Tabdumpapalooza

Okay, time to get rid of a few tabs, and maybe answer a question or two at the same time:

• Have you taken the The Web Design Survey from the folks at A List Apart? If not, go do it. Now.
  

• Navizon has what they call Peer-to-Peer Wireless Positioning for BlackBerrys that are not GPS enabled. That could be handy.

• For the two of you out there who haven't seen these yet: Lolcats at I can has cheezburger (what's a lolcat?). Which has, of course, led to lolgeeks. And loltrek.

  Now I'm thinking about redoing Pixel's page to be nothing more than a picture of him with "Dis my domain — u gets ur own" written on it.

• Of course I'm trying out Coda; isn't everyone?

• How to debug JavaScript with Visual Web Developer Express is

  a trick for getting a world-class debugger for free in IE

• I've been asked a few times if I got any results from my Apple, Hire Me post. Yes, but not really? (if that makes any sense).

  • A friend of mine who works at Apple told me privately that yes, there actually is someone tasked with the job of Dashboard Evangelist. That person has contributed a little more to the Dashboard-dev List since then, but OTOH, he still hasn't mentioned on-list that that's part of his job…

  • A large search engine company in the Valley (whose name includes "oo") called me, said that someone inside the company had heard I was looking for a job, thought I might be a good candidate, and would I send them a résumé? I would be happy to, so I updated mine and sent it off. Unsurprisingly, I never heard back.

  • No one from Apple ever contacted me about a job. Which is not terribly surprising, because that wasn't really the point of the exercise.

    A few years back, I managed a team of programmers. One thing I learned and passed on to my staff was: I didn't want them coming to me with problems unless they had also spent some time thinking about possible solutions. Now obviously, I'm not talking about, "the building is on fire"-type of problems; I'm talking about "I found a bug in our code"-type problems. If you've gotten far enough into the code to see that there's a problem, then you're the most capable person to figure out the solution. Go forth and brainstorm, and come to me if you've still got questions.

    This is what I was doing with Apple. I didn't just want to whine, I wanted to present a solution at the same time. I was (and still am, btw) annoyed at their actions, so I thought to myself, what should they do about it? Instead of complaining about a problem, present a possible solution.

    The best solution I was able to come up with was hiring me. Not that I actually wanted the job; I just wanted the problem fixed. Sadly, neither has happened.

  • Anyway, it's not like Apple has positions open where I'm one of the best-qualified people around. Except that at the moment, they do. Hmmm.

• Why yes, me blogging twice in one week does mean that we finished our latest book. In fact, it went off to the printer today. Huzzah!

Deaniacs for Edwards

Our friend Dan Wood is active in Bay Area politics (as well as a heck of a Mac programmer). Last year, he helped defeat the evil Richard Pombo and elect a new Democratic congressman, Jerry McNerney. His latest Web site, which has just launched, is Deaniacs for Edwards, where fellow Howard Dean supporters (like us) who are supporting John Edwards this time around (like me, but not yet Dori) can gather, tell our stories, and make things happen.

If you supported Dean then and are interested in Edwards now, go by Dan's site, help him raise his new barn, read our stories, and tell yours.

Birthdays, Badges, and Bogosity

I don't write about my Dad much on this blog, and I probably ought to more. He was a major influence in my life in many many ways, and I should credit the places where he shaped the person I've become.

I'm writing this tonight because if he was alive, today, May 2, would have been his 80th birthday. He died a little over ten years ago, but I still frequently miss him.

I'm also writing this because I never said anything here about the recent Kathy Sierra controversy; in particular, the backlash that followed and the "code of conduct" that (for once) appeared to have made a large percentage of bloggers agree on something—few of them liked it.

Yes, these two topics have something in common, and by the end of this, I hope you'll understand why I see them as a single rant.

"I pledge to do my best not to say negative things about other people"—does that sound kind of familiar? If it does, you may have been a blogger back in the dark ages, when someone tried to convince everyone that they should "blog nicely." That was seven years ago. Didn't work too well, did it?

I think that one of the most common misconceptions about conversations online is that "you shouldn't say anything to anyone you wouldn't say to their face." There seems to be a belief that no one is rude to another person if they're face-to-face, and this simply isn't true.

Example 1: I read on several blogs about the guy with a one-man show where dozens of people one night walked out in a huff. After enough pointers, I followed the link and realized, "Wait, I know this guy!" Turns out that the one man behind the one-man show was Mike Daisey, who's a friend of a friend (or more than one friend). They took me to his show 21 Dog Years in NYC several years ago and then out to dinner with him afterwards.

I read his blog post about that night where he said:

Last night's performance of INVINCIBLE SUMMER was disrupted when eighty seven members of a Christian group walked out of the show en masse, and chose to physically attack my work by pouring water on and destroying the original of the show outline.

He also wrote a follow-up about the aftermath, and they're both well worth reading. But most importantly, follow that first link, and watch the video: even though these people are face to face with him, they're not one bit polite.

Example 2: I was at a tech conference a few years back, having a casual conversation with someone (I'm not going to name any names here, sorry) when another friend walked by.

"Hey Dori, good to see you!"

"You too—how're you doing?"

"Great! And you?"

"I'm good."

"I have to run, but I'll see you around."

A pretty normal on-the-run conversation, wouldn't you think? I wouldn't even have remembered it, except that the person I was originally talking with then said, "You shouldn't have said you were good. You should have said you were well."

I could have gone into lecture #17a (The Difference Between Spoken and Written English), lecture #17b (The Difference Between Formal and Informal English), or even lecture #2 (The Way English Evolves From The Way We Were Once Taught)—but I didn't, because I thought it would be rude.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not much of a judge of interpersonal issues, so I tend to repeat conversations that I've had with people to others to get feedback on what was really going on. And in this case, it was unanimous: the guy was rude and condescending.

So, two cases, two similar events: people who were offensive, and it wouldn't have changed any if they were online.

Bringing this back to my Dad (remember my Dad? This is a blog post about my Dad), he was the one who taught me my love of the English language. One quick anecdote:

I was a teenager, and like many teenagers, I was using swear words because, well, I could. It was the late 70s, so I was using phrases like "abso-fucking-lutely." Dad objected, and when I tried the tried-and-true, "Hey, what's wrong with it?" his response wasn't about the language itself; what he objected to was cursing when it wasn't a drastic situation. He said that if you use extreme language in everyday speech, what words do you use to express yourself when you need strong language?

So, when I see a proposal for a Blogger Code of Conduct that tells me what language I should use, and what should be allowed in our comments here, I only have one thing to say: fuck that shit.

We the People

John Edwards comes out with a really kickass spot responding to Bush's veto of the Iraq funding bill. Check it out:

GOP, tiptoeing past the political graveyard, tries whistling

The Los Angeles Times published a piece today, GOP has uphill climb for cash and candidates, talking abut the difficulties Republicans are facing right now, especially with candidate recruitment for the 2008 congressional elections. Seems that many potential challengers have decided to either stay where they are, or completely sit this one out, because they believe that the GOP brand is so damaged that it will make the task of being elected with an (R) next to their name insurmountable. To say that I read it with glee is to understate the point.

But the really amusing thing to me was this series of quotes:

Moreover, GOP officials say conditions are likely to improve once the party settles on a presidential nominee -- who they believe will eclipse Bush in the public eye and diminish his drag on Republican prospects.

'No question, the president's gone through a rough patch. But the central figure for the Republicans next year is not going to be George Bush,' said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Shangri-La*), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Fantasyland*) described Bush as 'a millstone that most members will not have to be carrying around' once the Republican presidential nominee emerges.

[* edited for reality]

Oh, puh-leeze. This is George W. Bush they're talking about. The Imperial President. The guy who has been making it all about "Me! Me! Me!" for, well, forever. Bush loves the spotlight. Do they really think that he'll retire to the Rose Garden beginning in mid-2008? Do they really think that people will forget about the most incompetent president in American history, while he's still in office, continuing to screw up? Do they think that they'll be able to prevent the sitting president from being the wrapup speaker at the Republican Convention?

This will be the election that gets rid of Bush, whom the vast majority of the American people intensely dislike and distrust. The GOP candidate will have to, at least implicitly, explain why he's not like Bush, and why he will do just about everything differently than Bush. This will just get worse as Congress continues turning over rocks and the Bushies' blind wriggling worms of malfeasance and incompetence come fully to light. And every time the GOP nominee has to distance himself from Bush, he will remind voters what they don't like about the GOP. I think that we're looking at another 2006 blowout for the GOP.