Bruner Blog

My dearest friend Alev, my co-conspirator since about 8th grade, notorious trouble-maker, accomplished career gal, brilliant wit and ravishing beauty proved that good things do come to those who wait in her recent marraige to the likewise beautiful, brilliant and accomplished Nelson Thayer. Here’s what Alev’s employer, the NY Daily News recently published on the matter:

More photos on the way, like it or not.

As mentioned the other day, Jay Niemann is blogging. This is a good thing. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but let me first point out that the name of his blog, Filboid Studge, is not so much cryptic, as I suggested, but simply very obscure. As he points out, I had failed to notice that the name is explained in a short story running along the right margin of his blog: “Filboid Studge, The Story of a Mouse that Helped,” from The Chronicles Of Clovis (1912), by H.H. Munro (Saki).

This is classic Jay. If I may indulge myself for a moment (and gee, I have a blog, do I really need to ask permission to indulge myself?), Jay was a big character in my life once upon a time. My late teens and early 20s, to be precise. We met when my mom started dating his father. After they hitched, we were kind of like the Brady Bunch, except for the drug arrests, good music and other stuff.

Around about the second or third time I met Jay, I arrived home from my high school job at a cheese shop. Jay greeted me with a chorus of “We have a friend in cheeses” (to the tune of “We have a friend in Jesus,” in case that wasn’t obvious). I decided then I liked him.

He introduced me to Lou Reed. How could I not be grateful for that? Not to mention Robyn Hitchcock, The Jazz Butcher, We Might Be Giants, Richard Thompson, The Proclaimers and many, many others. Last time I asked, several years ago, he had around 4,000 LPs plus a few thousand CDs.

He also taught me the word “pedantic,” in the lyrics to our smash-hit single “We’re Huge!” (composed while sitting on the roof of our house): “Like battleship and barge, we’re oh so fucking large. We’re huge! We don’t mean to be pedantic, but we are just gigantic. We’re huge!”

It is also “thanks” to Jay that I have such phrases in my vocabulary as “holy Jesus acid fuck!”

One of the smartest guys I know, albeit a complete freak (in a good way). Just discovered his blog (we don’t keep in close enough touch), but am already discovering some of the most frightening nonsense on the Internet yet. How’s that for bald-faced nepotistic blogrolling?

It is my great pleasure to announce the product of many months of work, ExecutiveSummary.com’s Vendor Universe Database, a large and growing directory of e-marketing and e-media technology and services solutions providers I’ve been putting together since last year (with the help of the gifted jazz musician/java developer Travis Shook).

I’ve also just made some significant updates to my Rick’s Resources section of ExecutiveSummary.com.

Enjoy. Feedback eagerly awaited.

One of the many things I love about Google is its usefulness as a spell checker. Have you noticed this? If you’re a lousy speller (like I am), it’s quickly addictive. Type in a wrong selling into the main search field (e.g., I just tried “indespensible“), and the top link on the results page will come back with a suggestion of what is usually the correct spelling (”Did you mean: indispensable?”). No matter how far off you are, enough people have probably tried that same wrong spelling that Google has the right suggestion for you. Faster than running MS Word and better accuracy on the suggestions.

Just bought me one of these. Thank you, NYCBlogger.com!

I’m an athiest - or let’s just say a lazy agnostic. My parents made that decision for me before I was born when they abandoned the Catholic Church in college. I grew up going to services with some frequency at the Unitarian Universalist Church, where athiesm is tollerated, if not even encouraged (hard to tell what the Unitarians really do believe, as I’ve been discovering on my occasionally lapses back into that community). In short, I’m spiritual in a vague way, but I certainly don’t subscribe to anyone’s version of the Gospel (unless we’re talking about Thomas Dorsey or Sweet Honey in the Rock).

I very much respect anyone’s right to believe and worship whatever they want (within reason; Satanism’s a bit out there). This is what our Constitution says is a defining American characteristic, and I’m on board with the Constitution in general. But, like the Constitution also says, I really don’t like anyone, pariticularly the government, telling me or anyone else what to believe or think about “God.”

Thus, I have to tell you I’m really pleased to hear that a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has found the “Pledge of Allegiance” to be unconstitutional, as this Times article reports. Of course it’s unconstitutional. We’re supposed to separate church and state. During the recitaton of the pledge when I was in grade school (which I never really minded in general, a basic lesson in civics), I always stopped reciting that particular phrase “…one nation, under God…,” because that didn’t apply to me. I was teased a few times, but mostly it was my own silent reflection on the hipocracy of the system, even back then.

My favorite quote from the majority ruling today:

?A profession that we are a nation ?under God? is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ?under Jesus,? a nation ?under Vishnu,? a nation ?under Zeus,? or a nation ?under no god,? because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.?

NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, Cokie Roberts (don’t you just love that name?), said today that the chances that the ruling will withstand an inevitable review by the full Ninth Circuit court are roughly “zilch.” Oh well, I applaud them for their courage on this issue. I suppose if they opened up that can of worms, we’d have to start wondering about swearing on a Bible in court, “In God We Trust” printed on our currency and having televangalists inaugurating our president in the name of Jesus.

Rob Taylor responded to my earlier posting about just what Enetations is up to with its new little comment utility.

Hi,

I will try and explain what we are doing…

First up we are not evil spammers using a cunning email gathering device, however now you mention it…. We have not and will not sell any information gathered to anyone. We ask for your email address so if we need to alert you to a change in code or something big we can - as not all users read the front page.

All the information posted in a comment is stored on our servers, so yes this is turning into a spam harvester’s wet dream. You’re even getting me scared now! We did implement a anti-spam device to try and make sure that email addresses are not picked up by translating email@address.com to email at address dot com. That is straying from the point, however that was the extent to our spam related thoughts ;). I must say my personal spam levels have increased with admin@enetation.co.uk also being ‘targeted’ by earthlink users with macro virus’s :S

Displaying a privacy policy that we will stick to is something I will look into very shortly. Likewise I will expand on exactly who we are, what we are doing and why and post it all on the enetation.co.uk site.We will write biographys, and possibley oblidge with the odd ‘me as a baby’ picture as well. The inital aim was to make a good working system, the next aim is to improve it (such as more transparancy in ‘us’) and secure the long term future of enetetion, without shifting too much from what is alread established. The reason it has not happened yet as it is only 2 weeks old

Briefly I will outline what/how we are doing enetation here. I (Rob Taylor) run Studio-51.co.uk, a company that does outsourced programming and techie friendly hosting in the UK. Due to this I have some surplus resources and bits of kit allowing me to host something as bandwidth hungry as enetation.co.uk. Likewise it means that in effect studio-51.co.uk is currently subsidising enetation.co.uk and will do for a while yet.

I have been astounded by the response by the community to enetation, which has prompted me to think a little earlier that I was expecting on enetation’s future. There will be a point where I will have to make enetation ‘pay for itself’, or at least not incur infinately expanding costs to run it, that is as your reader correctly points out its very 1999ish and hiding from reality if I just ignore the issue until its too late. Usually generating an income stream would be done via donations or some form of ‘Pro’ version for a subscription fee. However I hope to combat that by enabling users to ‘donate’ bandwidth and ‘load balancing’ the commenting system. I must state this is just an idea and an ideal at this moment, and it would be damn good if the community could ‘run’ its own commenting systems!

There are numerous problems with that, such as backups of comments, the system itself, integrity of donors etc. All problems that will have to be countered - or just accepted and revert back to one of the above sources of income.

So in all honesty we havn’t a clue, as we didnt expect it to be as popular as it is. We are not ignoring the fact at some point some poor sods going to have to give enetation something - however if they get more features, a big ‘thank you’ or whatever. I just cannot say.

This has gone on more than I expected, so much for ‘briefly’, but I hope it answers the readers question, even if the answer is ‘we dont know’.

Cheers, Rob

Many thanks for the reply. Keep up the great work!

Golf and tennis are cool. (I thought I posted the golf thing once before, but now can’t find it in my own archives.)

I love reading my friend Emmanuelle’s blog in bad Google translation (as she writes it in her native French). It’s brilliant what the translation system comes up with. My favorite is “blogist” instead of “blogger,” which is hence forth my preferred term for our ilk.

Delighted to see that my step-brother Jay Niemann has started a blog, cryptically titled Filboid Studge, which apparently specializes in weird minutiae, not unlike the man himself.

A Bruner Blog reader writes in offering grains of salt about my recent optimism for new free software products, including Cloudmark’s anti-spam plug-in SpamNet, and the free utility for creating reader comments on blogs and websites from Enetations, which I use on ExecutiveSummary.com. SpamNet, it should be noted, is experiencing a fair bit of bugginess in its beta release.

My reader (who didn’t want the message made public) specifically wondered about Enetation’s business model, which as I mentioned in my prior note about them, is not exactly transparent or well marketed, if there is one at all. (No fee, no ads, no self-promo. Just plain free. Sound too good to be true? It’s not 1999 anymore, after all.)

The reader speculates that they could just be farming email addresses for resale. On the face of it, that’s true. When you sign up to use the service as a web logger, they ask for your email address, but they never mention what their purpose is in acquiring that address. Also, when someone uses the utility to post a comment on my blog, by default the form asks for their email address. (I believe I had the option to edit the form and perhaps turn that off when I set it up, but I’m not sure and can’t be bothered to go back and check.) Does that email address get stored on their servers? I’m not sure. Either way, there appears to be no explanation about privacy policies or how they treat email addresses in the FAQ or their About Us pages.

Furthermore, the About Us page gives no real explanation of the mission of the “business” (if it is, indeed, even a business), how it intends to make money, what happens to all my comment records if they go bust, or even biographies of the founders. It only offers their email addresses.

My own assumption has been that these are a couple of well-meaning techies who coded this elegent little utility and made it freely available to the world just for their love of the blog world and their programming creativity, and that how to make money or issues concerning privacy just haven’t really occurred to them yet because they’re too good and pure for that. And their British modesty makes them think no one would be interested in their biographies anyway.

Describing it like that makes me sound like quite a sap. But I think I’m right. In part because I wrote them email earlier with a minor bug report, and they both answered me personally. I know this thing’s gotten a lot of publicity inside the blog world, so they’re doutbless getting tons of mail. If they were just running an elaborate scam to farm email address, I can’t see them delivering such good customer service.

But the reader’s question is a good one that deserves a response, and an update of the site w/ a privacy policy at minimum. As readers should know, I am not just an armchair Internet media pundit: it’s how I make my living. I’ve done a lot of research in the email marketing space, and I can assure you that theirs are not best practices in terms of handling sacred email addresses online. But I am willing to bet they’re just naive, not nefarious. I’ll update with a response if I get one. (I’m not holding my breath for a consulting gig on this one.)

English scientists building artificially intelligent robots were surprised when one broke free of its cage and made it as far as the parking lot.

Morto the Magician

This animation was written by Steve Martin, apparently. I guess Morto is even suposed to be a caricature of him. Frankly, I would have expected better from him, tho it’s rather amusing.

Webbies

Lots of interesting sites to explore among the winners of this years Webby Awards, announced earlier this week..

It’s Only Fun Till Someone Gets Hurt

I just upgraded this morning from the free version of Blogger.com to Blogger Pro. (It’s great. If you use Blogger.com, you should really upgrade to the Pro version. Ev could use your support.) The transaction was confirmed with an email that began, “You are now a Blogger Pro subscriber. May you use your new powers for good and not evil.”

I have to admit, I’ve been a bad blogger. The other day I used the blog to mock a friend, a journalist who didn’t think blogs amount to a hill of beans. I thought it was pretty funny at first (and so did a few readers, I believe), but it got a bit out of hand. I’ll spare you the details, because that wouldn’t really be having learned a lesson to gloat about it. Point is, it was mean, and he was offended, and I’ve learned my lesson. I’m sorry, and hereby take the Blogger Pro pledge to use my powers of blogging only for good from here on after.