🔗 WWW
🎈123/366 For your most happy listening pleasure … put me in such a good mood.
🔗🎵📼 The Mariachis with Hugh Cornwell perform Golden Brown
🔗 Cigarettes After Sex are playing Madison Garden.
Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of them either.
🔗 🎵 Apocalypse is their ‘biggie’. (1,233,307,237 streams. Apparently, I must have been under my rock at the time.)
🔗 🎵 📼 Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven (But Nobody Wants to Die) - not as many!
That's Entertainment ...
No - 🎵🔗 not this
We knew Ms. Redstone wanted out. Looks like it’s going to happen.
And Ellison’s Skydance seems to be in the frame for the preferred acquirer which I definitely do not get - but sure why not?
I look forward to opinions from people like Rob Long and Peter Kafka, if I were to predict - I am guessing that Long in particular might be thinking like me. (Or am I thinking like him?)
The main question is what does David think he is buying and what does Shari think she is selling - because I think they are two very different things. But Heh! What do I know?
(Side Note - The ‘Ellison’ is Larry’s son - who seems to be turning out to be a media/entertainment version of technology dad.)
🎈121/366 I had been wondering about 🔗 Keycap Shine.
Then @gruber 🔗 explains even more today.
It all makes sense. Still bloody annoying.
At least I can stop polishing my keyboard.
Dana makes some good points in ‘🔗 Why Full Self Driving is a Fraud.’. And of course the US isn’t protectionist.
Today in Tedium:
As you may know, Tedium is a blog and/or newsletter (we haven’t decided yet–I know, surprising nine years in) focused on questions that you never bothered to ask yourself, but are suddenly consumed by the second you hear them.
I know how they feel!
Oh - and in that piece - i got pointed to 🔗 The Story of the Social Security Number - I did not know how the numbers came to be and what they are.
🎈120/366 🔗 The web is not dying
🔗 Bob’s writing about Music and Musicians, but what he described has applicability to any new business launching itself onto the world.
Yet another one to file in the bucket of things that don’t seem quite right.
New Projects -because of course, you can never have enough projects.
As my Category culling is drawing to a close continues with no end in sight, I just discovered a new project.
Not only do I have this space - but over on Blot I have a different - yet related space.
I used to have 🔗 https://words.philpin.com - for ‘words’ and 🔗 https://pictures.philpin.com which eventually became 🔗 https://images.philpin.com for, well … ‘images’.
And then I moved everything into 🔗 https://archive.philpin.com - it’s so easy in Blot - and everything is was great - were it not for rather a large number of links on Micro Blog that point to those three old blogs. (I know its large - because I just searched for those URLs in Mars Edit),
Three choices;
-
Do Nothing (which doesn’t really work for me)
-
Manually change them - one by one (which is something I don’t want to do)
-
Write a script to search for those three parts of URLs and replace with ‘https://archive.philpin.com’, at the same time as adding a category ‘My Archives’
Which is likely to happen shortly after we witness a small pig flying overhead.
🔗 Received from my friend Graham, article from The New Yorker .. as I commented tomorrow him;
Personally speaking - my life is too short
Another discovery from the archives … although only March, so not so bad.
Many of us seek status and belonging without even seeing it; we find it hard not to react to what others are doing, especially those we have been programmed to want to impress. We’re reactive without realizing it. We put limits on ourselves because we buy into other people’s rules. It’s the fundamental limit I’ve observed in most people, including myself and most founders: they define success by succeeding according to the rules that others have defined.
💬 Mike Maples
🔗 Source (Medium) - so heaven only knows how I stumbled on this one - other than Mike is actually very good at what he does - so maybe I was looking out from him?
😂 🔗 Letting ‘Marketing’ have a ‘seat at the table’
Truth in humor from Tom.
We Don't Care What The World Thinks - We Know Best.
🔗Over on Substack this morning, somebody had taken it upon themselves to ‘correct’ a writer’s English.
Tip: realized not “realised”. I’ll surprised that you got that passed spell check! 😊
The irony of her own typos in her post correcting someone that didn’t need correcting aside …
The click through takes you to the thread where Tom replied, but to save you that - this is what he wrote …
Thank you so much for your feedback in jumping in to correct me on what you believe is my poor spelling but you might want to check your facts: it’s lovely that America has its own spelling for words, and I am all for diversity of language, but I think I’m going to stick with the British spelling what with the fact that I was born in and live in the United Kingdom and (though I often wish it was more) have only visited the USA once in my life, for a total of five days.
Which then spawned a steady stream of comments.
Again - to save the click through, I wrote …
Pretty much whatever the UK does .. the response of the US is to do it different, if not completely opposite … spelling, driving on the wrong side of the road, eschewing roundabouts in favor of the four way stop, inventing its own version of perfectly acceptable games, defining the world as being the country .. ‘world series’, ‘
capital of the world’, taking a perfectly lovely uk show and rewriting it as an American show .. oh and then deliver an order of magnitude more episodes (Key Point: no series set up is that good) .. shall I go on?
And I wouldn’t normally bother writing this - except I was reminded of another Americn trait … we are the first … we are best .. we are exceptional …
Over in another group, someone posted this image.
Which reminded me of Philo Farnsworth (‘Father’ of TV), who has a staute in the Presidio in San Francisco
I quote …
Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) is the American engineer credited with inventing the first television. He had his potato row/scan line epiphany while growing up in Idaho, but it was later that he fully developed his image dissector and electronics system. His first successful broadcast happened on September 7, 1927, between two rooms in his lab in San Francisco.
In my world 1927 follows 1926 .. but let’s not let facts get in the way in America.
I am sure there is some bright person out there that will give me some technical overview of why one or the other - but really, to the average bear … this is the ‘Telly’ for goodness sake.
All this to ask … why are ‘they’ like that?
(I do know ‘they’ aren’t all like that - I’ve lived in the US long enough to know that - which I will use as my excuse why I freely interningle UK and US spelling in a single paragraph.)
Just a BIG shout out to @vladcampos for 🔗 📼 this video which talks you through how to rearrange the categories on the archive page of your MicroBlog.
GREAT JOB SIR - most excellent. Really really clear - and it worked first time.
AND of course - big shout out to @otaviocc for the new page.
I did it and it did exactly what it said on the tin.
Sadly it still isn’t quite right - i think mainly because Vlad is using Tiny Theme and I am using Hitchens and I am guessing some kind of styling conflict kicked in and it threw out the rest of my page (like Vlad I am not a developer), but no big deal, we just rolled back and maybe not at 11:32 pm I will look at the coe and se if I can parse what should be changed.
Vlad - one additional thing - rather than saving the name of a page and creating a new one - you can in fact click on the original page and when you save it - it automatically creates the edited page in the block at the top - that will save a few nano seconds.
Anyway - over and out - GREAT job. Thank you.
There Has To Be A Link Here For You ...
In case you hadn’t realized - I have been doing some backlog clearing over the weekend, this is one of those catchups. Links from the wild - collected and - not quite curated.
Still there might be something here for you?
🔗 Validating Factual Personal Information | February 2024 | Communications of the ACM - it’s as if Vint isn’t plugged in to the possibilities? What am I missing?
🔗 A Fascinating dive into the history of Poland
🔗 Why Is California the Way It Is? - by Tomas Pueyo - love this kind of visual analysis of the ‘history of geography’.
🔗 Haitz’s law - Wikipedia - the Moore’s law of light?
🔗 Rethinking the Concept of Philanthropy .. something near and dear to my heart as we ready to unleash our new organization onto the world.
🔗 The Seismic Shift That’s About to Change the American Workplace .. it’s Apple News, But TL;DR - old people is the fastest growing
🔗 A quick and easy guide to measurement. - Simon Wardley writing about ‘his thing’. It’s quotes like this that make me smile.
Deciding on what you will measure matters because it will change the type of system that you will build. A measure for getting people quickly from high to low altitude will encourage the development of one system - for example, personal solid fuel rockets. However, a measure for doing this safely will promote the development of another - for example, a parachute.
Three Links To My Readwise Library
🔗 Rishad Tobaccowala - Four Strategic Mistakes.
🔗 Roger Martin - Why Planning Over Strategy
🔗 Scott Galloway on (amongst many things) ESG - and is it failing to live up to its promise - he thinks so.
🔗 📼 This an 11 year old Ted Talk featuring Pablo Holman - demonstrating hacks on the stage. ELEVEN years ago .. so what 2013?
It includes a shout out to Kim Cameron who Pablo called The Chief Privacy Architect at Microsoft, which indeed at one time he was - though Kim retired from Microsoft May, 2011, the shout being an announcement that his hacks allowed him to track KIm as he moved through a conference - and … well, I will let you watch the video.
Imagine what is possible today. And you wonder why we have problems.
Kim of course is the author of The Seven Laws of Identity, that I have had the occasion to refer to on this very blog and it is unclear if Pablo’s call out of what he achieved in tracking Kim had any connection to Kim’s retirement - and to be sure I am not suggesting that at all, and to my knowledge nothing suggests that this was the case.
Fast Forward to last year and here he is again with another Ted Talk ‘Nuclear Reactors Can Solve Inequality’. 🤯
Both Talks were just absolutely inspiring
So imagine my delight to discover this one …. where he is talking at Charlie Muirhead’s CogX last year. I haven’t watched it yet - saved for tonight, but I sure am looking forward to it.
📺 Crooks
Netflix. Dubbed. Caper. Not much more to say, except I did watch it all the way through.
Crooks on 🔗 Reelgood
🚧 Setting The Record Straight
It has been brought to my attention that assumptions have been made - and - call me a stickler - that pisses me off.
Some level setting
My mum was born just outside of Manchester.
My mum’s parents were Mancunians.
My dad was brought up in Rochdale.
My dad’s parents were .. well, that is a long story.
I was brought up in York (not born - but then I wasn’t born in the UK - so there’s that).
Suffice to say that I would never have been able to play for Yorkshire - even if was good enough (I wasn’t even close … I got to play for my ‘house’ once because only 11 of us turned up) .. and by the way - despite what it sounds like my ‘house’ wasn’t part of a ‘public’ school.
(Oh - and in England - public schools are actually private - I know - it’s all fucked up}
Still, I am Yorkshire enough to know that this was a rule (until all the other clubs started bringing on international players and - well - ‘knocking them for six’.)
Suffice to say, I am without a doubt of Northern Stock .. and proud of it.
If You Are Keeping Track
It has been a while, but people that ‘fancy themselves with accents’ still pick up my Yorkshire twang.
My People First thinking probably emerges from my early (I wasn’t even a teen) introduction to ‘cooperatives’, that you may know got their start in Rochdale (guess who I learned that from).
He also told me all about Gracie Fields .. arguably one of the most famous Rochdale alumni (despite living out her final years in Capri) .. I sometimes wonder if this very early introduction to a singer from a previous generation sort of shaped some of my takes on music?
Despite never having lived in Lancashire, if there is one football team I could be described as supporting .. it would be ManU … because my Dad and Grandad were both supporters, ie long before it was fashionable to love them.
I am old enough to remember Cyril Smith .. and even though in those days I was not particularly politically aware, he made sense to me .. maybe that Rochdale fairness and equality shining through.
So What?
All this to say that when (and it is when - not if) I make a joke about ‘the north’, such as there should be customs at Watford Gap or the M25 is the inspiration behind the movie ‘Truman’, flat caps, ay up, whippets … whatever the hell it is … I am having fun - and dear ‘Upset Notherner’ - I would strongly suggest you get over yourself.
I would further argue that customs at Watford Gap would be highly beneficial to The North, because customs work both ways.
Facts
.. just a few - I could go on.
Flat Caps
Flat caps are dress accessories that fall between casual and formal. Back in the 19th century, a flat cap was a sign of working class men but has now evolved to being a piece of headgear popular among elites. Men who wear a flat cap these days are trendsetters and well-dressed men in Hollywood.
💬 W and H
AyUp
… ‘appen, ee bah gum - its all dialect people .. and if someone from Yorkshire is going to accuse me of cultural appropriation OR cultural sterotyping - well - I say Fuck You.
Whippets
Have you been to a party recently? Read the internet? Whippets might not be what you think I mean. But let’s say I am talking about the dog .. they have been a recognized bread in Kennel Clubs around the world for nearly 1 1/2 centuries. Moreover, it was a Whippet that won the Frisbee Dog World Championship three years in a during the seventies. They are great dogs and why is it bad to be associated with Whippets?
The Myth Is Busted .. years ago.
Bottom line, this fits in the Politically Correct space that is absorbing this world in a very bad way. No - you cannot tell me how I want to say things or reference them - particualrly if they are MY HERITAGE.