Eye on Winer

Tough to come by these days, but there it is. Allow me to introduce you to Jon Howard, who claims to have been blogging since 1982. (It’s worth noting that his archives only go back to 2003)

That’s right. This man claims that he had been keeping a “weblog” almost a decade before the “web” part of it existed. He also seems to think that the WWW was invented in 1995, which is even more bizarre. I’m not sure how he even comes up with some of this silliness, and he seems hesitant to define what “blogging” is by his definition (my guess: a diary), but nevertheless…

Dave’s claims that he invented blogging are, by far, less crazy than someone who claims to have been keeping a “weblog” far in advance of the existence of the most operative part of the blog: the web part of it.

I guess it just goes to show you that if you can dream a stupid idea… someone else has probably already started implementing it.

I used to live in a place where Comcast was the best service you could get. The local Bell had a DSL service which was much more expensive, but who wanted to pay more for a slower connection? While I didn’t have many outage problems, they invariably were a nightmare to deal with. I feel Dave’s pain on that one.

You can tell that most of the people who “respect” this man are raging sycophants and fanboys. Why? At BloggerCon yesterday Dave spent a portion of time during Mike Arrington’s session (and others) whining about how horrible the flaming has gotten, and how we shouldn’t be attacking the person.

But then you get a post like this where he endorses as personal attack by Jay Rosen on Marc Canter in the comments to one of his posts.

Lest anyone read Dave’s post and argue that he was just pointing out the discussion, you might read his reply to Jay’s comment: “Jay, amen.”

Anyone with even a hint of awareness has to realize that this is the kind of thing that Dave is consistently saying shouldn’t be going on. And yet, it’s perfectly okay for him to do it.

That’s hypocrisy, folks. Why don’t any of these people who “respect” Dave point this out? Chastize him?

Because they’re cheerleaders.

Dave’s still on his iPod rant… he says he’s not a newbie, which is true, but he apparently still acts like one, as anyone who has been using iTunes for 3 years really ought to know how to use it. Some of the least technical people I know have been able to use it very well right out of the box.

Although the most interesting part of Dave’s screed this time around is that he thinks who writes something matters.

If the people promoting an idea say nasty things about people who differ with them, and if they have to take their swipes anonymously, they must not have a lot to say that’s substantial, and they clearly aren’t willing to stand behind their own thinking.

This from a guy who has all manners of nasty things to say about Christians, conservatives and, really, anyone who disagrees with him. But the swipe at anonymous detractors is interesting… as though putting your name on something makes it more or less valid.

I don’t agree with 90% of what Dave says, but I don’t disagree with things just because he says them. When he says something, I judge it based on how much support he gives his idea, not how much I like him. Of course, that’s the logical thing to do.

His anonymous detractors have probably also been on the receiving end of Winer’s militia of angry sycophants who he’ll sic on anyone who dares say anything untoward about him.




Aside: I don’t have any way of getting in touch with the author of I’m Not Dave (link in the sidebar) if anyone else does, or if IND reads this, I’d like to get in touch… send me an email (address in sidebar), I’ve got an idea I’d like to kick around.

In a comment on this post (from a gentleman who looks to need a lesson in statistics) Dave defends his ridiculous rant by saying: “I know when something’s my fault and when it’s the software’s fault. Many users assume if something goes wrong, it’s their fault.”

Or, at least, he thinks he knows. The problem here, clearly exists between Mr. Winer’s keyboard and his desk chair, but he blames the software… and then screams loudly that he knows it’s not his fault. As though we’re supposed to believe that coming from a man who can’t figure out that if you click on the little icon that looks like an ipod, you can see what files are on it.

As a follow-up to his iPod post, Dave whines about it again, this time because iTunes doesn’t care about filenames. Now, I have to wonder, why on earth doesn’t dave just tell his ripper to populate the ID3 info correctly? One of the beauties of MP3 is that it doesn’t matter what the MP3 is named. Would it be a neat feature to allow iTunes to sort by that? Maybe. I don’t think I’d ever use it, but maybe. But that? That’s it? That the archos makes you futz with filenames and iTunes doesn’t? Bizarre.

And, for what it’s worth, I listen to audiobooks on my iPod all the time… and the ones I don’t download from the iTunes store I simply put in a playlist in the correct order. When I want to listen to the book, I just play that playlist.

Easy.

Someone pissed in Davey’s conrflakes yesterday, apparently, because there’s a lot of really silly shit on scripting.com. Case in point: Ho Ho Ho Yourself or “I hate christians and Christmas”.

The most striking thing here is how he claims, on occasion, to be a sensitive, thinking person, when he might have more prejudices than anyone else on the internet who blogs under their own name. I mean, the whole premise is flawed because he starts with “I’m a pretty friendly guy, and that’s 365 days a year” — but we’ll pretend like that doesn’t just shoot the whole thing down… because he is friendly, if you kiss his ass and agree with him. Or at least I’d guess so.

First he decides a whole bunch of happy people he doesn’t know are “bastards most of the time” — why? Because they’re happy at Christmas? Because they my be Christians? Or because they’re celebrating a time of year he doesn’t want to celebrate? Who the hell knows, but it strikes me as a horribly bitter little rant right off.

Then he goes on to try to justify “not really liking Christians” — as though that’s substantially different than “not really liking Californians” or “not really liking black people.” But how does he justify his prejudice? By just assuming that all christians are right-to-life and support the death penalty. So even if you pretend that this is hypocritical or conflicted (which it can be, but doesn’t really have to be), you still have him imputing two huge assumptions onto millions of people he has no experience with.

Then there’s this: “Why are they so happy for one week, and so pissed off the rest of the time?” I’m not Christian, but I can say that many of the happiest people I know are Christians, and the people who call themselves Christians, and really believe, but don’t really live it aren’t any more unhappy than anyone else I know…

But why? Why does Dave feel like he has to flame an entire religion? Ex-girlfriends. Yes, that’s right, ex-girlfriends. (Dave has had girlfriends? How the hell…?)

I’ve had the privilege of being inside on a few of these Christian Christmases, with shicksa[sic] women I was dating, and let me tell you, if you haven’t had a chance to see the inside of the holiday, it’s pretty pissy and angry, you know, like people really are, not like they pretend they are.

Wow. If that doesn’t scream “bitter, disaffected ex-boyfriend” I’m not sure what does. Maybe Dave’s just feeling a little empty and lonely this time of year, and even a swimming pool full of ones isn’t filling him up. Odd, that.

Anyway… f* that noise.


MERRY CHRISTMAS, EOW readers (even the Dave sycophants)!

Dave throws a bit of a tantrum about iTunes. Again.

I find it interesting that despite his inability to work iTunes, I have a whole host of computer illiterate friends who use it with no problems whatsoever. But, because he doesn’t understand something, it’s “the worst piece of crap [he's] ever used.” Now, I’m no big fan of apple. I think most of their stuff is over-hyped and under-produced… but iTunes is a great piece of software, so let’s take some of Dave’s flames:


“Well, both [the Windows and Mac version of iTunes] are head-up-butt impossible to figure out.”

This is bizarre because of the sheer number of users who not only have figured it out but have done so on their own with no help. Then again, this isn’t the first time Dave hasn’t gotten something figured out quickly enough and then declares the software crap for his own failings. FWIW, iTunes is about a dozen times easier to use that the Outliner Dave recently wrote. Pot? Kettle.


The user model makes no sense.

…except to 90% of the planet, to whom it makes sense most of the time.


When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they?

Now, maybe I have a special “easy” version of iTunes… but when I plug my iPod into my computer, a little icon shows up in iTunes and if I click on it, it shows me what exactly is on my iPod. You have as many copies as you’ve told it to make… one on your HD for sure… maybe two if you’ve done some sort of conversion (MP3 -> AAC, for example) and then one on each of your iPods, should you so desire.


How do you delete something? Is it really gone?

Well, I’m not sure if this is just my “easy” version, but I generally hit the “delete” key. If you do that in a playlist, it deletes from there (and if the playlist is set to automatically sync, it’ll delete from the iPod if it’s not needed any more by other synced playlists) if you do it in the library, you can have it delete from the library or the whole system. If the latter, it’s really gone, yes.


Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don’t say it’s okay to?

In short? It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, Dave has implicitly said it was ok when he told two competing systems to sync automatically with two different sets of files. C’mon, Dave, that’s just dumb. From what I can tell, the sync is one-way only, though I could be wrong about that.


I buy the CDs and scan em in.

That’s one hell of a scanner. I guess $2 mil can buy you a lot of neat toys.


What did I do wrong? I swear, I have no idea, and I’m a professional software designer. What about the poor schnook who is just a user?

And now the ego reveals itself! “Well, if I can’t figure it out, how could anybody?” And, you know what? That’s probably true… except that Dave doesn’t want to know how it works or find out. He thinks it ought to be immediately obvious to him, and if it’s not, it’s poorly written software.


Just. Fucking. Ridiculous.

Could this post mean anything other than that Dave is either a) a poor businessman in general or b) is whining over something about which he should’ve known better?

I wrote when it became clear that not only was Adam going to (try to) take all the credit, but he was going to take all the money too. Fact is, it’s almost a year later, and he’s never settled the account. I put a lot of creativity, time and money into building his business, and his (and Kleiner’s) position seems to be Thanks for nothing. I really appreciate that Ben pointed this out, he was the first to notice (other than me, of course).

The piece Dave links demonstrates only that those he was attempting to do business with ‘back in the day’ were more shrewd than he. This is, apparently, not so difficult do be. At any rate, the gist of the post is “Thanks for noticing that I’m not getting what I think I deserve.” Then again, I think we know that Dave’s M.O. is to demand far more than he deserves pretty much constantly.

Dave, today, has two posts of more than 25 words… which means someone must have really gotten under his skin.

In the first one, Dave is responding to another post by Mitch Ratcliffe in which he points out just exactly how ridiculous it is to pretend like podcasting, as a medium, has to stay put.

The bottom line is that the offeror gets to decide how their content is presented, and that’s how things are supposed to be. If you, as a content producer, want to toss your stuff on the net in MP3 for the world to have, go nuts. Nobody is (or will ever be able to) take that away from you. If, on the other hand, you want to restrict your content (for whatever reason or none at all), serve ads, or anything else… Audible (and soon, countless others, I’m sure) have some options for you.

This isn’t less choice, Dave, it’s more.