Sandhill Trek

"On [his] watch..."

The phrase "on my watch" is so much pretentious bullshit exceeded only by the delusional "not on MY watch!"  Bush is reported to have written "Not on my watch" in the margins of a report on the genocide in Rwanda.  I'm sure he meant that the Rwanda thing didn't happen on his watch so he couldn't be blamed for it.  He has other excuses for the things that have happened on his so called "watch."

Liars and Thieves

The Bush administration, like some satanic cult insistent on opening a door for demonic possession of the country's consciousness, has budgeted $10 million dollars to deodorize the lingering stench of death and decay that surrounds the Nixon legacy.  In 1974 the Republican warmonger's papers were seized by the government when his administration was brought down in disgrace.  At that time it was mandated that the US government maintain those records and recordings in safe-keeping in the National Archives near Washington DC.

Now, in the first step of a revisionist scheme to restore some dignity to the crook, the Bush administration liars intend to move the records to Yorba Linda.  What America doesn't need is money spent on aggrandizement of the vile creature's reputation.  Send the $10 million to New Orleans so they don't need to take foreign aid for rebuilding, but don't spend it on Nixon's memory for god's sake.   

This expenditure is as absurd as if someone sometime decided that George W. Bush needed a memorial.  Not all presidents of the US are worth remembering fondly. 

Loathsome

Ronni Bennett points to the Beast's fifty most loathsome people in america (2005).  Check out number four... YOU are on the list, right above George W. Bush:

Simply put, the stupidest man ever to lead this country. Bush’s lobotomized Will Rogers routine is a satirist’s dream, a European intellectual’s caricature of the dipshit cowboy American, all balls and no brains. Often responds to questions by attempting to define the word he finds the most challenging in them. Thinks press reports of his various crimes are responsible for his waning popularity, rather than the deeds themselves. Interprets the constitution like a Unitarian interprets the bible; for maximum convenience and with no regard to the actual text. Foreign policy vision is less serious and more simplistic than an issue of Captain America.

Who won "The War on Christmas?"

It sure as hell wasn't Fox News.  If you want to know why they lost big-time every-time they whined about it, read this:  F*CK CHRISTMAS

Warning... serious f*ck content...  and references to O'Reilly and the loofah...

Here's a taste, with some of the f*cks removed to protect the ignorant...

And guess who’s stealing Christmas, according to Gibson. Go on — guess. “A cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people.” (Emphasis mine. Pure, unadulterated anti-semitism, his.) A cabal? Are you kidding me? Could we  try to be a little more fucking original with our Jew-hating?

Speaking of Jew-hating, Pat Buchanan has joined the hype-a-thon of the supposed Attack on Christmas, too. Or, as he put it, “What we’re witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity.” Sorry? We’re not so hot on paying for an inflatable camel for your goddamn nativity scene and suddenly we’re Slobodan Milosevic? Fuck you. Get some goddamn perspective, you little prick. When they start hunting Christians in the streets, it’ll be time to start yelling “Hate crime.” And no, it won’t count when they start chasing you with the torches. That’ll be called “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

And Bill O’Reilly, Gibson’s cellmate in the silly shack, is doing his part to save Christmas, too. He’s been going after New York’s Mayor Bloomberg (that Commie) because he says the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center has been renamed a “Holiday Tree,” and “No Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools.” The only problem? Neither of those things is even remotely fucking true.

   

Intellectual Property is Usually Neither

That title has little to do with the post I've set out to write.  Sounds vaguely like a Dorothy Parker pronouncement though, so it can't be all good.

What I want to address is Nancy White's question from the comments below.  Nancy asks: "What would be on your conference wish list?"  This is not an easy question because it presupposes an intentionality that I fear I lack, particularly when it comes to professional gatherings.  I think I go to these things to see and to be seen, to meet people and to deepen nascent friendships, to gather a sense of what is happening in the world of the Internet with a focus on content creation and on the information systems technology that enables our virtual adjacency, and adds colors to our palettes, arrows to our quivers....

I come to conferences to learn, and I am willing to share, to teach, to participate in a meaningful way.  I want the accretion of my participation to add value to my work in the world of network technology consulting and project management.

So, that brief outline can probably be distilled to a bullet list, and if we are very unlucky, the bullet list can probably be transferred to an overhead projection that can bore the living spit out of a roomful of otherwise engaged people.

My conference wish list...

• A powerful assemblage of participants:  bright, knowledgeable, caring, unselfish people, with expertise in their fields.
• Mingling opportunities: a chance to more than rub shoulders, but also to converse, to laugh, to play together, a chance to follow-up after the conference.  More than that special exchange of business cards and self-conscious "networking", I want these events to share their rosters among the participants and to provide time and space for people to get to know each other more deeply than by professional reputation.
• I want a strong, coherent agenda.  I'd like a University gathering to have an academic focus, to be challenging intellectually and not to cover too much old ground.
• Small meetings within a conference are preferable to large presentation spaces.  There isn't sufficient time or social bandwidth to explore things meaningfully in a room of 100 or more participants.
• Professional facilitation is important.  Whether the participants' power comes from their brilliance, their pocketbooks, their unique glandular output or some combination, I prefer a professional facilitator engaged to lead meetings rather than a designated expert.

Nancy, these are a few of the things on my conference wish list.  And, I almost forgot... good schwag.  Send me home with a coffee cup, a flash drive, a canvas bag, something that I can put my monkey paws on later and remember the day.

A thousand words for ironie

You know the old myth about the esquimaux thousand words for snow?   I was thinking that English needs a thousand words for irony.  Every ironic circumstance is so nuanced, so different from all others that every whiff of irony is like a snowflake, unique.

Is it ironic that "Halley's Comment" doesn't take comments?  Is it ironic that "misbehaving" ain't?

Is it ironic when some aging white women struggle manfully to match the career arcs of the aging white men they scorn?  Is it ironic when they fail?

A person could go on in this vein, or a person could point to you some grand writing...

Is it ironic that the sleazebags exercising editorial control at "misbehaving" tore down my comment on the ridiculous "if you were timmie o'" post, the comment that cited the four or five women I would invite to a conference because I steal from them most often...  Shelley Powers, Jeneane Sessum, Madame Levy, Anne Galloway... and did they do this because...  well, why did they do this I wonder? ...and wouldn't it be ironic if it was for any good reason at all?  And is it shameful or ironic or non-sequitur that they left up the sycophantic bullshit while tearing down a comment made in good faith that highlighted four of the talented writers and technoids on the web, and if you don't think 21st century musicians cut your average tech school teacherette in the tech realm, well you haven't been listening and sure as heck you haven't been watching.  "I'd nominate you Liz.... ooo Liz... ooo-oooo-oooo Liz..."  And why does the tech school teacherette get me so riled up?  Something ironic about that.

Sometimes phat is just fat.  Ironic, ain't it?

Blot Bog Doom

This post pisses me off on a couple of  levels.  First, I'm annoyed that Halley is so cheaply bought.   "Search champs."  WTF does that mean?  This is a feel-good name for a focus group.  The idea that Microsoft will get some marketing traction out of inviting some tame bloggers to check out their goods  doesn't annoy me particularly.  What annoys me is a decent free-lancer putting on airs.  We all have to make ends meet, and it's nice to catch a little personal, professional, financial reward for doing something we enjoy with some people we like.  And Mary Hodder simply smells good, besides being a genius and all.  And Chris Pirillo is genuinely funny and charming and nice.  And so is Halley, really.  But jeepers.  Blogging qua blogging is so over.  It began to die four years ago when I got into it.   It was clearly dead when the likes of Liz Lawley over at the trade school honked on about it all and tried to enhance their professional reputations with "it."  Not that the strategy is a bad one.  Academia is deluded and delusional.  You can fool some of the fools etcetera.  But all this "we were there eating take-out chinese and chopping code into the wee hours of the morning with nothing but a sixer of Mountain Dew to keep our energy up while we went unappreciated by the purveyors of big iron...."  What bullshit.  Everybody is happy to make a few bucks.  The market around XML and web services has coalesced and reformed a couple of times in the last five years.  There's bread on the table all over town, and WE didn't put it there.  Adam Smith's ghost put it there.  Blogging is over.  MMORPGs are what's happening, wise men have told me so, and I suspect we'll be retreating to the Darknet to live these second lives...  But there's always a gig for a good freelance writer Halley.  Even on the web.

Anything you want to be
You can buy, even get it free
Make yourself a smoother dancer
Fill your head with easy answers
Never a backward glancer
It's you who makes the rules

Heaven help the fool
No, never a backward glancer
Heaven help the fool

The middle of a pentagram
Heart of a star (what you are)
You can trade your soul for an electric guitar

Fool, lotta pretty vanity
No, not me
Fool, glorified insanity
No, not me
When they offer golden apples
Are you sure you'll refuse?
Heaven help the fool
Are you sure you'll refuse?
Heaven help the fool

Just like a deaf man dancin'
Like a blind man shootin' pool
Heaven help the fool

- Barlow

Networked Computing

Dave Winer quotes today's New York Times to the effect that, "Companies are embracing the potential of networked computing to let workers share their knowledge more efficiently as they nurture new ideas, new products and new ways to digitally automate all sorts of tasks."

I thought it must be a joke, maybe an anachronistic sentiment used to launch an investigation into how far we've come in the networked data services biz since 1980 or so when that was true.  Sadly, no.  The stodgy sentiment is placed smack in the center of an article that deserves a good Fisking, had one the time.

There are nine such articles, and if one were to read them all, one would undoubtedly glean a little collection of factoids sufficient to stimulate the intellectual appetite if not actually to nourish.  To cast a sunnier, less jaded, light - anyone with an interest in web tech and life on the current global network will find something relevant.  But take it with a large shaker of salt.  The superficial look at "darknets," for example, is fairly one dimensional, and descriptive of peer-to-peer stuff.  It conflates private networks with social networks, implies that all darknets are about file sharing, and ignores the technical and sociological issues that make the dark net interesting (to me).  The NYT article by it's nature describes a handful of peer to peer apps and communities that reflect light on the concept of dark-networking and make it not so dark at all.  For a sense of other dimensions of "darknet," see these links:  Team Cymru, Paul Boutin, Search Engine Watch. 

What did I like best about the wealth of NYT tech reporting?  I liked the picture of Bill St. Arnaud in Markoff's piece.  And I loved the phrase "a free-enterprise zone where English will be the lingua franca...."

What gave me paws (meow)?  In all those thousands of words, most of which are manifestly directed at the emergence of what we are coming to know as Web 2.0, published on the day that the Web 2.0 conference opens, the tag, the label,  the cognomen "Web 2.0" does not appear once.

Looking for reasons...

I want to be grumpy about the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  I want to find reasons to criticize Berkman.  I want to construct a rationale around a knee-jerk reaction that I had to the Center a few week's ago.  Problem is, except for the no goatees rule, I can't find anything to criticize.  I'll have to dig deeper...  I certainly couldn't have been wrong.

Oblivious...

Party on Darth...