When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · June
· · · · 05 (4 entries)
38 Weeks · Everything happens at once. The pregnancy draws heavily to its end, the house is being renovated (we need another room), the kid’s in baseball playoffs and rehearsing for his summer festival and school is winding down. Work’s busy, too ...
BTL · I always have a big input queue of things I’d like to write about, but never enough writing time to drain it. So I try to spend that time on things where I’m in new territory or making an original point, rather than pointing to something out there, however excellent; because anything that’s worthy of linkage will have picked up some, even if it’s not from me. In recent months, I’ve noticed that an unreasonable number of things I’d like to have linked to have been from the BTL blog over at ZDNet; Farber and Berlind do a remarkable job of digging out industry trends and events, and then adding value by saying smart things about them. And this matters; for a couple of years there I thought the computer trade press might self-destruct completely. To be sure, it’s a pathetic shadow of its former self, but I sure hope the remaining few points of light are self-sustaining; because our business needs its professional storytellers. Along with BTL, I rely most heavily on Jon Udell and, these days, ars technica.
Stop the Metaphors! · Rich McManus says the Web is a platform, and reports that per Arrington, it’s an OS. I think this whole menagerie of metaphors around the Web has never been helpful and we should just stop dreaming them up. The Web isn’t a platform or a database or an API or an OS a cloud or a clickstream or any other of those things. In fact, the Web isn’t even a thing, it’s a mesh of agreements with a nice straightforward engineering rulebook. Play by the rules and you can be part of it and build something great, struggle against them and you’ll look lame and you’ll fail. But don’t try to analogize it; sometimes the world has new things in it and you just have to deal with them as they are.
Edmonton vs. Carolina · I was born in Edmonton and have roots there, thus I’m firmly partisan in the current Stanley Cup championship series; anyhow the notion of a championship hockey team from Carolina seems all wrong somehow. For connaisseurs of hockey and of fine writing you can’t beat Colby Cosh, who bleeds, uh, whatever colour corresponds to Edmonton. His hand-rolled duct-taped blogging system doesn’t extend to twenty-first century fripperies such as permalinks, but here are temporary links to his coverage of the five Edmonton-Anaheim games: 1 2 3 4 5. Cosh’s RSS feed doesn’t actually work to the extent of being able to click on the entries (in my aggregator at least) but I suspect his write-up on the current series will be definitive. He also serves as an existence proof that not all right-wing Albertans are parochial hicks. The first game just ended; the last-minute lapse was appalling, but if Hurricanes goalie Cam Ward stays that hot, the Oilers are toast anyhow.
