Two applications I used daily in the 90s/2000s but don’t exist today and I haven’t sufficiently found replacements for are MS Money and MS Access.
Thanks for ruining everything, Bill Gates.
For couples that book my David Copperfield package I do a cool magic trick and make your guests disappear.
Take & Leanna this afternoon in Tuscany.
WinRAR
Three years ago today I called for a new Saint to be named in Melbourne. turns out Aussies are super compliant and boring so nothing happened.
Saint Valentine of Rome was martyred on February 14 in AD 269 after he continued marrying people when marriage was banned. Weddings are banned in Melbourne from Thursday. Will there be a Saint of Batmania?
Jake Meador in The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church in The Atlantic:
Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.
If there was a major crime cast on society in the last generation it was this. The simple idea that professional and financial success reign.
I love my email. Not because I love my email but because due to the swings and round-a-bouts of modern life needing email, and because writers and publications I want to hear from send emails, I’ve figured out how to have an email account that I love. Which according to my friend Steven, isn’t possible. Perhaps it is not dissimilar to training a demon to do the housework.
But one day, I can only hope I am so unimportant, so unneeded, so unplugged from the swings and the round-a-bouts, that I can profess what Don Knuth wrote in the nineties:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.
His very-90s blog post is seemingly popular for advocating that the hyphen be dropped from e-mail, but I am so inspired to reach the stage of life that Knuth quotes in the post:
`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.’ – Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
A former boss told me that as you become more important in a job you start getting more keys, and you seemingly start on a path to have so many keys. Keys to the front door, back door, your office, someone else’s office, the stationary cupboard, the storage room, etc etc.
But then you reach a stage in that job where you are so important that you start handing keys back, and all of a sudden you have no keys.
Being that important sounds lovely, but I’m more excited about being in such a position that my importance in the world is not an ongoing concern. Instead, my friendship, my love, my efforts would be so valuable to my friends and family that none of us would be measuring importance - or likes, views, follows, or subscriptions - but that we would be in that beautiful utopia of just being a friend.
I was today years old when I learned that the word ‘homographic’ didn’t mean what my brain assumed it meant.
homograph - noun each of two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings and origins.
Like the word bass means a fish, an instrument, and a sound range.
Not recorded images or photos of certain people doing things.
Doing God’s work over here, keeping the Gold Coast honest about it’s Super Mario koala
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the All Saints sung, “flexing vocabulary runs through my head”. Not, “sex and the vocabulary runs through my head.” Not like I’d thought the latter for the last 26 years or anything.
📷🇮🇹 Siena, Tuscany
For an interesting NASA and Apple-related fall down a rabbit hole, start with the origin of the name of “The Whole Earth Catalog” in 1966, skip forward to 1972 when a whole earth photo was made.
Then take a turn to one of Steve Jobs’ favourite sayings “Stay hungry stay foolish” which he quoted in 2005 at Stanford in his famous commencement speech.
Ad then wrap back around to how the whole earth image as an iPhone wallpaper came to be.
Welcome to my brain, where I just think about this stuff.
I, for one, welcome our new British open web overlords
The BBC has embraced ActivityPub, nice work @[email protected]! I’ve always thought that the long term advantage from a commercial and brand point of view is to be able to say “follow us” and the words that follow are your own brand and your own network.
The power of Mastodon, ActivityPub, the Fediverse, means that the BBC can be on Mastodon, and someone else can be on a completely different platform that supports ActivityPub (like Threads or Micro.blog for example) and you can follow them. For example this very blog, because it’s hosted on Micro.blog means you can follow @[email protected] on your favourite ActivityPub service, like Mastodon, Threads/Tumblr/Flickr one day soon, Pixelfed, or maybe even X if Leon gets his head right, and you can read the blog there. Even WordPress has an official ActivityPub plugin now!
In fact I could imagine that sometime in the future there’ll be a new service that perhaps is more suited to a broadcaster like the BBC and they can transition from Mastodon to it, yet the social graph remains.
When brands and companies operate their own Fediverse instances you can get the updates from your electricity company, you can follow your celebrity or known-person-that-is-a-cool-person and they all get to control their brand and their experience. Instead of mess like this and this.
They are not at Twitter’s, X’s, Meta’s, Google’s or my mercy.
They also are not at the whim of a verification service that is either a secret black box experience, or thousands of dollars a month.
We’re using social.bbc as the domain, so you can be sure these accounts are genuinely from the BBC.
This is the social media future I’d like to see. Where following someone or something is as simple as sending and receiving email.
As a large, high profile, public service organisation, we’ve had to work through a fair number of issues to get this far and we’ve had advice and support from several teams across the BBC. Explaining the federated model can be a challenge as people are much more familiar with the centralised model of ownership. We’ve had to answer questions like “Are we running our own social network?” (well, we’re kind of hosting a small section of a social network) and “Are we hosting a user’s content?” (well, we don’t allow users to create accounts or post from our server, but they can reply to our posts from their own servers, and then their posts will appear next to ours and then they might be stored on our server and it all gets quite complicated).
Does ActivityPub and the Fediverse have issues? Yes. Should that stop us from moving forward and trying to figure it all out? No.
Tuscany for a week or so
Look, all I want to do with my life is make enough money so I can afford to buy Yahoo! which owns AOL which owns Netscape so I can once more have a web browser that has an animated N in the top right again.
Shane Parrish on fs.blog with, Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You, is such an encouraging read today. I was only thinking about how we more often than not think that everyone is looking at us as I was on a beach in Puglia yesterday considering very quickly stripping out of my swimmers into dry pants. I almost did until Britt suggested that everyone would see me. I still wonder whether they would have, and I think not. Most people don’t notice me, don’t see me, and don’t know me. Even less read this blog.
What is Hanlon’s Razor you may ask?
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.
The fs.blog article stretches the razor out to some real world artefacts:
The media:
Modern media treats outrage as a profitable commodity. This often takes the form of articles which often attribute to malice that which could be easily be explained by incompetence or ignorance.
Not everyone is out to get you.
Years from now the people of Puglia will still talk of the strange man who came from the land down under, where women glow and the men have takeaway American coffee with cold milk. I said, “Do you speak-a my language?” and they just smiled and gave me an espresso with a cold milk drink on the side.
Imagine your audience are the stupidest people alive
About 20 years ago, somewhere early 2003 from memory, I learned the most important lesson I’d ever been taught in broadcasting and business, from Stan Hillard:
(When you’re broadcasting) imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive, but treat them with the upmost respect.
It’s an axiom employee daily. Assuming the audience doesn’t know the backstory, they don’t know your reasoning or motivation, or they simply haven’t been listening. It’s about inclusivity, with the upmost respect for them.
On a side note, in trying to find where Stan was at today, I stumbled across this piece I wrote for Radio Today ten years ago. Looking back it feels rude at the time but still true today.
I reinstalled the Twitter app when X first appeared just so I could experience this firsthand, in the flesh
Opportunity cost and Eggs Benedict
Leaving Puglia today and I’m struck by the thought, after having experienced about thirty different international communities and societies over the last year that there is an opportunity cost to every society.
I’ve left every community thinking “this was great, but …” identifying trade-offs and compromises made to build that society.
Like Puglia for example, I love it here, but there’s no breakfast culture. In fact most of the world doesn’t celebrate breakfast like Australians do, and weirdly enough that’s possibly important to me.
Perhaps utopia is impossible because it would simply be the longest list of compromises ever made? Perhaps getting a good breakfast means you have to live in a society where everyone bottles their feelings and pretends to be polite in traffic, as opposed to Italy where you find out how the driver feels straight away but they won’t road rage you?
Is that the price I want to pay for eggs Benedict and a long black with cream?