Month: December 2005

I noted this rating on a site and submitted my own to the test:

Some of the information was useful (is this really illegal in England?), some of it amusing (This website is reasonably popular (approx #3,495,718 in the world)).

TypePad was offline for 13 hours t’other day, and I followed up some link that led to this exchange . . .

Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details:

“Six Apart has received millions of dollars in funding but has chosen to spend more generously on PR then technology.”

I don’t usually respond to these kinds of ad-hominems, but this is just demonstrably false and makes you look silly, Paul [not your humble scribe — ed]. Your blog’s not on TypePad, I’m not certain that you’ve ever contributed to the TypePad community (or to any other community around Six Apart platforms), and so it seems almost impossible to me that you could fairly judge how resources are being devoted. Given that you’re on a platform which lacks literally dozens of features which TypePad supports, it seems likely to me that your ignorance of our technology informs your statement.

I dunno. If you read the comments in the interview, I don’t see that 6A the company is any better at communicating with its users than 6A the couple working out of their back bedroom.

Q: Did you consider sending out e-mails to every TypePad member to let them know that they wouldn’t be able to post and their latest posts might not be available?

A: <snip>I spent all day commenting on blogs today. Other folks here at the company have. Jay Allen I think a lot of people will see out there. A lot of people have been on IM and on Skype and on phone calls all day too. We talked about if we should do a big Skype call with a bunch of people but finding something that we can setup in a short amount of time that scales to millions of users or millions of listeners is pretty hard. I think in the future we’ll see what we can do about that too.

So the big name people — Anil Dash and Jay Allen — commented on blogs and some other folks did IM and Skype stuff. How many people does that reach? I think I have asked before that their mt-users mailing list was for: I guess the TypePad community gets the same treatment.

Continue reading “learning from your mistakes. or not”

Looks like the seamless upgrade works just fine but none of my 1.5-era themes are usable. It looks like the theme-switcher is somehow to blame: if I simply rename my preferred theme to one of the two that come with the installation, I can see it.

<more fumbling . . .> it seems to work now, but not for all themes. Your mileage will certainly vary.

The detailed upgrade steps (ie, not for the impatient) are here. Little things like backing up your database are covered there.

I don’t even know what the alleged benefits are, other than 2 being a higher number than 1.5 😉 That’s always been enough for me.

Salon.com | Tainted conservative:

“The time has come that the American people know exactly what their representatives are doing here in Washington.

Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special-interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know. I say the best disinfectant is full disclosure.”

Tom Delay, 11/16/1995

Fifty-One-Seven / Camper Van Beethoven / New Roman Times – EP
Dumb Waiters / The Psychedelic Furs / Talk Talk Talk
This Is How It Goes / Aimee Mann / Lost in Space
Strange / R.E.M. / Document
Dissolve / Elvis Costello / When I Was Cruel
Sunset Road / Béla Fleck & The Flecktones / Live Art (Disc 2)
You and whose army? / Radiohead / Amnesiac
Susan’s Strange / The Psychedelic Furs / The Psychedelic Furs
Lazy Days / The Byrds / Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

Looking for alternatives to Word, prompted by this bit I read this morning.

More Apple Love:

The only really problem that I have had is with Office documents that folks send to my personal email.

I could, of course, just install MacOffice (which is a really great product), but I wanted to see what it would be like to be one of those “M$ haters” (which I clearly am not — since I work there and love it).

It turns out that iWork and OpenOffice aren’t too bad.

I couldn’t use it at work — I doubt anyone could actually — but it has gotten me past a few personal hurdles.

In short, it is very clear to me that this is a “Office World” and I am a “Office Boy” — and I think everyone else is too.

Not all of us want to be, though. I want to use something for writing that is simple (like TextEdit or TextWrangler) but not so complex as Word. I want basic text styling and fonts (one of the problems of having your first daily computer experience be the Macintosh, even if it was circa 1987). But I don’t need table tools, drawing tools, or all the scientific apparatus.

I used Mellel for my NaNoWriMo effort and liked it OK. It has lots of features I’ll never use but it is a writer’s tool.

I also took a look at Pages, part of iWork (well, not just part of it: half of it, with Keynote).
It’s OK, and close to what I want, but it doesn’t offer much more than TextEdit.

I think Mellel makes the most sense at US$49. iWork/Pages is $79 for something less fully-featured.

Any other options I have missed?

Political Musings:

If the media incline to the left, why has all the coverage of the transit strike in New York (all that I’ve heard, in other words “mostly NPR and online news sources”) stressed the hardship this strike imposes on commuters, tourists, hoteliers, and merchants, and the unusually-comprehensive pension and health care package that the laborers are striking to maintain? A lefty press would, I’d imagine, lionize the brave workers who have drawn the line at corporate exploitation (billions of dollars of profits, comfy benefits at the top, but a desperate need to cut benefits for the laborers who actually make the transit system run).

A left-inclined press might be baying at the heels of congressmen and White House officials who have fallen afoul a special prosecutor for violations of political procedure rather than for lying about a stupid, tawdry sexual affair. A left-inclined press might try to suppress or rebut, rather than perpetuate and amplify, reports that the press inclines toward the left. Or so I’d think.

I have been traveling and out of touch more than usual so I have not followed the strike too closely, but I think AKMA makes clear what many already know: that Fox’s “foul and biased” news is where you’ll find news filtered through a political agenda and the rest of the media outlets are content (or desperate) to chase rating success rather than follow their charter as public ombudsman.