The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Developers _Are_ Users

Adam Curry: “I want to be creating and distributing content to everybody in the simpelest way possible. Blogger, MoveableType and Typepad users surely want the same.”

I’m a user. I’m also a developer. In fact, as a developer, I’m a user. As a developer, it is important to me that I chose formats that will scale to my needs. RSS 2.0 is simple, and good for doing a great many things, particularly syndicating weblog (or similar) content. However, “syndication” feeds and aggregators are becoming useful for other types of information as well. Apple and Amazon have touched on the edges of this, but so much more is actually possible.
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Enter The RSS Ninja

Adam Curry: “[Google] is betting its future and shareholders money with a plan has historically been proven to fail. That is sad.”

Adam is referring, here, to Googles support for ATOM. There are so many things wrong with this, that I’m not entirely sure where to begin.
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When I Grow Up…

Mother: “When you grow up are you going to meet a girl and leave me?”

Son: “No, Mom, I’ll never leave you. I’ll sail to you. Every night when you sleep in your bed on my [pirate] ship, I’ll snuggle you.”

Caleb, our youngest son, wants to be a pirate when he grows up. No, not the kind that downloads crappy, cut-off .MP3s from Kazaa, the kind that sails the high seas and lives the hyper-romanticized life depicted in pirate movies. He wants to have two kids. One boy and one girl. He’ll name his daughter Sara, after his aunt Sara, and he’ll name is son Sean, after his brother.

Caleb is four years old. I certainly hope he DOES get to grow up and live on a ship, marry the pretty girl and have his two kids. I could, however, do without the murdering and plundering, though. We’ve got a few years left to try and talk him out of it.

Play Along At Home

Via Tim Bray: “…Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. I would add to the instructions: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.”

From The New Hacker’s Dictionary, Third Edition: “The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.”

This is like a bad blog chain letter…

Well, _I_ Won’t Be Switching Anytime Soon

Dave Winer: “[Gigablast is] designed to make transitioning from Google as painless as possible.”

How about a little vanity for a Saturday? When I search for “Cameron Watters” (quotes omitted in the actual search) on Google, Yahoo, alltheweb and Alta Vista, my site is the first (un-sponsored) link. On Gigablast, Teoma and Wisenut I don’t even rate a first page listing. All the results those engines do list on the first page are by and large to the same place.

One other small downside about Gigablast: The Add a URL feature is disabled at the moment. It’s probably just some technical thing that’ll be resolved soon enough. I probably shouldn’t jump to any conclusions and accuse anybody of a conspiracy or anything before all the evidence is in. That would be really foolish.

UPDATE: I’ve removed some of the stronger language in this post that may have been cause for offense to a prominent blogger. My original comments were tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings and my comments may have crossed that line. Mea Culpa (sp?)

Do Formats Really Matter That Much?

In the below entry, I expresse concern regarding Dave Winer’s belief that it should be illegal for Google to demonstrate a preference for a given data format. As I’ve thought about this, it has become clearer to me just how wrong-headed such a belief is. Antitrust considerations aside, I’m not sure I believe that it is even fundamentally wrong for Google to demonstrate a preference for a particular format per se.
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The Tin-Foil Hat Club Strikes Again

Dave Winer:“I never in a million years thought Google would stoop this low, even Microsoft on its worst day never played this dirty.”

It appears that Google is fast becoming the “Evil Corporate Giant” de jour. And with Dave leading the “Shoot First, Ask Questions Later” crowd, it is not surprising to see so much invective about the alleged slight to RSS 2.0.
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“The Apprentice” Finale

Let’s start with Omarosa. She’s a liar, an increadibly brazen bitch, and worst of all, she’s disloyal. I don’t think she’s taken responsibility for anything she’s done wrong. After playing the race card to defend her obvious inability to be friendly to people not interested in licking her pumps, she’s lost any credibility she might have had.

Kwame should’ve fired her, no matter what it took. In the end, it probably cost him the job. Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would hire her ever again, but this world is full of all types.

As for the rest of the finale, I thought Bill clearly did the better job. Kwame definitely relied to heavily on people that had already demonstrated their lack of value earlier in the show.

For the record, I picked Bill at the outset before any episodes had aired simply based on my reading of his online bio. I actually picked one male and one female contestant that first week. I was pretty close with my pick of Katrina to be the last woman standing.

Does This Make Me A Loser?

I just downloaded the entire William Hung CD from the iTunes Music Store. Does that make me a loser?

Now that I think about it, it’s likely that owning a copy of Hansen’s MMMBop single had already more than qualified me for such a label.

Me = Grammar god

Today, a friend sent me a link to the blog of another friend of his. While looking over it briefly, I noticed this post about english grammar.

Unlike Jacob, I don’t have any great 80s movie pics to associate with my post, but I did take the little quiz he linked to. This is what it said:

You are a GRAMMAR gOD!

If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. Congratulations and thank you!

Nuff Said!

Internal Dialogue: I’m not really that competitive am I? That I’m excited to win a grammar nazi contest. How pathetic.

All capital ‘g’s in “god” were replaced with lowercase versions for obvious reasons.

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s

A former employer of mine is in the news today. Apparently, they’ve been cheating on their corporate taxes for the past 10 years or so. Doesn’t surprise me, really. The first clue should’ve been the maintenance of foreign residence in the Bahamas and Cypress. The only more obvious tipoff would’ve been living in the Cayman Islands.

I guess it just goes to show there really isn’t much to gain by trying to get over on the IRS. Personally, I usually overpay a little. They’ll send it back.

New Kids’ World Website

My parents are in the child care business and they’ve finally commissioned a website. My wife and I put the site together and I’m pretty happy with it.

Assassination Is Nothing To Joke About

I know I said I didn’t want to post current-events political items, but I just needed to register my disgust with the apparently leftist vogue practice of flippantly suggesting that high-ranking Executive Branch should be shot, or, as Star Jones suggests, sending a Weapon of Mass Destruction President Bush’s way.

I realize it is likely hyperbole, but I don’t care which party is in office, this crosses the line. There are just too many whack-jobs out there that’ll respond to this kind of stuff.

The So-Called “Bush Tax”

A couple weeks back, I was pointed by Dave Winer to this item on Dave Pollard’s blog on increasing traffic to one’s blog. It strikes me that one way to do that may be, in fact, to write about how to increase traffic to one’s blog (which is right out of the Tom Vu/Carlton Sheets handbook if you ask me, but that’s a whole different subject). Having never been to Mr. Pollard’s blog before, I thought I’d have a look around. As I was doing so, I stumbled over this little gem which may rate a post of its own about using graphs of really small sub-sets of very large data sets to misrepresent the truth without actually being technically dishonest. Again, I digress.

Upon seeing the above, I was reminded of the fact that I’ve been wanting to write something seemingly intelligent about the standard liberal tripe about tax cuts mainly benefiting the “rich” (which I still intend to do, though this isn’t it). I thought I might do some initial research into what was being said about the “Bush Tax Cut” and I came across this: The Bush Tax. The basic premise is that states are now being forced to pick up the tab for the programs that were cut to make way for the Bush tax cuts. Because I’m not familiar with what is happening in other states, I thought I’d focus on mine. As I read, I was more and more amazed by the misleading information and in at least one case, factual inaccuracy, they presented as evidence. I’ll take on each of the first three, point by point:
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More Essays Posted

I’ve posted a few more old essays from my younger days for your perusal. These are the last of what I’ve found so far. There are a couple of other papers/essays I would like to have found, but I’m unable to find them. One of the missing items is an essay about women’s rights that I was pretty happy with from my year at the University of Washington.

Comments Fixed

Not that anyone was wondering, but I’ve fixed the problem with comments. That’s what I get for renaming a directory and forgetting to change the form action.