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| Thursday, August 2, 2001 |
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Turns out it was worth what she paid for it 
| | I hadn't been to eBay for quite a while before I looked up the item below, and I was impressed at how slow it was. Every search took forever. |
| | Then I noticed a bunch of suspicious stuff in the bottom of the browser window. I'll try to get the thing to repeat the sequence. Let's see... I'll look up "Nordmende Portable" (an old German radio that might be for sale). Okay. I get a blank page. At the bottom of the window it says "Sending request for /html/9306234/362212895/aol." The page is sitting blank for so long that I have time to spare for copying the whole number sequence down.... Okay, now the page is finally loading, and the browser says "/file/adsEnd.js." .... Okay, now it's done. I'd guess the whole loading process took the better part of a minute. Over a T-1 line. |
| | Do you guys get the same thing? If so, is it nuts or what? |
| | Whatever is happening here, it looks like Meg didn't take my free advice when news of eBay's advertising deal with AOL went down last Fall. |
| | Ah well. I cared about eBay then. Now I could care less. Literally. |
One more link in the postmortal value chain
| | Now that Webvan's stock is worth $0, its stock certificates are fetching up to $530 on eBay. |
| | (Thanks to Michael Stern, CEO of Information Markets Corp., for that one. A proud disclaimer: I'm on the board of the company — which, in spite of being a genuine dot-com, is also a genuine business. Michael deserves extreme praise for making it work. I'm constantly amazed.) |
It's easier to give bull than to take it
Still no beer for Dmitry
| | Dmitry Sklyarof is still in jail for alleged violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of the worst speech-strangling regulations ever lobbied through Congress. |
| | I'm not much of a joiner or a marcher for causes (kinda got my fill in the Sixties), but I'm in favor of everything we can do to spring this guy and turn the whole mother around. |
Reset to T1 time
| | Thanks to Andre Radke for getting me to check my TCP/IP settings one more time. Turns out I had a typo for the main name server, so the machine was going out and consulting a much less responsive server, apparently. |
Earth to Globe: free the fishwrap
| | Eric Norlin (below) also quotes a fine Jon Katz piece in the Boston Globe. Since it's in the Globe, you can't read the original unless you pay the paper $2.95 to "retrieve" it between 6am and 6pm EST, or $1.50 at less bothersome times. |
| | Like many newspapers, the Globe suffers the illusion that its "content" becomes more valuable once its print versions have migrated from racks to landfills. |
| | What they don't understand is that their only real product — the daily paper, which is worth its cover price for exactly 24 hours and nothing thereafter — becomes more valuable as an authority when its archives are exposed where others can point (or, in research parlance, refer) to them. |
| | Does anybody know how much, say, the New York Times makes by selling its archival stories? Even if it's a $million per year (which I doubt), I believe the loss in authority-building opportunity far exceeds that sum. |
Young love
| | In his latest bulletin from the leaning deck of our cultural Titanic, Eric Norlin clues us thusly: |
| | The challenge is to connect with the young. |
| | We see in them the ascendency of the amateur. |
| | Whilst the world of business struggles to keep from freezing in the cold waters of our current economy, a large undertow has formed beneath them. Spiraling toward the surface, this inescapable current is the amateur, the young, the kids — napster, rap music, the internet. Survive the "recession" and *gulp* — what the hell is that tugging on my leg? |
Delayed gratification
| | Here's a minor tech support question. I've got three boxes on one hub, all routed to the Net over a T-1 line. When I click on a link I get instantaneous response from two out of the three machines — the G4/500 desktop with Mac OS X and the G3/333 desktop with OS 9.1. The third, a G4/500 Titanium laptop, waits about 10 seconds before it even looks for the site. Otherwise it's as fast as (or faster than) the other two. (Unrelated: the Linux box is off line right now, though it should be back shortly.) Any idea what's up? |
Untangled up in blue
| | I now have 7 votes in favor of linky writing, none against. One response: |
| | Too linky? Naw. Fuck 'em. |
| | It gives people a sense of where you're coming from, saves time when writing, and gives the reader the option of going right to the original source. |
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