Recently in Old Junk Category

The word that you seldom hear, restore. You hear about backups all the time. If you read about how to do backups, you read about how important restores are all well. Let's face it, what good are backups if you can't restore them?

Before I did a clean install of OS X on Kat's G4 Cube, I backed up her documents to my laptop. Don't worrry, there is no disaster story coming. But I did forget to restore her documents back after OS X was installed. She was poking around today looking for her resume and couldn't find it. It instantly dawned on me that I forgot that critical step of restoring her files.

After I dumped them back, she went poking around through her old files. You usually always find something interesting. In this case she found a scan of a postcard that she had sent me a long time ago.

The push for privatization in government scares me. First, lets define what a private business really does. Private business is to designed make money for the people who own the business or the share holders if it happens to be a publicly owned business. Contrary to what some people may think, business is not about efficiency. It is about maximizing profit. In some cases that can be done through efficiency, but it doesn't have to be. The benefit is not to the customers or the employees.

The theory that the most efficient business will be the one that prevails works great on paper, but then so did communism. When it comes down to it, people are involved and will make the "on paper" argument invalid. So just go ahead and scratch that idea.

Even if business was about efficiency, look how it would be spun inside of a company. A business would have to figure out how to have as few people as possible, do as much work as possible, while charging as much as possible. This is not equivalent to providing the best possible service, only service that is just good enough compared to the next guy so they can still turn a profit.

Uplifting thoughts eh? Should I flush this out into another business article? Yes No

...but I fell asleep. I was going to get going on my next business story about the customer always being right and what that really means.

Oh well.

So I haven't written anything here because I've been playing with Radio 8. It's cool. Of course, the whole system is swamped with people posting, so a lot of times files can't get upstreamed to the Radio servers. Now, while this isn't really a problem, Radio also pings weblogs.com to say that your site has been updated. But if the files can't be uploaded...well, you see the problem.

Should Radio only ping weblogs.com after upstreaming has completed sucessfully? I don't know. I'm sure "Dave" has been chewing on this already...along with a ton of other things that have sprung up now that Radio is out in the wild.

Hey Dave, I noticed that there were two updates to root. Where do we see a changelog? ;-)

Okay, Radio must me one of those things that is just out of my comprehension bubble. I really tried to get into Radio 7.01 when it was out, then I heard that 8 was coming so I immediately threw away 7 and waited for 8.

It was going to be the weblog messiah. It would solve any problem. Which, you know...I'm always looking for something that will do that.

All the reviews that I have read so far seem to be coming from people who already groked Radio. So all the stuff they already knew how to do was there, and then all this great other stuff that just "made sense" to them.

The only non-gushy thing I've read about Radio 8 was on Flangy and even then it was only about the docs being rather...rough. Rough? How about not there. You get pointed to a discussion board.

Writing docs is hard. I know this. I hate writing them too. But good software needs good docs. The discussion board is a very valuable piece to fill in gaps, but I don't think it should be used as a substitute for the real thing.

For now, I'm going to have to stick with Manila.

Which brings me to my next point of contention with Radio 8. It does nothing to talk to a Manila server. Shouldn't Manila and Radio be complimentary products? Alright, maybe they are, but it would be nice if Radio could talk to Manila, and not just for editing stories.

I really like the way that Radio brings the news together and allow me to make a post based on what I'm reading. That is dead simple. Getting a weblog up in the Radio cloud is also dead simple. This is where there have done a great and amazing job. But I've put a lot of work into my weblogger.com site and want to keep it there. I like all the backend Manila stuff I can do. I want to use Radio to post to my Manila-based weblog. At least there I can be pberry.weblogger.com and not radio.weblogs.com/0100030/

I'm a person, not a number damnit! ;-)

If you ever read this "Dave", or any other developer on "Radio". You guys have obvioulsy done an amazing job. 3 million webloggers can't be wrong. In the word of George Costanza, "It's me, not you."

In no way am I saying that you shouldn't try Radio. It may be exactly what you need/want. In fact, give it a spin and tell me how I'm being stupid! Please!

This Yahoo News article has some choice tidbits about Microsoft not being able to dump more Windows software into schools to capture even more of the market.

The Microsoft spin: If you oppose us, you are punishing poor kids.

A new low...

Well, the music was key today. It kept me awake. Barely though. One more song for today. I know I said there would be a lot, but I was busy. So here is Monaco - What Do You Want From Me?.

Enjoy.