Oblomovka

2002-08-06»

Dave Eggers talks about his latest book. I’m glad he’s living in San Francisco. Seth took me to the Pirate Supply Store a while back. There were these extremely McSweeneyesque-style signs all over the place – on lard, and scurvy, and the use of eyeglasses. I’d be a bit afraid if anyone else was aping Eggers quite that precisely. Turns out it’s Eggers and the McSweeney’s Permanent Staff all along, and just a the flimsy front for his children’s writing lab out the back. Apparently it’s all funded from the pirate lard sales.

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2002-08-05»

According to this Slashdot post (and who could possibly doubt those), in Kansas you can check your home’s power consumption online on an hour by hour basis. I’d love to have those data points to snick into my evil number-crunching bots. Sadly, I live in California, where such eldritch magic is viewed as the work of Satan by our beneficent energy companies.

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The unstoppable Lloyd Wood sent me this PDF presentation, The First 31 Years of the Internet — An Insider’s View, for NTK. I’m going to stick it here first otherwise I’ll forget about it. It’s just the slides for a talk, but it stands alone as a great thumbnail explanation of a lot of the historical and future issues with the Net – including the Rise of the Stupid Network and the less-than-smooth political machinations behind the Net’s organising powers. It’s written by Bob Braden, who took over from Jon Postel as keeper of the RFCs.

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A wireless RS232 cable, courtesy of 802.11b. I really badly needed one of these about two years ago. I wonder if they’ll be able to do the same with USB?

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2002-08-04»

I spent a good hour ploughing through SuperSnail’s images of OSCON last year. And now he’s done the same for the people of OSCON 2002, and they’re just as funny and revealing.

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Dave Green angrily suggested I get a fucking search feature working on this site, so I’ve done so. It’s to the left. It doesn’t work very well if you search for URLs. It tries to “highlight” the search term, and so mangles any thing inside a tag, but I can’t work out a way of fixing that without parsing HTML.

One nice spin off, though, is that now my RSS feed does searches too. So if you want to keep an updated list of all entries where I mention the word “BBC”, say, you can subscribe to http://www.oblomovka.com/rss.php3?q=BBC and you’ll get just that.

I have a feeling that sooner or later, I’ll wish I optimised that code.

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I have made an unsolicited promise to my editor that I will never ever mention the looming arrival of my kid in the column. It’s a rule I’ll break eventually, but, well, you’ve got to exercise some discipline. (Except here, of course, where I can bang on about the topic all the time. Ha!)

I’m not sure why I made this commitment. I think it’s because I know at some deep level that my family is not as Universally Fascinating as I am currently being rewired by my own endochrinology to believe. Of course, computers aren’t either – but that’s okay, because those of us who are deluded into loving them are in a minority. So I still feel I’m catering to an underappreciated taste, which is the next best thing to being tasteful.

The other reason is because no matter how much I write, I’ll never be as good at discussing parenthood as my friend Juliet Jones, whose chaotic, mournful, celebratory and hilarious cries for help live on an obscure site in the middle of the Web, instead of the front page of the Women’s bit of the Guardian, or wrapped up in a best-selling book, or plastered in mile-high letters at the North Pole, or something.

One of the reasons why I hate columns about parenthood is you just know that the writers are mincing everything to make a good story – convey that they’re a good parent. Even the “my life is chaos!” pieces you get in the funny papers are junking the truth for a joke. Juliet’s pieces are bone-jarring honest.

Billie is a “lie in bed and yell till someone comes merchant”. Olly on the other hand, arrives like some dishevelled traveller carrying his most important possessions (pillow, toy, book) and sobs by the side of the bed. The Zombies to his Witchdoctor influence we rise, make room for him and one or other of us wanders off to find a new place of rest. One of the most bizarre and Kafkaesque stories I heard of nighttime waking was from a guy who did some plumbing work here. He said that every night his child comes into their bedroom, wakes them up and asks them to take him back to bed. Talk about playing with your mind.

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The consume.net mailing list folk have spotted a bargain: British branches of PC World are selling the SMC 2632 PCI WiFi Card for £49.95, which is about half the standard price. And, coincidentally, just two-thirds of the monthly subscription for BT’s new WiFi hotspot service. BT either have no idea about competitive pricing, or no idea about how to roll out a cheap network. Maybe both.

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2002-08-03»

A random mail from a random someone asking for advice.

Dear Sir, Imlooking for advice, & i went onto the net to seek it, please can you help me? my son had an accident, & i was put in touch with a solicitor…

… and it looks like the solicitor might have taken more than their fair share (or at least not explained the process well enough for their client to understand).

I don’t know jack about what to do about this, so I told this man what I would do. I’d find the local Citizens Advice Bureau, and ask them. I googled for a bureau near him, and sent him the URL and phone number.

Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He’d run away to Britain and she hadn’t heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her – again not much, but something.

Cory talks about using spare brain-cycles across the planet to solve problems. I think this is the closest I get. Not that my brain-cycles are that precious anyway. I’m wasting them right now, thinking too much about the strangeness of one word: bureau. We don’t start bureaux enough these days. We need to start the Distributed Bureau of Investigation.

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2002-07-31»

The best trick in blogging: wait a while, and someone else will write your entry for you. Dave Winer said yesterday:

Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it’s weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that’s freedom. To me it seems obvious that that’s slavery.

… which seemed to me so wrong, on so many levels. But it took a better man than me to write the gentlemanly reply (and from more experience than I can provide too):

I’m surprised by each of these sentiments: that we’re not writing usable software, that we’re not making money, and that it’s coercion (and thus slavery).

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