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Hil's birthday Have a nice one, Hil. Good event Nice job on BloggerCon, Dave, discussion leaders, and participants. It will be my drivetime companion for a week or so (if my MP3 player turns up). Thanks for the food for thought. Hil was asking me in chat if I had heard anything new. I guess not really, though I haven't listened to more than a third of the audio yet. But maybe it's not about startling revelations so much as it's about comparing notes, learning there are people in the same boat -- or conversely finding that your ideas or opinions are in the minority. I also think an event like BloggerCon serves as a kind of yardstick. I've listened to a few of the previous BC sessions on IT Conversations, and in comparison the tone of this one shows how mature blogging has become. And podcasting -- fugediboutit. The nature of the conversation shows it's come lightyears in the 18 months since the last one. Thin skins I can definitely identify with Mike Arrington's feelings about being villified. He led the Core Values session at BloggerCon. I've been in a tangle or two online. In one battle of two online groups several years ago over something embarrassingly petty, somebody suggested I didn't deserve to live. Scary stuff. I have to believe that people who go that far must be unbalanced, or they lack perspective. Nothing any of us says online is going to affect the rings of Saturn. As far as the advice to learn to let things roll off your back and not take things personally? People are constantly telling me that. Not gonna happen. Things get to me because I care about my work and my online hobbies. Everything is personal for me and that's the way I like to live. I've never understood the perceived virtue or maturity in having a resilient personal armor. Anyway, I'm too old to learn to grow a thicker skin at this stage even if I wanted to. Conversate Via Library Clips, Robin Good looks at Conversate, "instant online discussion spaces". Neat idea for one-off talks about a single topic. My dumb little Docnography console I think I'm going to change the address, so if you feel like popping in today check back here for a URL to a better page. I want to put the activeRenderer template inside a new page as an iframe so you can refresh the outline without getting bumped out of chat. As I said to Hil in chat yesterday, the thing will be toast after today, plus I can do IRC at home, but it was nice to have a slower conversation with fewer people than the IRC channel allows. Later: Here's the new page. A chain of tears Damn I was angry last night. I have a ton of things to do this weekend, and I ended up spending two hours repairing one thing after another in a ludicrous chain of events. - McAfee has been constantly trying to download an update on my home desktop for days. I'm tired of seeing it in my tray and imagine it's slowing me down. - So I try to log in to get the update officially and be done with it. - Their user/password entry feedback is unhelpful. I like it when I'm given more specific cues, like "We don't see that username in our records" rather than something like "Umm, either your username, or the password, or the combination, or something or other didn't work." - The forgotten password utility was no more specific. They tell me "If that username is in our database you'll get an e-mail." Gee thanks, guys. - So, I think. I probably bought the antivirus software before I standardized on gmail for account info. Maybe one of my crossmyt.com email accounts is overflowing again. - Sure enough crossmyt.com is over disk quota -- so much so that I'm not allowed even to delete an account -- so I head over to my reseller admin page and start adjusting the three hosting packages again, which is always a PITA because adjusting one limit on bandwidth or storage affects other domains. - But! See I've just moved my household and turned over a whole new tree and I'm in a let's-get-this-organized-once-and-for-all place. So I do what I've been meaning to do for a while: make a dedicated hosting package for each of my five more frequently traveled domains and stick the parked and teeny ones in a catch-all. That way I can adjust a package when it gets near the end of the month and it doesn't affect the other domains in the package. - That accomplished, now I'm able to clean out the piled-up inboxes. I try the forgotten password thing again and now I get email from McAfee. However, this morning I still have the goddamned yellow arrow churning, churning away, just trying to annoy me. I think I'll slap a sticky note over the corner of my monitor. How's that for a low-tech solution? The BloggerCon outline makes all the difference The Docnography or technography is a revelation to me. Listening offsite or after the fact is made so much clearer with cues to who is speaking. If I wanted to, without the benefit of having been there, I could make a Flash movie of a session, matching the audio to pictures and videos, showing exhibits. Or, the outline could be refined to include speakers names missed, links to the discussants' blogs. Genius. I'm impressed Doc was able to do it all day long. When I used to take near-verbatim interview notes on the phone, I remember being exhausted after an hour. Something I hadn't realized before I expected BloggerCon participants to be more technical as a group. Sure lots of the more vocal people talk like developers or are developers, but I guess I thought that was going to be the norm. I do hope "explain it so Ponzi can understand" doesn't get to be the new "explain it for mom." It's almost as bad. Single out a guy today as a countermeasure, to help along the memeradication. |
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