When the v2 WordPress plugin for Disqus hit the streets, Chris and I got into a discussion on the forum I run about it. I was vehemently against the plugin, but my reasons were based on previous perceptions:

I’ve seen stuff like FriendFeed do this as well: conversations about content done by third parties. And while this is, at some level, no different in you writing a response on your site to something I wrote and the discussion happening over there [which can and does happen; my favorite recurring one of these is when Mark T links to something Karyn wrote, and his entry gets 10x the comments his does], but then you’re making me work to keep in touch with the conversation.

Chris pointed out that the new Disqus model isn’t that at all.

Whenever I find myself reacting in such a knee-jerk manner, I try to remember that, hey, maybe I need to re-think these things. [Not all the time, mind you. I'm forever in danger of blowing out an ACL with all the knee-jerk responses I have in my life.] This re-thinking brought me to a point I’d like to note and amplify for a wider audience:

Hm. I should not criticize that which I haven’t test-run, I guess.

And as long as comments reference back to the URI, I guess that’s fine, right? I mean, all comments are remarks about a URI, whether or not they’re appended inline or left elsewhere.

Dammit, now I’m re-thinking this.

I’ve been thinking about this at idle times. What is a comment? A comment is a reflection—positive, negative, or otherwise—about something. If Chris writes a reflection or a rebuttal on his blog in the morning when he reads this, it’s a comment, but just one not posted on my site. What’s the difference in a comment that Chris posts on his blog versus a comment that he leaves here? It’s merely the control I have over that comment’s publication. I can leave his comment be, edit it [possibly reversing his point, if I'm feeling nefarious], or delete it altogether. These are all understandable responsibilities for me to have as the person providing the place for the commentary. After all, when you’re posting your comment on my place, I become responsible for it as the owner of this domain. This is why I use Alex King’s Comment License plugin.

Extrapolating from this: pingbacks and trackbacks are merely automated systems for notification of externally-hosted comments, prone as they are to spamming. But if we went to a world where we leveraged the power of GOOG and others to find all URLs that reference our source URI as commentary, well, that list is gonna get spammed. Highly-influential articles are going to get smacked and linked to in the hopes that people see the incoming links and think that there’s commentary there [and the GoogleJuice that comes from that], and low-traffic articles become ghettos for comments. In other words, nothing changes.

But what’s the result of this different thinking on my part? Merely that it doesn’t really matter where the conversation happens—just that it happens somewhere. So any third parties that seek to intermediate this, you have two responsibilities to producers:

1. Limit the spam. [Good luck.]
2. Make it dead easy for me to find the commentary.

That’s it. No other responsibilities are really necessary.

Back a year ago, John Gruber argued [and I concurred] that the iPhone was designed for consuming and not creating. This has not changed with the iPhone 3G—the only thing that’s changed, really, is that the App Store now means that the iPhone is for play. [Some would argue that play is consumption, but I'm not getting into consumer psychology tonight.]

But even those who once said “I would go raving nuts trying to use the iPhone as my mobile device” are now consuming on their iPhone:

I credit Brent and the excellent NetNewsWire for iPhone for my newfound ability to (almost) keep up with my feeds again.

Mind you, I don’t expect that Alex wrote the post on his iPhone … or his Crackberry. And this is not an argument that Alex should make the switch. He can’t get the hang of the iPhone keyboard, and he’s used to the Blackberry. Arguing that he should switch would be like me arguing that he should drive a manual transmission—just because I love it and think that it’s awesome doesn’t mean that it’s for him. I’d just argue that, well, he should know how in an emergency—and I’m sure that he does.

[Okay, I've only ridden with Alex a handful of times, and I can't remember whether or not his car is an automatic. I'm fairly sure his wife's is, but I won't hold that against him.]

[[And Alex, yes, I wrote this so I could tweak you and go all "iPhone FTW!!!" You know you're laughing.]]

Fastmail rocks. I sing their praises. But the primary datacenter is down for the count this morning, which means they’re offline despite the fact that FM’s failover and replication procedures are excellent. [And honestly, I foresee them addressing the single-point-of-failure datacenter in the future; they're awesome like that.]

So if you need to email me, well, hit me at work or GMail. And if you don’t have either, well, tough for you—not putting those here on the site.
Update, 0747: And we’re back.
Update, 2032: Indeed, now they’re going to work on redundant uplinks, as that was the issue. This is why I spend my money with them.

So earlier tonight, I tweeted:

Is it wrong that I want a syndication feed of my changes on Wikipedia?

Jason replied:

yes, you mad bread crumb collector, you.

Yeah, that’s me … a digital bread crumb collector. I’m as much trying to understand myself as anything. My instinct as both an engineer and a manager is to always get data.

I think I need to refine the Equation of Motivation for that pre-vacation period when you don’t feel like doing diddly-crap. I would, but I’m too apathetic [and have too much to do before I leave here tomorrow as it is].

It’s been two years since I launched IndieRiver as a bootleg-trading community tracker using BitTorrent. That seems just a little crazy to me. I didn’t think we’d be to 85 shows by now, but we are!
I don’t think I’ve ever told the story, but IndieRiver was a domain that Bryan picked up in early 2006. Around the same time, Ron picked up Indiemand.com, and Casella was pushing what ended up becoming the Square Peg idea. [To be fair, I think this is something that all the Pegs were considering, but I distinctly remember having more discussions about it with Jerry than anyone else.] As you might expect, we decided that it made sense to combine forces; as such, IndieRiver sorta sat on the sidelines, unused, and then when I fell in love with BitTorrent for distribution of allowable concert bootlegs, well … torrent, river, you got it.

It takes a village, people.

As a proponent of NoiseTrade and Matthew Perryman Jones’s Throwing Punches in the Dark, I’d like to offer you the opportunity to get it for FREE.

Found via Amy, who also points to where to get your own.

So today at work, we took a colleague out for lunch on his last day. He’s leaving the contractor world to become a civil servant. PB is a hard-working thermal analyst; hell, he was in the office on Sunday when I was. If I was in my last week of work, I … wouldn’t be in on the weekend. But there he was. When we talked about how life as a civil servant would be different, I said, “Hey, man, you’re gonna have to get some hobbies or something.”

At lunch, we talked about a variety of weird subjects—after all, this was a table full of nerdy engineers. But I think I out-nerded them all. The subject of earthquakes came up [in the context of a what-to-do-in-an-earthquake discussion about some safety slides that NASA/MSFC had circulated, because we're in such a dangerous zone here in Alabama ], and someone talked about the New Madrid earthquake. I then brought up Kentucky Bend, and then …

“How the hell do you know this stuff?”

“I read Wikipedia late at night when I can’t sleep.”

“And you tell me that I need a hobby?”

Heh. I come by it honestly. Dad used to read the encyclopedia as a kid. [So did I.]

I have always wanted to be a part of a WordCamp, and an unconference seems like fun, too. Add to it that it’s the weekend before my [30th!] birthday, and I’m strongly thinking about hitting the first South by Deep South. Any other takers [by which I mean, "Stephen, can I con you into this less than a month after Dragon*Con"] amongst the locals?

I took some time at lunch and watched/listened to Clay Shirky’s talk about the cognitive surplus, which I’d seen linked a lot of places, but today by Jeremy Zawodny.

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

Watching the comments on Andy Baio’s post on Infocom is endlessly fascinating for me, as I’m the Web host for the Interactive Fiction Competition, which is organized by my good friend Stephen Granade. Just earlier this week [or was it last week? They're running together], I had been telling Dr. Boom at lunch that he needed to check out Waxy. Heh.

I think my favorite thing is how Stephen just matter-of-factly points to Baio’s entry, too … me, I wouldn’t have been able to resist discussing how I would be freaking out if internal emails were getting posted on the Internet. Of course, I realized long ago that I was only one forward away from any of my emails being read by the one person I least wanted to see them, privacy disclaimers I might make to the contrary.

An aside, because I think it’s worth considering: email from 25 years ago was far more likely to be for-the-record, memo-style stuff than what you typically see today in business. There certainly was a lot less of it sent [as we were less used to it as a communication medium], and so everything was more focused—and, sometimes, strident. I think this accounts for some of the tone you see in some of the emails that Andy reproduced, and I think the following quotation makes my point:

I just wanted to clarify in writing what we discussed about “Restaurant” last Tuesday — what I will and will not agree to.

I will not sign a blank sheet of paper: I refuse to take responsibility for “Restaurant” in the state it presently is in — not knowing who is creatively in charge, how much thinking has actually been done, or how much of a script is written. …

– Amy Briggs

Consider the difference between this opening and most of the business email you send and receive. Do you write stuff like this from time to time? Sure, we all do. But those are the emails that we stay after hours to write—or, better, sleep on and write first thing the next morning. But it would be a mistake to not recognize that many of these emails were of a for-the-record nature, the kinds of things that make positional statements, and as such sound more assertive than we’re used to.

Dear Facebook:

The People You May Know thing? Awesome. Leverage the power of network theory to show you people that you’re likely to know. Here’s the problem: I know that I don’t know a lot of these people. [And some of these people, I know who they are, but we're not friends in any sort of way, so ... why do I want to be continually presented with them?] Please, please, please let me say, “Hey, I know I don’t know who that person is,” and “I know who they are, but we’re not friends”. There is value in the negative as well as the positive.

I get false positives for two reasons:

1. A lot of the Square Pegs are now on FB, so fans of many of them show up as positives for me on PYMK. More frustratingly to me, folks who are familiar with the SPA and my work with them then end up friending me. I have a very simple rule: if I have to ask “who?” when I see a FB friend request, I ignore it. And I still have 621 FB friends as of this posting.
2. I know a bunch of current and just-graduated students at UAH, and FB is presuming that I know current students. I know very few current students outside the folks I sit with at hockey games, or actual hockey players. But then FB presumes that I know these UAH Greeks that were in elementary school when I was a freshman, to say nothing of the puck bunnies. I … don’t know those folks, and I generally don’t care to know them. I’ve pretty much friended all the current students I know at this point in my life.

This seems like a terribly obvious thing, but they haven’t implemented it yet.

My Intel Mac mini—which was originally a refurbished model, so please don’t let my apparent lemon overly color your opinion of the model—needs to go back to the shop. The random shutdown issue that I took it in for back in early February has come back with a vengeance, and the machine is largely unusable. This is sad for me, because this new machine has become my primary Mac—it’s my only Intel-based Mac, and it has the most horsepower of any of my machines. [I said I'd be getting a MacBook Pro in March, but I've held off for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here. And besides, the longer I wait, the more likely I am to go with a MacBook Air. That's another post entirely.]

I did get it to stay up and running for a bit earlier this evening, so I forced a Time Machine backup. As I did so, I considered this: what if, when I took my mini in to my local Apple reseller tomorrow, they handed me back an equal or lesser mini to replace it? I could take it, load my Leopard DVD, and restore from my most recent Time Machine backup. BOOM! I’d be up and running while my other machine was in the shop.

Consider this: I’d not have any downtime while I worked on a loaner. I’m at no more risk of data privacy with the loaner than I am with the machine being in the shop in the first place. If someone at my Apple reseller wants to fuck with my personal data, he can do it with the loaner that I return just as easily as he could with the machine I’ve given him. There’s nothing that says they can’t power up the in-for-repair machine, clone the HDD, and then try to buy some sweet rims for their souped-up Chevy Cavalier.

I was inspired for this concept by two things: 1) Time Machine, with regular full backups, makes this a feasible option in my mind, and 2) this is functionally what Apple does with AppleCare fixes for iPhones. Have an iPhone problem? They loan you a spare handset while they fix yours. After the repair’s complete, you return the loaner, which they wipe in preparation for handing it to the next guy.

Think about the win that Apple [and its resellers; my nearest Apple store is almost two hours away, either north or south] gets from this:

1. Customers don’t have downtime. If your PC is in the shop, do you have that option? No, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
2. The repair folks don’t have to work as tight of a schedule. Just ask the repair guys at Mac Resource about how much I was up their ass about the AppleCare repair they did of this last time. [I'm giving them one more shot in doing this, and I will be paying their reasonable expediting fee to get it back if they tell me how deep their queue is tomorrow. If they burn me this time, I'm never using them again.] This is a win for resellers as much as it is for Apple, because they look like heroes.
3. You’re validating the strength of your Time Machine platform, which is a big selling point over Windows these days.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, but you may disagree. I’d love to hear what you have to think in the comments.

For my money, WordPress 2.5 is the best WP version yet. [Yes, one hopes that software would get better as it matures; this is not, of course, always the case.] A lot of the things that can be automated have been, and the UI has been thoughtfully re-designed. As always, there are some small things that bug me, but I’m gonna see if those complaints hold up over time.

I’m hoping that having a new toy to play with is going to cause me to write more. I’m about ready to write about some of the things I haven’t been writing about lately, but I guess I need to hold off a bit more. Anyway… thanks to the WP guys. [And yes, I waited to post this until all the WP installs that I control on the box were upgraded. I think the count's now about 85. Yeesh.]