Saturday at the ACC Championship Game

ACC Championship game in 2006 between Wake Forest and Georgia Tech

I attended yesterday's ACC Championship game between Wake Forest and Georgia Tech in Jacksonville, picking up two $125 lower deck tickets near the 50-yard-line. I wanted to see whether seats that good at Alltel Stadium are worth the price.

The game wasn't even close to a sellout, so there were giant packs of unhappy scalpers outside. One thing I didn't need to hear as my son and I walked in: "Lower deck seats, $5!"

The section we were in, 237, has its own entrance and a Carrabba's, Outback Steakhouse and other restaurants in an indoor mall. I didn't know this, so we entered through the main gates in lines several hundred people deep for a half-hour, holding nachos and popcorn.

In retrospect, carrying nachos through a large, tightly-packed crowd of people during cold and flu season wasn't the best idea. My open tub of cheese must have been exposed to every toxin short of Polonium 210, but I lacked the will to throw it away uneaten. I'm hoping the artificial preservatives and coloring in the cheese create an inhospitable environment for germs and viruses. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

As for the game, what's not to like about a 9-6 defensive struggle in constant drizzle as a bone-chilling breeze wafts off the St. Johns River?

The best part was taking my seven-year-old to his first football game and fielding his rapid-fire questions about the rules. He patiently asked "how do you kick a field goal?" a dozen times before I figured out he wanted to know how a coach decides to attempt one, not how the points are scored by kicking the ball through the uprights.

One I couldn't answer: What is a Demon Deacon? I couldn't think of a reason a school would adopt a well-dressed elderly Baptist deacon with devilish tendencies as a mascot.

Decked out in Wake Forest hoodies we bought on the way in as survival gear, we were so happy they won without going to overtime that some of the team's fans thought I attended the school.

Sports · Jacksonville · 2006/12/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Googlemilking: I Have a Small Penis

The talk of memes reminded me that it's been a long time since I milked Google.

Last year I created Googlemilking, a game where you choose a search phrase that lends itself to off-color or self-revealing results in Google. The game only got as far as one mention in the Scotsman, but it has made me the top result for the term totally straight. My parents must be proud.

So here's a new googlemilk.

I have a small penis, but ...

... my fiance doesnt seem to mind. ¹

... I think size doesn't matter. ²

... I still get female attention. ³

... that can't be the problem, because I know how to use it! ⁴

... it has a big heart. ⁵

... normal-sized nuts. ⁶, nominated as one of the "worst pickup lines ever."

... I drive a Honda Civic ⁷

... my post count is high. ⁸

The search also reveals the existence of a Google Group called Rate My Size that has the following purpose:

I want to know if I have a small penis. My girlfriend thinks i have a small penis but i do not. I want to know if i really have a small one.

The group has six members.

Google · Googlemilking · 2006/12/01 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Dave Winer's Pledge to Quit Blogging

Dave Winer announced in March that he would stop blogging by the end of this year:

Blogging doesn't need me anymore. It'll go on just as well, maybe even better, with some new space opened up for some new things. But more important to me, there will be new space for me. Blogging not only takes a lot of time (which I don't begrudge it, I love writing) but it also limits what I can do, because it's made me a public figure. I want some privacy, I want to matter less, so I can retool, and matter more, in different ways. What those ways are, however, are things I won't be talking about here. That's the point. That's the big reason why.

More than 250 weblogs spread the news. One blogger was so excited he created a JavaScript clock to count down the seconds.

In my estimation, the likelihood he'll quit Scripting News ranks somewhere between "snowball's chance in hell" and "the day after Ike and Tina Turner remarry." Winer's no Greta Garbo, as his appearance in today's Wall Street Journal demonstrates. I can't think of any high-traffic blogger who put down the crack pipe and reclaimed his life other than Russell Beattie.

In order to avoid ridicule upon his first blog entry on Jan. 1, 2007, Winer's only out, as far as I can determine, is to claim the invention of an entirely new publishing medium, complete with a new name, new XML protocol and a retooled Frontier/Radio UserLand/OPML Editor to support it.

He has four weeks. I'll track the development of the next iteration of davecasting on Workbench, but I'm not interested in serving on its advisory board.

2006/12/01 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Feed Autodiscovery Wiki Launched

Robert Sayre has created a Feed Autodiscovery reference that's growing more useful by the minute. He took the original document created by the RSS Advisory Board, placed it on a brand-new wiki, and is encouraging submissions from the public to cover autodiscovery for all syndication formats.

One way people can help is to add software they use to the supporting products section if it supports feed autodiscovery.

I like seeing a Creative Commons-licensed document I worked on put to use elsewhere, though over time it'll be weird to get credit for something that resembles our original less and less.

If I understand the attribution requirement correctly, FeedAutodiscovery.Org must credit the RSS Advisory Board. So if anyone uses their document to create something else, they'll have to credit both, creating the potential for absurd chains of credit: "This document created by Spacely Sprockets using a document published by Cogwell Cogs from a document offered by Slate Rock and Gravel Company based on the original drafted by Rockhead and Quarry Cave Construction Company."

Atom · Creative Commons · Rss · 2006/12/01 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Great Moments in Journalism with Michael Errington

Yesterday, Michael Arrington reported on TechCrunch that BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen is definitely on his way out at the company of the same name. He then bragged about how he and blogger Om Malik had scooped CNET:

While CNET writers were all cozy in bed last night, Om and I were competing to break the Bittorent story. That's why blogs will win, and CNET will lose.

Today, Arrington posted a correction:

In a very tense conversation with Bram Cohen and BitTorrent's Director of Communications, Lily Lin, today, the company made it clear that Bram is with the company for the long haul. They would not comment on the CEO search.

Cohen told P2PNet, "I'm still happily on board at BitTorrent, and not going anywhere."

Journalism · 2006/11/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Meme Starts and Ends With Me

Scott Eric Kaufman, a graduate student at UC-Irvine, is begging bloggers to link to one of his posts so that he can measure the speed of memes around the Internet for a talk he's giving at the 2006 Modern Language Association convention.

Asking people to do something and pass it around is too MySpacey (answer this question on your site and tell 10 people you know to do the same: "If you could borrow any living person's organ, which one would you take and what would you do with it?").

But in this case, Kaufman deserves our support because he wrote the following sentence:

Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are -- to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium -- "skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

I miss college.

2006/11/30 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Atom and RSS Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Bananas

When Randy Charles Morin and I were trying to wrap up the RSS Autodiscovery specification, we removed references to Atom to avoid discord. Telling Atom publishers how to implement autodiscovery while they're working on their own spec seemed like a good way to spark a war between syndication formats worse than "Dick York vs. Dick Sargent" or "let the rabbit eat Trix."

Naturally, our decision angered Atom developers.

Sam Ruby:

Push the reset button, and get a better attitude.

I thought I had the right attitude. Even though I am the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, I love Atom so much I should marry it. They've done good work and I want the board to support it in any area where there's common ground. A unified autodiscovery specification for Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 is the best possible outcome.

I contributed three proposals this morning to the Atom autodiscovery specification currently under draft:

Every page of the RSS board's web site includes a link to Atom and RSS 1.0. The same isn't true in reverse -- we're not getting link love from them yet -- but I felt like it was important to declare peace between our dialects.

As far as I'm concerned, the syndication wars are over and everybody won.

Atom · Rss · Xml · 2006/11/28 · 6 COMMENTS · Link