Tinderbox Syndicate

Over in the Tinderbox Forum, Jim Delaney reports an interesting discovery: dragging entries from BibDesk into Tinderbox turns out to automatically create and populate suitable attributes. It's a by-product of Tinderbox support for dragging tables from spreadsheets — a free bonus.

I’m at home waiting to hear from the doctor, taking it easy. My lower back is a morass of varying kinds of pain, from a dull one which feels like it’s coming from the base of my spine to some more spectacular muscle pains when I try to bend in certain directions. My right foot starts to get wobbly if I stand on it for too long, though it’s not too bad at the moment. I can walk, but very slowly and inelegantly. Something is not right, but I’m confident that things will sort themselves out.

Stuart Moulthrop (author of Victory Garden) is the guest editor of a new issue of The Iowa Review Web on Instruments and Playable Text.

I am having some back and right foot problems. More information after x-rays, but hopefully nothing dire.

Conference talks are usually governed by simple rules of civility, which equally bind employees of vendors and their surrogates, whether customers or academics.

• You can point to your own strengths, even if perhaps arguable. But if you point to your rival’s weakness, that weakness must be conceded by all.
• You can point to your own virtues (a fun place to work! free food! massages!), but if you talk about your rival’s vices, those vices must be conceded by all.
• You can talk as much as you like about your own motivations, but if you discuss your rival’s motives, you’d better have strong documentary evidence.

In other words, if you’re speaking for Gimbel’s, you are expected to behave as if Mr. Macy himself were sitting in the front row.

Open source advocates routinely break these rules. You hear this all the time. They impugn the motives of their competitors, from Microsoft to Twitter. They argue from deficiencies that cannot be demonstrated (they're proprietary, so might not add new features you want) and virtues that will be implemented any day now (we're going to replace Twitter, except without downtime!). This makes our conferences worse. It drives good people and good firms away from conferences. And there's no way to push back: when some junior sales rep crosses the line at a trade show, you can send a note to his management, but there's no one to sit down with OpenSource surrogates and explain how to behave.

I brought both iPods into the Genius Bar at the Jacksonville Apple Store at St. Johns Town Center. While I did have to wait about 20 minutes past my scheduled appointment, the service I received was excellent. Both iPods are being replaced. The Classic was replaced on the spot, as they had stock on hand to do so; while the 5.5G had to have a replacement ordered from the Mother Ship. But I was allowed to keep my current 5.5G, as it works fine from the dock connector, and when the new one arrives they'll notify me and we'll make the exchange then.

I was more than a little bit amazed to see a line of probably more than 100 people outside the store, all waiting for iPhones.

Of course, while I was in there, I was overcome by the urge to buy accessories. I ended up buying a new battery for the MacBook, though I'm not really sure I should have. It seems to go through the battery much faster now than it had before; but it's just over a year old now, so maybe that's just a reflection of its age. In any event, more juice is always a good thing.

I also bought a Griffin AutoPilot replacement for my RoadTrip, which doesn't work with the iPhone 3G. The AutoPilot works, but the audio quality is unacceptable. Too much static and noise, the RoadTrip was much, much better when it was connected to my 5.5G. It may simply be the electronic noise from the iPhone. The phone comes up with a dialog when the AutoPilot is connected that offers to go into Airplane mode to reduce noise, but then it's not much use as a phone. Of course, I shouldn't be using the phone while driving, so I may need to think about that a bit. I also bought another one of those tiny USB AC adapters.

In any event, the beat goes on...

Remote for the iPhone is pretty cool. You can control iTunes with it, which I could do before with Salling Clicker, but this is a good start. One feature I'd like to see implemented right away is to pause iTunes when a call is received. It might be something you'd want to configure, but for me it would be the default. Sometimes I like to turn up the volume a bit, and it makes it hard to hear the phone ring. So pausing on an incoming call would be a double alert of a new call.

I talked about NeoVictorian Computing at a very well-attended PodCamp Boston yesterday. John Wall liked my argument that the debate about amateur journalism is usually presented in specious form. Journalists in mainstream media are workers, not professionals. Rupert Murdoch can make you a professional journalist by giving you a job, but he cannot make you a physician or a lawyer or an engineer. John Herman thought the NeoVictorian connection was promising, though he found the talk too crowded. Another interesting discussant, a self-described ninja queercaster who name I missed and who is skeptical of my concerns about comments and flame wars, has a very nobitic blog.

Down the road at ReaderCon, John Clute brought down the house with a wonderful 30-minute precis of John Buchan's 1916 Greenmantle in support of an argument on coherence in fantasy.

Techsty, a Polish review of hypertext news , looks terrific. The latest piece covers the recent work of Susan Gibb.