Saturday, January 06, 2001
There you go. Dozens (if not hundreds) of posts that no one pays much attention to, and then at least two people post about my brief and impatient decision to ditch Blogger (since rescinded). Okay, so I was in a bad mood yesterday.
I'm still feeling rather equivocal, though, about this server fund business. Yes, it's a way to say thanks to a bunch of people who have given us a useful tool; but with over 80,000 users out there, I think they already know that we like what they've done. And the fact remains that it's pyra.com, not pyra.org (and, unlike some other dot-coms, they actually mean business). Pyra is not a small version of St Vincent de Paul or Goodwill, it's a small version of Microsoft or Adobe. The folks at Pyra may indeed be cool, but they're also employees of a company, even if they use their own product as much as any of us.
I guess what I'm getting at is that asking for donations isn't a sustainable business model. I know it was just one of those suggestions thrown out there on a whim, and that they've been genuinely surprised by the success of the fund, but what will happen the next time there's a server crunch—which, given the exponential growth in user numbers, could come next month or next week? Does the fund become a permanent fixture?
I know there are real dilemmas here. The transition period from small company to big company has killed hundreds of dot-coms, and I wouldn't like to see Pyra and Blogger die. But there has to be a better way if Pyra is to grow as a company rather than as a charity, a co-op, or a non-profit organisation. Which is not to say that those alternatives are out of the question if they can't figure out how to make Blogger profitable—but we're not there yet.
If advertising is a breach of the Blogging Code, why not explore the obvious alternative of subscriptions? Not 'tipping', but actually paying for a service: one US dollar a month, or twelve bucks a year, paid annually. At the current level of usage that would be a million bucks a year. Even if it led half the current users to quit, that's still half a million dollars, or a hundred $5,000 server funds. And it would scale right alongside user numbers, letting Pyra buy as many extra servers as they need, when they need.
Twelve dollars a year is a fraction of what web-hosting, domain names and so on all cost (not to mention PCs), and yet most Blogger users use it every day, or close to it. Can we really believe that they wouldn't cough up such a modest amount for their main posting tool? I think most would—for a service, where they'd know that their money would buy speed, stability and reliability. And for those that don't want to—well, there's always FTP.
There's a crucial difference between subscribing to a service and donating to maintain something that's free. The former brings a predictable income stream to the company and gives subscribers a guaranteed minimum level of service. The latter brings an unpredictable income and guarantees nothing. I know which I'd prefer.
link
____
Speaking of Marco Polo and Microsoft Office, as I was in separate posts earlier today, I'm surprised that MS hasn't included an Office Assistant called 'Macro Polo'. He could be the animated intrepid Explorer of superfluous software features.
link
____
Peter Moore, mentioned below, also has a website. In fact, his first book, No Shitting in the Toilet, was based on part of this site. I've read that book; it was amusing enough, but not as engaging as The Wrong Way Home. Anecdotes are one thing, but you can't beat the power of narrative. (Says he, as he enters yet another anecdote into his weblog.)
He's also put up some slide-shows to accompany his books, with photos from the trips they describe. I didn't expect Albania to look so clean.
link
____
...of course, that whole Blogger existential crisis made me think again about what exactly I do find useful about it. It's always useful to have periods of reassessing one's tools and whether they perform the tasks required. And God knows, when you use computers you have such periods ALL THE BLOODY TIME.
MacOS 7, 7.5, 7.5.5, 7.6.1, 8, 8.1, 8.5, 8.5.1, 8.6, 9, 9.0.4, Win 3.1, 95, 98, every incarnation of Office, Netscape, Explorer, Eudora, Fedora, Remora, Algora, all with teething troubles, all with bugs, ALL THE BLOODY TIME.
I just want it to work. I don't want 20 extra megs of Office assistants installed on my hard-drive, I don't want to spend half an hour downloading AOL Instant Messager over a 56.6k modem, and I don't want to paste QuickTime movies into a Word document. I want Word 5.1, not Word 2000. I want Microsoft and every other software company to accept that certain branches of software have reached their logical conclusion, and should be left there, not beefed up on protein powder like a WWF wrestler. Then we can all spend our time creating something new.
I mean, really. Imagine if Microsoft had developed the scythe. Would they have left it virtually unchanged for thousands of years, a classic tool perfectly suited to its task, or would they have produced MS Scythe 6.0 with an elaborate handle carved out of mahogany, a blade that weighs 50 kilos, and a completely un-optional inbuilt potato-peeler? When they should have been turning their attention to combine harvesters?
(I had a point in there somewhere, but I think I lost it shortly after I switched into rant mode.)
link
____
Crikey. Baron Munchausen has even written his own role-playing game. Quite remarkable for a semi-fictional character who's been dead for a couple of hundred years.
link
____
I've just finished reading Tony Hawks's Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, an entertaining example of the humorous travel-writing genre. (Having plans in that genre myself, I've been reading quite a bit of it lately.) Now I'm working my way through Peter Moore's The Wrong Way Home, which so far has confirmed my complete lack of desire to ever visit Albania. It's also made my Madagascar adventures seem a bit tame compared to wandering around in Mostar in the middle of the Bosnian war. That's the trouble with reading too much travel writing: everyone else's travel stories seem more exciting and interesting than your own.
Still, if all travel writers took that attitude we'd still be sitting around reading Marco Polo and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
link
____
If you were looking in over the last day or so, you'll know that I temporarily abandoned Blogger and started hand-posting here, out of frustration with days of ASP error messages. But their new server seems to have fixed matters for now, so I've had a last-minute change of heart. Blogger it is.
link
____
Friday, January 05, 2001
An internal dialogue:
Reasons to Stick with Blogger
- It simplifies the archiving and permalinking of old weblog posts;
- Its web-based interface is useful when you're away from your own machine or another with FTP access;
- It effectively makes an offsite backup on its servers, again useful when you're away from your own machine;
- It makes you part of the warm and fuzzy Blogger community;
- Those folks at Pyra are cool.
Reasons to Give Up Using Blogger
- It's getting insanely slow as a result of its own popularity; what was at first a minor irritation is now a major inconvenience, eating up way too much of my time, which is ridiculous for a 'time-saving' tool; if it really came down to it, given my reduced rate of posting these days I could probably do the archiving and permalinking by hand in less time than it takes Blogger to return an ASP time-out error;
- I'm always at my own machine at the moment, so the web interface and offsite backup advantages are neither here nor there;
- The warm and fuzzy Blogger community doesn't even know I exist, because I made the mistake of creating a new Blogger blog for Walking West 2 (in an attempt to keep it psychologically distinct from WW1) which has never been added to the Blogger directory, so never shows up in the 'updated' list; even if they did know I existed, I'd never know they know, because the Blogger search function has been out of action for two months, so it's impossible to see who's linking to me unless I actually read their blogs regularly, which greatly reduces my chances of finding new like-minded people out there;
- A perfectly reasonable alternative to sending money to those cool folks at Pyra to buy a new server would be to delete my old posts from their servers to free up some space, and to stop using Blogger when I don't really need to; there'd be nothing to stop me using it again someday if its current problems are fixed.
Still, that 'Reason to Stick with Blogger' No. 1 is pretty compelling...
link
____
Help! I'm trapped inside a Blogger edit window showing "Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'"!
link
____
Thursday, January 04, 2001
Some receipts are too good to throw away. Jo'burg Airport, South Africa.
link
____
This will be totally meaningless to non-Aussies, but any Australians who are feeling nostalgic for a mixture of boned mutton, celery, cabbage, barley, rice, carrot and spices ... wrapped ... in a thick slab of egg-and-flour dough will be entranced by this tale of the mighty Chiko® Roll:
- Invented by a Boilermaker from Bendigo!
- Starts as a continuous CHIKO Roll which after cooking is sliced down to size!
- Doesn't and never actually has contained chicken!
- Leaves one hand free for a beer!
- Win a date with the CHIKO Chick!!!
Who says this isn't a great culinary nation?
link
____
Monday, January 01, 2001
What an excellent date that is!
link
____
Sunday, December 31, 2000
For the last couple of months I've been visiting friends all over Melbourne, all from different periods of my life, most of whom have moved here from elsewhere. I've been talking about old times; describing (and explaining) over and over again what Jane and I have been up to, and what our plans are; and looking around at what they've made of their lives. (Houses. Kids. Stability. That sort of thing.) Then, to cap it all off, my Mum and Dad were in Melbourne for a couple of days this week, which gave another occasion for reflection, remembrance and revision.
I haven't written anything about it here, but that much talking about and dwelling upon the past takes its toll. It makes us both feel the temporariness of our current arrangements all the more, and hope like hell that they won't last for much longer. In a couple of months I hope we'll either be in England (or on our way), or will have decided once and for all to stay put. Whichever it is, you'll hear about it. Stay tuned.
link
____
The last day of the century, then. Or, to be more precise, the last day that we'll be able to argue about whether or not it's the last day of the century. Six and a half more hours and we'll all agree that it is unequivocally the 21st century. At last. Although personally, I'm not looking forward to 365 days of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'.
Because Australia was federated on 1 January 1901, it's our country's hundredth birthday tomorrow. Apart from a television commercial that asks, 'What sort of country would forget the name of its first prime minister?', you'd hardly know it. I wonder if we'll get a telegram from the Queen. (Dear Servants stop. Thank you so much for retaining the British monarch as your Head of State for one hundred years stop. Looking forward to many more centuries of rule stop. Love Elizabeth R stop.)
link
____
I saw Meet the Parents on Boxing Day. That's the day after Christmas for any Americans reading this; so-called because by then most children have come to blows over who got what presents. Ha ha. Actually, it's the day when presents were traditionally exchanged in Victorian England and hence throughout the Empire, keeping Christmas itself pure and unsullied. Of course, now it's a total anachronism which serves only as a convenient opening day for all the movies the cinemas have been holding back for weeks.
Anyway, the movie. A fine comedy of discomfort. Full of those cringe-making moments of 'Oh my god, he isn't' and 'Noooo, don't do it'. Guaranteed enjoyment for all sons-in-law, prospective sons-in-law, and masochists.
Hmm... in the first line of this post I wrote 'I saw...' and then gave a link to a website, which could be mistaken to mean that I saw the website on Boxing Day, not the movie it promotes. Indeed, the site is full of the typical gimmicks of movie-promo sites, with screensavers, wallpapers, and unoptimized graphics that take forever to download. You could almost be forgiven for thinking it's a stand-alone entertainment—except that it isn't very entertaining taken out of context.
I wonder how long it will be before websites loom into the collective consciousness in the same way that movies do, perhaps for a similarly limited time? So that when someone says 'I saw such-and-such', we won't be able to tell if they mean a website, a movie, or a TV show?
We usually say that we 'visited' a website, not that we 'saw' it, because we're still thinking of websites as virtual places, as part of cyberspace. So web-surfing, in our minds, becomes analogous to tourism, as we travel from 'location' to 'location'. I wonder whether this is limiting our sense of what the web is and could be. Physical places don't move, and don't change all that quickly, so tourists have a sense that they can always go back another day and have a proper look around, to build on the cursory glimpse of their first one-day visit. How often I find myself doing the same with websites, only to return to find that they're gone or have changed completely.
It would really make more sense to think of websites—or at least certain kinds of websites—as channels, like cable TV channels. You don't 'visit' Channel 31, you 'watch' it, and 'watching' suggests a different kind of activity. (A more passive kind, perhaps, which may or may not be a good thing.)
But that doesn't really fit the web, either; the failure of web entertainment start-ups like K-Grind suggests that people aren't quite ready to 'watch' the web. (I wonder if RushTV will fare better.) And the idea of 'visiting' still makes sense for sites that don't change that often, that don't disappear overnight... (but do we 'visit' old movies when we rent them from the video store? Or do we 'visit' old books in the library?)
Dammit, we need a new language to describe this thing, one that doesn't constrain us with its inappropriate metaphors. 'Surfing' on dial-up modems? 'Visiting' places that aren't 'there' without having to get out of your chair? Or, for that matter, 'watching' a site that grows more slowly than grass?
Drug-culture had the right idea. Spliffs, tokes and bongs. Use words that don't mean anything else, so that their other meanings don't confuse the issue.
link
____
