A beautiful essay where in the middleman rants at his dear good friends on both sides of the divide he bridges. A good example of both how the middleman is always struggling with how to frame how he characterizes these parties; but more so how there is always an underlying larger scope that is likely more critical than their self indulgent disdain for each other.
Speaking of living on borders: a nice paragraph:
Which brings back a memory. About nine years ago, as a young pup, I recall meeting a Programme Director from another organisation. Having just come back from years in a field office, she was gaunt from tropical diseases, and wrinkled and weathered from years of sun exposure. Her clothes looked like they were from another decade. She wore no jewellery and no make up. She spoke slowly and deliberately, using simple words and short sentences. No jargon. No sophistication. Plain speaking. Every few minutes, she would pause and check that you got her point. I recall another colleague saying derisively, “You can tell when they have been in the field too long. They lose touch”. I recall that now. And realise, with some pride, I too have lost touch.
This just makes my skin crawl: a catalog of autistic schemes to reify reputation in your software. These social software people seem hell bent drain the blood right out of the community they attract.
Google Voice, the refresh of their GrandCentral acquisition, is quite nice. The transcription of voice mail to text is quite amazing and useful.
Django’s templates … {{block.super}} leads to all kinds of tangled wonders. But then these frameworks are 90% tangle out of the box, right?
On the attention management tool front: The Readablity bookmark (make your own) is addictive. Combines nicely with the rough but useful Firefox plugin FullerScreen. I often use Platypus (another firefox plugin) to reduce the clutter on a web page prior to printing it. I’ll note you can edit your Firefox navigation toolbar so it’s more at hand.
I’ve been using the Perspectives Firefox plugin for a while now. It’s great if you interact with sites that have homemade SSL setups; particularly now that firefox has gotten all fastidious about them. Appears to be pretty, if not more, safe too.
Yeah! Here’s why Quicksilver stopped working r. my Firefox bookmarks. Toggle browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true via <about:config>; and then you have to explicitly add the resulting bookmarks.html file (hidden in you Firefox preferences folder), and finally toggle the settings so quicksilver's cataloging mines the urls out of it.
As side effect of my work on the Simile project I found my self drawn in to the puzzle of how hard it is getting for Reasearch Libraries to archive the output of scholars. I was discouraged to see that while the librarians were very worried they didn’t seem to be even close to sufficently worried. By way of the enjoyable Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog here is a fine example of what a good scholarly paper should look like, and hence what the Libraries need to figure out how to capture and preserve.