Sometimes technology can obscure greatness. Funny, and says a lot more than the obvious joke.
Month: February 2001 (Page 1 of 4)
Opponents call it the “death tax,” which conjures up images of quaint family farms sold off to pay the gubment. Proponents call it the “inheritance tax,” which conjures up images of rich fatcats passing their ill-gotten gains on to the next generation of weak-willed scions. Either way, it’s amazing how perception of the same subject can vary with substitution of one word.
Learning presidential history with The Simpsons:
Grandpa: We used to get spanked by presidents ’til the cows came home! Grover Cleveland spanked me on two non-consecutive occasions!
Words mean things in the business world
“My boss seems to have some sort of mechanism, installed at the School of Effective Management, which forces him to throw in at least one non-word for every sentence spoken.”
Thinking a lot lately about possible alternatives to Blogger, considering. My investigation so far has turned up nothing with the same set of advantages as the system I’m using right now. There’s LiveJournal, Pitas, EditThisPage, Radio Userland and Greymatter. LiveJournal is interesting, and even has a desktop client, but like Pitas it requres you to host the blog on some other server. EditThisPage uses the intriguing but programmery Manila system, which is cool, but still, you’re on someone else’s server. Radio lets you FTP your posts to your own space like Blogger does, but it doesn’t have as many options as Blogger. Greymatter is also interesting, since it installs as a Perl script on your own server space and generates flat HTML files. But again, it doesn’t seem to offer any advantages to Blogger and has the added complexity of installation. I was psyched for Blogger Pro, but now I doubt that will come to pass.
Anyone have any suggestions other than the ones I’ve mentioned? Or if you have some personal experience with the above tools and think I’m off base, let me know.
I must admit that I was mystified by Apple’s recent announcement of some freaky-looking iMac designs. I’ve always been a big fan of Apple’s industrial design, and watched with amusement as beige box makers like Compaq take design cues from Apple, long after the fact and after years of derision on the part of PC-heads. Well, big surprise, folks, design matters, especially now that most people who are going to get a computer already have one. Case in point: the incredibly sexy titanium PowerBook G4 has everyone (including me) literally drooling.
But Flower Power and Blue Dalmation? These are just begging for parody.
Regarding last night’s Survivor: as we were taught by Clockwatchers, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. I can only thank god that Kucha had enough sense to get rid of Kimmi and not Alicia, who as of last night is my current Survivor favorite (castaway? castmate? teammate? lab rat? I’m not sure). She’s strong and smart, and doesn’t take crap from anybody. Admirable qualities, in or out of the Outback.
You can’t depend on anyone but yourself. Do so at your peril. That’s all I have to say about that.
In contrast to my earlier post about web hosting, I have to give credit to TDS Metrocom, which not only is saving me money every month on my phone bill, but installed DSL service that has worked flawlessly since its installation some months ago. Sometimes technology works. Once you’ve gotten used to a persistent, fast Net connection, you’ll never go back to dialup. It’s so basic – would anyone put up with “logging in” to their cable television? (Not that that might be a pretty good idea, considering the amount of soul-draining television Americans watch in a given year.) But unlike TV, the internet allows people to interact, research and publish whatever they want. It’s the freedom and democracy technology.