Programming, Publishing, Politics and Popes
For the last five months, the members of Ground Control to Major Tom have been reading novels to pick our semifinalists that will advance to the next round in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC). We began in November with a 25-book scout pile to sample, chose six of those novels to read in full as quarterfinalists, and have now chosen two of the books to advance as…
The spaceship has been moved to the launch pad and gantries shifted into place. Final preparations are underway for the fourth Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC), a contest where a large group of enthusiastic volunteer readers chooses the best work of self-published SF out of hundreds of entries. Because some of our judges are returning to their own writing and others are taking a…
I've been reading commencement speeches by Kurt Vonnegut, which are well-remembered today for mordant wit, dark humor and prophetic warnings about where society was headed. There was no one greater at sending freshly minted college graduates into the world with their skulls full of newfound doubt and grave misgivings. In his 1974 Hobart and William College commencement speech , Vonnegut talked…
A vivid memory has kicked off a few days of music nostalgia. It's 1985 and I'm driving home from the only job in my life that gave me any working-class cred, a summer gig pulling up and replacing carpets at apartment complexes across East Dallas. My thumbs are healing from cuts because I'm too inept to use an X-Acto knife properly, which my boss Eric predicted would happen on day one and considers…
I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth. There's a spaghetti of half-implemented features, integrations with long-dead blogging services and random one-off…
The RSS Advisory Board just turned 20 . It was launched on July 18, 2003 -- the same day Harvard was given the RSS specification and released it under Creative Commons for the board to manage. I became a member 10 months later and have been one since then, often as the chairman and always as the webmaster. The brouhaha last month over the W3C republishing the RSS 2.0 specification was the first in…
Five days before the Blogs at Harvard server was scheduled for shutdown , I asked Doc Searls on Twitter where his blog would be moving. He'd been on the server since August 1, 2007, and had written a staggeringly huge number of entries. I was not expecting his response: Holy shit. I hadn't heard it would. Do you have a link? This began a frantic four days in which I helped him export his blog to a…
My take on Threads is a lot like Amit Gawande's : Threads reminded me of why I eventually fell off the Twitter timeline. It's the same people talking about the same stuff they always do. The early adopters, the famous bloggers and podcasters. The social media celebrities. They have a bubble of their own. They talk amongst themselves as you listen. You are not part of any community -- you are…
I recently finished John Grisham's The Guardians , a 2020 novel about an Innocence Project-type attorney and Episcopal minister working to free a man wrongly convicted of killing his former attorney in Florida. This is the first Grisham novel I've read since his early novels The Firm and The Client made him a household name. I once took a flight where I saw a dozen passengers with copies of The…
There's a marriage proposal in the lettercol of this week's Amazing Spider-Man 28: As a lifelong Spidey fan, I never tire of reading about the adventures of our ever-friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Even after over 900 issues, I say 900 more! Spider-Man means so much to me and my partner of over 13 years. We've been together for so long, and she recently gifted me (believe it or not) a genuine…
My RSS Advisory Board blog post marking 20 years of Atom includes an expression I learned during that project's boundless debate among a hundred people about what to name the format. An issue so simple that everyone feels comfortable voicing an opinion is a "bike shed discussion," and the length of discussion will be inversely proportional to its importance. The phrase was popularized by an email…
With all the attention the RSS Advisory Board has been getting lately, I've been doing some work on the site, primarily to make it look better on mobile. I also wrote a tutorial on how to read RSS with PHP using SimplePie. For years my sites have used another library called Magpie to do the same thing, which made me wonder why people keep naming RSS libraries after pie. SimplePie co-creator Ryan…
I picked up Jenna Black's urban fantasy novel Dark Descendant at a Louisiana gas station that still sells paperbacks on a spin rack, reminding me of childhood trips on my 10-speed down the hill in Burleson, Texas, to look for books at the Stop-n-Go. Dark Descendant is about Nikki Glass, a detective whose case takes her to the compound of a creepy cult outside D.C. on a night where snow and sleet…
The W3C publishes a copy of the RSS 2.0 specification on its website as part of the documentation for its Feed Validation Service . Dave Winer has started making complaints that the W3C is violating his copyright. As the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, the group whose document the W3C is republishing, I can state that there is no copyright violation by the W3C. It is redistributing our copy of…
Jay Duplass and Kaitlyn Dever in the 2017 movie Outside In I was trapped in an endless scroll through Netflix movies the other night until I saw one of the Duplass brothers. Jay Duplass stars in the 2017 movie Outside In with Edie Falco and Kaitlyn Dever. He plays a man released after 20 years in prison because of the efforts of his former English teacher Falco, who championed his cause. Dever…