I hate sticky keyboards. Very low tolerance.

I'd like YouTube TV to let me block Fox News. It shows up on their home screen as the default channel and it starts playing automatically. For some reason they've decided I want or need to watch Fox News. Please stop doing that. Not just for me, for everyone. If there has to be a default make it something easy like Seinfeld perhaps. Or Law & Order. I haven't switched from Spectrum, I'm trying YouTube TV while I think about switching. This is a small thing, but might be a deal-stopper. I don't want my nose rubbed in how evil they are. I know. I want to turn on TV to escape. A Julie Andrews movie perhaps.

Thanks Mr President. This needed to be said.

Matt Terenzio, who has been a friend for many years, threw a fat pitch about people like me who think the NY Times has a lot of explaining to do. I don't think anyone is listening, but my issue with the Times is when they embrace and promote conspiracy theories that damage our political system. Matt says we have many truths, and I think that's where we differ, there has to be one truth when it comes to accusations of the kind that the Repubs throw at Democratic candidates and minorities. When they take a side against the people, that's when I have a problem.

"Too much of everything is just enough." -- The Dead.

I'm working on a server app to read blogroll source in OPML, and build a database of other blogrolls that are linked to feeds in the original blogroll, accessed via the feed or html source. It was a lucky thing when I designed the format for subscription lists back in the 00s that it included the htmlUrl attribute, it makes the HTML easier to find (though the channel-level link element in the feed could play the same role). Anyway, of course I'm using a SQL database for all this, and when I was thinking about it initially I thought "no big deal" it's a variant of a SQL table I've now done a dozen times. But it was a big deal, because I've yet to come up with a way to factor this so that I have a library that knows how to make the kind of table that keeps coming up all the time, to bury the complexity and make creating a new one much simpler. Same thing with CSS and JavaScript. I know the justification for CSS is that it makes scaling from phones to desktops possible, but that would be equally possible if you provided a good object with properties that can be configured at runtime. That's how we do it on servers with a config.json file. Then you could do a much better job of factoring browser-based apps. Imagine how much smoother everything would be if these structures could be factored. This probably doesn't make sense to too many people, maybe it won't even make sense to me in a couple of years, when hopefully I've moved on to a better way of doing these things. I would love to have the time to take a crack at doing the factoring anyway, I'm sure it's possible, just not obvious how to do it. In the meantime I think there are now enough blogrolls out there to build something interesting out of them, which is why I'm taking my break from The Next Product to do this.

It's not much of a secret that my next product is the minimal writing tool I always felt WordPress should have. I have not been doing this in conjunction with Automattic, I'm not sure we're on the same planet re what WordPress is for. Ultimately it'll be their decision if this idea gains traction. But I keep hearing people ask for this product, and I think it's the reason Substack and Ghost have become popular. I'm going to put it out there, and see what comes back. 😄

Also, I'm using their Calypso API to talk to WordPress. I like it. Well-designed and documented. I've built another layer that makes it even easier for a browser-based JavaScript apps, and also added storage, which you can't do a web app without.

BTW, I love the new margin image of NakedJen. Talking with her the other day we decided this would be the opening scene of The NakedJen Movie. The meaning of the image is well-known to people who travel with the Dead, as Jen did. I've never been to a Dead concert with her, but I understand it's like going to a Comdex or MacWorld in the 80s or Esther's or Stewart's conferences for me in the 90s. Sure you go for the music, but mainly you go to schmooze in the hallways. I love talking with her on the phone the most. We have thought about doing a podcast, and even tried recording one, but our one-to-one conversations are much more interesting, and funny. We're take turns being Pinky or the Brain.

I did a search on my site for NakedJen.

Google thinks I meant "Naked Men."

This is why Google should know I have a blog and it has it indexed, and if it just looks it would know that question shows how dumb it is.

When I type my mother's name in, searching on my own blog (again) it tries to correct the spelling of her name. My own mother's name.

Google started out so smart then they must have lost all the smart people. Or they got stupid? I don't know. But there's so much they could do to improve their product, it would be sensible to, while they're shooting for the fences, do the small things that would give users an idea that there's some humanity to the product.

PS: ChatGPT should also know where my blog is, and it should be constantly loading the updates. This is the freaking breakthrough. Do it.

Is this the user experience writers want from WordPress? If I were designing it, I would start from scratch, build an easy writing tool for writers to focus on writing, make the design process accessible if they want to work in that mode, but keep it out of their way because most writing has nothing to do with design.

A simple example where ChatGPT saves programmer time. MySQL has awful error messages. Rather than try to figure out what they mean, I paste the message into ChatGPT and say nothing. It tells me what the error was and even fixes it for me. I copy the result, paste it into MySQL and I'm back on the road. One can imagine where they build that into the MySQL app and I converse with it instead of the app with the awful error messages.

Meanwhile the Repubs are getting ahead of themselves. Bannon said something that he should be arrested for. I'm sure it's horribly illegal to threaten people the way he did, and he did it in public.

I caught a bit of the last Wheel of Fortune. The three players were celebs: Vanna White, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik. What was remarkable was how super-human Jennings is. He could solve the puzzle with almost no information. I have no clue how he saw the patterns. He has freakish intelligence.

Someone should tell the kids the Repubs will come for their weed. Just sayin. There probably are a number of voting age youngsters who have never lived in a time and place when cannabis was illegal.

By popular demand -- my blogroll now makes it more clear that the permalink to each item is the date of the item. Screen shot. This is a convention in blogs and social media apps that the timestamp doubles as a permalink. And I think this is more distracting, and cluttered, but let's give it a try. It's possible that people missed that they could go to the website from the blogroll. Now it should be more obvious.

The Repubs are coming uncloaked. Their slogan might as well be Revenge. It's the one thing everyone who votes for Trump wants more than anything. They hate their lives, and are looking for someone to release their rage on. They don't know how else to do it. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement. Ask a billionaire if you don't believe me. They have huge grievances which you would have thought all that wealth would have cured them of. The new Nazis have a selling proposition that works every few generations, after the memory of the previous societal explosion are gone. My parents, the last people I knew who lived through the Nazis are gone. I just have the memory of the aftermath, and it wasn't pretty. “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” We're at the beginning of the "happen again" moment. My grandfather told me what to do, but I won't do it, pretty sure of that.

It's been driving me crazy watching Stan Krute doing all these weird and often beautifully bizarre ChatGPT images, and realizing they are only being seen by people on Facebook when there's this huge world of creative people that don't or won't use FB.

Then it occurred to me, I have the perfect place for these images, outside the facebookiverse, that would showcase them, and be easy to produce (I don't want to take on responsibility for big production overhead myself).

I have images I put in the right margin of blog posts on Scripting News. Small little bits of creative color, that may or may not be connected to the story they are next to. And sometimes connected in non-obvious ways, intended to make you think.

Then NakedJen sent me a recent picture of herself that's perfect for the right margin. Seen in the right margin of this post.

Here's a page where you can scroll through the collection of images I can choose from. I'd love to add more creative stuff here. And I'd love to get some of Stan Krute's genius or Brad Pettit or whoever else might be so inspired.

No promises about when or if they'd be used. You can post them here, as comments on this message if you like.

I may have to restrict this to people I follow, just letting you know, based on past experience.