The Gong Show

The Gong Show is dead. Long live The Gong Show. In short, I got bored with Wordpress, so I’m moving my blog to Tumblr.

Part of the reasoning behind my decision was the Google seems to really dislike my blog. It used to rank #1 for all kinds of vanity searches. Now, it’s still in the index, but Google drives almost zero traffic. I think I got blacklisted somewhere along the way. So, I’m not bringing my domain with me (thought I could, because Tumblr’s domain mapping rocks).

Speaking of Tumblr rocking: This admin interface is beautiful. And I love the template scripting language. It took just a dash of CSS to make my template feel very ME-ish… much easier than messing around with Wordpress templates.

Also, I completely purged my Tumblr account because I wanted to start fresh. I had imported 1000s of posts via RSS in my old Tumblr account that I didn’t want in this new version of The Gong Show. So, if you think you’re currently following me on Tumblr, you’re not. Re-follow me if you want the latest on what I’m up to.

And, if you’re viewing this through the web (not RSS), then learn more about the piping plover in my background. Best beach bird ever.

I’m going to London for Seedcamp and am interested in meeting other members of the web tech community there. If you’ve been following this blog from the UK and are interested in chatting (or want to make an intro to someone I should meet), ping me.

Google launched a browser: Chrome. I downloaded and it and took it for a spin this afternoon. Here are my first impressions.

HolyCrapItIsFast! Seriously, it starts up fast, tabs open and close fast, browsing is snappier and more responsive. I wish I had some solid way to quantify what I am experiencing, rather than just qualitative anecdotal evidence… But, simply put, if you want to browse the internet faster than I recommend you try Chrome.

They put the tabs and the address bar in the correct order. Hooray! It’s a small detail, but I have always been irked by the inconsistent layout of tabs being below the address bar, instead of above the address bar where they belong. Why are tabs supposed to be above the address bar? Because moving to a new tab changes the contents of the address bar. So, when you change a tab, everything affected by the change should reside below the tabs. Laying it out in this order makes tabs more consistent with the real-world metaphor of folder tabs after which tabs in GUIs are modeled.

I do have a few nits to pick:

• The keyboard shortcut ctrl-tab does not go to the last tab you were on. Instead, it goes to the next tab in the list. This is silly. ctrl-tab should behave the same way that alt-tab behaves in OS environment. Firefox also makes this mistake, but since Firefox has a add-on architecture, a kind hacker fixed this problem by creating the Last Tab add-on. That brings me to my next nitpick.
• There is no add-on architecture on day one. This is a no-brainer feature that I’m sure the Chrome team will add quickly, but until they build an add-on architecture, they are missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage talented developers’ desires to scratch their personal itches and extend the browser for all users. Due to Chrome’s missing add-on architecture, Firefox’s library of add-ons will be a significant advantage for Firefox in the near-term.
• Adding new search engines is too hard. To add a search engine in Firefox, all I have to do is right click on the search box I want to add and then click the “add a keyword for this search…” menu item and fill out the dialog that pops up. By contrast, to add a search engine in Chrome, I have to go to “options” -> click “manage” under “default search” -> then click “add”. Not only is it more clicks, but it’s a significantly higher cognitive load on the user. There must be an easier way to add search engines… if not, then I’m sure the Chrome team will fix this issue quickly.

Overall grade: A-

Thanksgiving used to be known as the holiday then you go home and install Firefox on your parents’ PC. Now Thanksgiving will be known as the holiday when you go home and install Chrome on your parents’ PC.

At my high school one of the requirements to graduate was that you had to carve a 12″ x 12″ x 1″ wood panel that is displayed in the hallways of the school after you graduated. (Yes, I attended one of those private schools you see in movies, like Dead Poets Society).

I recently discovered that my high school has gone digital and has now archived pictures of all the students’ panels online.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I have an obsession with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that borders on unhealthy. So, I carved the cover of the book into my wood panel, as pictured in the top of this post. The picture is a little blurry; if I ever go back to the campus, I’ll have to take a better one myself.

Here’s the original cover for Snow Crash that was the basis for my panel.

Georgia accused Russia of a coordinated CYBER-TERRORISM attack today… little did Georgia know, Gmail was down for all countries, not just them.

Ba-dum Ching!

Sometimes I read something that is so boneheaded that I literally smack my forehead. It happens frequently enough, that I’m going to start a series of posts on the subject. I’ll tag them all with the tag “smacksforehead” if you want to follow them in the future.

Here’s my first *smacks forehead* comment of the day, courtesy of the McCain campaign:

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” said Mark Soohoo, a McCain aide for online matters. Source: NYT

Are you kidding? You undoubtedly need to use a computer to understand it’s influence on our country. It’s like seeing in color… if you see in black & white only, there’s no way I could possibly trust your judgment on color.

*Smacks forehead*

Luckily, the second half of the paragraph from the NYT article sums up my feelings succinctly. Here’s the full quote:

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” said Mark Soohoo, a McCain aide for online matters, at a conference on politics and technology. “You actually do,” interrupted Tracy Russo, a former blogger for John Edwards.

Yes, you do.

There is an over-emphasis on the individual when it comes to responsibility and rationality in decision making. I rarely agree with David Brooks, but I found this paragraph in his op-ed today to hit the nail on the head:

Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

To be clear, I think David Brooks is correct in his assessment on how we, the general public, make decisions, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I wish the opposite were true; the world would be a better place if decision making were a more rational, logical exercise that happened in higher levels of consciousness. But, using nothing more than my own subjective observations as evidence, it’s not.

When I have a point of view about something in pop culture that can easily be summed up in 140 characters, I like searching for it on search.twitter.com to see how original or unoriginal my point of view is relative to other internet geeks.

For example, after watching The Watchmen trailer today, I was really worried that the movie could suck… it looks like I’m not alone.

However, sometimes these searches fail. For example, I thought The Watchmen was far more funny than either serious or dramatic. I don’t want to spoil any part of the story for anyone that has not read it, but I found myself actually bursting out in laughter in parts, particularly the ending… It’s a humor where I’m laughing WITH the author, not AT the author. Sure, it’s DARK humor, but it’s humor nonetheless. However, a search for “Watchmen funny” or “Watchmen humor” does not unearth any like-minded readers. Am I alone on this one?

Marco quoted the following paragraph from an article on MacUser. The article bemoans users expectations that web services and software be free. See the quote:

Despite the recent advent of ad-supported programs, people have been paying for software for years. And developers put no less time and energy into writing software than a woodworker puts into fashioning a table or a chef puts into cooking a dinner—yet nobody demands that those products be provided on an ad-supported basis.

I’ve heard this analogy used frequently, and it’s time to put it out to pasture.

Users expect software, music, and other digital goods and services to be free because they know it costs zero to copy and distribute the digital goods to them. Users expect to pay the marginal cost of a good, especially when it created for the purpose of being distributed at mass scale. Most users don’t understand what “marginal cost” is, but most rational users will indicate they want to pay the minimum price possible for a good or service, and that minimum price (in any medium or market, not just digital media) is always the marginal cost of production and distribution.

Returning to the faulty analogy which kicked off this post, prices trending towards marginal cost is true in woodworking or culinary disciplines too. If two restaurants offer a comparable cheesecake, all else being equal, a consumer will be drawn to purchase the cheaper one. The two restaurants will compete on price, and the minimum price that either restaurant can afford to offer (while managing to stay in business) will be the marginal price.

Consumers’ demand for free software isn’t novel. It’s as old as trading itself (think: animal furs and crude weaponry in caveman society). It’s the basic desire to receive goods or services in exchange for as little as possible. The reason why the demand for free software deceivingly feels novel is that we have never before had a medium where so many goods and services can be viably offered for zero marginal cost.

So, enough comparing software to bookshelves and desserts. If you want to make an analogy to other industries, choose one where marginal costs are also zero, so you have an increased possibility of pulling off and apples-to-apples comparison.