President Bush is a Gas, Gas, Gas

According to U.S. News and World Report, legislation isn't the only thing that President Bush is interested in passing:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

He wasn't the first president to violate the Clean Air Act, according to Capitol Hill Blue:

Harry Truman belched and farted in front of people, much to the consternation of wife Bess. Dwight Eisenhower may have been in the Army but he cussed like a sailor. John F. Kennedy would leer at young women and make comments about their attributes. He was, according to historians, a breast man.

Lyndon Johnson scratched his crotch at Cabinet meetings and in front of female White House staff members. Richard Nixon, as the Oval Office tapes showed, cussed a blue streak.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, may have been the last President too tight-assed to do anything untoward while in office ...

My guess is that no president could clear a room like William Howard Taft, who grew in office to 340 pounds.

I hope the press will get to the bottom of this.

Politics · 2006/09/09 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Pope Benedict's New Hat

Pope Benedict XVI donned a new hat for his address at St. Peter's Square today:

My mother remembers seeing this hat, which is called a saturno, on pictures of past popes at the Catholic school she attended in her youth.

With the addition of a leopard stripe band, that would be a bitchin' pimp hat.

2006/09/06 · 51 COMMENTS · Link

Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board

Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project:

Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by just one person, Brion Vibber, who appears to have his hands more-than-full just keeping everything running. The entire system has been cobbled together as the site has grown, a messy mix of different kinds of computers and code, and keeping it all running sounds like a daily nightmare. As a result, actual software development goes rather slowly, which cannot help but affect the development of the larger project.

I can't vote in the election because it requires at least 400 edits, but I thought I'd pass along Swartz's announcement because he'd be an excellent choice for the board. I don't recognize any of the other 16 candidates.

Swartz has been a significant contributor to RSS for six years, which is remarkable considering the fact that he's not yet 20. He coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification and the RSS Content, Dublin Core and Syndication namespaces. He was a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and is a founder of Reddit.

Wikipedia · Rss · 2006/09/01 · Comment · Link

Tim O'Reilly and Dave Winer, Peer to Peer

Six years ago, Dave Winer felt like he was wrongfully excluded from an O'Reilly "summit" on the newly emerging field of peer-to-peer programming:

David Stutz, Gene Kan, Ray Ozzie and Dan Gillmor were there. I wish I had been. I could learn a lot from each of them. Wouldn't you have wanted to hear what I think about P2P? I'm curious. Are you? If there are going to be more meetings like this, I want to be there. Ask Tim to explain why I'm not invited, and see if you accept the reason.

Peer-to-peer technology was so white hot back then that Michael Arrington is developing a time machine so he can go back and pimp it.

When some people asked O'Reilly about the snub, he explained:

... why didn't I invite Dave? I was looking for people who I thought would work well together in an unstructured way, without grand standing or insulting other participants if they happen to disagree. My experience in working with Dave is that you never know what you're going to get. He can be a great contributor, but he can also decide, for no apparent reason, that someone is somehow on "the other side," at which point he becomes disruptive and abusive.

I know Dave claims he doesn't like personal statements (except the ones he makes, of course), but he suggested that his readers ask, and you've done so. I've given Dave this feedback privately, and each time he's said it's inappropriate to tell him such things, that he believes his behavior is above reproach, and that I'm out of line for giving him any personal feedback.

When someone reserves for himself the right to "flame at will," and claims that his flames are only his quest for truth, in spite of feedback to the contrary from many people, he should expect that those people will not invite him to their meetings or discussions. I completely grant that Dave has the right to remain on the outside, to critique anyone he likes, and to crusade for whatever causes he believes in, but if he wants to be included in events that I organize, he'll have to behave more politely. He may consider that censorship; I consider it etiquette. No one disputes his right to his views -- in fact, we all still read him because his views and ideas are so interesting -- but I think he needs to recognize that his social habits will, from time to time, lead him to be left out of events and discussions to which he might otherwise be invited.

So, did my personal feelings about Dave (or more precisely, my personal experience working together with Dave in the past) influence my decision not to invite him? Absolutely.

Today, Winer believes he's being wrongfully excluded from Friends of O'Reilly (FOO) Camp, an emerging technology conference:

A dam is about to break. There are a lot of people pissed at O'Reilly, every time you do another exclusive event, more people are getting angry. ... what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess ... We're not going to be able to keep a lid on it much longer, and it's better to let it out in a way where people know we're listening and we want to work with them.

I've been rightfully excluded from every technical conference since 1996, so I'm in a poor position to judge whether these peers should form a network. But if they don't, it may break the lid off the bloody dam of inclusiveness.

Perhaps we can draw some hope from an event that happened five years ago: Winer was invited to speak at O'Reilly's next peer-to-peer gathering:

A quick good morning from the O'Reilly P2P conference in San Francisco. ... Many thanks to Tim O'Reilly for putting on such an excellent conference.

Business · 2006/08/31 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Warren Buffett Remarries (or Doesn't)

I received an anonymous news tip this evening from somebody in Nebraska claiming that Warren Buffett just married his housekeeper of 25 years in a private ceremony at his home.

My effort to confirm this with sources has been hampered by the fact that I don't have any sources. I wish I did, because I'd love to get this scoop. This is the biggest celebrity gossip involving a man in his '70s since Anna Nicole Smith took a husband.

If it has been reported anywhere this evening that Buffett is off the market, nobody told Wikipedia yet.

Alleged congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Buffett.

Update: In a Surprise Merger, Warren Buffett Remarries

Business · 2006/08/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Testing an RSS Feed's TTL (Time to Live)

I'm currently researching the RSS element ttl, which tells aggregators how long to cache a feed before checking it again.

Although ttl has been part of RSS since the original version 2.0 published by UserLand Software in 2002, I'm having trouble finding aggregators that honor it.

This weblog entry is going out in an RSS feed with this value:

<ttl>90<ttl>

Aggregators that support the element should check it no more than once every 90 minutes.

Rss · 2006/08/30 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Sold Cell Phones Reveal Customer Secrets

A company that makes phone-security tools bought 10 phones on EBay and shared their contents with a reporter, finding evidence of marital affairs, business deals and other juicy private information.

One phone surrendered the secrets of a chief executive at a small technology company in Silicon Valley. It included details of a pending deal with Adobe Systems Inc., and e-mail proposals from a potential Japanese partner:

"If we want to be exclusive distributor in Japan, what kind of business terms you want?" asked the executive in Japan.

Trust Digital surmised that the U.S. chief executive gave his old phone to a former roommate, who used it briefly then sold it for $400 on eBay. Researchers found e-mails covering different periods for both men, who used the same address until recently.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "former roommate" has to be a euphemism for a relationship, right? They were sharing a residence, e-mail address and expensive cell phone, which the roomie quickly dumped. I'm sensing that somebody's got a box of somebody else's T-shirts, toiletries and The Best of Judy Garland two-disc vinyl record set, and if he doesn't pick it up soon, that crap hits the garbage.

Security · 2006/08/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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