Categories
Just Shelley

Car loan

Forecast for Northern California: rain, followed by rain, preceded by periods of rain, with occasional breaks of clouds that are just too tired or too wimpy to rain.

Found a loan for the car — Ouch! There goes my savings safety net. Must write more. Must sell more books. Must look for a new contract. Must not tell clients they’re idiots when they make the same old technology mistakes that are the equivalent to me of fingernails on a chalk board.

(Just foolin’ with that last one — honest. I never call clients idiots. Well, almost never. Not to their face. Not in print where I can get sued.)

Categories
Technology

Robb’s tops and flops for 2001

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

John Robb’s posted his Tops and Flops in Technology for 2001. Among the flops, he picked P2P, 3G, Portals, and Open Source. Among the tops he posted Tivo, Wifi, and digital cameras. As you can imagine, there is disagreement with his choices, such as Dive Into Mark.

I also take exception to John’s pick of Open Source and P2P as flops, regardless of his justification that they didn’t live up to their “hype” from 2000.

Yes, P2P did generate a lot of hype, primarily because of Napster. But P2P is not just Napster, or Groove, or any one application. P2P is a concept rather than a specific implementation. P2P is based on the concept of non-centralized Internet access; access that isn’t controlled by an one server or any one entity. If you apply this concept to Internet access today, it could cover email, weblogging, and even web services. It would even cover something like Userland’s Manila. Napster was only one aspect of P2P, and not a great one at that.

As for Open Source, well Mark has it right — John you missed the mark (sorry, pun unintended) with this one. Consider the premise behind open source: groups of people from throughout the world, working on source code for specific projects, in most cases without any expectation of remuneration or even acknowledgement. Now consider the products, as Mark did: Apache, Mozilla, Python, Ant, Linux, and the list goes on. Too much hype? We haven’t hyped these efforts enough! They represent the best of our industry; they represent the best of us. If we measure technology success purely by stock value and profit, then we’re in sad, sad shape. What was it Dave Winer talked about recently? Internet carpetbaggers?

However, I also realize that John is basically a Suit. He reads about trends, and he reads about approaches, and he writes about them, and he makes recommendations, and he manages — but John doesn’t get his hands dirty. He doesn’t get into the technology. He might be called a “technology expert”, but he’s not a techie. So he’s not going to look at Open Source, or even P2P from the ground level. He’ll look at it from a bottom line, or from a spreadsheet, or from the viewpoint of counted lines in publications, or from conversations with techies, but he’ll never have a techie perspective. So, I’m tempted to cut him some slack — he doesn’t really understand the technology. The industry, yes. The business, yes. But not the technology.

December 28th

Robb has pulled the entry with the following statement:

I am beginning to think there isn’t any real intellectual rigor behind the open source movement.

 

Categories
Web

Seven wonders of the web world

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Hey, Blogger was listed as one of the seven wonders of the Web world, along with Amazon, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Project Gutenberg, and Multimap. I’m not into online auctions, and I’ve never heard of Multimap, but I’m a big user of Google, I use Blogger for this weblog (at this time), and I subscribe to several Yahoo groups. And I buy at Amazon (though I’ve been going to B & N lately).

Congrats Blogger!

Categories
Just Shelley

My first car

I’m buying myself a late Christmas present — a 2002 Ford Focus SE. It ain’t a Jaguar, and it ain’t a Porsche, but the thing’s a kick in the butt to drive. And it’ll be all mine. My very first car.

Hey, I only got my driver’s license this year. I started to learn how to drive in Boston, and finished up with my test in San Francisco after driving across country (with a co-driver of course) in 3 days. Not bad for someone in their 40’s, eh? Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

P.S. Call me old dog to my face, and I’ll show you that I still have most of my teeth, too..

Categories
Weblogging

Another blogger quits

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Another blogger bites the dust — Time for your Meds left weblogging abruptly, posting a note today that she won’t be writing to the weblog…or writing at all. A loss to the weblogging community because Tracy’s writing was always fresh, insightful, and interesting.

I think that weblogging can become such an intensely personal experience at times, that you have to take a break from it or become lost within the postings. Sometimes the break is temporary; sometimes it’s permanent. Regardless, it comes suddenly, leading the weblog readers to wonder at the story behind the end. Whoever said there’s no mystery in life, has never spent time on the weblogging circuit.