I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first in...

I want my blog on the same network as my social media.

AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.

Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.

Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece.

There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it.

If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking.

A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.

The great thing about MLB as compared to the NBA is that the teams play a game pretty much every day. And the Mets, my team since 1962, are really exciting right now, after a month of being lost. They have great rookie pitchers who are full of youthful enthusiasm and they kic...

Short excerpt of the ICE commercial which aired several times on WPIX during yesterday's Mets game. There aren't that many drug trafficker, predatory gang members in the US for ICE to deport. And they completely misrepresent what a sanctuary city is. The commercial is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. Shameful.

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.

Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work.

I like what Vivaldi says about the web. It makes me want to do more to re-stock the web with interesting, inspiring human ideas. Maybe we could make our blogging software work better with their browser. All for the web, for humanity.

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get the snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.

It's the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina which wiped out New Orleans, a major American city, which I knew because I went to college there. I went there in December 2005 to get an idea of what a post-apocalyptic American city looks like. On the flight from Atlanta to New Orleans, a 50-minute podcast with Janet, a woman who lost her house and all her possessions in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. It's quite possible this and the one that followed were the only contemporary podcasts about Katrina, because in 2005 there wasn't all that much podcasting going on. You can see these episodes in the Morning Coffee Notes program listing.

Stephanie Booth, an old school blogger, wanted to hook up my RSS feed to a new service that supports inbound RSS, which we appreciate. Apparently they can't handle HTTP, which of course we don't.

Story. I'm on a mail list for Berkman, where I spent two years at Harvard. Alumnae of all generations are on this list, and it's interesting. Just got an email that someone was proud of having their picture taken with Susan Landau. I didn't know who she was, so I looked her ...

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the boost to yesterday's post. Glad to finally get the whole plan down in one place. Each piece of the puzzle took a while to come together in concept and then in implementation. I'm still working on all levels, last week I added a feature to Fee...

Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application s...

Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application s...

Steve Jobs asked you to think differently about computers. I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress. I'm not going to make you wait to hear what it is. I want you to see WordPress as comparable to Bluesky or Mastodon. I've done this before -- asked people...

Last week I did an unusual podcast about three huge birds fighting over a fish in a nearby pond. Usually I write and talk about technology or politics, but this was such a compelling story and I didn't have any photos or video, so I did a verbal story. Hope you enjoyed it. W...

news.scripting.com continues to grow. There must be some word of mouth. Or perhaps people are refreshing it more often. I have no analytics except for a hit counter. Maybe I should do a little work on the site. Let me know if you have any feature requests.

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers them. Period.

It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only br...

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.

2003: "The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence."

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web.

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating.

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some settings where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.