Dave Barry said he works hard 40 hours a week to make every column sound as if he tossed it off in 20 minutes after having four to six beers.
One of my favorite comments about writing.
Box CEO Aaron Levie: “The reason I’m insanely bullish on AI… “ AI provides the possibility of indexing and working with unstructured information, which is the vast majority of information in a business.
Not just in business. Everywhere, in everything.
Parable of the Sofa — Tim Bray praises lifestyle businesses.
In the 2000s and early 2010s I developed a 3- to 4-can a day Diet Dr Pepper habit. Our nurse-practitioner advised me to cut it out; she said she wasn’t satisfied with the studies of consuming that much artificial sweeteners at that level over a long period. So I stopped.
It wasn’t hard. Quitting smoking was hard.
Sometimes I still want a diet soda, and then I have one when I do. Not often. A few times a year. Diet soda isn’t meth, a little every now and then won’t harm you.
The moral of this story is that not every bad habit is hard to break. Sometimes it’s not a moral struggle and life-changing experience. Sometimes you get a habit of doing a thing on the regular, and then you get credible information it might not be good for you, and you stop doing that thing.
Dr Pepper is now the second-most popular carbonated soft drink in the US, beating Pepsi. Coke is still number one by far. M.G. Siegler has thoughts.
I liked Mr. Pibb, a Dr Pepper ripoff, when I was in college at SUNY Binghamton. Dr Pepper was unavailable there and then.
I’m glad to see M.G. Siegler is back to blogging regularly. He’s talented.
Where's a good place to post links, and just links?
I like the idea of having a public record of noteworthy and interesting things I’ve read, watched and listened to, but I’d rather reserve mitchw.blog for my own creations and thoughts. Other social media platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, Masto, Threads, etc.) are siloed off from each other.
I’d like to find a place that’s centralized, that belongs to me and automatically propagates to other social media. Maybe just a separate category here on mitchw.blog? Or a separate blog entirely? Micro.blog, the platform I use to host mitchw.blog, will let me start another blog at no additional cost.
Is Altsore in the US stable and safe to run on a daily driver iPhone? I’m tempted but I don’t want to make my main iPhone unstable, buggy or unsafe. Do any American users here have experience with it?
Hamilton Nolan: The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is — Almost nobody on the left is refusing to vote for Biden over Gaza or anything else; it’s a false argument to scold the left and say they need to support him because Trump’s worse. Also: “Without a theory of change, nothing changes.”
I found out last night that Facebook allows me to automatically cross-post to Threads, so I switched that on.
Find me on Threads at @mitchwagner@threads.net. You can follow me there from Mastodon or elsewhere in the Fediverse.
I like this a lot. Anything I can do to broaden my vast social media empire without having to do a lot of cut-and-pasting makes me happy.
Like I said yesterday, I’m consolidating where I post on social media just to avoid all the cut-and-pasting and fussing. I’m limiting my meme and social media posts to Facebook, Tumblr and—now—Threads. Here I am on Tumblr and Facebook:
Reviewing my notes app I find the following, which I wrote to myself at 9:29 last night:
Dogs
Cats
Monkeys
I do not remember writing this. Why did I leave this note for myself?
I loved the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100
I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer in the 1980s, and loved it.
I worked for a community daily newspaper, the New Jersey Herald in Newton, NJ, 1985-89. I drove 40 minutes each way from the newsroom to cover city government meetings in Vernon, NJ. After the meeting, I’d write my article on the Model 100 in the lobby of the city municipal building.
To submit the article, I’d use a gadget called an “acoustic coupler.” This was two suction cups with speakers and microphones inside them, attached to each other by wires and plugged into the computer by another wire. I’d drop a bunch of quarters into the phone—later I used a calling card—punch the number into the phone, attach a suction cup each to the earpiece and mouthpiece of the payphone, press a couple of buttons on the Model 100, and the article would upload automatically to the newspaper publishing computer. It took a minute or two to finish. Connetions were shockingly slow then. When the article was done, I’d call in to the newsroom to double-check to be sure the article made it and then hop in my Honda Accord and drive back, chain-smoking the whole way.
When I arrived at the newsroom, my editor would have already edited the article and it would be ready for my revision.
I suppose I’d like to play with a Model 100 for a minute sometime in the future, but I have no desire to own one today. Today’s technology is so much nicer. Still, the Model 100 was great for its day.
Photo by NapoliRoma - Own work, Public Domain, Link
The Hugos There podcast discusses “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Madeline L’Engle — Good episode. I want to reread the book now. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. I recall bouncing off the mix of science fiction and fantasy. I could relate to Meg, a weirdo who desperately wanted to be normal and fit in.
