When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · February
· · · · 21 (3 entries)
No Right Hand · We have a cat that’s getting old and thus needs more and more medical procedures. Three weeks ago, he seriously objected to one of these and bit me on the right middle finger, hard. The first antibiotic failed to clear up the infection and now I’m the one needing more and more medical procedures. It turns out that if you can’t bend or exert any force with your middle finger, that hand becomes remarkably useless. So I’m off to California today on a one-handed basis, should be interesting. But, I can type.
HST · There just haven’t been that many books in the history of the world that can make you laugh out loud, over and over, and anybody who writes one is OK by me, and Hunter S. Thompson did. Plus, he changed what the word “journalism” means, plus he helped advance the general understanding of the U.S. electoral process. But maybe those things are less important than a couple hundred pages of perfect comedy. The bloggers are waxing graceful in eulogy; I like Doc’s take. HST was a very strong man, but the fact is that decadence in general, and cocaine in particular, take things away that usually don’t come back. [Update: Gunnar Peterson wrote me about this unusual reflection on HST, by his son.]
Dodging Thought Leaders · At the Northern Voice party I was talking with Scoble about the Google “smart-tags”-redux mini-scandal. He was pointing out once again that Google doesn’t have to play by the rules that govern Microsoft. (For how long, I wonder?) I remarked that I hadn’t heard about any first-hand experiences since few people I work with live on Windows. But Lauren was there and I’d sent her a pointer to the Google thing, so I asked her what she thought. “How would I know?”, she said, “It’s IE-only.” The proportion of thought leaders who use IE on Windows is trending to zero. But you’d have to be really paranoid—more than me, even—to suspect Google of a deliberate dodge. Whatever; releasing anything IE-only generally sucks.
