According to the AP, "About seven in 10 voters interviewed in exit polls said they had made up their minds how they would vote on the recall question more than a month before the election." Time to give up on politics, folks. The voters just don't give a crap who leads them. They've just elected a bad actor with no management experience to run the fifth largest economy in the world. I am so obviously completely out of step with the citizenry of this country that it ill behooves me to spend another nanosecond providing public commentary on the subject. RIP, California,courtesy of the GOP Right. RIP, American democracy, same source, different election.

Well, it appears it's time to launch the Recall Arnold campaign. If we can get the LA District Attorney to file criminal charges against the Governator for his improper conduct with no fewer than 16 women (I'm guessing the actual number is in the hundreds), we'll have a better reason to recall this unduly elected "leader" before he can move his free weights into the mansion in Sacramento.

Safari doesn't let you export bookmarks. I don't know if this is an oversight, a soon-to-be-added feature or a deliberate lockin attempt by Apple. But it doesn't work.

There's a nifty program called Safari Bookmark Exporter that has to be one of the most elegant and trouble-free programs I've ever run. And it's free.

I hope Apple buys it and makes the developers insanely rich. Well, OK, modestly rich. Nice little utility!

I can't tell you how much I hate saying this. But it's true. At least for me.

Web browsing on Windows is a better user experience that on OS X. And that's sad. I don't know if the blame for this lies with Apple's OS people, with the tech teams writing browsers for the two platforms, or somewhere else. But I have in the past two days spent about equal times on OS X (Safari and Netscape 7.1 for the most part) and Win2K (Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.4 and Opera 7.11). While a lot of this is subjective, it seems to me that Windows browsing is faster, more reliable, less "jerky"

So why don't I just switch to Windows and stop griping? Because in every other way, my Mac feels more comfortable and friendly and usable than Windows. And because I'm a Mac kinda guy. Which I suppose is saying the same thing two different ways.

Still, I'd sure love to see a fast, standards-compliant, smooth-performing browser on the Mac. Maybe Opera is it, but Opera on the Mac is a full version behind its Windows counterpart. I suspect that's due in no small measure to Apple's decision to produce its own browser, Safari. Safari is my favorite Mac browser to date, but it crashes at least once a day, frequently becomes non-responsive, and isn't yet sufficiently standards-compliant that I don't run into a few pages every week that just won't load into it though they work fine on every other browser.

I'll report back on my Opera experiences after I've run it for a while. I live in my browser; I just have to have a better experience than I have had lately.

Report: Sooner Than Expected

Opera 6 loses. Loading this blog, it refreshes the screen multiple times after login. No other browser behaves that way. I don't have the patience to deal with that kind of stuff on my primary site. So it's back to Safari, I guess. Maybe if I restart it a few times each day it won't get quite so recalcitrant.

Sigh.

Has the value of platform-specific look and feel diminished to near the vanishing point? With users doing more and more of their work in browsers, and with Microsoft essentially setting the productivity tool UI standard, are we ready for a singular cross-platform user interface?

Read the rest of the story

Doc Searls echoes my sentiments exactly. I wish I had a way of hanging black crepe on my blog. It's a sad day for America.

I'm voting against the recall today. Not because I like Gray Davis (I don't, basically), but because the law making it possible is a terrible one and needs to be changed.

As written, the incumbent governor can get 49.9% of the vote and still lose to a challenger getting 13% of the vote. That's just wrong.

[Doc Searls]

Silicon.com announced their top 50 "agenda setters" today. Apple's Steve Jobs nudged into first place ahead of Microsoft's Bill Gates. But if you check out the top five technologists, you'll find Gates at the head of the list; Jobs isn't a technologist, according to these lame-os.

Jobs is listed as a business leader. But so is Gates. Sorry, guys, but if Gates is a technologist, so is Jobs. Nice of you to put Jobs first overall (though I'm not sure I agree with either being the top agenda setter) but to treat them so differently discredits the poll completely.

BTW, I found it interesting that my old buddy Marc Benioff is #38, two spots ahead of his old boss and mentor, Larry Ellison. I always liked Mark and never liked Ellison and I know neither of them cares, but there you have it.

Footnote: My name was, once again, missing in action. Sigh

I am delighted that the Indianapolis Colts beat the Tampa Bay Bucs last night on Monday Night Football, only because I made a last-minute decision to switch my prediction from the Bucs to the Colts. I did so on the informatino, which turned out to be erroneous, that EJ would be back in the Colts' backfield.

And while I don't want to detract from the most dramatic comeback I think I've ever seen at any level of football, I have to say that two calls by the officials really cost the Bucs that game.

The first one, running into the kicker, was a lousy call because the rushing defender was on the ground, clearly trying to avoid hitting Guy Vanderjagt, who ought to get an Oscar nomination for the performance he put on to draw the yellow hanky. Shameful.

But the second one was just a ticky-tacky chickenshit call. Yeah, Sapp fell down on the guy in front of him after leaping to block the field goal. But even though the call was correct, it was clearly not in the spirit of the rule, which is designed to prevent guys from using their teammates' backs to leap up in an attempt to block or interfere with the kick. The rule needs to be changed, but the officials' calling that in that crucial situation was really dumb. I suspect that it's a call that could be made on more than half of the place-kicking attempts in the league.

Anyway, it remains true that you have to play through bad officiating, and the fact is that the Colts just never quit last night and eked out a win that they probably deserved on grit alone.

I'm going to pick the Colts every week the rest of the season. Maybe.

Marc Canter, who's a big fan of Laszlo Server technology, pointed to a new site today. I visited it. About 1/3 of the sample Lazslo apps there didn't work on OS X under Safari. If it's going to be the Flash design solution, Lazslo's going to have to keep improving its cross-platform capability. Oh, and while they're at it, maybe they can come up with a name that's easier to type.

myLaszlo

myLaszlo.com.

Check out myLaszlo.com. As well as showing off some examples, this is a way of getting free hosting for Laszlo applications written using the Laszlo Presentation Server's Developer Edition — which is also free.

Some applications that people have already posted:

• A Tree View control, in less than 70 lines of code. The Laszlo User's Group has written some notes about it here.

• The Pot Store. Sarah Allen has written about the development of this application. Try clicking on a pot — there's an interesting use of layouts here.

• An online version of Sam LLoyd's Fifteen Puzzle.

• My Laszlo Blogging Widget.

and almost a dozen more. [Oliver Steele]

So the A's, up 2-0 on the Red Sox in the ALDS, blow three in a row and end up sidelined for the postseason as well. As a result, it's the ALCS the world wanted: Red Sox - Yankees. This one should be a barnburner, but from here it looks like the Yanks have too much power -- and now too much rest as well -- for the Bosox to overcome.

Yankees in six.

(Of course, my first-round pick success -- two out of four -- hardly qualifies me to even continue picking. But I've never let that stop me before!)

I don't know if this is true, but Greg Palast reports that Schwarzenegger is working with Ken Lay to ensure that Enron's ill-gotten gains are not returned to California's treasury.

If this is true, it's all the reason we need to vote for ABA (Anybody But Arnold) if the recall passes (which I hope it doesn't but which appears at this point all but inevitable).

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger...

The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.

Boing Boing

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Recently, a few forward-thinking news makers have seen the power of creating their own messages. They are frequently unfiltered, and almost always more unvarnished than the standard PR-massaged and/or lawyered offerings (though the higher the profile of a corporate blogger, the more likely he or she will be careful in choosing what to say). The informality can add credibility, not diminish it. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

This is a good piece about an interesting guy making really effective use of a blog. A really uplifting essay on a day when I needed one. Thanks, Dan.

Kevin Werbach wonders aloud whether some form of instant messaging might be the logical successor to email as the latter dies a slow, twisting death. I've talked about that before, but while I think there is some potential there, I don't see it as rich a vein to mine for a solution as a publish-subscribe model using RSS or something like it.

For one thing, enclosures are a problem. For another, message length is a problem with the way IM clients deal with open sessions. Spammers have already figured out how to clobber an IM client, which they cannot do with RSS feeds in any way I know about. So in the final analysis, IM seems to me to be too far down the wrong roads for it to be a viable alternative to or replacement for email.

But we gotta keep lookin'.

(Thanks to Jeremy Allaire for the pointage.)

My Giants couldn't even beat the stinking Wild Card Florida Fish in a 5-game series. They lost the fourth and last game today, 7-6. So a magical season in which they became only the ninth team in history to wire to wire in first place goes for naught as they don't even make it to the NLCS.

This is depressing. It's also infurating. Where are all of Felipe Alou's defenders now that he has cost the Giants their chance at glory? By starting Jerome Washington instead of Jason Schmidt today, Alou sealed the Giants' fate. In a short series, you have to be willing to go to the mat when you're down 2-1 on the other guy's turf. Starting Jerome was a wimp move reminiscent of Roger Craig's stupidity in handing the ball to a rookie pitcher in Game 7 of an NLCS vs. the Dodgers a few years ago.

Oops. Correction required.

An astute reader, Pete Danko, wrote to point out that I completely blew this reference. He's right. It wasn't Craig, it was my buddy Dusty who made the stupid decision and it wasn't a playoff game but the final game of the 1993 season. As I recall, the bad move cost the Giants a shot at the playoffs, so it's still a good egregious example, just one I completely incorrectly recalled. Sorry.

I will be watching closely how those fair-weather fans who screamed for the ouster of Dusty Baker react to this stupid move by Alou, who, as I pointed out earlier today, also cost us Game 3 with two highly questionable calls. Will they be consistent? Or will they forgive and forget with Alou where they wouldn't with a proven multi-time winner of the NL Manager of the Year award?

It will be particularly interesting to see how they respond if the Cubs beat the Braves (as I expect they will) and then go on to defeat a Marlins team the Giants couldn't take two of three from when the going got tough.

This was a great Giants team. It deserved better. Yeah, five-game series suck and prove nothing. Except who gets to keep playing. No way the Marlins are a better team than the Giants. But the boys in orange and black are gone fishin' while the fish stay in the game.

Yeesh.

My Giants lost Game 3 of the NLDS to the Florida Marlins yesterday. It was a game they could and should have won. They set a record by stranding 18 men in the course of a game in which they out-played and out-pitched the fish and still got beat.

In the seventh inning, Marquis Grissom committed a huge base-running mistake. With the score tied and runners at first and second with one out, he attempted a steal of third against Pudge Rodriguez, perhaps the best defensive catcher in baseball. He was out. Dumb, dumb move.

Then late in the game, Giants Manager Felipe Alou, he of the quick hook, left Tim Worrell in too long and Worrell ended up giving up the game-winning hit in the bottom of the 11th after the Giants had struggled to go ahead in the top of the inning.

Alou gets the blame for both of those moves. I wonder how long it will be before the fickle and overly demanding SF fans will be screaming for his head like they did the best manager in baseball (Dusty Baker) last year after he took the Giants to the seventh game of the World Series.

Oh, BTW, Dusty has the perennial losing Cubs up on the heavily favored Braves in the other NLDS series, 2 games to 1. But I suppose that's not his doing. Sheesh.

Today, the Giants have their backs to the wall but instead of going with ace Jason Schmidt on three days rest, Alou throws youngster Jerome Williams. As I type this, the Marlins are up 3-1 in the fourth.

If the Giants lose in the first round of the playoffs to the Wild Card team, heads must roll and Alou's must be one of them if the Giants are going to be consistent with their idiotic 2002 behavior.

At the conclusion of a fairly naive and shallow piece on spam control, the editor of the Libertarian "Colorado Freedom Report" has this comment, which pretty much sums up my general feelings about spam.

Finally, let's not forget that spam is a wonderful problem to be faced with. After all, spam exists for some of the same reasons we love e-mail. The marginal cost of sending a useful e-mail is zero. ZERO. We can communicate regularly with people all over the world, instantly, at no marginal cost. This is a technology that is revolutionizing the planet. The fact that complete idiots -- the very ones who fall for the spam scams -- are now able to access a world's worth of information at the touch of a button, is a very healthy development. Are there problems? Yes. Is it perfect? No. Is it worth the hassle? Hell, yes. I mean, come on, people. I remember running a phone line from the kitchen to my 300 baud modem in my bedroom so I could call up an independent server a few miles away. If I wanted to connect with a server in another town, I had to pay long-distance fees. I'll take spam any day over that. Yes, there are ways to reduce the spam load, and those efforts are worthwhile. But as we're busy picking nits, we oughtn't forget that we live in a fantastic era, and we take for granted a technology that most of us couldn't even imagine when we were children.

In an intriguing and far-reaching interview on CNET, former Apple CEO John Sculley says that the biggest opportunity Apple Computer missed on his watch was HyperCard.

Boy, is he right about that. In fact, he says in this interview, "We weren't insightful enough to recognize that what we had inside of Hypercard, essentially, was everything that later was developed so successfully by Tim Berners-Lee with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)."

I had at least two conversations with ranking Apple officials in the early 1990's in which they and I clearly saw this opportunity and shared our frustration over Apple's blindness. I've said many times since in private conversations and email that if Apple had seen what it had and stuck a TCP/IP stack behind HyperCard, it would have been the Web. Earlier. And in some ways better.

Today, we have Revolution to carry on the grand tradition of HyperCard, brought up to date, accelerated, and made broadly accessible (i.e., not Apple only).

Sculley concluded: "In hindsight, I wish Apple had recognized that we had a huge opportunity to go take our user interface culture, and our know-how, and applied it to the Internet. I think we would have had a very different story for Apple during the 1990s. But that, of course, is hindsight."

Sure is.

In the last few days I've had some far-ranging conversations with various people about the current zaniness going on in my home state of California. In case you're from some other country or planet and have no clue what's going on, let me brief you quickly:

We elected a governor last November.

The Republican right wing didn't like his politics, so having been unable to beat him fair and square, they launched and financed a recall campaign which required a ridiculously small number of peoples' signatures to get on the ballot.

As a result of horrible lawmaking many years ago, the recall election is on the ballot of a special election next week which a bad actor named Arnold Schwartzenegger is likely to win.

As a result, California has replaced Florida as the laughing-stock of the country if not the world.

All of that aside, though, there's an interesting open question about the real meaning of the exercise itself.

Some of my friends say California is simply providing us a laboratory of democracy in action, where voters take matters into their own hands and we see the ludicrous consequences. This apparently makes us more tolerant of the real political scheme in the United States, which is not a democracy but a republic (or if you prefer a representative democracy which is probably a self-contradiction).

Another view holds that this isn't anything like what true democracy, freed of the partisanship of a Darrell Issa being able to write a $1 million check out of petty cash to pay illegal out-of-state signature gatherers to ram this ridiculous election down our throats, would be like.

Either way, my friend, it's pitiful, downright pitiful.

On top of it all, the likely next governor of the state whose economy would be the fifth largest in the world if we were a country separate from the United States, is:

a proven womanizer

accused of indecent touching by more women than accused former President Clinton of the same kind of conduct

a political and management neophyte

a liar on the subject of Indian casino gambling

incredible as it may seem, more inarticulate than the current White House occupant

a liar about taking contributions for his campaign from special interests

Sounds like the right man for the job to me. How about you?

Wild Pitch is the second-best baseball novel I've ever read. It is a well-told yarn about a dead-arm former Mets hurler who gets a second chance at the career he caroused away and makes the most of it.

The writing is crisp, the baseball real, and the story line twisty enough to stay just outside the reach of the predictable.

I gave this one a 9 on my difficult 10-point scale. There was too much repetition of some of the gratuitous drinking-and-carousing scenery to suit my taste and the ending was a bit unsatisfactory. But on the whole, a great read. Particularly if you're a baseball fan. Even more particularly if you're a Bosox or Yankees' fan.

(BTW, my No. 1 favorite baseball novel is the marvelous If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock.)