A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I can’t figure out what’s wrong, but when I look at the home page all I see is the first-draft-with-typo version of my first entry of the day and nothing since. They Events Log appears to show regular uploads and my local versions of the pages are up-to-date, so I don’t know what the problem is and I don’t know why I’m posting about it because if it’s a real problem you can’t see this post and if it’s an illusion that’s only preventing me from seeing the updates then this post is less than useless.

Call it blowing off steam. Time to reboot. But why is this happening?

…

Well, that didn’t do the trick. I looked at the files on the local Radio server and they look as they should. You can even go to today’s archive page and see at least some of the missing posts, but I still don’t see them on the home page no matter how often Radio claims to have upstreamed the local version.

This is maddening. It’s antiblogging. [Radio Free Blogistan]

You poor bastard. Welcome to the dark side of Radio.

John Andrew Holmes. “It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.” [Quotes of the Day]

Bismarck. “When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice.” [Quotes of the Day]

Share Your Queries. Do you use Mozilla or Netscape 6? Do you use custom keyword bookmarks for searching? If so, please take this opportunity to share those searches you find useful. [kuro5hin.org]

Whups. I almost didn’t click through to this. That would’ve been a very big mistake. I figured something like this was possible, but I just didn’t think about it very much. (I don’t think I would have come up with this technique if I had either.)

The 8 Most Common Myths About Teamwork.

are debunked here. My summary:

1. Responsibility is individual, not diffuse.


2. Teambuilding is a bottom-up process.


3. Motivation counts more than skills.


4. People must love the goal, not necessarily one another.


5. Self-interest is good.


6. Getting the job done and treating one another humanely are not antagonistic.


7. Teambuilding happens in the course of work.


8. Keep the plans under scrutiny throughout.

[Seb's Open Research]

More great stuff via Seb. This is a pretty good read.

Holy Crap! This works!

tell application "Finder"
     say "I'm sorry Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that."
end tell

One for PingBack.

I agree with Ray.  I don’t want pingback, trackback, or refererback.  I get enough feedback with comments, spam free e-mail, and links to IM.  If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

È Quite frankly I do more than scan my referrer lists “once in a while” as Ray puts it.  I am always scanning them, looking for the breadcrumbs of someone or something interesting that has passed by.  Always on the lookout for that connection that could have value for me or my business.   I get as much spam as anyone, but I’ll put up with a future of pingbots right now if it means I make the connections that helps my business to succeed.  Just like I put up with spam to use email today.  I can’t afford to pull up the draw bridge.

PingBack may not be good for John, Ray, and others on the path well trodden.  But I think there are lots of people like myself who see things differently.  I want to know when someone is talking about what I am talking about and especially when they are talking about something I’ve written.

I don’t know all the answers to the path I’m on, it’s only through shared dialogue and the connections that I am making that I have a hope of moving forward.  I see PingBack as a valuable way of making those extra connections that I need, of closing the loops, and getting the feedback.   If Ray & John don’t want to come to that party that’s fine, but I hope that, their not turning up, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a party at all.

To put it another way my blog isn’t the government emergency broadcast system, it’s The Frasier Crane show.

So go ahead and ping me.

I’m listening.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I want:

• true aggregation of my referrers over time. (right now I use perl to hit the radio page every night at about 2:45 eastern time.) with timestamps.
• Notification of comments (got that through the “Radio Comment Feeds!” thingie I set up yesterday.)
• notification of linkbacks and cross posts. This is of course imposible except within the blogosphere. The only solution I can think of is to scan referrers for forward links. Yeesh, that would work.
• A whole lot of other stuff I’m working on, which prevents me from talking about it just yet ;-) (Did someone say “Interest Engine”? No. Nobody did. Tee hee.)

Just finished reading “Next” by Michael Lewis. More over here.