Davos Newbies

This is very odd. Very odd indeed.

As one of the comments says, “The only thing sadder than female journalists taking a sudden interest in football is political spin doctors pretending to be sports jounalists.” (It’s also odd that you need to click on comments to read the full post. Hasn’t the Labour Party heard of any tried and tested blogging software?)

As one observant blogger friend noticed, my family ended a year without television because of the World Cup. I’m determined to get lots of work done in the next month, but the distraction of the world’s greatest sporting event is powerful, even when the lure is Germany v Costa Rica.

I went with John, a non-fan colleague, this morning to our local coffee shop, which has – like my family – installed a TV because of the World Cup. The usually mellow Berkeley morning crowd had been displaced today by some different faces, including one young man in a Germany shirt. John and I sat down, not reluctantly, to watch the first few minutes of the game. Amazingly, even though we only watched 12 minutes, we saw two goals. John is going to get a very wrong idea of football.

For the office-bound, minute-by-minute coverage, as pioneered by The Guardian, is a vital link. I was excited yesterday when The New York Times’s very good World Cup blog announced that it was going to provide a play-by-play of every game. Sadly, it is a very, very pale imitation of the original. Compare the NYT coverage with The Guardian. One understands both the game and humor; the other doesn’t. Message to the Times bloggers: loosen up.

Incidentally, when my football-obsessed 10-year old son and I discussed the opening match this morning, he authoritatively proclaimed, “Germany will rout them.” Not so fast, I cautioned. When I lived in Italy, I went to the opening match of Italia ‘90. A friend was desperate to give away seats since no one wanted to see Argentina trounce Cameroon (particularly in Milan: Maradona had led Napoli to the scudetto over AC Milan, and he was hated in the city). The result was one of the World Cup’s great moments.

“What would you do with the UN? > Ich wolde heale the grete schisme bitwene Rome and Avignon.”

It can only be the great Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, interviewed in Normblog.

Mark Cuban is a wonderful blogger and a rare billionaire who is happy to admit his childish pleasures:

The good news is I have a smile on my face that no one will be able to wipe off for at least another 3 hours and 20 minutes.

I plan on writing this. Checking somethings and getting on the court to shoot a couple baskets. I have to shoot some baskets on the NBA Finals floor. Period end of story. I wouldnt forgive myself if i didnt.

I get a lift from Bibliodyssey on a nearly daily basis. Today PK posts some extraordinary drawings on turtle embryology, but I was more struck by the fascinating information graphic from Louis Agassiz relating depth of excavation to species. If I ever have the spare time (and spare money) I could see building a wonderful collection specializing in nineteenth-century information graphics. They really knew what they were doing.

Jacob Weisberg’s column in today’s Financial Times is a sensible examination of why president Bush is both wrong to push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and why it will fail (subscribers only). But he gets awfully muddled by trying to be politically even-handed.

Any political party counts on having a few hot buttons it can push at those moments when it is a few points behind in the polls with not much time until election day. These issues have certain characteristics – a whiff of pandering, the flavour of insincerity, an aura of desperation. They aim to stir passion but have little, if any, effect on most people’s lives… Flag-burning has long been such an issue for Republicans. Raising the minimum wage sometimes serves the same purpose for Democrats.

Huh? Raising the minimum wage may be a touchstone issue for Democrats and it almost surely does appeal to the party’s base. But how on earth is it “pandering” or insincere? How can anyone argue that it has “little, if any, effect on most people’s lives”? And how can anyone equate an issue that has a real economic rationale (whether you want to argue pro or con) with one that is purely stirring emotions?
If you did an analogy test and claimed flag-burning:Republicans most resembled minimum wage:Democrats you’d certainly fail.

I’m mystified by the reluctance of people here in the Bay Area to use Bart and other public transport. I just had an easy breakfast meeting across the Bay in San Francisco thanks to Bart.

Over the last few days, the local news media have warned everyone that lane reconfiguration on the Bay Bridge – which links the East Bay to San Francisco – would cause traffic chaos. The result? Bart had a magnificent 3.7% increase in usage yesterday.

A friend who is also a Bart fan reckons the system’s problem is that it shuts down late at night. That might deter a few people, but this area is so not a late-night place I don’t think that explanation is sufficient. It’s much more basic: people refuse to be torn away from their car, even when it’s irrational.

The extreme example of the car’s hold on the imagination out here? My wife is writing an article about recovering from disaster for the Financial Times and she has interviewed some people about the Oakland Hills fire of 1991. She spoke to someone who lost their home and all their possessions – pets, art, clothes, personal mementoes. But what horrified their friends? “Ohmigod… your car was reduced to ashes!”

Well, maybe I can climb back up the marginally geekish ranks. With plenty of hand-holding from DreamHost and Zack Rosen of Civicspace Labs, I set up my crontab. And it works. But I think I’ll steer clear of Unix commands in future.

Over the years I’ve taken a quiet satisfaction in my ability to figure out some of the backend stuff on my websites. I thought I’d moved from geek wannabe to at least geek manqué.

But I have to admit defeat. I’m working on a project now that uses the wonderful CivicSpace open source community platform. But to run the aggregator within the site, I need to set up a crontab on our server. So Dreamhost, our ISP, helpfully pointed me to an article on SSH and crontab. But I defy any mere mortal to understand the first thing about using PuTTY. I’m totally at sea here.

Why can’t there be a helpful radio button on the Dreamhost panel (at every other turn over the last few years, Dreamhost has been a great champion of simplification)? Or is that the kind of dumb remark that only a hopeless newbie would make?

Chekhov’s Mistress: “You guys remind me of those people who proudly resisted getting a cell phone for so many years before finally giving in. Perhaps instead of celebrating how great you are, you should just join the conversation. There is no need to triumph over blogs.”

I did think that blogs versus traditional media discussion was over. I guess not.