Month: February 2001 (Page 2 of 4)
If you’re anything like me (and heaven help you if so), you’ll be thrilled that andyrooneymustdie.com is still available. I’m considering it.
Offered: a link for everyone who’s become obsessed like me.
You would think that web hosting would be the easiest of tech businesses to do correctly. Set up the servers, make sure the power stays on, and voila! So why is getting reliable web hosting so difficult? Why are web hosting techs either clueless or condescending? Why do hold times reach past the half-hour mark? Is this so hard? (I hope my hosting company isn’t reading this, or this may be my last post.) I sincerely hope that persistent web connections become the norm, so we can all set up little bulletproof servers and be done with the whole business.
On a related topic, Blogger is great, but Dave Winer (also see previous post) is right. Centralized web services depending on giant servers humming away flawlessly is a crappy model for changing the world. Microsoft’s .NET is the latest stab at this bad idea. I’m starting to feel like an NRA member with “the law” beating down my door to take my gun (read: desktop computer) away, telling me, “The police (read: Microsoft) are the only people who need guns(computers). Remain calm.” I guess Charlton Heston and I have something in common, after all.
Learning about pop culture with The Simpsons:
Marge: “Fox became a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn’t even notice.”
My favorite quote on the pervasiveness of information:
“You have no privacy. Get over it.”
-Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems
It’s an inescapable truth: the world would be a better place if every movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow starred Bridget Fonda instead. She even makes foreign remake dreck like ‘Point of No Return’ interesting. It’s a crime that the only work she can seem to get these days is things like playing the girlfriend in the scarily horrrible (from previews evidence) ‘Monkey Bone.’
Anyone who is at all interested in the future of the internet should take a good look at Scripting News. Dave Winer (who I’m going to add to my web heroes page as soon as I get around to it) is doing some amazing stuff emphasizing content on the web. His Manila web content management system is cool, and if it can evolve a few more steps to be usable by the general public, it could be truly revolutionary.
The web is the printing press of the 21st century. Traditional publishing, whether it be newspapers, magazines, hardcover books, or whatever, is not the vehicle for the average person. It never has been, but now we have an alternative. We need to hang on to weblogs for dear life. Expressing ourselves keeps us alive.
Jean Teasdale, my favorite Onion columnist, has become a union organizer.
Two examples of the blurring of entertainment and reality have come to my attention recently. Both are quite interesting but somewhat creepy and disturbing at the same time – pop culture as traffic accident. The first is Series 7, an independent film shot on digital video about a (at least for now, fictional) television series called The Contenders, where the contestants kill each other until only one is left. Then the champion must face a new crop of players in the next season. The movie website is unsettling in its deadpan depiction of training “ordinary” citizens to be killers.
I can’t wait to see it.
The second development is an internet-based adventure game called Majestic, where you sign up to play the game, and get real-world faxes and phone calls that advance the story, with you as a character. Sounds fun…sort of. Also scary, in a slippery slope kind of way. I guess I don’t want to blur the lines any more than they already are.