had conspired against me and my wallet and put me in front of exquisitely designed experience that is the apple store. staring into the store, i lose all self control and decide that i am going to hook myself up with one of everything, starting with the tricked-out titanium machine which is just a few feet from the entrance.

i walk in and make a pathetic attempt to pretend that i'm just browsing when i overhear a customer talking with a salesperson.

customer: "i think i need something called virtualpc. do you know about virtualpc?"

saleperson: "[nervous laugh] um, well, i think i've heard about it. i'm not really an expert."

customer: "[slight irriation on voice] well, i'm also thinking about getting a digital camera. can you make any recommendations?"

salesperson: "[ more nervous laughter] well, i've read the product stickers. i, um, don't really know that much about them."

somehow, by overhearing that brief exchange, the spell was temporarily broken. brought to my senses, i leave the store, new pants in tow, and decide that i can probably wait to purchase my new mac when i get my tax return. phew.

proving that rule that if you do something long enough, somebody will give you an award. o.k. it's not really an award, but i'm happy nonetheless that blogger decided to take note.

so a big hearty welcome to all you new people. have a look around and feel free to come back anytime.