Month: November 2004

Categories
Just Shelley

TiBook battery saga continues

The Apple Store is in the West County Mall, a very upscale and large mall that’s only about twenty minutes away. This was my first time in one of these, and my first reaction was that they must still be moving in. However, I was assured that the white, empty spaces made it easier to look at the products.

I showed the TiBook to the ‘genius bar’ guy, and he’d never heard of the stuck TiBook battery before, and went to look it up in whatever genius bar guy manuals there was. It would have been better just to check the Internet, though.

Anyway, he said that he thinks the rim that holds the battery is broken and that’s why it’s stuck. Since this isn’t covered under warranty (“But it’s a known design defect!” “I don’t know about that, but look at the wear at the latch.” “But that’s because of me trying to get the battery unstuck!”), it will cost me about $250.00+ to fix it. Big ouch.

He was also cool and mentioned a couple of other places that do Mac repair and how they might be able to fix the battery without replacing anything. So there is that. However, I think it’s going to cost, and I’m not ready to do this.

Right now I have about 2 1/2 hours of battery life when fully charged, and that’s usually enough for sitting at the coffee shop, uploading work, downloading work, catching up with the weblogs, and email. I’ll probably just keep things as is until the battery gets worse, and then I’ll look at upgrading the memory in addition to fixing the battery when I take it in. With this, my TiBook should be good for at least another 2-3 years. Considering I bought this about five years ago, that’s not bad.

While I was waiting for the ‘genius’, I looked around at all the new gadgets the store carried. The company has a real thing for white, silver, and blue, doesn’t it? Made me feel like I should put on a virginal white robe and bath in a bath of fragrant herbs, first, before entering the store. Or is it black t-shirts with little bitten white apples?

Also, is the company philosophy consist of “why do things square when you can do things rounded, eh?” However, if you’re thinking of getting one of those new 12-inch PowerBook, think again. I mistook one of them for a really big iPod until I realized what it was. Speaking of which, there was a silver gray kind of blobby thing, which I think was a speaker system and holder for an iPod. I do wonder about the Apple design people and their use of drugs at times.

Most of the printers were Epson, but when I asked about the 300 the salesguy said I would have to download printer drivers for it, the printer is so new. I asked if I’d have to use CUPs, and he went, use what? Hee hee hee – so much for genius. I think the store should hire me; I look good in black.

Categories
Weblogging

Sex, weblogging, and power

A few years back sex was introduced into weblogs in a major way and we went all shivery with anticipation about the freedom we had to explore our sexuality online–through pseudonyms or not, as the case may be. Women incorporated semi-nude glamour shots of themselves into their blog designs; or posted photos of their breasts covered in wet, white t-shirts (all in a good cause of course). The men joined in at one point, posting photos of their penises laid out on tables in various states of arousal, like sausages ready to be sliced for pizza. We were like the kids (both boys and girls) in the Klub Howz looking through girlie magazines and imagining the possibilities.

Sex had an impact on weblogging, of that there is no doubt. When Technorati first created its Top 100 list, based on links scraped from weblog pages, many of us noticed that a) there were few women; and b) what women there were tended to be associated with sex in some way. At the time, the list was heavily skewed to the Suicide Girls, with a slight aside into sites like Wonkette’s.

However, when I went to write this essay and dropped back into Technorati’s Top 100 to get some statistics, I was rather amazed at what I found: not only was sex not a significant indicator of popularity in the list, neither politics nor technology were, either–not cleanly, and with strong enough representation to stand on their own, as in “If you want to be a top blogger you must…”

Among the women in the list, several were part of group weblogs, such as BoingBoing and Corante. Though Corante does have a disproportionate number of men weblogging as compared to women, there is such a strongly sexless feel to the site that not even having Chris Locke, aka Rageboy, as a rare commentator can break through all that lab-coated dispassionate goodness. And while it’s true that BoingBoing has somewhat bought into the ’sex sells’ mindset lately, I’ve never heard of the site referred to as ’sexy’; nor do lonely men and women turn into the site on Saturday nights in order to indulge their fantasies. Lordie, at least I hope not.

You could point to Wonkette as a weblog that uses sex, but her popularity seems to be related more to her access of insider information combined with a voyeuristic interest in watching her fast paced and rather fashionably seedy lifestyle than anything directly related to sex. As for that other ‘bad girl’ of Washington DC, Jessica Cutler is fast becoming Jessica “who?”

No one can say that Dooce is about sex, though she writes frankly and baldly about most aspects of her life, as if it were continuously under a 10,000 watt bulb; Michele from A Small Victory is known more as a gun-totin’, “better red than dead” mom then a sex kitten.

As for the men on the list, ’sex’ is most likely not the first word that pops into your mind when you hear their names. No, not even instasex.

Sex and sensuality, as threads among many in a weblogger’s works, can add to the seductiveness of their writing and other offerings. Sex for the sake of sex, though, doesn’t hold attention when it’s stripped of all context of life; not once we were past that first heady moment of discovering our sexual freedom in this medium.

Somehow, in the space of a couple of years, the concept of ’sex sells’ quickly grabbed a foothold in weblogging and then just as quickly slipped down the slope along with other sure fire ways of becoming famous.

Categories
W3C

The whole thing

The Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition was just issued as a W3C recommendation. I love that title — it reminds me of Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”, volume one.

Interesting bit about URIs in the document. To address the ‘resource as something on the web’ as compared to ‘resource as something that can be discussed on the web’ issue, the document describes a resource thusly:

By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of what might be a resource. The term “resource” is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images, product catalogs, etc. as “resources”?. The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message. We identify this set as “information resources”.

This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can be encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits. There is nothing about the essential information content of this document that cannot in principle be transfered in a representation.

However, our use of the term resource is intentionally more broad. Other things, such as cars and dogs (and, if you’ve printed this document on physical sheets of paper, the artifact that you are holding in your hand), are resources too. They are not information resources, however, because their essence is not information. Although it is possible to describe a great many things about a car or a dog in a sequence of bits, the sum of those things will invariably be an approximation of the essential character of the resource.

The document then gets into URI collision:

By design, a URI identifies one resource. Using the same URI to directly identify different resources produces a URI collision. Collision often imposes a cost in communication due to the effort required to resolve ambiguities.

Suppose, for example, that one organization makes use of a URI to refer to the movie The Sting, and another organization uses the same URI to refer to a discussion forum about The Sting. To a third party, aware of both organizations, this collision creates confusion about what the URI identifies, undermining the value of the URI. If one wanted to talk about the creation date of the resource identified by the URI, for instance, it would not be clear whether this meant “when the movie was created” or “when the discussion forum about the movie was created.”

Social and technical solutions have been devised to help avoid URI collision. However, the success or failure of these different approaches depends on the extent to which there is consensus in the Internet community on abiding by the defining specifications.

Categories
Weblogging

Bloghost blogs

Elaine just posted a note at IT Kitchen that Bloghosts has failed, perhaps because of some form of deliberate manipulation.

If you’re a Bloghosts blogger, and you’re adrift right now, feel free to use the Kitchen weblog as a way of letting people know where you’ve moved, or to let people know what’s happening with you until you get a new home.

P.S. If you can help a Bloghosts blogger move, or find a new home, please put a note either at the Kitchen Wiki, or the Kitchen weblog.

Christine at Big Pink Cookie passes along an offer of a home at Blogomania, with the first month free to Bloghosts webloggers, to help in transition.

Categories
Weblogging

Kitchen reading

Aha, a new cable modem and I am back among the continuously wired and co-dependent for another couple of weeks.

Don has written a couple of wonderful weblog posts about blogging gardeners: on the raft and Staying True. In Staying True, he wrote:

Genre blogs do not display the arc of a good long novel, or a series of tightly written and well-thought arguments. They are notes from a corner, maybe a small corner, maybe a big one. My own sense is that this little golden age of blogging won’t last—that new technology will come along making us radio bloggers or tv/film bloggers to the extent that we lose this odd, populist outburst of the written word.

I hope not. I sincerely hope not. It is odd, though, that those who are weblogging’s most ardent supporters are also the ones that seem to want to destroy that which is unique about this medium. I guess there are those who want to carve their names into history, and those who are content just to scratch their initials into dirt.