Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Antoin O Lachtnain: "I gave up smoking quite a while back, and I have been meaning to take it up again now for some years.  

MyWireService "delivers the headlines and summaries to you in an easy to scan page." 

Went to a Broadway matinee, it was great, a musical, lots of fun! 

The RSS-User mail list is off to a great start with 81 members. It works because it's moderated. All the posts have been about feeds and howtos, no politics, no personal attacks.  

Bush officials tell holiday stories, including Karl Rove reading Santa's New Reindeer. Requres Real (video). 

NY Times: "Gephardt's aides say he has to win Iowa to have any hope of gaining the Democratic nomination." 

Editorial 

Wired: "If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development."

Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools.

I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue).

One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.)

How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.