Got mail from Massachusetts demanding excise tax on the car. Am sending them a copy of the paperwork showing that we were only in Massachusetts for about a week after buying it.
Q: Why is the City of Cambridge office of vehicle taxation like a swan?
A: They can both stick their bills up their asses.
(Sorry, I guess I’m still a bit bitter about that unexpected $7,000 tax bill.)
Back in 1988, Dave Winer founded UserLand Software to sell a product called Frontier. It was a dynamic scripting system for the Mac. It was a bit odd; Dave was also the author of MORE, an outliner, and Frontier treated source code something like an outliner and something like a database. It was supposed to be quite good, but as of 1992 he wanted $250 for it, and if you were outside the US the price was jacked up by another 90%. So, I never bought it.
Then Apple introduced AppleScript. It did most of the important things Frontier did, and was free on every Mac. Dave Winer was furious. How dare Apple including a scripting language as part of the OS? Yes, they had added all the hooks to the OS, and he had used them for Frontier, but how had he been supposed to guess they were intending to use those hooks themselves? Sure, they were documented publically, but how dare Apple call them an “Open Scripting Architecture” when Dave wasn’t asked to help design them?
The rants have gone down in legend. The Mac was doomed now that Windows 95 had shipped. Apple’s best bet was to license Windows NT and make the Mac a graphical shell for it. Dave had spoken.
It was pretty clear that what Dave really wanted was for Apple to worship him. Of course, the nice gentlemen in Redmond were only too keen to invite Dave round for a chat about their plans and make him feel loved.
So before long, Dave was a Windows developer, had ported his software to run on PCs, and was eagerly drinking the .NET Kool-Aid.
Meanwhile, he had found a new niche for Frontier, as the basis of Manila, a content publishing system for the web. He started giving Frontier away for free, and gave away Manila free too.
Then after a year or two turned around and began charging everyone $899 a year for it. Not for upgrades, just for a license to use it. It must have seemed like a great business plan back in those dot com bubble days:
Of course, it didn’t quite work. And as the famous saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Before long Dave Winer was universally acclaimed by Dave Winer as the inventor of weblogs. He started weblogs.com, running on Manila. The plan was to give people free blogging space in the hope that they would like it enough to purchase his rather expensive software subscriptions.
Needless to say, they didn’t. And after a while, UserLand Software decided they were tired of wasting money on the exercise, particularly since Dave had officially left the company. Of course, he still owns the company, and is a multi-millionaire… but those are minor details.
Dave reportedly tried to transfer the blogs to a new server in Cambridge, MA. However, it was time for his chickens to come home to roost–his software is all Windows-based, and when he loaded it onto the new server and tried it out, the system thrashed itself to death. To get scalability for a mere 3,000 users he would have had to buy an entire server farm of Microsoft systems. That was too much like work, so Dave pulled the plug. Without notice. 3,000 weblogs vanished overnight. He recorded a heartfelt audio goodbye, and hosted it at Harvard University’s expense.
But hey, he’s a reasonable guy. He says he will provide people with their data some time in July, if they ask nicely. Not sure why it’ll take him until July to offer backups by request only, given that his software has overnight backup as a standard feature, but hey, I’m sure he has a good reason, just like he has a good reason for not even offering a redirect from the blogger.com domain to the users’ new URLs. (He says his DNS server can’t handle 3000 hostnames. I guess he runs his DNS on Windows too.)
So anyway, my point is: when’s the last time you backed up your LiveJournal?
Dave Winer relented after people offered their hardware and bandwidth. Users will now have until September to sort out commercial hosting, and will get a redirect. Of course, there’s still the problem of either paying for commercial Manila hosting, or getting your data out of Manila somehow…
LiveJournal disabled my account. Yes, I had backed everything up.
On the Monday we went to SFMoMA. Much good stuff. There was a really wonderful Rothko painting; normally I’m not as big on Rothko as, er, sara… but this one had a wonderful ethereal translucency to it. Rather like San Francisco fog.
I learned that Roy Lichtenstein actually painted all those little dots by hand. Later in his career he started using pre-made dots, but he still stuck them on by hand, individually. The mind boggles. Suddenly I admire his work a hell of a lot more.
At this point I had started to realize that all the stereotypes about San Francisco are basically false. It isn’t full of overpaid yuppies—or at least, it’s no more full of overpaid yuppies than Boston or Cambridge. It isn’t full of hippies either. It isn’t very gay at all, unless you head down to Castro. It isn’t perpetually summer. It isn’t full of flakes and freaks.
I’m not sure what it is, even now; I just know what it isn’t. If I’d had expectations, I probably would have been very disappointed.
Tuesday we took BART out to Berkeley. It’s about as you’d expect… very like Cambridge, MA in fact. I noticed that the copies of Socialist Worker actually used the ‘S’ word; ‘round here they rename it Revolutionary Worker. I guess “Socialist” has all the marketing power of the “Fried” in KFC.
The temperature in Berkeley was about 6 degrees warmer than SF, and students were arriving and joining frats and going to sports events. We met up with someone I knew from IRC, and had some lunch. In the afternoon we browsed Moe’s Bookstore. I was pleased to see an extensive selection of titles by Philip K. Dick, one of UCB’s most famous dropouts; there were even some I didn’t have. I bought The Simulacra and The Game Players of Titan. After all, you can’t travel to San Francisco and not get any Dick…
Returning to SF, we actually saw the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, not shrouded completely in fog.
Cambridge University Computer Lab sent me a postcard to announce the opening ceremony of the new William Gates Building they’re moving to.
I trust that soon the School of Journalism will move to the Robert Maxwell Building. Then the Business Studies department can move to the Ken Lay Building on Enron Avenue, and the School of Design can move to the John DeLorean Building.
Then, perhaps, Cambridge will consider whether it really wants to whore out its academic credibility to any rich head of a lawbreaking corporation. No, wait, apparently they already decided that…
NPR has a feature about Cambridge schools. Apparently they’ve been told they can’t use race as a factor when assigning children to schools, which they used to do to ensure diversity. So now, they’re using economic level instead.
Of course, this makes more sense—economic level has much more of an effect on academic performance than race.
They interviewed a Cambridge parent, who said that while she agreed with the idea of mixing different economic levels intellectually, nevertheless if her kid ended up in a school full of poor kids, she’d move house to put the kid in a different school.
I was strongly reminded of the song “Love me, I’m a liberal“ as performed by Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon.
Last night we met up with some friends and went to the candle-lighting vigil in David Square. It was very solemn and tasteful, mostly. People stood around in a ring with candles, cupping their hands to protect the flames from the breeze. Every now and again someone would walk forward to the large stone compass in the center of the square, and place the candle there.
There were songs. I didn’t know the words, and I can’t really reach the high notes anyway. One person preached, but nobody seemed very receptive. (This is Cambridge, MA, after all.)
A few flags were waved. Some annoying people drove a car around playing “God Bless The USA” really loudly on the tape deck. It could have been worse, it could have been Springsteen… Other people honked car horns in support. I thought that was very American—drive-thru vigils.
There were one or two hundred people there from 19:00 through to about 22:30, when we left. (There was a trip to a nearby Chinese restaurant during that period.) There was a bigger gathering outside the Christian Science Center in Boston—people four or five deep all around the artificial lake, floating candles out onto the water.