Looks like bloggers will have even more choices of what tools they use to maintain their weblogs soon. In addition to Big Blog Tool, which I’ve promoted before, I just heard about CityDesk, by programming whiz Joel Spolsky. Sounds sort of like Blogger on the desktop – a Windows program that maintains a database of your blog entries, then FTPs changes to your web space. If this is a decent program, it could be the best of both worlds – an easy-to-install system that doesn’t depend on someone else’s crowded server. And as commercial software, the makers will have a financial stake in making improvements and giving tech support. Cool.

(BTW, why not stop by Heather’s new weblog. Always nice to see interesting people starting up weblogs.)

Gratuitous B Kliban cartoon. Enjoy.

I have books full of these, so if you like them, I can post more. I don’t like all of his cartoons – some are too weird even for me. But boy, can he be funny. And don’t we all need a little more humor in our lives?

Dave Winer at Scripting News has a fascinating idea – why not have commercial aircraft stream the flight data recording to some server on the ground? Then if something happens, you don’t have to search for the “box,” and the data is available immediately. Cool idea, I think.

On NPR this afternoon, about this morning’s plane crash:
“A preliminary check of the passenger manifest revealed no cause for concern.”

Translation? No Arab names on the list.

“Why does it look so fake?”
-my mother, reacting to the Star Wars Episode II trailer before “Monsters, Inc.”

I don’t see a lot of really bad movies. My friends say I’m picky, but actually I just have a highly-developed sense of what I’m going to like and what I’m not going to like.

Last night, I rented “Swordfish.”

Truly this is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in the last decade. Stupid, pointless, tasteless, unbelievable, and filled with bad acting. But what amazed me most was the level of in-your-face violence spread with a putty knife across the screen. In the first scene of the movie alone, you get to watch in slow motion as a hostage’s body explodes from the C4 strapped to her back, and the camera spins around as ball bearings also strapped to the hostage whiz by, killing bystanders and making cars explode in flames.

Things go downhill from there.

Yes, I could have (and should have) turned the damn thing off right then. But as each scene got worse and worse, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was transfixed. Interesting, too, that the plot (so to speak) of the movie had arch-villain John Travolta (!) stealing billions and killing indiscriminately in order to finance anti-terrorist actions. It’s funny that the entertainment industry wants to erase the World Trade towers from “Zoolander,” but does nothing to protect us from this unbelievably violent tripe.

Happy Birthday Matt!
Today is my brother Matt’s birthday. He’s 40. He’s having a little trouble with this anniversary. He would probably be mad if he knew I was mentioning his birthday on my weblog, but he doesn’t read it, so it’s OK. In fact, I once had a discussion with him about this weblog, and he considered it sort of perverse that someone would write this stuff for everyone to read.

The two of us lived together one summer when I was in college and he was just out of college, in Ithaca, NY. We lived in about a fifth-floor walkup, and the last flight was incredibly steep, like Rapunzel’s tower – you almost had to hold onto the handrail to haul yourself up. The apartment was above a stationery store, and I was always worried the giant 3-D pencil they used as a logo would snap off and kill someone in the street below. Matt used to order plain-cheese Domino’s pizzas for dinner – and this was back when Domino’s didn’t even try to make anything resembling food. I also recall we almost killed each other during a fight about the proper way to fry bacon.

Funny the things you remember.

He’s incredibly smart, talented, and funny, and I love him dearly. Have a great year, Matt.

Apparently while in some sort of NyQuil haze I don’t recall, I agreed to have Thanksgiving at my house this year. Words to describe me when I think about this event are: afraid, apprehensive, unsure, twitterpated. Ack!

Just call me Nostradamus. On Wednesday, I suggested that the Survivor producers find ways to break up the tribal voting blocks that make the show so predictable. And ping! So it shall be done. Three members of each tribe were switched to the other tribe last night, throwing cold water on the plans of slimy Silas and his gang of whiny Gen-Y slackers. So Teresa and Frank, the “older people” targeted for extinction, were given new life – and Silas was kicked out by unanimous vote! As Martha would say, that is a good thing.

Of course, I missed the big switching action, because I assumed the “presidential address” at 7 p.m. was being carried by all the networks. So I was watching ABC – the only network to carry the speech. D’oh! Thanks to my friends Dave and Susan, who called to discuss the big switch. Without them, I might have gone on watching Alfred E. Newman, and missed the entire show.

Since Blogger was down most of this morning, it adds a little kick to my publicizing of Big Blog Tool, a Blogger alternative weblog publishing system. They’re charging right off the bat, but it’s a very small charge – I didn’t hesitate to spend $8 for three months of access (I’m just testing it, since I’m still working on my own system). It’s the first Blogger alternative I’ve seen that follows the Blogger model: runs on their servers, but uploads the content to yours. I bet with them charging immediately, it will keep traffic down and thus help with uptime. They have some nifty features, like multiple content areas on a single page, remote templates, and “friendly links” so you can have fellow webloggers’ names translate into links to their sites automatically.

From the little I’ve seen, it looks like a good system with lots of enthusiasm and plans for the future. Bravo to their decision to charge. I’m just surprised it took this long for real Blogger competitors to emerge. Here’s hoping this is the first of many.