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Mark Atwood

3 months ago

in Portable Contacts and vCardDAV (IETF 74) on Joseph Smarr
It was good to see you there. This has been my first IETF as well, and for the most part, a very positive experience.
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Joseph Smarr's picture
Joseph Smarr Yeah, great seeing you there, and congrats on the amazing progress you're making with drizzle!

3 months ago

in With a newspaper gone, who’s the watchdog and where do advertisers go? on The Evolving Newsroom
The end of printing the Seattle PI does not mean the end of newspapers in Seattle. Seattle was a two-newspaper town, now it's a one newspaper town, with the Seattle Times still printing daily. We also have a world class weekly with a reputation for occational investigative journalism, the Seattle Stranger.

This experiment will have to wait until we get a zero-newspaper town. Possibly San Francisco (but then, since the Chron is so bad already, its basically already a zero newspaper town....)
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Julie Starr Thanks Mark. It'll be interesting to see how much advertising the Times and Stranger pick up then.

Love the name of the Seattle Stranger. Don't think we've ever had any Strangers in New Zealand. A few Chronicles, several Times, a couple of Heralds certainly, but no strangers.

2 years ago

in Verizon Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine on The Technology Liberation Front
In the mid-90s, at the very starting edge of the dotcom boom, I was the lead tech guy behind a project, we put a nationwide yellow pages database on the web, ypol.com.

At the time, nobody else had done it, but we were sure that many other people had had the same idea. And since it's rare for someone to care about finding a plumber or locksmith in another state in the middle of the night, of course I had location based searches from the start.

It was, in fact, my first real encounter with using Oracle, Sybase, and using Perl to interface to a DB. (This was before Perl5, so there was no DBI module, so it was all oraperl.)

I'm pretty damn sure my old YPOL project is prior art. I'm even willing to testify on that point ...

3 years ago

in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » A Paranoid Parent Ponders GPS Tracking His Kids on The Technology Liberation Front
I call this syndrome "Parents Disease", because I keep seeing it happen over and over. I'm fully convienced that it's a type of brain damage, possibly caused by lack of sleep and then then guilt.

It's bad enough as it is, the real problem is that such parents also use their political muscle to forcably recruit the government and their neighbors into supporting their insane paranoia.

They've destroyed rock concerts, band camps, SF cons, SCA gatherings, and such, because the people who were teens at those events a generation ago have grown up, and gone back and in their paranoia about their own kids, forcably stopped the kind of stuff they themselves did.

I'm firmly convienced that we're going to see the same thing happen in the raver scene, as ravers grow up, have kids, and their kids grow up to the age they are now.

A pox on the lot of you.
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