Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Just encountered a weird run of commercials - within the same break, I saw a Victoria's Secret ad with a Bob Dylan song in it, and then a hotel ad with a Johnny Cash song in it. Weird indeed.
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Things Fall Apart, The Center Cannot Hold Weak president losing hold over party. Boy, it's clear that GOoPer congresscritters are reading the same polls we are.The U.S. Senate defied a second White House... [Daily Kos] Ok, it's a stretch to even vaguelly refer to the Bushies as the center, but hey. I like Yeats. Read Kos - the rats are leaving the sinking ship that is the Bush administration.
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Hillary as Clark's Campaign Co-Chair? Just to make the Clark entry even more interesting, Fox News is reporting that Hillary will be Clark's co-campaign chair. Will this be a good or bad thing for Clark? I don't know yet - it's a question of whether the Hillary baggage causes more problems in the general election than the positives you gain by having her on-board in the primary, both in symbolic ways and the more direct ways she can (and will!) contribute...

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Check Talking Points Memo for some good Clark-in-the-race analysis...
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Here Comes Your Man, pt. II CNN: Clark to enter presidential race. "He's made his decision and will announce it tomorrow in Little Rock," said Mark Fabiani, a spokesman for Clark. [Scripting News] Whoo!
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Testing Trackback... This is just an experiment - trying to see whether TrackBack is working at all...so ignore this link. EDIT: Ah. Good. It works.
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I Like My Toys Can I just say how incredibly cool it is to have an MP3 player with something like 2,000 songs on it, randomly playing its way through the whole list? I'm lovin' it.
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Thank God I'm Not A Hawks Fan... posted by lilnemo to Basketball September 15 6:04 PM. AOL pulls out of deal with David McDavid.The Hawks have been in ownership limbo since the end of the 2001-2002 season. Texas Businessman David McDavid was going to ride in on a white horse with his group of investors and save the day. Even pal Mike Dunleavy Sr. was going to join the posse as they resurrected the franchise. None of this happened. Instead it appears AOL has shifted gears and agreed to sell to Boston businessman Steve Belkin and a group of Atlantan investors. Are the Hawks in the clear now? Are good things ahead? Or is this more of the old 'same old same old'? [SportsFilter] Interesting - a lot of Belkin's appeal when he was making plays for the Celtics and then the expansion Charlotte Bobcats was that he brought Larry Bird with him...well, Larry's in Indiana now, so Belkin's just a money man now. Then again, I guess that's all AOL really cares about anyway. I wonder if any of the rest of the Belkin-Bird basketball brain-trust (way to do the accidental alliteration...) will be coming with - M.L. Carr, Jan Volk, et al...

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www.verisignblows.com Feel our awesome naming fu. Verisign modifies the infrastructure of the net to point back to themselves. Verisign has rigged all .com and .net mistyped domains to reroute to their branded search page. This makes them effectively the biggest cybersquatter on the net, and will make it impossible for most spam filters at the network level to operate as well as seriously complicating the lives of network administrators everywhere. [MetaFilter] I'm gonna set up a script that randomly generates gibberish .com domains and then pulls down the web page there, just to beat up on Verisign's server. Ok, maybe not, but I feel like I should. This is just *dirty*.

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Anti-British Feeling In The United States. Kick A Brit In The Nuts: We've heard enough about anti-Americanism. What about anti-British feeling? Check out the USian website. Is there still a lingering, post-colonial resentment in the U.S., Australia and South Africa? Why not, apparently, in Canada or New Zealand? Is it anti-British, i.e. including the Scots and the Welsh, or just anti-English? Finally, is Usian the best collective noun for citizens of the U.S.A.? Will American eventually become politically incorrect, even though no one calls a Canadian an American? Sorry about so many questions. Me confused European! [MetaFilter] It doesn't seem that strange to me that the US, Australia, and South Africa would still have some hints of anti-British feelings, while Canada and New Zealand don't - the US became independent via a war, Australia's population is largely of Irish heritage (combined with the bad mojo of its origin as a prison colony and lingering bitterness over being abandoned by the British during WWII), and South Africa only came to exist as we know it due to the British conquering the Boer states in the Boer War. Canada, on the other hand, seperated peacefully, as did New Zealand, which had much less in the way of uncomfortable history than Australia. And yeah, I think it's anti-English, not anti-British.

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What Could Have Been... Microsoft fires Web conferencing salvo. Microsoft this week will unveil Office Live Meeting, the first service offered as part of its Office productivity suite. Although the first version will pepper only a few enhancements above the service Microsoft acquired from PlaceWare earlier this year, the move signals Microsoft's long-term aspiration to bring online meetings into the enterprise collaboration platform fold. [InfoWorld: Top News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] This new MS product, along with WebEx, and equivalents from Oracle and IBM, is very reminiscent of a product from Cisco called the Cisco Collaboration Server. That's what I started working on when I got to Cisco, and I still run its builds and branching policy. It's focused mainly on the contact center market - Lands End was one of the most visible customers before CCS was bought by Cisco, for example - but we looked into pushing it into the elearning/emeeting markets a couple years back. Didn't happen - that was a shame. While the new products in this vein coming out now are probably more advanced than CCS is now (it hasn't had serious development resources on it for well over a year) but two and a half years ago, it blew everything else out of the water. Ah well...

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David Harris Is An Interesting Guy Remember that semi-gibberish post from a few days ago, linked from David Harris? Well, it turns out that it was, at least partially, an experiment in meme propagation. Take a look.
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