Last August I wrote a short post about how surreal the world became after 9/11 after Congress and the mainstream press rolled over and allowed the Bush administration to frame recent history. Apparently, Naomi Wolf, writing in today’s Guardian thinks so, too. Fascist America, in 10 easy steps.
It’s very interesting living during the mid-Triassic period of the computer age. Industrialization was a bigh thing. It took culture over a 100 years to kind of “get it”. Look at cars. The first ones were called “horseless carriages”, because that’s exactly what they were. It took some time for someone to figure out that, once the horses were gone, you could change the carriage in new and interesting ways. The carriage was no longer defined, in part, by the horse.
Computers are like that now. What do you do with one? Well, you can make it act like a bunch of information handling things: typewriter, darkroom, printing press, music player, movie theater. This is all neat. But this is all stuff that the computer replaces. The computer will come into its own when it does things that are analogous to *nothing* else.
John C. Fox is founder &Â CEO of [GroupSmarts, LLC](http://www.memoryminer.com/mmlanding “GroupSmarts website”), publisher of MemoryMiner software. MemoryMiner does something that only a computer and network infrastructure can do. It is billed as “Digital Storytelling Software”. True enough. But the cool thing about it is that the story can be linear or non-linear, can use and connect multiple media, web services, and is designed to be Internet publishable.
This is what software should be. John Fox “gets it.” What MemoryMiner does can only be done by computer. There is simply no easy analog to it. It doesn’t “replace” a story book. This is a step out of the Triassic. Thank you, John.
I went to MacWorld last week. 
My first. Not my first trade show, though. Like many others who have lead the cubicle life, I’ve been to my share of trade shows. I still reached the EGO point (Eyes Glazed Over) after only a few hours. I suppose that means I’m in the wrong line of work. Be That As It May…
It was fun and interesting. Apple announced the iPhone and re-demonstrated the ?TV. ?TV. What kind of name is that? How do I pronounce ?? That’s Shift-Option-k on my Mac keyboard. I have no idea what this will look like online. If the thing is pronounced “Apple TV”, then for God’s sake, write it that way. I thought everyone got the point when Prince did it. That was clever. This is inane. As for the marketing types who think it’s trendy to create symbolic characters for names. Put them in the rocket with the phone sanitizers.
I liked the product, by the way. We don’t stream movies in our household, but I can see the uses. Of course, our cell phone is mainly for emergencies, so we don’t have much use for the iPhone either. It’s cool, though. At least it’s not an ?Phone. I can see that it was a very important announcement for Apple(,Inc.). I won’t buy one. I like my phone separate from my iPod. I am looking forward to that cool technology trickling down through the iPod line.
In the meantime, I suggest you go see “An Inconvenient Truth“. Republican or Democrat, it’s a compelling film. If you’re not a fan of Al Gore, get over it. Don’t let the messenger keep you from hearing the message.
By the way, the link is to the science page of the global warming information site listed during the movie. I didn’t link you to the home page, because they commit one of the egregious sins of site design. A soundtrack on a page without an “off” button. Or a “volume” button. Not. Good. But see the movie anyway. Then, really, write your congressman to put this issue firmly on the national radar.
I subscribe to a daily digest from Wacco-BB, a Yahoo! group that serves as a great local bulletin board for the community where I live. I saw a post promoting a single payer health care bill called: California OneCare
Take a look at the video. I have recently become convinced of the necessity of this kind of health care reform, mostly from incidents that have happened to me and members of my family. The current health system in our country is broken and needs fixing. This might be a good start. For more information, there’s a website: onecarenow.org. I’m heading over there right now…
I got an email this morning from a fairly rampantly liberal friend of mine. He was waxing ecstatically over the following story:
Granted, Democracy Now is a website with a mission. You can hardly say they are not biased. But the filing of a lawsuit for war crimes against major officials or former officialsin our government does seem like news to me. So, I went online and checked Google’s news, usually my first stop for the major stories of the day…nothing. So, I starting looking at other front pages: New York Times. Nope. Washington Post. Score! CNET. Nada. International Herald Tribune. Uh-uh.
Frankly, I don’t know if you can make a charge like that stick. It seems to me first a reflection of the frustration many have over the foreign policy moves of the Bush administration over the last 6 years. But what really strikes me as interesting is how invisible this story is in the mainstream press. Don’t you find that a bit, well, disturbing? Makes me wonder what other major news I don’t know about, and why…
I like this site. The Masked Blogger, supposedly an Apple employee but who knows? Still, he, she, or they, post thoughtful comments. The Masked Blogger: Dumb Ass Thinking. This one was about the MB’s frustration at the ‘normal’ corporate behavior to be found at Apple, in spite of it’s “think different” public image. But, people are people. I don’t expect Apple to be very different. There’s a lot I don’t like about the company. But Apple is different enough. Significant differences are, in reality, subtle things.
Okay, so here’s the top news I get from my daily delivery of the New York Times, online.
Star Power to Blood Sport, Tennessee Senate Race Has It - New York Times
Take a look at this article. Hell, take a look at every big media outlet, newspaper, television, or online. What you’ll see is lots of space devoted to the the carnival, the strategy, and the sport of politics. I figure this must because the reporters have heard the speeches soooo many times that the only thing that interests them is the daily drama. That’s understandable. But, I thought a reporter’s job was to do something hard, like getting to a candidate’s stand on the issues and really telling us, under all the glitz, what this person is about politically. Even NPR, my usual refuge during election years, has failed for the last few elections.
Take a look at the NYT article. It’s two days before the elections. You see anything about issues in there? Anything? Someone please tell me where I can get informative news! Pleeeeeease?