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Category: Internet

Fake Steve Jobs: Still Got It

Can I just say how much I (still) love Fake Steve Jobs?

Greenpeace, as I live and breathe, by Grabthar’s hammer, by the sons of Warvan, I shall see your offices and ships destroyed. I shall see you crushed and driven before me. I shall hear the cries and lamentations of your women.

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Voĉo el pasinteco

While researching the previous post, I was surprised to find that the most recent reference to me in USENET is in soc.culture.esperanto from 2004:

[Ĉu] estas pluraj “Esperantistoj en MIT kaj Harvard”? En mia tempo
(malfruaj sepdekaj jaroj) estis nur po unu – respektive iu Russell Finn,
studento pri komputiko, kaj mi.

— Angelos TSIRIMOKOS, Bruselo

Are there multiple “Esperantists at MIT and Harvard”? In my day (the late seventies) there were only one at each – respectively, a computer science student named Russell Finn, and I.

— Angelos Tsirimokos, Brussels

I’m amazed that Angelos remembers me after all those years. I had learned Esperanto in my teens, and had made an abortive attempt to form an Esperanto club at MIT, but as I recall I knew Angelos only through meetings of the Boston Esperanto Club. I remember him, of course, but I haven’t thought of him in years. It’s been years since I was active in Esperanto, too.

Saluton, Angelos. Mi devas baldaŭ retpoŝti al vi… kaj jes, nun ekzistas MIT Societo por Esperanto!

To learn more about the international language Esperanto, visit the World Esperanto Assocation or Esperanto-USA (formerly the Esperanto League of North America).

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USENET archeology

Via Chuq von Rospach: What is your earliest USENET post on Google Groups?

Mine dates to October 17, 1983 and was posted to net.sport.baseball [sic].

Boy, am I old or what.

Unrelated note: I’ve never met Chuq, but based on the odd photo of him I’ve seen from time to time, I look somewhat like him. I’m a little taller, I believe, and not quite as heavy — although if I don’t get off my butt soon, he’s going to pass me coming down. Also, compared to his current weblog page, I have less forehead and much less gray in my beard. 😉 That’s OK, because I believe he’s got a couple of years on me too.

No significance to any of that, except it’s fun to have some connection to a bone fide net.god. 🙂

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Nonsense up with which I shall not put

I understand that some media companies feel the need to monetize their value propositions (to misquote the inestimable Merlin Mann), but isn’t this taking things a bit far?

Picture 1.png

Yes, that’s right: after exactly one sentence of the story, a full-column ad (about three column-inches high). Not shown: the banner ad that, combined with the video box, pushes the first sentence of the story a good six inches below the top of the page (if I wasn’t using a 24-inch Cinema Display, in fact, I’d probably have to scroll down to see it); or the vertical banner add down the side of the page.

We wouldn’t put up with this in a print magazine; why should we have to do it in a web magazine?

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Bandwagon and DreamHost

So now Bandwagon and DreamHost are co-operating on a promotion: DreamHost members get a year of Bandwagon, and vice versa.

Well, I haven’t had a chance to set up my Bandwagon account yet — and, as has been pointed out, it may not be an optimal solution for large iTunes collections — but I’m a DreamHost subscriber, and my renewal date is coming up in a couple of months, so here goes. Now all three of you who read my blog will have something to chew on for another five months. (Hey, I couldn’t keep up with the blog when I wasn’t working full-time — what makes you think I’ll do any better now?)

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Ride the Bandwagon

Bandwagon logo

Bandwagon launches tomorrow; it purports to back up your entire iTunes library over the Internet to their servers (or alternatively to your Amazon S3 box) for a flat rate. Updates occur automatically in the background. Sounds like a good idea, if they can pull it off. (Mac only at the moment, apparently.)

Disclaimer: This post is earning me, like others, a free one-year subscription.

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The O'Grady Factor

Item on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Apple Genius says: Moo’ing normal.

Same item as quoted on Powerpage: Apple: It’s Normal for MacBooks to Moo.

Now I’m not a professional journalist, but even I can tell the difference between one offhand comment by one employee at one Apple store, and an official position by Apple the corporation.

Also omitted from the quote on Powerpage: the part where the TUAW writer then called AppleCare and is having his MacBook repaired under warranty. (Of course, the Apple Genius should have handled this…)

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take Jason O’Grady seriously. How he ends up writing for ZDNet is beyond me.

(By the way, my new black MacBook does not moo.)

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Hey, where've you been?

Well, I’ve been really busy, is all. How do you people find time to post every day? I’ve got a wife and a kid (make that *two* kids now, which is obviously a large part of the issue), a job, a commute… I barely have time to listen to the *radio* anymore. (And I lost my iPod somewhere…)

So since virtually all of the activity over the last six weeks has been from comment spammers, and since WordPress 1.5 has just hit the streets, I’m taking the opportunity to switch over. You like it? It’s so *purty*, too…

Switching was pretty easy, too, especially since I’d been playing around with WP last December and kept a parallel copy of all my posts; so it was really just a matter of following the 1.5 upgrade instructions. A few little graphical glitches here and there, but I’ll probably be hacking the CSS anyway soon.

I should probably think of a more clever name for the weblog, too. Hmm…

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Prehistoric links fixed

To the fraction of a person who cares: the one [page][] on the Internet that links to my pre-MT blog is now correctly redirected to the equivalent items in the MT blog. (Originally, I used a [Redirect][] directive instead of a [Rewrite][]. After I reinstalled MT and switched to a MySQL database because the Berkeley DB was corrupted, I just put the archives at a compatible URL.)

Oh, and Google finally indexed my website again, so searching for the title of the weblog now yields the weblog as the second result (the first result is still [Blogshares][], for some reason — I don’t play, but I claimed my blog anyway).

That is all. Please resume your regular indifference.

[page]: http://www.nickbastin.com/archives/000146.php
[Redirect]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_alias.html
[Rewrite]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
[Blogshares]: http://blogshares.com

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Pardon Our Dust

If anyone out there was checking the blog during the day, they may have noticed the appearance flipping around a bit. Turns out I was editing the CSS stylesheet directly on my web site, where it got overwritten the next time I published (silly me). It took me a while to find it in the “templates” list of MT; poking around my web site didn’t reveal any obvious source file. Guess I’m still getting used to this whole CMS thing; I remember when we had to make our websites by hand, with stone knives and bear skins…

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