textiplication.com

Overheard from the playroom - my six-year-old playing chess.

The Gray Lady has discovered that you can’t quit Facebook:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/technology/11facebook.html

People used to make fun of Google’s "Don’t Be Evil" motto, but my sources tell me that it’s taken seriously inside Google and results in discussions about the morality of alternatives.  Probably, exactly what (and no more than) the founders intended.

What’s Facebook’s internal motto, if they have one?

The obvious? "Be Evil."

"Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then?" — the opening line of Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil, in my opinion the funniest line in the philosophical canon

"…Evil is usually …. good…"  — loose paraphrase from the same work

Or, my favorite - All your face are belong to us. 

Darn.

Not first to apply this to Facebook, this guy seems to be the first - or first-ranked.  But it does seem to capture their philosophy, doesn’t it?

The0 was asking.

Here’s what I do (crossposted from theophrast.us):

1. Add a new Chapter 5.
2. Rewrite Chapter 4 so new Chapter 5 makes sense.
3. Go back to Chapter 1, change one line to make new Chapter 4 make sense.
4. Update Chapters 2 and 3 to accommodate the effects of that one-line change, originally motivated by that new Chapter 5.
5. Fix Chapter 4 again, recovering from the rippling effects of that one-line change in Chapter 1.
6. At last, begin rewriting forward, making minor edits to Chapter 6 (formerly Chapter 5) and Chapter 7 (formerly Chapter 6)
7. The shit hits the fan. Chapter 8 now needs to be rewritten from scratch. Longingly contemplate working instead on novel #2 (unfinished) or novel #3 (unfinished). Play Kingdom of Loathing instead.
8. Rewrite Chapter 8 (formerly Chapter 7), doing beautiful job, loving every minute of it. Unfortunately, it’s in third-person objective instead of first person.
9. Rewrite Chapter 9 (formerly Chapter 8!) in third person.
10. Start the third-person rewrite of Chapter 10 (formerly Chapter 9). Realize that this is how I got into this problem in the first place.
11. Rewrite first 1000 words of Chapter 1.
12. Rewrite first 1000 words of Chapter 1 again.
13. Write new Chapter 1, occurring entirely before existing Chapter 1. I’ve been wanting to tell this part of the story for ages, wrote thousands of words at it, couldn’t do it. Now it works.
13. Rewrite Chapter 1, now Chapter 2. Was 6500 words, a long goddamn chapter. Now it’s 4500 words, every one of which I like better than the old version.
14. I’ll let you know…

The last time I had this much trouble implementing a bug fix, I was probably twelve.

Software’s for suckers.

Caitlin Kiernan is a wonderful writer with some health problems and no insurance.  Only in America!

You can help.

I am sorry, I can’t cancel your Facebook account. My post was a joke, elliptical and weak, hut in the proper light quite humorous, I swear - Scoble, who is one of the most famous bloggers evah, got his account canned by testing a tool that created an abuse of terms of service. 

I would never advise you to do such a thing. 

Therefore, there is no way to cancel your Facebook account. 

Facebook loves you too much to let you go.

Not me, him.

Let’s think about this for a moment.  The0 has just written his fourth novel - in the last two, two-and-a-half years.  (He’s not counting at least one prior work of at least a couple hundred thousand words.)  Each of those novels is over a hundred thousand words.  At least a couple of those novels he rewrote - as in, start over from the beginning and go all the way to the end again - at least once, in that span of time. 

So call it six hundred thousand words in the last two years, 

Plus a bunch of short stories, 

Plus several dozen beautiful watercolors and digital artworks,

A national award for a short story, and a contract for his first book,

–All of this, on evenings, weekends, and occasional plane rides–

While holding down a more-than-full-time job as an technology leader for a fast-growing company.

Let’s hear it for the man!

Samir wants to know what I think of the Google barcode idea, forever hereafter known as the GooCat.

My first reaction was much the same as Joel’s:

“The number of dumb things going on here exceeds my limited ability to grok all at once. I’m a bit overwhelmed with what a feeble business idea this is.”

Quoting himself, yet - tell it like it is, Joel.

Richard MacManus feels much the same way:

Dear Google: 2000 Called, It Wants Its Ad Format Back

I have a few thoughts to add, pro, con, or unable to suppress giggling about the whole thing:

1. The cellphone thing.  Both Joel and Richard concede that it’s at least somewhat more likely that people will use their cellphone cameras to scan barcodes than that they would use the ungainly devices promulgated by Digital Convergence oh, so long ago.  Both also point out that the major difficulty will be getting Verizon et al. to preinstall the barcode scanner application on people’s phones.  Given that Verizon et al. hate Google with the blood-dimmed passion of people who can’t figure out why anybody should ever get paid besides them, relying on them to preinstall the app that helps Google bridge the gap to print ads seems chancier than chocolate skateboards.
2. Well, Google’s kind of announced its own phone, and its intention to buy some sweet spectrum, and its plan to build its own cell network where you can use any phone you want, including its own.  Might help with the preinstallation concern.  Although the timing’s terrible - if they’re planning to put this into their own phone on their own network, might be a good idea to have the phone and the network first.  Could avoid years of GooCat mockery that way.  I’m just sayin’.
3. Now I’m back on the it’s-a-dumb-idea track.  Isn’t print advertising slowly augering in already? Isn’t internet advertising’s share of the ad pie expected to increase dramatically over the next five years?  Is Google trying to slow the rate at which ad spend displaces print spend?  (If so, then I expect they’ll soon start selling Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door.) I guess the print pie is still pretty damn big, so Google could get a few years of growth out of filleting whatever parts of that business Craigslist leaves intact.
4. You know what would be a really good idea?  See if eBay’s new CEO feels like selling Craigslist and its 24 employees, who are destroying eBay’s local business (and everyone else’s) out of the belief that advertising wants to be free.  Google could sell the ass off ads on Craigslist pages.  Eric, Sergei, and Larry could offer the post-Meg some of those chocolate skateboards that Verizon’s going to give them instead of preinstalling the barcode scanning apps.  Although those would be hard to give up.
5. Still, if you could stipulate success, you could foresee some totally fun non-ad applications of this.  Geocaching-style barcode-finding games.  Stick one on the side of your new ink-cartridge-refilling shop, give ink-cartridge-refilling prizes to the first ten people to upload their scans.  The Amazing Race to the next barcode, the excitement of reality TV meets the real reality of the supermarket checkout line. 
6. Actually, if I could stipulate success, I’d go after the Craigslist thing first, then buy Nokia.
7. Hey, you could actually wander the grocery store buying things with your phone — the flip side of the as yet unrealized dream of browsing the web on your refrigerator.  Could this be what Google really has in mind - 2D-barcodes + Google Checkout?  That’s thinking big - I’m sure that the retail supply chain is dying to redo their barcodes, right after they finish putting in Wal-Mart’s RFID tags.

That’s all I’ve got for now - who else has a great GooCat story?

UPDATED 1 MINUTE LATER: FIRST! I officially claim ownership of the idea of calling this wacky scheme the GooCat.   Nothing else out there but some baby pictures, a Chinese cartoon logo, and some WoW stuff that’s totally under my head.

D’you suppose they’re going to be fashionable again? or, I guess, for the first time?

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/googles-newspaper-ads-big-hopes-for-small-barcodes-goog.html

Google’s efforts to get into the newspaper ad business have yet to yield much. One tool it hopes will eventually change that: Small, square barcodes, like the one at the right, at the bottom of print ads. When a person scans the barcode with a compatible camera phone, it takes their phone’s browser to a mobile Web address encrypted in the graphic.

Now this is cool.

A. Torralba, R. Fergus, W. T. Freeman at MIT have collected 80,000,000 pictures representing the meanings of the 53,463 nouns in the English language, and presented them for our perusal in the form of a clickable abstract pattern!

When you get there, the very bright blue splotch at the center near the bottom is mostly sharks.  The first one I clicked on was Cow Shark.  I couldn’t find it again, though.  More tragic, I clicked randomly on the word "nympholept,’ then clicked away again before taking the time to note how it was depicted graphically.  I couldn’t find it again, so now I may never know.