brentashley

the word of the day is usurp – thanks Tara. nice to converse with someone in your daily stream of existence who is able leap from esoteric semantics to obtuse cartography in a single bound. when was the last time you discussed the mercatur projection map?

i’m sitting in the chair at Union Station wating for Bruno the barber today reading the Toronto Sun, something i don’t often do, and i burst out laughing, almost causing Bruno to graze this guy’s scalp.

in this article about Ontario members of parliament seeking pay raises into 6 figures, some MP is quoted:

“The risk factor for an MP is very high,” said the Liberal. “We can lose our job every four years.”

boo-fucking-hoo for you, mister hard-done-by MP. give us a break, dipstick. in the real world, you can lose your job every four frickin minutes!

so i’ve got radio userland on my new notebook. i’ve flipped my page. i’m entering this text. i still can’t figure out how to change the heading at the top of the page – aah, save as… that does it!

Wow. A gecko-based browser that is quick, standards compliant, runs javascript (JSRS works with it), and is entirely unencumbered by excessive features. K-meleon, you got my vote. Fan-frickin-tastic.

i was in the dentist’s chair the other week, and during the intervals where i could actually say something intelligible, i was asked what it is i do and responded as usual that i’m a computer nerd. we discussed how it’s great to do what you love and get paid for it. my hygienist says to me “i’m glad you do that and not me – geez, i couldn’t program all day, how tedious!”. this from someone who’s ecstatic that she gets to fumble around in strangers’ mouths all day scraping plaque and inhaling halitosis-breath. it really does take all types to make up the world, doesn’t it.

youngpup calls this fluid nav bar experiment a failure. it’s lessons learned from this type of improvisational ‘failure’ that moves us all forward a notch. i’ll say it again – i’m glad there are people like aaron around to do this creative visual stuff that escapes me.

aaron also reminded me that i’ve been anticipating this Tibet thing for a while. should be interesting. this JDE javascript debugging environment is way neat, too.

thank you, douglas, for your wondrous five-part trilogy, for our friend dirk, and of course, for all the fish.

Being that I live and work lately in the ‘burbs, I was in downtown Toronto today for the first time in a few months. Lovely day, bright, sunny, 25 degrees (that’s 77 fahrenheit). Did quite a bit of walking around.

I’ve gotten used to being in the relatively unpopulated open spaces outside the downtown core, so am quite content with the solitude of walking or driving there.

Interestingly, it occurred to me that while downtown, surrounded by huge amounts of humanity and activity, my aloneness and solitude wasn’t lessened any. That’s not to say it was depressing at all, just that despite the sense that you’re in a large community, you’re all really islands of solitude milling about without mixing.

Petula Clark seemed to like it.

je voudrais ecrire en français aujourd’hui. je regrette que je n’ai jamais l’opportunité à pratiquer mon français – si on peut être bilangue, je pense qu’on doit essayer (au moins, plus fort que j’essayes).

j’ai recu, cette semaine, un version de mon JSRS faites pour utiliser avec PHP, merci à mes nouveaux amis, Sébastien CRAMATTE et Pierre CAILLEUX, de Boulogne Billancourt, France (leur website). Je vais le mettre sur mon website bientôt.

I’ve just released the latest JSRS with PHP support as provided by Sebastien and Pierre. Cool!

Craig Mundie, Senior VP at Microsoft, spoke about The Commercial Software Model at The New York University Stern School of Business today. Even before the text of the speech was published, Slashdot and others responded with predictable polarized gainsaying.

I’m not going to argue the minutiae of Craig’s speech or the whole Open Source vs Intellectual Property thing. For what it’s worth, I’m more on Microsoft’s side than the OSS side. However, you don’t have to probe the actual issues to derive analysis from this particular Microsoft move.

Here’s the thing:

Let’s say that things are as they are presented. Microsoft believes that their commercial software model will prevail. They believe the OSS community is misguided and will fail miserably if they insist on continuing with their flawed unsustainable business model.

So what the heck is up then with clueing your opponents in to their own folly? This isn’t the Microsoft we know and [insert your preference here]. What kind of poker-face is this? You should be straining to hide your glee that you’ve got a straight flush to their pair of threes, not warning them that now’s the time to discard and regroup!

That is unless you’re bluffing. Unless you suspect there’s an outside chance they might just prove to have a better hand than you.

Now I don’t know which hand is better, but it seems inescapable to me that Microsoft wouldn’t be playing this strategy if they were really confident about their long-term position.