No Mod Required

I've been trying to figure out who the Web 2.0 bubble's Henry Blodget is* over the past few days and then along comes Fake Steve Jobs to remind me that Blodget himself has a chance to keep the crown. The following quote is brilliant stuff:

Folks, if you're working at any of these "digital startups" you really don't need Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider index to tell you what your options are worth right now. I'll tell you the answer right now. They're worth nothing. That's for most of you anyway. Because one day very soon this whole crazy mess is going to blow up and you'll be looking for work at Starbucks again, just like you were after the last bubble burst.

My advice? Print out this crazy list and pin it to your wall and wait for the crash. Then you'll have a wonderful keepsake by which to remember Bubble 2.0.

Because if there's any sure sign that the end is near, it's the fact that Henry Blodget is publishing an index with ridiculously high valuations for companies that don't actually make products and don't have revenues. What drives this ridiculous man? Why the obsessive need to hype and tout? Is he not satisfied to have played a starring role in the greatest financial mess of our lifetime? Now he needs to do it again? It's like a real-life version of Groundhog Day. Or one of those rings of hell in Dante's Inferno where people are condemned to keep performing the same sinful acts over and over again into eternity.

Read the rest:

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Alley Insider creates Bubble 2.0 keepsake

*since we've clearly transitioned into a world that parallels the "irrational exuberance" of the late 90s. I knew something bizarre was afoot when Facebook's "$15,000,000″ valuation was actually swallowed wholesale by people who should know better. That feeling has been furthered by the idea that it's a good thing for apps like Twitter just grow and grow and grow only to "figure out how to make money later." I like Twitter a lot and am impressed by Facebook's core application and API, but I look at these and other services and just don't see big $$. At the end of the day, real money (cash flow) is what's going to keep this euphoric wave going. Without some real cash for some of these services, things have the potential to go south in a big way and if they do people are going to be hurting again. We went through that once already and I'd like to see this valley be a little less painful than the last time we were in a downturn. I survived the early part of this decade and came out stronger (unlike many people I was able to stay in the industry during that period,) but that doesn't mean I want to go through that again any time soon.

Yes, April has been on of my busiest months in years, so I haven't had time to write as much as I would like.

May will be all kinds of awesome.

In the interim, here are some links I crafted, just for you.

Meet the Web's 10 most hated people.

That one should be pretty self explanatory.

I'm loving aliens instead

Robbie Williams disappeared from view at the end of 2006. Since then, he has become obsessed with UFOs and extraterrestrials. To gather evidence, he and Jon Ronson headed deep into the Nevada desert

On December 18 2006, Robbie Williams played the last of 59 stadium shows in a row, announced he was going to spend Christmas at his home in Los Angeles, and then basically disappeared. He was hardly seen at all in 2007. He briefly checked into rehab. He spent quite a bit of time hiking and playing football (he owns a football pitch on Mulholland Drive). Then he stopped hiking and playing football. His record company, EMI, announced he had no plans to release an album in 2008. Today he unexpectedly calls me to ask if I want to go with him to the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

Visualizing Viruses

Most people want to avoid spam and viruses, which is exactly why MIT Media Lab's grad student Alex Dragulescu spins the net's detritus into art.

9 Common Idioms That Come from Technology

Again, straightforward.

Any dramatic chipmunk tattoos out there? Internet, please say yes.

I'll be adding to this all day.

• SlideShare Blog » Blog Archive » Tufte joins SlideShare board of advisors; No more bullet points on SlideShare

  My reaction? Funny

(Tufte famously hates Powerpoint)

• John Resig - Classy Query

  My reaction? Funny, but only to JavaScript geeks.

• Diesel Sweeties drawn in a "normal" comic style: "Not a Dream, Not an Imaginary Story."

  My reaction? Kind of funny. More clever than anything. Bonus points for it featuring Indie Rock Pete.

• New ASO rules; Ball buys time; OBRA bans Astana?

  My reaction? Funny, but only for people who know what I mean when I say I'm looking forward to the Ronde van Vlaanderens.

• Introducing Gmail Custom TimeTM
  Be on time. Every time.*l

  How do I use it?

  Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
  Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?

  Yes. You'll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.
  How does it work?

  Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).

  My reaction? Funny

• Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages

  My reaction? Surprised that anyone would fall for it. Not that the underlying issue is so far-fetched, but that they believed TechCrunch would sue Facebook. In case people haven't noticed, TechCruch lervs Facebook. "TechCruch and Facebook sitting in a tree…" That said, it is a funny piece, so they get points for that.

• YouTube is rickRolling its users!

  All the "featured videos" on the home page are RickRolls.

  My reaction? Funny like Turducken

• Best one so far for me:

  Inside AdSense: Introducing AdSense for conversations

  My reaction? Laughed way out loud

  

As long as you're happy with 5 being the definition of an explosion

Craftsmanship

Markup & Style Society Talk - Bokardo

"For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well."

Not the greatest slideshare, but the very thought of it speaks to me as I'm trying to improve quality across the presentation layer at work and getting people to think in those terms is a key to getting the work I want to see produced on a consistent basis.

Wayback machine

jwz - Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

jwz has resurrected a ton of old Netscape/Mosaic history, including the old Mosaic Communications Corporation web site and some ancient versions of their software (with which to browse it.)

SEO

Free Firefox Rank Checker - Check Your Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Search Engine Rankings : SEO Book.com

Pretty self-explanatory, no? I took it for a test drive this morning and it's a fine tool.

A New Blog I Love

The Leila Texts

When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then– bizarrely– your text will come to me.
This is a blog about the texts I have received. All of them are from strangers, intended for other Leilas, but obviously they missed their marks.

Just read it. It's not a big time investment and it's interesting/funny/weird/cool.

Creative Wins at PR

Message to Daniel_K - Sound Blaster - Creative Labs

Description cribbed from metafilter:

"A geek named daniel_k wanted to help his fellow Vista users. He created a set of drivers that would get their Creative sound cards working under Vista — something beyond the ken and expertise of Creative's engineering team. Creative VP Phil O'Shaughnessy, however, took umbrage. The results? A PR disaster with hundreds of users pledging to boycott. "

It made slashdot, digg, reddit, etc. Nice work Creative!

The weirdest thing about it is that it's Hammer (yes even weirder than the fact that his mom is knitting in the background.) I'm not even sure this guy was alive when Hammer was doing his thing.

And yeah, Wordpress is upgraded to 2.5. As I mentioned on twitter, it might take five minutes (and the core upgrade will.) The problem is, the "extra" stuff might break and cause me nothing but problems for hours or even days on end. I'm especially curious about the Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress since I post so many images to the site and want to continue to host them @ Amazon S3. Since so much of the admin interface is changed, I fear that will just break.

I just started looking into this hosting upgrade option, so I'm looking for advice/anecdotes wherever I can find them.

To that end, anyone out there have any experience with either of these two services?

Dedicated-Virtual Server from Media Temple

Low Cost Virtual Private Servers from JohnCompanies.com

Failing that, anyone have any really good alternatives to the above two?

I know I'm being terribly lazy with the last question. Sure. Sue me I'm just hoping I can go to bed and wake up with a half dozen or more fantastic hosting alternatives that I can kick the tires on over the next few months.

Looking at the pricing and features, these VPS's look like the perfect upgrade track for me as I start to push the limits of what I should really be doing in a shared environment. I'm cool for now, but I'd rather be prepared for a potential move than have to scramble at some layer date. VPS's also open up a lot of options in terms of what I can do for some of my clients in terms of hosting, which would be (a) a cool thing to offer and would (b) help offset the cost. The problem is, I just don't know anyone that's actually got any experience working with them, so I'm not sure which way to go in terms of companies/options. All the guys I know that know about this stuff are all knee deep in multiple (often load load balanced) machines hosted at the RackSpaces of the world. They don't have a lot of experience with the kinds of options available at my (comparatively) puny computing budget.

I used to have an Ubuntu partition running on my old Dell. I used it for development from from time to time and I just enjoy using Linux/Unix systems, so it was always nice to have that partition to switch into when the need arose (How often was it to use wget? Pretty often.) When my Dell died and I got my new HP, I really didn't have any time set aside to set up a dual boot machine. I had client work hanging over my head and had been without a computer for something like three weeks so it was a desperate situation. There was no time for niceties. I had to toss the Adobe Creative Suite disc in there, watch that thing grind through its install; toss the MS Office 2007 disc in and watch it do the same; and then I had to go.

Fast forward to this week. With the release of Internet Explorer 8, I set up a new Virtual PC using the IE App Compat VHD (in English- the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility Testing Virtual Hard Drive.) While testing that promising browser (and it really is promising), I was struck by the thought of setting up a Linux instance on a Virtual PC. One quick Google search later I was presented with this:

Installing Ubuntu on Virtual PC for Windows Lovers

Which seemed promising

Following the advice presented, I was able to set up Ubuntu pretty much without issue and I've been happily messing around, setting up the environment for my needs (installing Apache, Mysql and PHP5, Subversion, Wordpress, etc.,) ever since. Even running inside another OS, it's actually a reasonable experience and everything else is pretty seamless. There's also the added bonus of being able to switch back and forth between Linux and my Windows desktop, which allows me to keep up with the day-to-day while still hacking mad gibsons on the Linux side.

As an aside, while I'm comfortable on the command line and on Linux/Unix systems, I'm not all that great at anything web-centric beyond what you have access to in a shared environment, so it's kind of fun for me to actually build and configure a server. I normally don't get a chance to actually edit apache configuration files (instead I have to on .htaccess files,) so a lot of what goes on there is a learning experience for me. Being the unrepentant geek that I am: Learning Experience + Computers + Open Source Software = Good times.

Anyway, even if you're not looking to set up a server and are just curious about the Linux "experience" this is an easy way to go about getting a taste without putting your current system into danger. Try it, risk free!

What are you waiting for?

In addition to revamping their interface, LinkedIn is also now being graced by the presence of Bill Gates:

LinkedIn: Bill Gates

Speaking of the interface redesign, I actually like it. It's clean, orderly and has much improved organization. It's certainly an improvement over the old interface. I hated the old interface.

"It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google"

That descries the situation pretty well.

Honestly? I'd like to see YHOO stay independent. Being an internet person, it would be sad for me to see one of the original internet
giants swallowed up by the house that Gates built. It's also a horrifying merger from pretty much every conceivable standpoint. Mismatched systems, divergent ideologies, competing services, scale… I wouldn't want to unravel any of it.

For my part, I just hope they leave del.icio.us and flickr alone.