| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |  |
Travel day  | | I'm flying to New York from San Diego today. See ya on the East Side, if not along the way. |
discuss | Tuesday, April 25, 2006 | |
On the ground | | The recent flap over six retired American generals publicly calling for the Secretary of Defense to resign, also brought out opinions, via the Internet, from lower ranking troops (active duty, reservists and retired.) The mass media ran with the six generals, but got shot down by the troops and their blogs, message board postings and emails. It wasn't just a matter of the "troop media" being more powerful. No, what the troops had going for them was a more convincing reality. Unlike the six generals, many of the Internet troops were in Iraq, or had recently been there. Their opinions were not as eloquent as those of the generals, but they were also more convincing... |
| | Naturally, the details of this media battle didn't get a lot of coverage in the mass media. Makes sense. Who wants to discuss a defeat, by a bunch of amateurs no less. But the mass media has been missing an even larger story about the military and the Internet |
| | It would be nice to see links to examples of what both the media and the soldiers wrote about the topic. But there isn't a single link in the entire piece. Still, it all rings true. Especially the last paragraph: |
| | This is all uncharted territory. There's never been an army before where all the troops were so well connected with each other. So far, the benefits have outweighed any liabilities. But no one is sure where it will go next, and the public is largely unaware of the impact, because the mass media has not grasped nature and extent of the changes. |
QuoteAge | | Got quoted (final word, even) in this story about VW's new crash & learn TV ads. I told the reporter that I thought safety was a good thing for VW to sell, especially given the company's lousy reputation (look 'em up in Consumer Reports, April issue) for reliability. And, as ads go, these are good ones. |
Our hearts go out | | Terry Heaton: No man ever expects to bury his bride, especially one so young and healthy. |
| | Terry is a brilliant writer and thinker, and the leading authority on Where Broadcasting is Going. But he didn't write alone. He reveals, |
| | She was my life, folks. She was my inspiration, the one who reached in and brought out all my essays. With her unrelenting encouragement, I've written 65 or so essays about broadcasting, postmodernism and new media. None of that would've been possible without my Alicia Faith. |
| | One of the comments says more than I (who have never met either Terry or Alicia in person) can even guess: |
| | As a close friend of the family, I want the blogosphere to know something. Alicia and Terry had a love like I've never seen before. Alicia and I never had one single conversation, not even over something trivial like what I should bring to Christmas dinner, that didn't turn into a long discussion of how much she adored him. The light in her eyes everytime he walked into a room was one of the most astonishing examples of love I've ever had the honor to witness. |
| | This was the real thing, the kind of love most people can only imagine experiencing. Their wedding was small and intimate, but the love in that ceremony was so palpable and tangible that it remains a benchmark for what real love looks like. It is the standard. |
| | Alicia was the single most joyful human being I've ever met. She was filled with the joy of the Lord. The loss of her is devastating beyond what words can express. And yet, in the midst of heartbreak, there is an overwhelming sense of privilege for those who knew her personally. She taught me more about love in the last two years, just by example, than any person or experience before or since. I am certain that everyone who observed their love up close would say the same. |
| | In a marriage, there is so much that "the couple" is, and does. "We" are more than the addition of "you" and "me". So that's another huge loss here. |
| | I hope friends and loved ones in Nashville are gathering around Terry, as well as out here in the 'sphere, and giving him the support he needs. |
| | Our prayers are with you, Terry. |
Moving picture | Monday, April 24, 2006 | |
Chain Still in training | | Well, I'm on the southbound Amtrak, heading through San Juan Capistrano, en route to San Diego. Nice to be able to connect over bluetooth, but the speed is sooooo sloooowww. This may be one reason Sunday didn't happen on the blog. Or did, sort of. It wasn't there, then it was there, with a bunch of posts duplicated. |
| | Then I got into Monday, even though it's still just 6:39pm here on the Coast. This is intentional, sort of, since I keep the blog on Atlantic Time or something. But I thought I was moving belatedly from Saturday to Sunday, not Sunday to Monday. |
| | It's a beautiful day outside, though the air here in the train has been kinda thick and hot. The AC finally kicked in about a minute ago. Nice. |
| | The fare from Santa Barbara to San Diego is just $28. This is while the price per gallon of gas in some local stations has moved north of $4.00 and any trip through L.A. by car can be an ordeal. The seats here are comparable to first class on an airplane, and there's nobody telling you to put your seat belt on and worry about "unexpected turbulence". And here in biz class (for an extra $16) they have lots of power outlets. So I have the laptop plugged into one while the cell phone is plugged into another. This is extra handy because the connecting to the Net drains the phone's batteries pretty quickly. |
| | Anyway, gotta get back to work. |
| | [Later...] Okay, I fixed it. No more duplicate entries for Saturday and Sunday. |
| Sunday, April 23, 2006 | |
Monopoly bored? Free Neil | | Neil Young's newly recorded protest album "Living With War," including a song calling for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush, will be posted for free Internet streaming next week, his label said on Friday. |
| | Starting April 28, fans can log onto Young's Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and listen to the 10-track collection in its entirety, free of charge, said Bill Bentley, a spokesman for Warner Music Group's Reprise Records |
A little better than half right A cockroach theory of Flash intro pages | | Web sites end up getting polluted with crap like Flash and JavaScript for various reasons, but perhaps the single most common underlying issue is that "designers" have no content to give you, so they substitute an "experience" for something useful. Yeesh. I don¹t spend (way too much) time on the Internet to have an "experience," I just want to get some information or look at pictures or something. It¹s kind of like the now-defunct Damon¹s, a restaurant chain that sported multiple big-screen TVs tuned to various games. They billed themselves as "A Dining Event!" I tend to think of a ³dining event² as something like that time when The Boy found a dried-up roach in his cereal — I don¹t want a "dining event," I just want something to eat (preferably insect-free). Same with the web: I don¹t want Flash and Java$#!+ substituting for content. If I wanted to waste time with mindless garbage, there¹s a TV in the living room. |
Sorry, Steve. Had to link ya. | | Steve Gillmor: These links are pretty nifty for a dead technology... |
Whenever | | Today's scrub was caused by more problems with a refueling aircraft required by a downrange launch tracking plane, a NASA spokesman now confirms. Discussions are underway to determine a new launch date. |
| | When I'll be out of town, no doubt. I take a train to the Desktop Summit in San Diego later today. New York and New Jersey (the homeland) on Wednesday. Won't be back for a week. |
| Saturday, April 22, 2006 | |
(Not quite) never on Sunday | | For some reason my blog won't go to Sunday. Until it does, I'll post here, yesterday. |
Subtext: beyond marketing Land of the fried, home of the depraved | | Disinhibition Nation, by Daniel Henninger, deputy eiditor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has the subhead When blogs rule, we'll all talk like ----. Set off by Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma Carls Jr. worker and blogger with a taste for chopped-up children, Henninger huffs, |
| | I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share. |
| | Subtext: That untamed hoi polloi, those unwashed minds polluting the discourse, that rabble on the verge of violence -- they are at the ramparts! Isn't there some way to mow them down with grapeshot? |
| | Henninger is nostalgic for inhibition: |
| | In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue. |
| | The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind." |
| | The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already. |
| | Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition. |
| | Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 comments on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----." |
| | No examples from the right, of course, where comments in rough agreement with the WSJ's leanings are no less inhibited. As Greyhawk in The Mudville Gazette puts it, Henninger offers very little to counter his implied point that cannibals and left-wing screamers are typical of the blogosphere. Obviously he hopes his audience is still unfamiliar with the medium. |
| | To be fair, Henninger is referring primarily to personal¹ bloggers. However, one wonders what his point is in bringing up the Internet¹s latest blogging cannibal. Would the world be better if child-murderers like Kevin Ray Underwood would refrain from sharing their weird thoughts with the world and simply stuck to practicing their ghastly, self-chosen vocation? |
| | We think that Mr. Henninger may have things backwards: the lack of self-restraint has always been there. It was simply expressed by — and happening to — the type of people with which mainstream types like Mr. Henninger aren¹t acquainted: a world in which no one he knows is a victim of monsters like Underwood. Welcome to the nuthouse, Mr. Henninger. |
| | i know this guy was one on a million, that there arent that many people who dont get touched and then snap and kill and then try to eat people, but we need to lower the odds of this shit happening again. its just too painful. |
| | I've always believed that a more reasonable comparison for modern bloggers are the old hand-printed broadsheets that once were a staple of American political life. They were partisan, nasty, occasionally unhinged and definitely inflammatory. But they stripped bare the cossetted worlds of politicians and priestly presses alike. The broadsheets faded over time, becoming either extinct or mutating into more "professional" productions. Blogs may and probably will do the same. Until then, relax, Dan. The world is not coming to an end. But it is changing faster than you know. |
| | Right. I'm already nostalgic for the time when the only place you could find creepy stuff like this was on television, and all the perpetrators were TV viewers. |
| Friday, April 21, 2006 | |
Save now or lose | | I am fed up with the current wave of soundbites, platitudes, ads and marketing flooding the airwaves that profess to speak for the advancement of the Internet and communications. These ads are influencing Congress and governments around the World as they write the rules that will shape the future of the Internet and communications. |
| | But, where is the voice and message of the Internet community -- the Internet innovators, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts -- in this world-changing discussion? We are primarily sitting out the battle, or perhaps comfortably blogging and Monday-morning quarterbacking on the sidelines. Sure, we¹ll be able to point to our blogs and do a big ³I-told-you-so² if the rules ultimately prove to undermine the promise of the Internet. But, we will not be justified in our criticism if we don¹t at least try to affect a positive result. |
| | Rules have to be written to enable us. If we do not participate in the debate, if we do not transform the messaging, the rules will not be written with our best interests at heart. And, frankly, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have to take over the messaging, both within the corridors of power and within the public zeitgeist. |
| | We need soundbites of our own, messaging of our own... |
| | Bonus link. Advance to Scenario III. Starts about halfway down. |
Earth to NASA and SpaceFlight Now: Blog with RSS | | Let's bring space flight into the Live Web age. |
| | For an example, let's take a live subject: the CALIPSO and CloudSat satellites that were both due to lauch this morning from Vandenberg AFB aboard one Delta II rocket. |
| | The launch had a one-minute window, at 3:02am Pacific time. It was scrubbed at 3:01am. Spaceflight Now reported progress this way: |
| | 1009 GMT (6:09 a.m. EDT
Tomorrow's one-second launch opportunity will be 1002:26 GMT (6:02:26 a.m. EDT; 3:02:26 a.m. PDT). |
| | 1006 GMT (6:06 a.m. EDT
Officials are tentatively posturing themselves for another launch attempt tomorrow. |
| | 1005 GMT (6:05 a.m. EDT
The launch team is working through rocket safing procedures following the countdown abort. |
| | 1005 GMT (6:05 a.m. EDT
Both the primary and backup communications links between CALIPSO and its support center in France went down simultaneously, violating the launch requirements, NASA says. The satellite is a joint U.S. and French project. |
| | 1003 GMT (6:03 a.m. EDT
The CALIPSO spacecraft lost communications lock with its ground systems. That prompted the mission team to call a hold. |
| | The countdown was halted just inside T-minus 1 minute due to a problem. This effectively scrubs the liftoff for today. The available launch window was just one-second long, leaving no margin for any delays. |
| | HOLD! Countdown has been stopped. |
| | 1001 GMT (6:01 a.m. EDT
T-minus 1 minute. The Range has given its final clear-to-launch. |
| | The Delta 2 rocket's second stage hydraulic pump has gone to internal power after its pressures were verified acceptable. |
| | 1000 GMT (6:00 a.m. EDT
T-minus 80 seconds. LOX topping to 100 percent is underway. |
| | 1000 GMT (6:00 a.m. EDT
T-minus 1 minute, 45 seconds. The launch pad water suppression system is being activated. |
| | Each of those should have been a blog post with a permalink. Instead they were composed and posted inside whatever Content Management System Spaceflight Now uses. (View Source shows relatively uncomplicated HTML.) |
| | Time-to-index for Live Web search engines (such as Technorati) are getting down into the sub-minute range, making RSS more "live" than ever. |
| | On its Current Mission page, Spaceflight Now's most recent story (top of its reverse chronology) is from March 28. The top story on its front (index) page is from yesterday. No mention on either page of the CALIPSO and CloudSat launch/scrub for today. |
| | In the right column of Spaceflight Now's index page is this block of text: |
| | RSS News Feed
Spaceflight Now is pleased to announce the availablity of an RSS feed of our news headlines. By subscribing to our feed you can be alerted when we post new stories on the site via an RSS compatible news reader or web browser. Click the RSS button to subscribe. |
| | I just subscribed and got ten stories all dated March 17. |
| | Over at NASA, if you click around you might find CloudSat's main page, with news that the mission has been scrubbed for today and rescheduled for tomorrow. There's a link to this series of minute-by-minute updates (like the above), each with a +View Video link such as this one, which gets you to a video file page with links to Real and Windows Media clips. |
| | 04.10.06: CALIPSO Prepares for Launch! » View the pictures |
| | Over at Space.com, there's a story of the scrub. I suppose Space.com doesn't want to make its Top Stories a blog because it might crowd out the ads and other promos that crowd the page. |
| | So, no 'fence, but they all suck. There's no excuse for that, now that we're five decades into the Space Age. |
| | The simple answer for all of them is to put the news in a journal, rather than a site. This requires a metaphorical switch. It isn't hard. |
| | And then dig Dave additional remarks, posted this morning: |
| | Journalism is the new practice for Everyman, it's what we all will be doing all the time in this new century. As the professional media pulls back, the citizens, you and me, need to fill in and replace every pro with 100 of us, to cover every school board meeting, every planning commission, defense contractor, civic organization. It's like the Second Amendment for information and ideas. We need a well-informed electorate to make the tough decisions on our future. |
| | Which means space freaks like yours truly and Susan Kitchens (and many hundreds more like us) need to gang up and help out the Space Media. |
Ed 2 Lee re: Bob | | I only hope there will be some way to time-shift this. As much as I¹d love to sit down every week and listen to the Bob Dylan show, that isn¹t the way the world works anymore. I want to record it, save it, carry it on my portable music player, put it in my car for a long drive. |
Bonus cringe: they'll be making nukes | Thursday, April 20, 2006 | |
Out to launch | | I'll be up at 3:02:08am for the launch of the Calipso CloudSat from Vandenberg tomorrow. The satellite will for the first time look into clouds from space, and produce detailed 3D images along with other useful weather data. |
| | It has a launch window just one minute long. |
| | Update: the launch was scrubbed, due to a last-minute communications glitch. The new launch window is Saturday 10:02am PDST. |
Narrows it down | | So, it is true that this guy in the blue shirt runs the world. |
| | I said that in my sleep last night. That's what my wife told me this morning. |
Bladio | | Wow. Lee Abrams has a blog. I never knew Lee, really. I just met him a few times very early in his career as one of the biggest radio programming consultants of all time. That was back when he was consulting WQDR in Raleigh (would have been in the mid '70s), one of the earliest Album Oriented Rock (AOR) stations. The term, and the format, were (as I recall) Lee's inventions. |
| | Anyway, it's way cool that he's blogging. It's not cool (to XM, anyway) that I'm a Sirius subscriber, I suppose. But... whatever. Be curious to hear (from others) how it goes. |
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