Month: September 2003

Happy New Year, and would you like to buy a ring?

I got an email today that started off like this: “I would like to wish all my friends around the world Shana Tova, K’tivah V’chatimah Tova, A happy New Year, health, happiness and peace for all of us.” Featured prominently below, a link to a website offering “art and treasures from the holy land”. Jewish spam. I think this is a first.

The Kendall Flower Shop (242 Main St – Cambridge, MA) has fresh fruit out in front of their door among the flowers on display. I often stop by and pick up an apple or banana on the way to Sloan. Every time, the fruit is fresh and delicious. The regulars drop off their cash, 50 cents per piece, on the right end of the front counter. Sometimes wordlessly, with just a “hello” nod to the shopkeeper. Little things like this make me happy.

Can the lazy Web stand in for eBay?

Due to recent furniture upgrades at Andrew Grumet LLC’s world wide headquarters, I’m looking to unload a 19″ trinitron monitor. The monitor works great, it’s just too large for my new space. An eBay search for this item shows that it’s going for $40 to $140. So, whaddya say, how about $100? I’m not interested in boxing it up so you’d have to be willing to drop by my place in Somerville, MA to get it. If you’re interested and live nearby, or if you’ll be in town for BloggerCon, comment on this post or send me an email.

Update The answer is apparently no. The good news is that I found a friend who was willing to take it off my hands. Now just have to figure out how to get rid of the rest of my crap :->

I recently came into possession of a Mac, but am hopelessly unproductive on it. I still can’t figure out how to execute one of my favorite Windows shortcuts, “Show Desktop” (or Windows-D), which hides everything so that you can easily locate and bring forward just the window you want.

Over the weekend I thumbed through a copy of this book. Could it be my gateway to Mac salvation?

Unsolicited advice: weblogs are about flow

I’ve noticed this thought trend among technologists to want to contain, control and constrain the weblog information space. Some want the content to have more structure so that it can be searched using advanced methods. Some think about establishing uniform style rules so that every piece by every author looks and feels the same. Some exert special effort to craft each post into a work of genius. Some want to track each news message that they read, “keeping” some, marking others as read, deleting others.

The way I see it, these folks are thinking about weblogs in a static way, like a mid-90s era homepage or a Government database that gets distributed on CD ROM. But weblogs are about flow. They are closer to jazz improvisation than Beethoven’s fifth.

To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: “If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don’t stop! Hit it again and keep going”. Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun.

To really get into weblogs as a reader, try to avoid micromanaging each weblog post. Holding your posts too closely will often lead to one of two outcomes: a) you’ll have a narrow subscriptions list, maybe 4 or 5 sites, because you can’t possibly follow more (experienced readers can follow dozens); b) you’ll wind up with thousands of unread posts in your aggregator (the horrors of email all over again). I’ve written about this elsewhere.

In short, free your mind, and your weblog will follow.

Ben Adida: “Today, we have the technology to cheaply deliver any piece of music ever recorded to your car, stereo, or portable music player within seconds (remember the old Qwest commercials?). Why isn’t it happening?”