| 4 February 2000 Well. New Hampshire could have gone better Bradley-wise, but certainly exceeded expectations McCain-wise. What a stomping! So now, the same pundits who were saying, roughly, "McCain staffers haven't laid out much of a plan past a New Hampshire win; it's hard to see how they could win much more than the one state" are expressing serious doubt about the Bush campaign's ability to understand and recover from its defeat. Ah, fickle punditry. Entertainingly, Bush's 20-point lead in South Carolina polls has evaporated [CNN], at least for the moment. Fickle, fickle voters. You gotta love it. The weird thing is, all these pundits (Barnes, Kondracke, Matthews, etc.) that point out how badly Bush has screwed up apparently also feel compelled to try to help him out; they're all putting forth various prescriptions for the Bush campaign to get out of the hole he's dug himself into. Hey, why not just leave him there to figure it out himself, anh? Next time Brit Hume asks you 'what does Bush need to do now', throw up your hands and say "Gee, he sure does seem to have problems, doesn't he. Arguably, the voters gave him what he deserved. I sure wouldn't presume to give him any bright ideas if he can't think of them himself. That's what he has strategists for, right?" Of course, that would leave more time to fill. Windows Me [CNET] (the name of the next 'consumer version' of Windows) is a very strange name. If it's short for Windows Millennium Edition like they say, you'd think it would be Windows ME. Windows Me makes 'Windows' sound like a noun-used-as-request, like 'Beer me' or 'Burger me' at a barbecue. I guess Windows ME might be misinterpreted as 'Windows, Medical Examiner'. Coming in March (and rehearsing now): Washington University Opera Theatre is putting on Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring. I'm playing Police Superintendent Budd. Come see! The directors do want some sort of English accent, and my character's a bit dim and not at all well-educated, so I've been watching the policemen Graham Chapman and Terry Jones played in various Monty Python sketches for ideas. Aw-roit aw-roit aw-roit...wot's all 'is then? A funny thing's happened to epinions.com... they seem to have addressed most of the problems various people (including me) pointed out right after their debut. Imagine. Guess I'll take another close look once I have some time for epinion-writing (hah!). I'm still in the throes of software development for two different web-based services, and I'm going to be making a bunch of complicated database reports for someone else shortly... oh, for a plain old html-pages-&-images project so I can rest my brain! Once I get out from under the current stuff (and once the opera is done with), I've got some other non-paying projects waiting in the wings...one of which is: add some sort of feedback/discussion aspect to this site. I'll probably roll my own just for the fun of it. Not to mention, I really want a web-based way for me to post here so I don't have to be at home on my G3 box to post. This is partly why I haven't been updating much lately; I haven't been home to use my copy of Frontier. Since Perl + MySQL is what I'm using most right now, this of course looks like a Perl + MySQL project to me. (EditThisPage.com is all right but doesn't offer me all the features I'd really want. Or maybe I just don't want to pay another $900 for features I'm going to want to overhaul anyway.) So, eventually I'll be making something like that too. Not to mention, I really need to figure out how I want to release Formjack (my all-purpose CGI tool, which I'm using heavily in my current projects)... the part of me saying 'just make it free' is getting louder. Another part of me says 'make a basic version free, charge for the extras'. Then there's the whole license question... which license to choose? Is anybody out there who's both familiar with commercial uses of nontrivial Perl programs and willing to kibitz a bit? Let me know. A few handy quotes, worth remembering:
Yes, yes, and yes (except, I guess, for intranets where everyone always has a high-speed connection...which is Just About Nobody). All right, that's it, gotta go. Back sometime next week.
|