Blogger doesn’t seem to want to publish my changes. Well, here goes……….

When I started freelancing, I bought an IBM Thinkpad i series laptop with the DVD drive. Beautiful machine, even if it does run Windows. I didn’t think I would have much use for the DVD capability, since I don’t travel a lot, and I already have a decent setup to watch DVDs the normal way. But I’m going to be gone most of next week to a business camp for high school kids, staying in an empty apartment without so much as a TV. So I connected the laptop to some small computer speakers I had and fired up “Toy Story 2” just to test the old boy out.

I can’t tell you how cool it is to watch the Toy Story 2 outtakes on a laptop screen. I’m looking forward to this week.

How to Write Good

Now that Anil has apologized to Walt, and Deborah Branscum and Dave Winer have weighed in on the subject, the implications of Microsoft’s latest stab at world domination have started to sink in for me. I don’t know about my fellow webloggers, but I decide what my pages say. I decide what words are linked and where they go – no one else. If not, what’s the point of self-publishing? I actually cheered for Internet Explorer to blot out Netscape, so web design would get easier. Now we begin to see the real effects of a monopoly.

What if Microsoft decides to replace text on your web page with ads? What if content filters built into IE9 block your site from view because it has ‘objectionable’ content? This stuff gets scary.

“The power of the printing press belongs solely to those who own the presses.”
-A.J. Leibling

I’m proud to say that I’ve convinced my friend Amanda to begin a weblog, using Blogger and BlogSpot. (Whether we will be friends for long remains to be seen, considering the recent lack of reliability of these two amazing, free, infuriating services.) There’s only one post there now, but watch out for her once she gets going.

And my friend Kevin has (temporarily?) renamed his weblog, based on a conversation we had last night about ice cream. I’ll let you fill in the details yourself.

Anil Dash thinks Walt Mossberg (and by extension me, since I agree with him) is being paranoid about Microsoft’s ability to make any word on any web page link to whatever they want. (See previous post.) But as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

As if we needed further proof that Microsoft is evil.

I miss my Mac. About 18 months ago, I went over to the dark side, mostly because my employer was an all-PC place, and I began to work in Cold Fusion, a PC-based programming environment. And, I admit, I like to play games, and most games are for the PC. But Windows is a steaming pile of doo-doo which crashes my machine multiple times daily. Beyond that, even after this many months, it just feels wrong in a way that’s hard to explain in words. When I sit down in front of my (admittedly very nice) IBM Athlon, I tense up; when I sit in front of my Mom’s iMac, I just feel a sense of relief. I’m almost beginning to feel that owning a Mac is like belonging to the ACLU – a small gesture to stem the tide of the dark side, one person at a time.

Dell is apparently going to design a computerized voting system to try to eliminate errors in the current chad-based tabulations which caused so much hoo-ha in Florida last year. What’s alternatively funny and horrifying to me is that I believe it will be impossible to design a system that a fair number of people will not be able to screw up. Some of those Florida ballots may have been slightly confusing. But if you can’t figure out how to make your mark for Bush or Gore, should you really be voting at all?

And as Jimmy Fallon said on Weekend Update, “Oh, that’s a good idea. We know how much elderly people love computers.”

Invention idea: someone should build a combination phone/answering machine with a “movie” button, which would mute both the ringer and the message speaker for two hours. That way, you can avoid the distraction of the phone, and not have to remember to turn everything back on again. I always want to “let the machine get it” when I’m watching a movie at home, but then hearing the answering machine (right smack in the living room) is more disruptive than just answering the phone. Someone could make millions on this. Millions, I tell ya!

I’ve been distracting myself this afternoon with my new collection of Before & After design newsletters, which came in the mail yesterday. Great publication. So I saw a tutorial on 3-D boxes and had to try it. What do you think?