Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Who's who in the blogging world

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A simple guide to the A-list bloggers is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek introduction to the “big names” of weblogging. Choice quotes from the ones I read:

Dave Winer: “In the beginning was the Blog, and the Blog was with Dave, and the Blog was God. The same was in the beginning with Dave. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness (everyone but Dave) comprehended it not.”

Doc Searls: This new meme here, that new meme there. Here’s some pointage to back and forth between this person and that person on this issue. DIY Journalism. The powers of Big Media have been forever broken!! Power to the People. Linux rules! Linux makes a great hamburger topping. Blogs, there is no us and them. It?s all us. Weblogs are the highest form of audience content. Weblogs are the highest form of evolutionary development. Printwash, Searlsowash, but NOT Googlewash, no no. Google is God. If not on Google it doesn’t count.

Ben and Mena: We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. We are cute. Blogs rule. Moveable Type rules. We are cute. We are cute.

Anil Dash: You can’t ignore wheat. Links. Weird Links. Cool Links. Links about Links. Links. More Links. Index of Links. Link Indexes of Link Indexes Indexed. Ben and Mena inside gossip. Moveable Type. Radio sucks! Dave Winer is a smushed toad. Winer is a Whiner. I work in Marketing. Moveable Type! Journalists are the Devil, they only ever rewrite Press Releases. Just who do they think they are anyways? Bah Humbug! Bloggers are the future.

Robert Scoble: I am nice, reasonable, normal smart type, not always given to the usual Blog Groupthink. I am not like all those other Bloggers. So why I am a Blogger? I am just gaming this meme. Link to friends. Link to more friends. Link to other friends. Link to these friends. Link to more friends. Link to my boss, he’s way way cool. Hey, didyah know, I used to work for Radio Userland. And I used to plan Tech Conferences, I know every Geek in the world! They all like me.

Cory Doctorow: Check out the guest blogger! We bagged Dvorak! Blogs have power! Guess old John C. knows old media is DOOMED. “Amazzzing Graccce, I onccce wasss blllinnnnddd butttt noooowww I seeeeeeeeee…” Whooooo! My first novel is out! I love me. I write weirdly chaotic makes-no-sense Sci-Fi stories about a not-to-distant future, or maybe the future is now. But since it is all Sci-Fi I get away with all this random un-defragged sheer-chaos. Look at me! I write Sci-Fi. I won all these awards! I won the John W. Campbell Award! Yeah yeah yeahhhh! I am special! I like Disney!

(via Robert Scoble and Dave Winer)

More impeachment talk

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It’s probably still unlikely to happen, but as more and more information surfaces about just how much ‘misinformation’ was presented as fact by Bush et al in order to justify our attack of Iraq, more and more people are talking seriously about the possibility of impeachment.

This is explosive stuff. And considering that the war’s number one cheerleader — Bill Kristol — is now admitting Bush made “misstatements”, it looks as though the whole WMD issue could very well be an albatross hung around Bush’s 2004 re-election effort.

It seems to me that impeachment isn’t unrealistic to at least consider, at this point. As has been quoted here before: Bush lied. People died.

Slipping through the cracks

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In a very interesting “mea culpa” article, ABC News’ political column The Note lists a huge amount of stories that should get more recognition, but for one reason or another, don’t get major coverage.

With all those reporters covering politics and government in Washington and around the country, you would think that the press would be watching the powerful on behalf of the people pretty persistently.

But you would be wrong.

On any given day, owing to tight budgets, the evasiveness of those we cover, and the generally (sorry ? ) lazy nature of some reporters, way too much of what gets covered in politics and government are the spoon-fed public events that the communications staffs want covered.

Even “enterprise” and investigative stories tend these days to come not from innovative shoe-leather work, but rather are generated (and often thoroughly researched by) interest groups, political actors, and other non-journalists who want to see a story come out.

…for every newsworthy evasive action we learn about (because the press gets tipped off or stumbles into something or finds something through hard work), there are literally thousands that never come to light.

With the president headed off to sell Medicare reform in Chicago (and, we bet, suck up to Mayor Daley big time), and the Senate poised to announce today a plan for dealing with what Democrats still see as a ticking time bomb for the president — the intelligence questions surrounding the missing weapons of mass destruction — the questions of hide-and-seek and American political journalism are front and center for us today.

So, we offer you several outstandingly illustrative examples.

~~The article doesn’t have a permalink yet — it will next week, but there’s no telling if I’ll remember to come back and re-link it.~~

[Update:]{.underline} Here’s the permalink. For future reference, though, the title is “W’s WMDs Aren’t the Only Things Missing”, published on June 11, 2003.

(via Lambert)

Like

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I think, like, I want to, like, ban the word, like, “like,” from the English, like, language.

Alexandar Diego Soli

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And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers — what he called aleph null — is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the infinites of the higher alephs, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believed that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god^2^, there must be a god^3^ and a god^4^, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And so to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one’s tongue than to speak the word “I.”

— Mallory, in Neverness, by David Zindell

Still here?

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Been kind of quiet around here lately. No major reasons for that, really, but a few minor ones.

I’ve been wanting to revamp my photoblog for a while now, but it had been one of those “back burner” projects. I finally decided it was time to get started, and — rather than do my coding from scratch, as I normally do — I went out looking for a decent pre-made template to use. Unfortunately, I don’t think that that’s going to work. I started work on setting everything up, but all I’ve succeeded in doing so far is making my photoblog all sorts of screwy. The template I found, while a decent look, is designed for smaller photos than I’ve been posting (so I’d have to resize everything I’ve uploaded so far), uses very different posting conventions (so I’ll have to fix my previously uploaded photos), and — the two most damning issues — will not work for portrait photographs (landscape only), and is a heavily table-based layout (rather than CSS-based). Ick. So, I need to start over with that project.

Another project I’ve got going on is fixing up all my past entries in this weblog to work better with the related entries hack I put in last week. In order for it to calculate which entries are related to a given post, the most important fields are the ‘Excerpt’ and the ‘Keywords’. Well, as I’ve wasn’t using some of MT’s features when I started this weblog, only about half of my posts have excerpts, and I just started using the keywords field. So, I’m working my way backwards through over two years of posts, adding in the missing information. It’ll be good when it’s done, but it’s a long, slow process.

Lastly, when I’ve been taking some time to scan through my newsreader, there just hasn’t been anything much that’s really catching my eye enough to post about. All the political stuff starts to sound the same after a while, the technical weblogs I read have been focusing more on issues that I don’t deal with very much, and the mac world is more or less on hold until WWDC at the end of this month.

So, things are a little slow for the moment. I’m sure they’ll pick back up in a bit — I go through times like this every so often. Just a bit ‘OB’d’ (overblogged), I think. ;)

In the meantime, I’ve started yet another project (because I need another one…), and will be resurrecting my long-dead quotebook by posting a quote a day to the ‘quotes’ category of this weblog. Until any more substantial content shows up, enjoy those!

Foolishness

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Who is more foolish — the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?

— Maurice Freehill

That'll stop them!

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(Shamelessly snagging this post from Bob Harris at This Modern World, as nothing more needs to be said.)

Our Attorney General wants to make terrorist attacks against military bases or nuclear plants a capital offense.

Obviously. Nothing deters a suicide bomber quite like the death penalty.

The full article is even scarier, though. Ashcroft is calling for a widening of the Patriot Act.

The Purity Test

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Dyanna and I got talking online tonight, and over the course of the conversation, the topic of the infamous Purity Tests came up.

I don’t really know where the Purity Tests got started, but I first found them not long after I first got online, sometime in 1991. The test itself (which now exists in various versions, though my personal favorites are the ‘original’ versions that I found all those years ago) is a series of yes or no questions designed to determine how morally, ethically, and sexually pure you are. As you go through the test, you mark off each thing you’ve done. At the end of the test, you count up your answers, and figure out your percentage — the more you’ve done, the lower your final score, and the less “pure” you are.

It’s all in good fun, of course, and they make a great party game. The only solid rule is that at the end of the test, anyone who took it must admit their final score. It’s entirely up to each person if they want to admit the answers to any particular question — and in many cases, they won’t — but the final score must be admitted!

The person with the lowest (least pure) score then gets hit on by everyone for the rest of the night, while the person with the highest (most pure) score gets giggled at by everyone for the rest of the night. ;)

So…now that all that’s out of the way…anyone care for a test? All of the following links are to downloadable text files. My scores either are posted, or will be after I re-take the tests — leave yours in the comments!

  • The Purity Test: 100 Questions (Quick and dirty, get it out of the way, see what you think. My score: 6%)
  • The Purity Test: 500 Questions (My favorite of the set — long enough to be thorough without getting overly ridiculous or tedious. My score: ??)
  • The Purity Test: 1000 Questions (Starting to get a little overly long, but still bearable. My score: ??)
  • The Purity Test: 2000 Questions (Farily ridiculously long — they’re stretching to find this many questions, and it shows. Included mostly for completeness/curiosity’s sake. My score: ??)

Have fun!

Episcopal Church elects first gay bishop

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Excellent news this morning — the New Hampshire Episcopal Church has elected the nations first openly gay bishop!

The selection of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, 56, who was chosen over three other candidates in voting by New Hampshire clergy and lay Episcopalians, is still subject to confirmation next month by the church’s national General Convention.

The confirmation is likely to be a heated battle with international implications. Robinson drew opposition from many in the Anglican community worldwide.

After the election, Robinson told his supporters to be gentle with those who disagreed with their decision.

“We will show the world how to be a Christian community,” he said. “I plan to be a good bishop, not a gay bishop.”

This is wonderful to hear, and makes me quite glad to have been brought up as part of the Episcopal Church. Many congratulations to Bishop-elect Robinson!

(via D)