EOW Randomness...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Friday, April 25, 2003 at 08:19 AM [GMT-6]

Where does the week go? I spent most of yesterday morning in a surgical waiting room while my dad underwent blepharoplasty (he's doing fine, except for looking like the other guy after an alley encounter with Mike Tyson), and then did a short presentation for the local Mac user group on—of all things—blogging. Consequently, I didn't have time to blog.

The user group thing was interesting from this perspective: fully 75% of those in attendance didn't know the meaning of "blog." Granted, Midland isn't the center of the "new media" universe, but this perhaps is a reminder to bloggers that we're still a "fringe movement," albeit a rapidly growing one.

Even more interesting/disappointing, the term "Axis of Weasels" drew mainly blank stares. I was counting on that phrase to spark an understanding of the influence of blogs in today's culture. So much for enlightenment.

On the plus side, I did get to use Keynote for the first time (one of the members converted my PowerPoint show beforehand and we ran it on his 12" PowerBook). I assumed that conversion would be pretty easy, using an import command or something similar, but the guy who did it said it was even easier than that: just drag the PowerPoint file icon onto the Keynote app icon and voila yee-haw, there it is.

...

James Lileks recent domain name renewal (hijacking?) problem is just a high-profile example of something I deal with almost daily: the ridiculously complicated domain administration process. I'm constantly getting hysterical notices of impending doom ("Renew now! Or lose your identity forever!") regarding domains coming up for renewal. Some of those domains don't need to be renewed; they were meant all along to serve temporary purposes...but just try letting one actually expire. You'd think the registrars live and die according to what I decide to do with that one domain name. That's why I suspect Lileks was not the victim of a mere expiration, but of something more sinister. OTOH, it could have been just a crashed DNS server (like I really know what that means).

...

I read part of Helen Thomas' column this morning (no link available; I read it in the treeware version). I didn't mean to...I didn't want to...but her columns are like those particularly spectacular crashes you pass on the freeway. Your eyes are just drawn to the disaster, against your better judgment and morals. And for that lapse, I was rewarded with this:

Paul Kennedy, Yale history professor and author of "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers," was quoted recently as saying he was "shocked" to hear a Dutch journalist tell him that his countrymen were now "scared" of America.

"The Dutch. Scared. Is that a good long-term policy for the number one power in the democratic world?" Kennedy asked.

Well. Where to begin? Let's start with the secondhand quote referring to yet another quote from an unidentified individual purporting to speak on behalf of an entire nation. Just oozes with credibility, doesn't it? Of course, the fact that it was a journalist who stepped forward to represent his country makes it OK. So we have a journalist quoting a Yale professor quoting a journalist...who says his whole country is now afraid of the US.

I suppose the Gallup organization is quaking in its collective shoes, realizing that it can easily be replaced by a journalist. An anonymous one, at that.

Sources aside, one wonders if, perhaps, the Dutch are suffering from a guilty conscience. Is there something we should know about, something that causes them to places themselves in the camp of evil, murdering, oppressive dictatorial regimes? Because, as far as I can tell, those are the only folks who have anything to fear from us.

Interesting questions. But I won't count on Ms. Thomas for answers.