I've been getting into a groove, doing the same ride every day. Enter the park at Columbus Circle. Ride around the park drive, but take the cutoff before the big hill at Harlem Meers. To make up for that, I do an extra circuit around the front part of the park. So I actually get more mileage than one circuit. But I'm getting stronger. Pretty soon I'll start going the full route.

The difference between this year's standard ride and last year's is this -- hills! At first I swore I'd never get used to it. But when I rode in Menlo Park/Woodside in Calif, I did a lot of hill riding. So I can do it. I just have to get in shape.

My rides are getting me more oxytocin or whatever it is that you get high on. Because I float after I ride. And if I miss a day, as I did yesterday, I get very grouchy. I think it's called withdrawal.

One more thing. It's wet and humid today and the park is filled with smells. These are magic smells. I'd get this experience when I lived in suburban Boston, because these were the smells of childhood, the good ones (there were bad ones too, like the smell of the incinerators burning garbage, they used to do that in NY when I was growing up). Boston was close, but these are the exact smells my brain is programmed to recognize as "home" -- proof that our lower brains are programmed just like all animals, to find comfort in being in a familiar place, even at a sub-conscious level. Another reason my heart is activated on these rides (the other being, of course, exercise!).

This makes me feel good. Happy to say.

Map: 7.5 miles, 43 minutes.

 5/9/2012; 2:04:49 PM.

Farhad Manjoo, one of my favorite tech writers, has a stimulating piece today about Amazon. He says he can't figure out what they're doing, how they intend to make money. What's the razor and what's the blade? He wonders if they know.

In the old days companies offered the same deal to everyone. They had to because they didn't have all this information about us and computers and actuarial tables, and years of experimentation to guide them. That's not true anymore, and especially not true of Amazon. That's the first thing you have to realize. They're blazing a new trail in selling things. No one has been down this path before. Yet there are others that are on the path.

They made me the same offer they made him. Because I pay $79 a year for Prime, I can have one book a month for free. They pay the publisher on my behalf. And it's not all books.

They might make me an offer on one book and another to Farhad. You just don't know. One thing's for sure, their algorithm has a hunch that if it does this, I might do that. And if I do that, maybe I'll do something else. Somewhere on that path I will trip over the wire and Amazon will make $100. That's how they make money. They can't explain it, any more than a hedge fund guy can tell you why his algorithm just decided to buy 214,203 shares of Podunk Mining Co and turn around and sell it five minutes later. He might, if he did a lot of data dumps, be able to trace back and see how it made the choice, but by then it'll have done 813,329 more transactions.

More and more you and I are hamsters. They're making money off the pellets. That's the best we know.

BTW, I asked my friend NakedJen, who is a serious dog person, what she thinks her dogs think she's doing when she picks up the prizes they leave in the park. She carefully puts them in plastic bags. Later it appears she is depositing them in a bank. What must the dog think about her relationship with Jen?

Sorry if that's too vivid an example, but hopefully it makes the point.

BTW, he thinks Apple has a straight relationship with us, more straight than Amazon's, but I bet he's wrong about that. They've just managed to make us feel more comfortable about it. They hire from the same talent pool as Amazon.

 5/9/2012; 11:38:49 AM.

Twitter is getting all kinds of kudos for not turning over the tweet history of a user in response to a New York State subpoena. But what are the facts of the case, and is Twitter doing the right thing?

Here's a BBC story on the issue, and one from the ACLU.

Here's the question -- were these public tweets? If so, that's like asking for the archive of a blog.

Which raises another question. Yes we know that Twitter's archive is unreliable, that after a certain period of time tweets become inaccessible unless you have a direct link to them. What that period is is uncertain. And why you can access them when they are inaccessible is another mystery.

Is the State of New York just asking for help working around a glitch in Twitter's software?

What is Twitter's explanation?

Now, if this user's tweets were private, that's another matter. I would say it's still a gray area, that the tweets are somewhere between public and private. Does Twitter's terms say what's a permissible use of a private tweet that you have access to?

Neither of the two articles dive into this story in enough depth to ask these questions, which imho are crucial to deciding whether or not Twitter is acting correctly.

Also, btw, to NYS which I happen to be a resident of -- this is ridiculous. These people are citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. There were a lot of people at the Brooklyn Bridge that day, and it wasn't clear what the police instructions were. Why don't you work with the citizens. These are the people you work for -- aren't they? Please. Pick your battles.

Another btw to NYS, even though I think what you're doing is wrong, you might check with the Library of Congress. They have a complete archive of the flow of Twitter. Our tax dollars at work! (He said sarcastically, the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies.) Thanks to @dannyhorowitz for the link.

 5/9/2012; 8:26:58 AM.

The only time the world "dead" belongs in the headline of a news story is when something that was formerly alive is no longer. A person, animal or plant. That's a legitimate use of the word in news. I can't think of another use that isn't some kind of revenge or spite. Because things that were never living can't be dead.

Fred Wilson has a blog post about this today, which means it will probably be picked up on TechMeme, where a lot of former TechCrunchers, especially Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor and MG Siegler will probably see it. These three people went on a campaign to plant a meme about RSS that I still hear about every day, usually in the form of a well-intentioned person saying that RSS isn't you-know-what. Every time this happens I put a pin in virtual voodoo dolls of each of their spirits, esp since two of them are former friends. For some reason they decided to put this bell around RSS's neck. Their idea worked. It didn't hurt RSS, it just gave it a smell that isn't very nice. And this for something that never did them any harm, and that they still use on their blogs, and for all I know in their reading of the web. If they don't they're not very well-informed because the news still flows through RSS, and honestly it's hard to imagine a day when it doesn't.

It's shit like this that makes me cry for tech. That such carpetbaggers have gotten control of the flow of ideas. It's very much like the world that we encountered before blogging. And then I remind myself that we marginalized that generation of gatekeepers, and we can do it again. We will do it again.

 5/9/2012; 8:07:00 AM.

There's a new Bootstrap menu on scripting.com.

Gotta say it's been a long time coming. And then yesterday I realized I was within a few inches of putting it together. So that's what I did this morning.

You can see from the menu that my Scripting News world, which is one-half of my online existence, has a blog, a linkblog, a top-40 list (which is a nice feature of the linkblog), a place for discussion (threads), a river and a personal site.

The linkblog is the content you see in the gray box in the right margin on Scripting pages.

The other half of my online life is my work. There's a worknote for this bit. If you look in the menubar of that site you'll see how that side fits together.

Note that all of this is hosted on my own servers, I'm not depending on Facebook, Twitter, Google or even Wordpress or Tumblr for my hosting (special mention for the latter two because they wouldn't lock me in, the others would).

I've also been investing in smoothing out all the components to make it possible for more people to install it on their own servers, on EC2 or Rackpace or elsewhere. Right now it's easiest on EC2. That's where EC2 For Poets fits in.

It's a big universe for one guy to manage. It's no wonder my back hurts!

 5/8/2012; 11:31:01 AM.

I had no idea how Jason Pontin's piece, Why Publishers Don't Like Apps, would end, but it was a riveting story, for a guy like me, who believes that what comes first in news is what's new.

I don't think that fancy layout trumps newness. The name "news" tells you what's important about news. Newness. So if you follow that clue, it leads you to the obvious conclusion that news should present first the newest bits we have. What's next? The second newest bits. And third, fourth and so on.

News is one of those things that is that simple. But it takes people a while to get there if they don't allocate the time to take walks in the park and think about this stuff in an organized way. Maybe, as Steve Jobs said, it helps to have dropped acid when you were young.

Pontin has discovered the truth of rivers. He says that Flipboard is an RSS reader. It is! And if you want to do RSS for news the best way to go is rivers.

Why do the Flipboards of the world get the attention from tech execs, VCs, users and the press? It has always been thus. Hypercard was more popular with editors than outliners. They always go for the flashy bits. They think that a glittery carousel is how information should work, ignoring that history hasn't worked that way. Books don't win because of flash. They win because they're readable. It's the words that provide the excitement. Anything that gets in the way is going by the wayside.

Okay so I feel slightly vindicated here. Now while I have your attention, let me point in the next direction. Once you have a river, do something bold and daring. Add the feeds of your favorite bloggers and share the resulting flow with your readers. Let your community compete for readership. And let them feel a stronger bond to you. Then when you learn about that, do some more. (And btw, you're now competing, effectively with your competitors, Facebook and Twitter. Don't kid yourselves, these guys are moving in your direction. You have to move in theirs and be independent of them. Or be crushed.)

I wish I could work with the teams of the best publications. If that could happen, we'd kick ass. But I'm here on the sidelines giving advice that you guys take on very very slowly. It's frustrating, because it's been clear that rivers are the way to go, to me, for a very long time. A lot of ground has been lost in the publishing business while we wait. There's a lot of running room in front of this idea. We can move quickly, if publishers have the will.

PS: The new EC2 for Poets tutorial gets you all the way through a River. Takes a few minutes. And it's free for a year if you're a new Amazon customer.

PPS: This is my personal river. I take my own medicine. It includes lots of feeds from people who read this site. And I'm always open to adding more.

 5/7/2012; 10:40:09 AM.

Yahoo's CEO lied about having a Computer Science degree.

That's a fact. It can be spun in a lot of different ways, but that doesn't matter.

In CEO-level business, that kind of lie is material.

I've done two major corporate transactions, and contemplated a number of others that made it past letter of intent and into due diligence. In this mode, the lawyers emhphasize over and over that you want to disclose every liability, no matter how small, up front, before the deal is signed. Any liability that is discovered later will cost you. If the liability is big enough, you could have to return all the money, and your liability isn't even limited to that. I had one bizarre case where I was being sued by my own lawyer, and advised by another to settle or risk losing everything.

When you're working at the level of CEO of a public company, as the Yahoo CEO is, by definition, at all times, you want to preserve your right to litigate. And given Yahoo's litigious nature under this CEO, you gotta figure that'll bring out the litigators from all over.

While I've only had an occasional glimpse of the lawyer hell that corporate CEOs live in, it's hard to imagine going into that kind of constant battle with this kind of exposure. How can you sue someone for breach of contract when you lied to get your job. It's a pretty awkward situation. Never mind what it says to people who apply for jobs at Yahoo. Don't worry about lying on your resume. We don't take that stuff seriously here at Yahoo.

And just imagine the shareholder suits if they don't fire the guy.

They're going to have to do it. Yeah, it's definitely a bad day for Yahoo, and they don't have too many good ones. But it's really unthinkable that he stays.

 5/5/2012; 5:44:34 PM.

Yesterday I wrote that the Knicks season was over. Even if they were to miraculously win the next four games, it would still be over. Because the illusion of an all-for-one and one-for-all cause is broken. The bubble has burst. For me it wasn't the firing of the coach, or whether there was room for anyone on the court with Carmelo Anthony, though in retrospect, those were really clear signals that this was a mess, not a cause.

What had attracted me to the Knicks was of course Linsanity. Because here, for a brief moment, it didn't seem to be entirely about money. The young man, overcoming prejudice, breaking through and shining bright through vision, talent and vitality -- that was hugely attractive.

The image of Stoudemire sitting on the bench next to Lin killed all that was left of my enthusiasm for the Knicks. I don't care how much they are paying him. He doesn't belong there. The fans shouldn't have been booing the Heat players as much as the Knicks management who didn't have the good sense to keep Stoudemire out of view.

Anyway, this connects nicely with a blog post published a few hours ago by Paul Krugman at the NY Times.

He points out that facts aren't facts, according to some in politics, if they come from the wrong people.

There, he put his finger on the problem.

Many people see politics as I see sports. There are two teams, and my team is going to beat yours, and nothing else matters. Winning is everything. And that's a bad mistake. Because as we noted yesterday, while sports is a simulation of war -- it's harmless to project tribalism on the symbols of basketball or baseball -- it's not harmless to do that with politics. We're not manipuating symbols there. There are real armies and economies at stake. Nuclear weapons. The viability of the planet. The future of our species. If we see this as war, then it is war. How much do you know about war, and do you really want to usher it in so quickly, without thinking.

That's the problem. Politics and sports are not the same thing. One is frivolous and the other is anything but.

 5/5/2012; 1:04:43 PM.

If you've been reading this site since 1995 you know that I am mystical about sports. That means I see the mystery in it. I don't see things as entirely deterministic, at least not in the sphere that you and I occupy (assuming that gods don't bother reading my rants).

In that spirit, last night's game had moments when the Knicks looked like they could win, but it was not meant to be. And like the awful way the Bay Area handled the World Series of 1989, when the As played the Giants, the Knicks doomed their own game by putting Amare Stoudemire on the bench, along with all the courageous warriors who suited up to face the enemy, and did not inflict wounds on themselves so they wouldn't have to play.

You do realize that sports is our simulation for war, in a day when wars are fought by drones, and when the bodies are kept out of view, and when taxes go down instead of up in wartime. We, as humans, have a need for war simulation at least. We need to feel that our strongest men are doing battle to preserve the honor of our tribe. And a deserter has no place of honor alongside Chandler and Anthony, even Bibby and Novak -- people who give their all for the cause. No place.

Put a picture of the young fallen hero Iman Shumpert in the seat that would be occupied by Stoudemire. Or a roll of toilet paper. I don't care. But Stoudemire had no place on the bench last night.

The place for deserters is a firing squad. Would you like to say anything before we shoot you? "I didn't punch the glass with a closed fist." Okay thank you. Then the blindfold goes on. Ready. Aim. Fire.

The pivotal scene in the great movie Patton is very much like this moment. The General is touring a hospital, pinning medals on soldiers who were injured or killed in battle. You can tell that he really feels this. Then he sees a soldier, sitting up, and asks him what's wrong. He's scared, he says. Patton blows up. Get the fuck out of my hospital, he says (paraphrasing).

You can't put a coward on the bench, a pretender, alongside heroes, and expect to win in battle. It's pretty simple.

The Knicks have to stand for something other than money. Okay, you gave $80 million to a coward. You lost $80 million. Too bad. Now get that asshole out of there.

 5/4/2012; 9:17:46 AM.

Sometime in the last few months Canon released a couple of cameras that support wifi. If you've been following Scripting News for a few years, you know this is an event I've been waiting for. And since I had a birthday coming up, I decided to spring for it. I'm going to give my old Canon point-and-click to my Mom. She needs a new camera. And I need a new toy!

Which has turned out to be a real puzzle. How do you get the wifi to work?

I started a thread for that, detailing my experience so far.

Here's how I think the camera should work:

1. Turn it on.

2. Like either of my smartphones, an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy running Android, it automatically connects to my router, which I had previously told it the password to. (That much seems to work with the Canon.)

3. Go to my desktop Mac. The camera appears in my list of nearby computers.

4. Click on the icon, see the disk, same as any other computer on the LAN.

5. Open the disk, open the folders and there are my pics.

6. Use the Finder to copy them where ever I want. (They are my pictures, yes?)

Reading the docs, which are, as usual, awful, or the reviews on Amazon, makes me pretty sure this isn't the way it works. Instead, you somehow have to connect to the desktop from the camera and then use its unfamiliar and awkward UI on its low-rez screen (which is really cheap of them because the screen is actually very high resolultion, it's the software that doesn't have enough pixels and that's just memory, and not very much) to copy the files from the camera to the computer. That's exactly the wrong way to do it. But I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

There have been some reviews of this product in the usual tech pubs. Gizmodo claims they got the camera to connect to the computer, but they didn't say how they did it other than "it's a bit of a pain."

The other day I wrote a piece about how I like to spend enough time with my own products to make sure stuff like this works and isn't embarassingly difficult. It's products like this Canon camera that have taught me how a lot of product makers don't give a shit. Or their companies don't let them give a shit. Net-effect is the same.

BTW, it takes a really sharp picture. This is why I want to use a Canon camera that communicates instead of using a smartphone that takes pictures. Here's the same pic at full resolution. Look at all the detail!

PS: The manual on the CD included with the camera says nothing about wifi.

PPS: Peter Rojas started a thread on gdgt to try to figure out how to get the Canon 320 wifi working.

 5/3/2012; 9:04:17 AM.

"I think you're an okay person. Why do people say you're an asshole?"

This used to happen a lot, not so much these days, but it still happens.

What do you say when someone says that. There are so many things wrong with it. I don't even want to try to list them.

I tend to want to respond with something approximating the truth.

The "people" who say this, if there really are any, are doing it behind my back, not to my face. We both know that's not a highly principled thing to do, right?

I'd like to say I don't care, but I'm a human being, and we are approval-seeking animals. So when you say that, and it registers -- and believe me it registers -- my body chemistry reacts as if I've been threatened. I then have to have an internal conversation about it to compensate. "There really is no threat," I say to myself. And that's energy I'd rather not spend.

But maybe there is a threat. Who knows. It's such a vague statement. You know what, if you say that to me, you aren't being a friend. Maybe that's the best, simplest, thing to say.

 5/2/2012; 11:38:32 AM.

The other day when I wrote the Last Man Standing piece about Carmelo Anthony, I was bothered in the back of my mind about Amare Stoudemire. I know we're supposed to think of him as a star, but I've never seen it with my own two eyes. He doesn't feel like a star to me.

I still feel the tenacity of Melo, esp after Game 2, where he overcame Miami's suffocating defense and scored a bunch and did a heroic job of trying to win for the team. Really, I never expected the Knicks to win any of this. And I don't care. I just love the illusion that they're putting their heart and soul into it.

But then Stoudemire punches a fire extinguisher, cuts his hand, and is out for the series.

Everyone else on the team seems to be doing whatever they can. I cry for Iman Shumpert, the rookie with the huge heart, who died on the field of battle in Game One. Stoudemire was supposed to set an example for the rookies of how to keep your cool when the world is crumbling around you.

Then I saw an off-hand comment about how much he makes. And the bubble popped. This guy is paid $20 million per season. It's his job to get to the playoffs, and then push as far into the post-season as he can. They lose two games on the road. It's not over. Not even close. But his heart is sick and he can't see himself on the court, so he takes himself out of it. I don't see how Stoudemire goes back on the court again, especially wearing a Knicks uniform.

I couldn't believe this comment on Twitter. "We all have done thing out of anger that we regret. That makes us human. Bad timing on my part. Sorry guys. This to shall pass." Human? I suppose. But then being a pussy, coward, dickhead and loser is also human. I don't care if what he did is human. He didn't want to compete so he took himself out. Yeah, that might be human. He should give the money to charity. That might restore a little of his dignity, honor or manhood.

But he still has time on his contract. So they say he will be back next year.

If that's the case, I hope they trade Melo, Novak, Lin, Fields, Smith, Davis, Chandler and Shumpert, and all the other fine players on the Knicks. I'll root for them on their new teams. Just so I can forget about the cowardice of Stoudemire.

And btw, to the Knicks' equipment man -- put a punching bag in the locker room so no player in the future has even a remote excuse for doing what Stoudemire did.

 5/2/2012; 9:09:18 AM.

Can you imagine if you wanted to play professional basketball, and you were good, you were on a couple of championship teams, and have set a couple of records, that they'd say to you "Okay, we'll let you play, but you have the be a CEO and give us a business plan we like."

What if in addition to being a great painter or musician, you also had to look great in a suit and have an MBA?

Or if you wanted to be a surgeon, and had to spend all day every day in meetings with people you don't like or respect, explaining to them, without hurting their feelings why you have to use this scalpel instead of that one.

Maybe you might not be a great CEO but you could paint Starry Night or sing a nice ballad, or arrange flowers nicely, or cook a great meal for 2000 people.

There are a lot of talents that have nothing to do with being a CEO.

And then there's this...

I don't want to be a CEO.

Let me say that slowly.

I. Don't. Want. To. Be. A. CEO.

But I do love to make software.

I suspect in 20 or 30 years the tech business, if it survives all the bubbles that will come and go between then and now, will be structured around creative talent as well as corporateness (and I'm being generous to corporateness). But that day has not come yet. And until it does, btw, the tech industry is just as vulnerable and just as dumb as industries it looks down on. As long as you think of programmers as employees and not creative people, or see being a CEO as superior to being a world-class developer, you're vulnerable to disruption. Really big time disruption.

 5/1/2012; 3:36:03 PM.

A lot of things are working now in the WorldOutline, so I've really slowed down the development work and am spending a lot of time trying things out just using the product.

I used to do this at Living Videotext, a long time ago. Back then, I wasn't coding the product, so I got to play a different role in the development process. I called that role First User. I would use the product to do the things it was intended to do, and in doing so would bump up against loose-ends or rough edges. I would then communicate them to the lead developer, in a daily meeting.

I would always bring my notebook, which was a physical thing, because the tool I was working on was a notetaking tool. I needed to have some other work to use the product for, which wasn't a problem because I was also the CEO of the company (my Day Job) and was working with a lot of other people on a lot of projects. That's what a CEO does. Juggles lots of things, all of them important, some tedious, but necessary -- and others more than necessary, crucial to our success. Making sure the product could be used for what it was meant to do was somewhere between necessary and crucial. And it was also a matter of honor. One of my pet peeves are products that have glitches that every user must see. That means the company either didn't know or didn't care. By glitch, I mean an annoyance that could be easily fixed.

The project I'm playing with is the "threads" app. It uses Disqus for comments, and all of it is embedded in the Bootstrap 2 environment. So I can use any of the gizmos or doodads that they define there. (This gives me an idea, Disqus should have a switch that allows me to tell it that it's running inside Boostrap and it could use their doodads and gizmos too.)

Here's the example that goes with this post.

The menu you see at the top of the screen is the one I'm going to use to tie together all the scripting.com sites. They don't all have the same menu, but they should. That will happen when all my content is flowing through this engine. That might be a very long time from now.

BTW, I set the menu for a page, or a site by setting the menuName attribute to the name of the menu. There is no command yet for setting that attribute in the OPML Editor, but I can do it with a one-line script.

op.attributes.setone ("menuName", "scriptingNewsMenu")

That's the advantage of having your editor be a scripting environment too.

Also one of the things that comes out of using your product as it was intended to be used, is that you learn how to explain in very few words what its intended purpose is. As you're developing it, especially if you're not following in someone else's footsteps, that can be a hard thing to come up with.

I've created an abbreviated version of this post on the threads site in case you'd care to comment, or have a question.

 5/1/2012; 2:05:52 PM.

Twitter made a change in the last few days that's going to contort the web outside of Twitter in a whole new way. Not that Twitter hasn't done that before, they have. The 140-character limit forced everyone to use URL shorteners. After years of experimenting, I felt I finally had something that was fun and interesting, for me and for people who follow my links. Only to have Twitter nullify that by hiding my URLs and replacing them with the long and often very ugly URLs behind the shortened URLs.

To be clear, in the design of the web, the URLs were meant to be visible, but not in your face. Twitter changed all that. The URLs became the primary user interface for accessing web content.

Now they display my stories with the full URLs, even though they still route through my URL shortener, so I get the click counts. But I can see them changing that again, and replacing my URL-shortener with theirs. They now use theirs and mine. So there are three URLs in the mix: 1. The original URL. 2. My shortened URL. 3. Their shortened URL. What a contortion of TBL's invention. And I'm sure there are more twists and turns coming.

To be clear, none of this should ever have happened. The URLs should not have been in the 140-characters of a tweet. They should have been transmitted as metadata, with all the other metadata that accompanies a message. We've been through all the arguments over and over, and that's what it comes down to. They made a mistake, and the result was an ugly scar for the whole web.

Now, when I look at how Twitter is displaying my messages, I think I'd better change the way my CMS works, so my natural URLs are very short. All this movement, just to stay in place. The web, as an open platform, was much better without Twitter contorting it. I've been writing about this since the inception of Twitter, and they never respond. It just gets worse. If Twitter breaks, huge portions of the web will break with it. That was never the idea of the web.

 4/30/2012; 8:41:23 AM.

Like a lot of people, I've become an NBA addict this spring. It started with Jeremy Lin, but it didn't stop there. I've become a fan of the sport, and specifically the Knicks. This isn't new. I went to Knicks games with my grandfather in the sixties and seventies. I was there for the great team that won it all. But you aren't a fan because your guys win. You're a fan because of love. Because you see things from the same perspective of other people who love the same team. It's visible evolution. We have a need that's unmet by the world we live in, to be part of a warring tribe. We live and die together. So we invent something to satisfy that natural urge.

At times this season I felt the Knicks should clean house and just go with the rookies. It's still a great fantasy, but after all the ups and downs of the season, I now really feel intense admiration for Carmelo Anthony. He's not quite the Last Man Standing in the Knicks battle, but it's pretty close.

In the last few games of the season you could see Knicks coach Woodson tutoring Iman Shumpert, a wonderful young rookie, trying to toughen him up for the playoffs. It was going to be something watching this young guy with all that great energy get schooled by the Great Miami Heat, but he was stopped in battle before the first game was finished. And of course Jeremy Lin is injured. And in the first game whenever Carmelo Anthony was about to take a shot, two intense Heat players would block him out. That was when you knew that the Knicks would pay the price for having no real Plan B. The Heat were saying, you guys can score any other way, but you can't use Melo.

Somehow, for at least three more games, two of them at the Garden, the Knicks are going to have to find a way around that block. It's going to be a tough remainder of the series. I don't want to say exactly how bad it looks. But I do want to say that Melo has my admiration. He got the booby prize and he's taking it like a man.

 4/30/2012; 8:19:12 AM.

Can you imagine that someday you will be able to say to a computer: "I want to follow the NBA playoffs very closely. Find me a great feed, or create one, subscribe to it and when playoff news has slowed down or stopped, unsubscribe."

Can you imagine that that day won't come soon? Or that it isn't already here?

I posted a thread question yesterday about the existence of a great feed for news about the NBA playoffs. I'm pretty sure what I'm looking for doesn't exist. But it really should. After all, RSS was discovered to be a wonderful way to distribute news over ten years ago. Ten years. But there's been very little improvement since then, and I'm afraid I include Twitter and Facebook in that appraisal.

So why doesn't this feed exist?

Because there are two dominant products in RSS, Google Reader and iTunes. Good luck getting any new features into the base in any meaningful way.

And Twitter and Facebook are not the answer for news. Neither are First Amendment platforms, and you can't run news without the basic protection of free speech. And they are not open to new software, so we would be just as stuck waiting for them to invest as we are with Google and Apple.

If news is going to work on the Internet we need a lot of suppliers, both in technology and in feeds. No way around that. No one company is going to clean it up, because if that happened, it wouldn't be news anymore.

 4/30/2012; 7:14:31 AM.

This is a permathread in the tech discussion, and it's basically always true, and the discussion is always the same.

First, there are the mature companies, ongoing concerns. They are never part of the bubble. Apple makes products that people buy. They will likely make faster CPUs and disks will get bigger, so we'll buy new computers periodically. And they also invent new stuff and we buy that too. Any business that makes products that people will continue to buy long-term is not a bubble company.

Then we hear from VCs, and they report on it as if the front-line of whether it's a bubble or not is in their minds. If they're making decisions based on sound business principles, they believe, then it's not a bubble. It's understandable that they're self-centered, that's the reflex we all have. And money -- everyone likes to talk about money. That's why when VCs speak lots of other VCs come to listen, and the press, and prospective entrepreneurs.

The reason it is a bubble has nothing to do with the minds of the VCs. Nothing.

The question is this. Are the new businesses, the startups, making identifiable products that make sense, and will they make money selling them, and how long will that last, and most important, will they grow. Because that's fundamentially what makes companies worth something. If you put money into them, how much will it grow.

If they are making good businesses that will be profitable and will grow, then no bubble. If they aren't -- depending how frothy the startup scene is -- that's the extent to which we're in a bubble.

An example of a bubble was the derivatives market that grew up around junk mortgages. that popped in 2006 through 2008. No one is in that business anymore (at least I hope so!) and the collapse took a lot of people's futures with it. Jobs were lost, houses were lost, and sure some investors lost money too. But the big concern are the people who could ill-afford to lose. When they lost they were put out into the street, or unemployed, future-less, hope-less. Fucked, as we used to say in the dotcom crash of the early 2000's.

This time around they're building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe. And when they're done, what will happen to them. What institutions will the bubble-pop take with it. How many people, and which people. That's what we have to worry about.

You do know that a lot of universities were hurt hard when the real estate bubble crashed because they got greedy and put their endowments into the derivatives market. This time around it's going to hit universities even harder. And the people who will be fucked won't be homeowners. They'll be young people whose lives are just beginning, who have student debt to pay off, and post-bubble will have few prospects. It's a vast game of musical chairs, and there really aren't that many chairs.

We're not worried about the VCs, or we shouldn't be. They are the promoters. They have the money, and they surely will protect themselves against losing everything. It's the generation that will be lost, and the educational system that will go with it. That won't be fun to see. I'm totally sure it's going to happen. We've seen this so many times, how can we pretend not to see it this time?

How many times have we been through this? Here's a good indicator. I wrote this piece in seven minutes. Believe me, it's well-rehearsed.

 4/29/2012; 3:21:35 PM.

Mathew Ingram asks on GigaOM if we should be as worried about CISPA as we were about SOPA?

I say that's not a good question -- because our response to SOPA was inadequate and wrong, and proves that Internet that's supposed to be so responsive to threats, is as centrally controlled as Viacom, Disney, Fox, Apple, Google etc. Instead of being controlled by a few media and tech moguls it's controlled by Jimmy Wales. So he did what MSG did when they didn't like the terms that Time-Warner was offering. Wales got what he wanted this time, but I don't think it's going to work again. That bullet, once fired, can't be fired again. And sooner or later someone is going to ask the question, if the Internet is a chaotic cacophony of the free and brave, why is it that one person can turn off Wikipedia?

The tech and media moguls might ask aren't you just like us? And the answer is yes. We are just like you.

What had to happen, and what still has to happen, is as unlikely as the people of the earth waking up one day and realizing that unless we all radically reduce our production of carbon and also stop having so many children, our species is looking at some really hard times, if not extinction. The Republicans are worried about Social Security running out of money in 40 years. We might run out of oxygen before then.

There won't be a mass uprising in defense of freedom on the net. Some people will get book contracts, and we'll probably be watching Wolf Blitzer on Twitter and/or Facebook before too long.

We didn't have much of a wad to shoot, but it's shot. It would have been so much more impressive if we made sure Wikipedia was functioning 24-by-7, without interruption, no matter what the government did.

 4/27/2012; 6:18:58 PM.

Harry Truman said I don't give em hell. I tell the truth and they think it's hell.

Beautifully concise.

Here's a day I learned a little truth, about myself.

I was sitting in my car in San Francisco on a beautiful morning. I had just spent the night with a loving woman who took very good care of me. She had hopped out of the car to get us some coffee. We were driving up to Marin for the morning to go hiking on Mount Tam, and then to have some lunch and drink and more love-making. But I wasn't feeling happy. My mind drifted and I daydreamed. Then saw a couple walking hand in hand and the thought popped into my head, involuntarily, that it would be nice to be them. I saw another couple and thought the same thing. Then a moment of self-truth-telling. I realized how foolish this desire was. I remembered that moment.

I didn't learn to think those things about myself until I was in my early 40s, btw. Before that pain and happiness would come and go without me understanding how independent these feelings were from events.

When people ask why you feel blue, if you pile up enough of these experiences you realize there is no reason. It's not about reason. Feelings come from somewhere else.

So then the big question -- what does it all mean? Why are we here. What's after death. And fear of all that. It's always waiting for you when your mind pauses. So you try not to pause! But eventually you do have to stop.

Lately I've been thinking that fear of death, like almost everything else about us, comes from the natural selection process. That animals that had no natural predators might not fear death at all. But our evolution must have selected people who were very scared of death. Because people who weren't thinking about it night and day and always preparing for it didn't procreate as widely as those who were obsessed. So fear of death might just have to do with genetics.

I've heard that once you give up, when your body knows there's no hope, you relax about it. I don't know if it's true. But then I know it might be a feeling, and you can't think your way to the answer, as was previously demonstrated.

Smartest thing I've heard today is that we ought to be looking for more planets that can support life. Because this one is heading off a cliff. But I have a hard time really feeling that. You know. I'm more concerned with my end, than the end of the planet. I guess I have good genes!

 4/27/2012; 12:29:22 PM.

I loved a lot of things about the Apple II and came to hate quite a few others. But the biggest thing it brought to my world was memory-mapped video. It's probably a foreign concept to programmers today, because we're so far from it, but it was the coolest thing. It was the guarantee that you could make the hardware do anything it could do that you could think of. Which back then wasn't really very much.

Here's the deal. There was a two-dimensional array of memory that you could read from and write to, just like any other memory. But the display hardware read the memory sixty times a second and smashed the bits out onto the display. So the way you changed a pixel from white to black is by clearing a bit in the right place. No APIs, just write directly to the memory.

There were actually two screen buffers, or was it four?

There was a bitmapped display and a character-mapped display.

And there were two versions of each so you could prepare a new screen out of view of the user, and then change the address of the screen buffer and blam the bits would all change at once.

Maybe that was on the IBM PC -- it also had a memory mapped display.

That idea didn't make it to the Macintosh, though I wish it had. But they had something even cooler, Quickdraw. Those were the days.

The reason I think of it is that I have become a rabid consumer of CSS tricks to make today's screens do impressive things that wouldn't even be slightly impressive on an Apple II or PC of the early 1980s.

If Woz is out there reading this, a virtual hug to you! What a great hack. I totally loved it then, and I love the memory of it today. Keep on truckin.

 4/26/2012; 1:09:08 PM.

Some things I push to Twitter are bits that I want to come back to.

I use Twitter the way people used Delicious, or Instapaper or Readability.

Because there's room in my mind for just one bookmarklet that "Routes this somewhere."

The same channel is used for must-read bits. Or pictures I took in the park, or on a bike ride. It's a mishmash that no one is supposed to make sense of or remember in any general way. It's my contribution to the fog of realtime.

That's all I had to say today.

 4/26/2012; 12:44:48 PM.

I caught on that there was a conference in NYC as it was happening called Hacking Society, put on by Union Square Ventures. They invited a lot of famous Internet thinkers and the CEOs of some tech companies, and people from Washington.

I only listened to the end of the audio feed, so I only know what was discussed through people's summation. So I don't know if what I am about to say was said. If it was, it bears repeating.

The best way to preserve Internet freedom is to use it.

That means creating a network that is of the Internet, only. Without any corporate ownership of rights to individual people's content. As nice as the VCs are that ran this show, and the execs who were there, and they certainly are very nice people, it doesn't matter. Corporations behave like corporations. And freedom and corporate ownership are two things that don't mix well.

It also means creating a network of people who vote.

That's the main way to get lawmaker's respect, I hear. From a pretty good source. Sure they need to raise money, but their opportunities to make money are greatly enhanced by being in office. And votes is what puts them in office and keeps them there.

That means, esp if you are a Republican, fighting the voter suppression efforts of the Republican Party.

 4/24/2012; 7:50:24 PM.

I downloaded and installed Google Drive right away of course.

I can share a folder publicly, which is useful.

You can also link to an individual file in Drive.

This link should take you to a picture of the White House if it's working. Only sort of. It tkes you to a page that includes the picture. I'd like to link to just the picture. Let's see if this link lasts.

The picture of Carlos Boozer to the right was being served from the Public folder of my Google Drive folder, but then the link broke. So you can't point directly to a file. The link isn't persistent. That's an advantage that Dropbox has. Here's the link to the small picture of Carlos Boozer on Dropbox. It won't break.

Drive begins with the same two letters as Dropbox. So when you're typing the name of one into the browser's address bar you'll see the name of the other, if you've been to their website.

Question -- will Google's search engine go into folders that are marked public. I don't see why it shouldn't. I think they want to go in there.

Gotta wonder how long before Google-Plus features show up when you view a folder or a file.

Update: Here's a place for comments.

 4/24/2012; 5:51:29 PM.

Fred Wilson really started an interesting thread.

It continues over on Rex Hammock's blog.

He says that everything is programming. That you have TV itself and you have shows. People may have thought I Love Lucy or Johnny Carson were bigger than a TV show, but in the end they weren't. Are the companies Fred helps get started really companies, or are they really shows? To which I said -- they're rock bands.

But there's more to it.

Sometimes things that are TV shows have features which are sucked down into the medium. It's how there's a continuity between the TV of Lucy and the TV of Linsanity (which is thoroughly captivating TV, even though Lin himself has been sidelined). The platform is shifting and adopting features from its programming.

Podcasting, RSS, blogging, YouTube, I would argue Angry Birds and Twitter -- all become part of what the Internet is, but they started out as programming. Before that Compuserve, MCI Mail, AOL. AppleLink. Craig's List. MySpace. And on and on. Each came out as a program, then became part of the platform.

Look at how magazines as a platform have changed. It used to be a gatekeeper model. Now lists like Time's 100 most influential are revealing because they have become jokes, anachronisms. Why did we care who influenced the editors of Time? Becuase that was the only path to fame. Now there are so many other paths to fame.

Postel said be liberal in what you understand and conservative in what you say. You could think of that as the law of platforms as much as it is about interop.

McLuhan said The Medium Is The Message. It's really the same idea.

Said another way...

We're paving cow paths.

 4/24/2012; 12:25:02 PM.