Table of Contents:

General News

• Change Sucks
• Kosovo
• Gas Prices
• Python and Firesign

Computer Industry News

• Anti-Windows Bias
• Stupid Brand Name Tricks

Web Site of the Week

• Cluetrain Manifesto

Humor

• Headline Bloopers

Movies

• Dangerous Liasons, The Man Who Knew Too Little

Letters

• Bill Gates: The Anti-Christ? My mother doesn't think so. Also, Joe Brancatelli on The Simpsons.

General News

Change Sucks

Ian Shoales, a lifestyle commentator, once said "Middle-aged men love change about as much as they love heart attacks."

I haven't had a heart attack yet, but the amount of change around here is becoming seriously disorienting.

For months, I have been coping with the realization that, come September, Marlow will move out and go to college. I will go from being the leading man in the sitcom of her life to being a bit player. I'll make a "special guest appearance" each year on the Christmas show. Or, if I'm really lucky, I'll be helming the summer replacement program (anybody here old enough to remember when there were summer replacement TV shows? Or when Johnny Carson had guest hosts and fresh shows?)

For weeks I have been dealing with the fact that my professional home for 19 of the last 20 years, CMP Media Inc., is 'in play" and may very well be sold. I'll make out OK personally, but I'll soon be learning a new corporate culture for only the second time since 1979 (the first time was my 14 months at Ziff Davis in 1988-89). I have been through all the stages of mourning, I think: anger, disbelief, negotiation.... whatever. Now I am at acceptance. I don't know if it is an intelligent acceptance, or merely a numb one, but I don't get excited or worried about events any more. I don't obsess about it. To use a felicitous term once coined by one or our managers, I am past the whining and mourning.

Or at least I thought I was. Last week, one of my best friends and most trusted colleagues, Jeremy Barna (son of Becky Barna, whose kindness in bringing me back to CMP in 1989 can never be repaid and will never be forgotten), finally got an offer he could not refuse from an outside firm. His obvious talent and enthusiasm, combined with his winning personality and scrupulous work habits have made him a recruiting target at the score of firms to which CMP internet people have been dispersing over the last year. He's going to Quokka, the Internet sports site firm that swallowed up CMP's Jen Kaczor earlier this year. Jen's headed for Switzerland for three months to work on the International Olympic Committee official web site.

He'll leave a hole in the CMP China Basin office that will be almost impossible to fill. In conjunction with the dozens of other resignations that began last summer when Becky Barna and Mitch York left, Jeremy's departure makes CMP's San Francisco Internet operation that much more lonely. I've lost the only other audio engineer in the place. I've lost one of the last G2-capable producers. More importantly, I've lost a workplace friend.

On the upside, last week I went to Internet World, and saw Dave Sims. We had a lovely chat in the press room and walked the floor together for a while. My former supervisor, he left at the end of February. The difference is astounding. He is so much more relaxed, confident and happy that it is palpable. I can only wish for the same transformation with Jeremy. (By the way, Dave said I seemed much more at ease and enthusiastic, which he and I attribute to my assignment to the Byte.com project).

In any case, Change Sucks.

Kosovo

OK, you pay me the big bucks to take positions on the tough subjects (OK, you don't pay me anything, except the coin of your attention. Still, that's worth a lot).

I have been avoiding commenting on Kosovo because, frankly, I didn't know where to come down and didn't want to appear two-handed about it.

The question is, how are we to think of Kosovo? Is it Pre-WWI Balkans? Is it Germany on Kristalnacht? Rwanda the day after the Belgians pulled out? Is it Vietnam? Or, worst of all, is it something we have never seen?

There are probably elements of pre-WWI Balkans in the situation. I mean, it's taking place in the same country. The civil war down there has been going on since the 14th century. Like Ireland, it may be intractable.

After the Holocaust, it wasn't just the Jews who said never again. When the scale of the even became clear, the civilized West said it would never again tolerate genocide. Then, because it was convenient, and we were distracted, and the victims were black, we tolerated it in Rwanda. Arguable, we also tolerated it in Bosnia and Croatia.

Thus, we come to Kosovo with our moral authority sapped.

On the face of it, American news coverage makes it crystal-clear that the Serbians are wrong and NATO is right to bomb in order to head off either "ethnic cleansing" or genocide (or both) in Kosovo. Alas, I know from experience that things are never as simple as they are made to appear in American news coverage. If you read the British coverage (most easily done on the Internet), things aren't so black and white. If you want the full-blown Serbian view, in English, check out Truth In Media.

I think we are doing this right. Try diplomacy. Bomb and keep trying diplomacy. And if bombing and diplomacy fail, try ground forces--European with some American backup--only with a clear, limited war goal.

Vietnam was wrong because it was a civil war in which we had no right or reason (other than commercial and political) to participate.

We lost it because there was no support at home for the utterly ridiculous war aims. Why were we there, to stop the Commies before they invaded the West Coast?). And, of course, there was mass revulsion at the draft. This, in turn, stemmed in part from the political decision to keep the military from doing what it would take to win, since no one could define winning.

In Kosovo, things are different. The question is moral: can we stand aside while clearly documented ethnic cleansing and genocide takes place? For a change, we truly have no ulterior motive (we don't need the minerals they have that badly, and they don't have any oil to speak of).

This is where we draw the line in the sand and say "no more genocide."

To keep this from becoming Vietnam is simple. It's a volunteer army now. All we need is clear war aims, and a commitment to achieve them by any non-nuclear means necessary.

Maybe it's the Gulf War, only this time we won't stop until we take the bad guy out.

Gas Prices

My mother pointed out that in the 50s, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk and a pound of hamburger were all the same price as a gallon of gas. In the half-century since then, these basics have inflated at different rates. But if you average the prices of bread, milk and hamburger today, $2 a gallon isn't so bad.

Firesign and Python

Two of my favorite comedy groups in the world are the Firesign Theater and Monty Python. Firesign is on tour; they played San Francisco last week when I was on vacation in Santa Cruz. I am deeply sorry I missed them. If they're coming to your town, don't miss them if you can. All Hail Marx and Lennon (visual pun). And heavy on the 30-weight. If you've never heard of them... details available on request.

If you don't follow the present-day doings of the Pythons, you may be pleasantly surprised to hear that the remaining cast members (Graham Chapman being dead and all that) are supposedly going to tour in the fall. No dates set yet, no cities settled (although LA and NY seem almost mandatory), but they discuss the prospect on their official web site.

Computer Industry News

Anti-Windows Bias

Technically, this is a letter to the editor, but I had two of those, and the subject was, "Have I Mentioned I Don't Like Windows," so here is my classmate, computer graphics whiz Craig Reynolds:

Your PSaCoT access counter is under-reporting visitors to your site. At first I thought it wasn't working, since each time I read your column I saw the same number, then I realized it was being cached by my browser. Doing a reload of the page, even a cache-clearing reload, did not cause it to change. (Whereas, for example, the counter on my page increments on a reload. I'm not sure what causes the difference.)

It was not until I exited from Netscape (Communicator 4.05) and restarted did I see it change. For your readers who use Windows this is not an issue, the OS forces them to restart apps or reboot the system frequently enough to flush the cache. On my Unix system apps can stay up for months at a time...

Regarding your 20,000 Email Messages item, this bug is avoided in the Unix "vacation" program. It keeps a list of the email addresses to which it has sent an autoreply. It does not sent another autoreply until a certain (user definable) interval has past. Unsurprisingly, the Windows implementation is dangerously inadequate. From the Unix online documentation ("man") page on "vacation":

...This feature reduces unnecessary mail traffic for the system and undue irritation for those who send you mail. An interval of "0" means that a reply is sent to each message, and an interval of "infinite" ... will never send more than one reply. The default interval is seven days. Caveat: An interval of "0" is quite dangerous as it allows mailers to get into "I am on vacation" loops...

Stupid Brand-Name Tricks

Silicon Graphics Launches New Identity As SGI

Web Site of the Week

Cluetrain Manifesto

This is either the most brilliant thing I've ever seen or the stupidest. In either case, it is one of the most subversive web sites I have ever run across. Here is just a sampling. A Tip o' the Schindler Chapeau to Richard Dalton, who turned me on to this.

Humor

Dogs have masters, Cats have staff

Headline Bloopers

Journalism humor. Headlines that went awry in 1998:

Movies

Dangerous Liaisons, The Man Who Knew Too Little

I have every intention of getting out and seeing a movie Sunday; what I don't have is any assurance I will feel like writing it up until next week. So, no fresh movie review this week, but rather a golden oldies pair of selections.

First, this from Diana ben-Aaron in Finland, apropos of my remarks about Dangerous Liaisons here last week:

While I was in LA for Internet World, I spotted a copy of Bill Murray's rib-ticking comedy The Man Who Knew Too Little at a supermarket checkout stand. Not being a professional reviewer, I have no idea how long it has been out on videotape. But I do know this: despite tepid reviews, it was in fact a clever and funny film which let Murray be Murray. I don't think I need say any more than that. It is well worth owning.

Letters

A lot of you are on the same kind of mailing lists I'm on, so you've probably already seen this:

Hell yes! That's the definition of a coincidence! Besides which, they cheated to count his III as 1, 1,1. To be consistent, it should have been counted as the letter I (ASCII 73) or the numeral 1 (ASCII 49). But as usual, when people make these things up, they twist them for their own purposes. I wonder how long it took to find a variation of his name that added up to 666? Just for another example, he is either William H. Gates III (formal) (but that doesn't add up) or he is Bill Gates (informal), but that doesn't add up either. Find a reference in a mainstream publication, ever, to Bill Gates III. You can't. It doesn't exist.

Or, as my mother put it,

Finally, Joe Brancatelli noted that I was complaining about a lack of letters, so he wrote me one. I'd say it was off the subject, if this column had a subject. But since I wholeheartedly endorse his opinion, I'm printing it here.

Futurama, Matt Groening's other show (Tuesday nights on Fox) is already showing potential to be the equal of The Simpsons. God, what a genius that man is.