Category: Blogosphere

Many Sun bloggers have been trying to draw South Park characters that look like them – all because this crazy German SP fan Janina Köppel designed a South Park Studio using Flash. (And she did a really nice job of it.) Anyway, here’s my effort – click on the thumbnail for a larger image (if you must)….

Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin‘s blog: the Caesar’s Bath question: ‘list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”‘. So let’s see….

1. Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious…. I’d rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.

2. SUVs: They’re ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. (“Are you compensating for something, perhaps?” No, that’s tacky.)

3. TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I’ve been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth….

4. The Matrix: It’s not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think “brains in vats”.) But it wasn’t even a good film…. (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)

5. Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C’mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can’t believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun – OK?

If you have a moment, please check out this Action Alert from the Lupus Foundation of America. They’re not after your money; they just want a little help in getting the attention of Congress-critters who seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the urgent and the important. (Ritalin for all of ’em: that’s my prescription.)
And thanks. Many thanks.

Over at total information awareness I encountered a new blog meme: name five people you’d like to blog with. I interpret this as “name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you’d like to read and link to”; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar. Anyway, here are my five, avoiding the obvious choices like Einstein, Mark Twain and Ben Franklin:

• Walt Whitman

• Erasmus

• William James

• René Descartes

• Richard Feynman

Hopefully these choices are self-explanatory. My guiding principle is that of the 17th century English diarist, John Evelyn: Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (‘explore everything; keep the best’).

The blogs where I read about this said something about “tagging” other bloggers, but that seems inconsistent with the spirit of blogging. Memes spread if they deserve to. Let’s see if this one does. Your turn. (However, if I were tagging, I’d choose Terry, Alec Muffett, and Jonathan Schwartz.)

Many, many Sun employees are now working from their homes in every corner of the USA world. Many have chosen to live in low-tax states. How is this New York ruling (reported in Slashdot) going to affect this? Will Alaskan telecommuters wind up paying California income taxes if their VPN connections terminate in Menlo Park? Once again, technology meets tax policy, and the result is going to be a mess….

“hal9000(jr) writes ‘The Boston Globe is running this story on an out-of-state programmer working for a New York company who had to pay state taxes. ”New York has the right to tax 100% of a nonresident employee’s income derived from New York sources,’ according to the 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals. The court relied on a fairness rule called the ‘convenience of the employer’ under law that says a worker’s income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.’ “

AOL reacted pretty quickly to all the negative publicity about their AIM Terms of Service. The new language is much better. The power of the web, eh?

The new text (with my emphases):“You or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to public areas of any AIM Product. However, by submitting or posting Content to public areas of AIM Products (for example, posting a message on a message board or submitting your picture for the ‘Rate-A-Buddy’ feature), you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. Once you submit or post Content to any public area on an AIM Product, AOL does not need to give you any further right to inspect or approve uses of such Content or to compensate you for any such uses. AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating Content posted to public areas of AIM Products.”

Welcome to the revised AIM Terms of Service from AOL. The interesting thing is that AOL wants the benefits of being a common carrier (e.g. they disclaim all responsibility for what passes through their system) while at the same time gaining full rights over that content. Would you use a VoIP service from somebody that reserved the right to record your conversations and publish them? If these various communications media (POTS, VoIP, IM, email, etc.) are really converging, let’s make sure that AOL doesn’t set the standard for privacy:

“Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL… the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.”

(Via BoingBoing.)

Testing bitsplitter’s Vagablog tool.
Yet another PalmOS blog tool.
[I’ve just fixed the post – yet another tool with no categories and “first five words” subject line.]

This is my first attempt to blog using my Treo. The thumb keyboard is ok: the biggest problem is simply navigating around complex CSS-structured pages on a small screen.