net.culture

Will Firefox be Netscape’s revenge?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , ,

John C. Dvorak says the browser wars are still raging. He cites figures from his blog as evidence that IE only has 50% market share.Well, my logs have always indicated that IE accounts for somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of hits to my blog. The reason for that is pretty simple. This blog appeared in its first form about five years ago. Two months later, I published a computer book that, among other things, advocated using any browser but Internet Explorer and contained detailed instructions for removing Internet Explorer from Windows 95, 95B, and 98.

It’s pretty safe to say a large percentage of my early readership found out about my blog from my book, and the people who read my blog most likely read it because they read my book and liked it, and if they liked my book, they probably agreed with it and were therefore very highly likely to be running Netscape.

For a while I switched to IE, primarily because IE had better keyboard navigation than Netscape and I had repetitive stress injury. I said so. Around that time I saw IE usage increase. I don’t think it had much to do with me. Netscape’s market share was headed for single digits.

By the time Mozilla was approaching version 1.0, I was squarely back in the Mozilla camp and advocating it. Again, IE traffic started to drop. Did it have much to do with me? Something, surely. People who agree with me are more likely to visit again than people who disagree with me.

I think John C. Dvorak’s logs are more likely to reflect PC enthusiasts than mine, simply because he’s a PC Magazine columnist and I’m the author of a now obscure computer book who happens to enjoy blogging, and who blogs about baseball, Christianity and Lionel trains as often as computers these days. That’s opposed to a year ago, when I had a reputation for writing about baseball and Christianity as often as computers. So hey, my horizons are broadening.

Since more of my traffic comes from Google and other search engines than anywhere else, and often it’s people looking for ways to hook up DVD players to old TVs, ways to disable websense, or information on Lyman Bostock, I probably get a decent portion of the non-computer enthusiast crowd.

I think IE’s market share is somwhere between 60 and 75 percent.

I also think it’s going to drop. The last person I told about Firefox wasn’t so confident about it when I told him it was at version 0.93. Now that the magic 1.0 is near, it’s going to jump as early adopters who are nervous about beta software jump. When it hits version 1.1, it’s going to jump even more when people who have been sensitized by Microsoft dot-oh releases start switching.

So while I think Dvorak is wrong about IE’s market share, I think he’s right that it’s dropping and that the browser wars aren’t over.

Online support of Katie.com is inspirational but misguided

Dave Farquhar net.culture

The Register, Slashdot, and others have been posting the story of Katie.com, a personal website that’s existed since 1996 but whose name was hijacked for a book about an online victim of a sexual predator, published in 2000 by Penguin Putnam.

The author has been getting harassed now, and that’s misguided. Here’s why.The short answer is that authors often don’t have any control over the titles of their books. They can make suggestions, but ultimately, the book title is usually up to the publisher.

That’s my experience as an author. My book was titled Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics, and Multimedia. It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, contained an oft-misunderstood technical term (“Optimizing”) and a dated buzzword (“Multimedia”), and, well, don’t get me started. I lobbied against it. I wrote in with a dozen alternatives, at least. None were picked.

I didn’t make a huge deal about it. I was more concerned about getting published.

Maybe the author, Katie Tarbox, approved of the name. Maybe she didn’t. Ultimately, it was the publisher’s decision and the publisher who is accountable. By some accounts, she seems to approve now of the publisher’s actions, but to think she has the ability to control her publisher is foolhardy. And to think she’s going to contradict her publisher is equally foolhardy. Getting into print is hard. Staying in print is just as hard, if not harder.

The Slashdot crowd has written numerous negative reviews on Amazon.com, and today Slashdot seems dismayed that the negative reviews and ratings are gone. Why? Amazon is not a public forum for your personal agenda. Amazon has had problems in the past with authors sending their shills to post glowing reviews of their books and/or malign their competitors’ books, and has tried to eliminate some of that. If you want to exercise your right to free speech online, exercise it on your own web site.

Don’t get me wrong. The groundswell of support is good. A book publisher should not have the right to steal someone else’s pre-existing web domain, whether it’s a registered trademark or not. I’m not one of those people who believe that big corporations can do no wrong. They’re just like Big Labor and Big Government: They’ll all do as much wrong as they think they can get away with, as long as that wrong is somehow profitable.

Penguin Putnam had intended to call the book girl.com but realized that name was taken and probably owned by someone who would put up more of a fight. Besides, at the time it was a porn site.

Corporate bullying? It looks like it.

So complain to Penguin Putnam. Tell them you’re not going to buy their books until they quit victimizing innocent bystanders online. Tell them you’re going to ask your local bookseller not to stock Penguin Putnam books for the same reason. If you own any Penguin Putnam books, consider dumping them on the used market, cheap, to take away a potential new book sale from the company. One way is to list them on half.com and see if you find any takers. You can let Penguin Putnam know you’re doing this as well. (Don’t burn the books–that doesn’t hurt the publisher any, but the used channel potentially does.)

For that matter, tell ’em it’s a stupid and misleading name anyway, because 13-year-old girls generally don’t use names like katie.com in chatrooms.

The key is to not make this about the book. Make it about the publisher. Books come and go, and publishers know this. Negative balance sheets and corporate image last much longer.

That type of protest has a small but real chance of making a difference. Online harrassment via Amazon.com does not.

It\’s that time of month again, time to Slashdot the Wikipedia

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , , ,

Slashdot published an interview today with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I found it entertaining reading. Even though I’m a semi-regular contributor over at Wikipedia, I’ve never encountered its founder, possibly because I do my best these days to stay under the radar over there.The discussion on Slashdot was interesting. As always, someone questioned Wikipedia’s accuracy, wondering how anything but chaos can come from something that anyone can edit at any time. A few people read two articles and came back with the usual “99.9% of Wikipedia articles cite no sources and have inaccuracies in them.” Someone else came back and said he’d made a change to the M1A1 Abrams article and was corrected by an Army mechanic. I always like comments like that. It shows who actually has experience and who’s talking out his butt.

Wales was incredibly idealistic, with a vision of free textbooks educating the world and ridding the world of places where people have no sanitation. Free access to the sum of all human knowledge will solve all the world’s problems.

I wish I could be so idealistic.

Oh well, shoot for the stars and maybe you have a chance of hitting the moon, right?

I found the discussion on credibility more interesting. Someone asked how an encyclopedia produced by anarchy could have more credibility than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica or even World Book. Linux Kernel hacker Alan Cox weighed in, pointing out that there’s plenty of bias in academia too, that academia is a tyranny of the day’s popular ideas and that generally ideas change by one generation dying out and a new generation with different ideas taking over. At least with Wikipedia, the divergent ideas get a chance to be heard. He had a point.

I disagree with Wales that his project will drive Britannica out of business, but I agree with Cox about credibility. I had an argument with a college professor over using the Internet as a primary source of information. This was in 1995 or 1996. I wrote a short paper on the Irish Republican Army, and I wanted to find out what people sympathetic to the IRA were saying. So I went to Alta Vista, did some searching, and cited what I found. I wanted to know what the people who made the bombs were thinking, and figured the people who made the bombs were more likely to have Web pages than they were to write books that would be in the University of Missouri library. But my professor wanted me to look for books. I decided he was a pompous, arrogant ass and maybe I didn’t want to minor in political science after all, especially if that meant I’d have to deal with him again.

I forgot what my point was. Oh yes. In journalism we have a sort of unwritten rule. You can cite as many sources as you want. In fact, the more sources the better. If a story doesn’t have three sources, it really ought not to be printed. That rule gets selectively enforced at times, but it’s there. Your sources can spout off all they want. That’s opinion. When three sources’ stories match independently, then it’s fact.

So what if Wikipedia is never the Britannica or even the World Book? It’s a source. It’s much more in touch with popular culture than either of those institutions ever will be. Most people will think you’re a bit odd if you sit down with a volume or two of the Britannica or World Book and read it like you would a novel. I know people who claim to have done it, but that doesn’t make the behavior unusual. Hitting random pages of Wikipedia can be entertaining reading, however. As long as you don’t get stuck in a rut of geography articles. But that’s become less and less likely.

So I don’t think it matters if the Wikipedia ever attains the status of the paper encyclopedias. You’ve got what the academics are saying. Wikipedia gives you the word on the street or in the coffee shop. Neither is necessarily a substitute for the other.

I’ve appealed to this before, but I’ll do it again. Visit Wikipedia. See what it has to say about your areas of interest. If it doesn’t say enough, take a few minutes to add to it. Resist the temptation to go to the articles on controversial people like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It’s a good way to get into an edit war and get frustrated. Find something obscure. I mostly write about old computers, old baseball players and old trains. Not too many Wikipedians are interested in those things. Especially the trains, so that’s what I write about most. (Other people seem to be; when I troll the ‘net for more information on those old companies, I frequently find copies of what I’ve already written and put in Wikipedia. It’s flattering.)

I look at it as a way of giving back. It’s relaxing to me. But there’s a community who’s written a ton of software, including an operating system, a web server, and a blogging system, and they’ve given it to me and never asked for a dime in return. I can’t program so I can’t give anything back in that way. But I have interests and I have knowledge in my head that doesn’t seem to be out there on the ‘net, and I have the ability to communicate it. So I give back that way.

It won’t change the world. Maybe all it’ll accomplish is me seeing fewer “Mar” trains on eBay and more Marx trains. But isn’t that something?

The problem with online streaming video

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , ,

I think we may have lost a project at work today: a project to do streaming video. It’s not really our fault; our offering looked just like everyone else’s streaming video.

The problem is that our competition isn’t everyone else’s streaming video.First let’s look at the hurdles. No matter which option you pick, some percentage of your audience is going to have to download or install something. That all but eliminates Real, since I don’t think even Woodward and Bernstein could successfully track down the link to their free player every time.

Windows Media Player is easier, but won’t necessarily run on some older versions of Windows. An overwhelming number of people have Windows XP now, but not everyone does. How many hundreds of millions of copies of Windows 98 did Microsoft sell? Do you think all of those people have thrown them away yet? No. Those people will have to download and install something.

But Media Player will leave some Macintoshes in the cold. Do you want to do that if your target audience might include schools?

QuickTime is the best cross-platform solution, but again, Windows users will have to download and install something.

OK, so you got it installed. Prepare thyself for thrilling, 15 frame-per-second 160×120 video!

Translation: Video the size of a postage stamp that moves about as fast as your mailman.

Theoretically you can stream bigger and faster video, but it’s going to be jerkier if you do. There’ll be dropped frames, artifacts, and the audio may drop out. And what’s it look like when you send DVD-sized 720×480 video? Well, considering a lot of people run their monitors at 1024×768, it makes letterboxing look good. It’s not full-screen like it is when you pop a DVD into your DVD drive.

And that’s precisely the problem. The competition isn’t other people who stream video. The competition is DVDs. Computers are digital, right? So why does its video look worse than the oldest, most worn-out VHS tape at the video rental place? And why do I have to jump through so many hoops in order to play it? On a DVD, I hit the "menu" button and then I hit "enter" or "play." (Also keep in mind that some people can’t even figure out how to do that. I’m serious. I dated a girl once whose parents couldn’t figure out a DVD player, so they had to get their 15-year-old son to come hit the buttons for them.)

And that, I think, is the reason you still don’t see tons and tons of streaming video on the Web, in spite of the high availability of DSL and cable modems in the United States, the abundance of cheap bandwidth, and the cheapness of the server software (free, in the case of QuickTime, and included with Windows Server in the case of Media Player).

Wikipedia hits 200,000

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , ,

Over the weekend, Wikipedia reached the milestone of 200,000 entries in its free encyclopedia. Dan Gillmor praised it in his syndicated column.As usual, Slashdot got wind of it, and as usual, people who’ve never even seen the thing started spouting off about how something that anyone can change can’t possibly be accurate or useful. (Wonder how many of those people run Linux?) At least one person ran over there and vandalized some pages to demonstrate his point. And I’m sure the edit got reversed within a few minutes when someone noticed a change in a watchlist. I, for one, visit occasionally and whenever a change pops up in my watchlist, I look at it out of curiosity. Sometimes I learn something and sometimes I find defacement, which I can then fix.

But I guess if Slashdot discussions were the only thing I ever read, then I wouldn’t have that high of an opinion of something written by random people at will, either.

A more valid criticism is that Wikipedia, by its very nature, can never be accepted as a source for scholarly work. But then I thought back to the papers I wrote in college, and I don’t believe I ever used an entry out of any encyclopedia as a source in any paper that I wrote. And being a journalism major who was 3 credit hours away from a history minor and who filled most of his electives with English and political science classes, I wrote a lot of papers in college. When I wrote my paper on the influence of William Randolph Hearst on the William McKinley administration, I may have looked up both Hearst and McKinley in an encyclopedia to get background information, but I doubt it. Why use an encyclopedia when there are so many good, specialized texts available?

There is still valid use for questionable sources in scholarly work anyway. One professor actually encouraged us to look in Mother Jones and American Spectator when possible, just to get the views from two extremes on the topic at hand. And Wikipedia can give you leads to follow, even if you don’t end up citing it in your bibliography. The material in Wikipedia came from somewhere, after all.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia for the past year or so. I left it entirely when I got tired of an overzealous editor deleting my additions. I guess I wasn’t the only one who complained about her; she’s since disappeared. I used to look at the day in history and try to fill in the gaps; for example, I noticed on one of Jesse James’ anniversaries that he didn’t have an entry, so I put one together. Unfortunately, high-profile stuff seems to be what attracts both vandals and overzealous editors.

So when I came back, I decided to concentrate on things like baseball, obscure old computers, and things that have connections to Missouri, particularly Kansas City and St. Louis. Those are more my areas of expertise anyway, which makes writing them a lot less work, and the topics are obscure enough that I’ve been mostly left alone. Those edits that do pop up usually are true improvements, rather than someone going on a power trip. My entries get linked much less frequently on the front page now, but I’m happier.

Another thing that I’ve taken to doing is to always check Wikipedia whenever I’m researching something. Sometimes Wikipedia has good information, but may be missing some detail I found elsewhere. Sometimes it has very little information. In either case, I try to enter the information I found. I recently created entries for Lionel Corporation, American Flyer, and Louis Marx and Company. Of course I got interested in them because of my recent renewed interest in toy trains, and during the time period I’m interested in, those companies were the big three in the United States. Some of the information about those companies is difficult to find online. Or it was. Now it’s in Wikipedia, which makes it easier to track down.

According to Wikipedia’s records, I’ve contributed to 323 entries. Most of those are pretty minor. There are lots of people who’ve contributed a whole lot more than me.

But I often notice a domino effect on my entries. Soon after writing the Lionel entry, I wrote one for O gauge model railroading in particular, and made an addition or two to the main model railroading article. Soon, other people were making their additions to specific gauges and scales, or creating them when entries didn’t exist. Within a few days, Wikipedia had some good information on the topic. It’s anything but exhaustive, but I’ll put it up against any other encyclopedia’s offering.

One difference that I have definitely noticed about Wikipedia, as opposed to conventional encyclopedias: Wikipedia has a much better pulse on pop culture. I’ve often lamented that people who have entries in the more traditional encyclopedias don’t have entries in Wikipedia, but every teenybopper band that’s come along in the past couple of years has an entry. But I guess ultimately that’s going to prove to be Wikipedia’s strength. In 30 years, it’ll be possible to go to Wikipedia to find out what the hubbub about Justin Timberlake was about. And in 30 years it may be the only place. (One can only hope.)

And in 30 years, those people who deserve more attention undoubtedly will have gotten their entries as well.

I definitely encourage people to look up their topics of interest over there and think about adding some of their knowledge.

This is still a blog

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

A year, or maybe two years ago, I wrote a piece called “This is a blog” in response to an overly full-of-himself author who said that serious professionals don’t blog. It infuriated some people and got me kicked off the daynotes.com web page. I don’t have anything like that to lose this time around, so I don’t approach the topic with the same kind of eagerness–you’re always more eager when you know someone’s going to be offended and throw a temper tantrum–but since everyone and his uncle seems to be writing about John C. Dvorak’s current PC magazine column, Co-opting the future, I might as well weigh in, since it’s the in thing to do, and disagree with the majority knee-jerk reaction, since that isn’t the in thing to do. But I won’t do it to be counterculture. No, I’ll disagree with the majority reaction because the majority reaction is wrong.

Yes, I find it funny that the guy who was recommending novelty domain names as Christmas presents back when a domain name still cost $99 a year is today opposed to blogs. What else is someone going to do with a personalized domain name? I’ll tell you what I’d do if someone gave me the davefarquhar.com domain–I’d run a mail server on it and I’d hang my blog off it. Dvorak would run a mail server off it and post some recipes on it and some pictures of his pets. But my site would be more useful–at least blogging software provides a search engine so you can find the stuff. Isn’t it tacky to tell people to go to Google and type what they’re looking for, followed by site:yourdomainnamehere.com?

But unlike the vigilante masses, I don’t take issue with the majority of what Dvorak says. So he cites a paper that says the majority of blogs get abandoned. The blogosphere goes nuts. Well, I’m sorry, folks, but Dvorak’s right. Go to any public blogging community and start navigating random sites, and you’re going to find a lot of abandonware. It’s like any other hobby. It’s great when the novelty is new. But eventually the newness fades away. Some people abandon their blogs for a while, for various reasons, then come back. Hey, I posted as much in the months of September and October as I used to post in a week. It happens. I came back because I love writing. Some people find they don’t love writing. Some people find they love writing but they run out of things to say. It happens. Large numbers of people trying it and deciding they don’t like it doesn’t invalidate it. How many millions of cameras sit in closets, only to be taken out during birthdays and holidays, if then? Does that somehow invalidate photography?

Then Dvorak says the people who stick with blogging are professional writers. Interestingly, the people rebutting Dvorak bring up the blogs written by–guess who?–professional writers. Now I don’t see how that invalidates Dvorak’s point that the longest lasting, most popular blogs tend to be written by people who do it professionally. I think it’s obvious. If you’re going to write professionally, you have to love it. And if you love writing, you’re more likely to blog.

In other news, computer professionals are more likely than others to build their own computers, dogs are more likely to bark than cats, the sky is blue, and if there’s snow on the ground it’s probably cold outside.

The really incendiary statement Dvorak quotes is that the majority of blogs have an audience of about 12 people. Sometimes reality hurts. I remember checking my logs in my early days and being shocked when I had 40 visitors. Then I was shocked when I found out some people looked up to me because I had 40 visitors. I thought I was the only small-market guy.

Eventually, one of three things happens to every small-audience blogger. Some get frustrated and quit. Others toil on in obscurity. Still others one way or another stumble onto something that people like and they grow their audience.

Today, my audience is closer to 12 hundred people. That doesn’t make me a superstar, but it’s not bad. Some people I remember celebrating breaking 20 readers a day five years ago aren’t doing it anymore. Others are, and they probably get 1200 people a day too. Or more.

I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone, but Dvorak will be Dvorak. I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone when he wrote about OS/2 either, and I think Dvorak’s personal crusade against the caps lock key is idiotic and annoying. He needs to just download a utility that remaps it to a control key and shut up. Those of us who really know how to type will continue to use it when we need it. So Dvorak doesn’t like blogs either. If I only ever read people who agree with me, I wouldn’t ever read.

The only thing I really disagreed with was Dvorak’s assertion that big media is taking over the blogs. Yes, big media is blogging. But the little guys will always outnumber big media. There’ll always be professional writers who blog on their own time to keep sharp or to experiment. There’ll be part-time pros like me who don’t like big media and don’t like most editors–well, I can name four editors I worked with who I liked–who blog because it’s a way to write and stay in touch with the craft and be true to one’s self. There’ll be up-and-comers who are in high school or college and decide to start blogging as part of the process of finding one’s self. There’ll be people who do it just as a hobby.

And guess what? Google starts out with no assumptions. It treats all links the same. That’s why little guys like me can get 1,200 hits a day.

And next week Dvorak will be off on another crusade. There’s about a 50% chance of him being right. I’ve known that since I started reading the guy a decade ago.

When will we take security seriously?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , ,

Overheard today at work:
“Hackers don’t usually work during the day, or on weekends…”

I guess by that same logic, I could say that I ran file servers with all ports exposed on the public Internet for years and never got hacked (just don’t mention that those years started in 1996 and ended in 1998).

It’s sad that there are people who still don’t take security seriously. The attitude I heard 10 years ago–“What? Do they want to look at the GIFs and JPEGs on my hard drive? If they can get in, they can have ’em!”–pervades today. Nobody’s interested in your GIFs and JPEGs because you don’t have anything that hasn’t been posted on Usenet’s alt.binaries groups a dozen times, but they want your high-speed connection. It doesn’t matter anymore how insignificant you are. If your computer is online, they want it.

I’m quickly reaching the point where I believe it’s socially irresponsible to have anything faster than a 56K dialup connection and not have a hardware-based firewall sitting between you and the Internet. I bought a couple of the low-end Network Everywhere-brand (made by Linksys) 4-port cable/DSL routers a year ago. I paid $50 apiece for them. That’s what you’ll pay for a shrink-wrapped “Internet Security” software package, but it’s more effective and it doesn’t slow your computer down. Even a one-computer household should have one.

As far as antivirus software goes, Grisoft offers antivirus software free for home use. Yes, it slows your computer down. If you don’t like that, run Linux. Grisoft’s AVG is free, effective, and easy to use. And it stamps outgoing e-mail, assuring your friends that your mail has been scanned. That’s comforting in these days.

Hopefully the typical computer user will soon outgrow the teenage it-can’t-happen-to-me mindset.

But I won’t hold my breath. Since hackers only work on weekdays, problems can only happen when I’m at work and my home PC is off, right?

Using your logs to help track down spammers and trolls

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , ,

It seems like lately we’ve been talking more on this site about trolls and spam and other troublemakers than about anything else. I might as well document how I went about tracking down two recent incidents to see if they were related.
WordPress and b2 store the IP address the comment came from, as well as the comment and other information. The fastest way to get the IP address, assuming you haven’t already deleted the offensive comment(s), is to go straight to your SQL database.

mysql -p
[enter the root password] use b2database;
select * from b2comments where comment_post_id = 819;

Substitute the number of your post for 819, of course. The poster’s IP address is the sixth field.

If your blogging software records little other than the date and time of the message, you’ll have to rely on your Apache logs. On my server, the logs are at /var/log/apache, stored in files with names like access.log, access.log.1, and access.log.2.gz. They are archived weekly, with anything older than two weeks compressed using gzip.

All of b2’s comments are posted using a file called b2comments.post.php. So one command can turn up all the comments posted on my blog in the past week:

cat /var/log/apache/access.log | grep b2comments.post.php

You can narrow it down by piping it through grep a bit more. For instance, I knew the offending comment was posted on 10 November at 7:38 pm.

cat /var/log/apache/access.log | grep b2comments.post.php | grep 10/Nov/2003

Here’s one of my recent troublemakers:

24.26.166.154 – – [10/Nov/2003:19:38:28 -0600] “POST /b2comments.post.php HTTP/1.1” 302 5 “https://dfarq.homeip.net/index.php?p=819&c=1” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7”

This line reveals quite a bit: Besides his IP address, it also tells his operating system and web browser.

Armed with his IP address, you can hunt around and see what else your troublemaker’s been up to.

cat /var/log/apache/access.log | grep 24.26.166.154
zcat /var/log/apache.access.log.2.gz | grep 24.26.166.154

The earliest entry you can find for a particular IP address will tell where the person came from. In one recent case, the person started off with an MSN search looking for information about an exotic airplane. In another, it was a Google search looking for the words “Microsoft Works low memory.”

You can infer a few things from where a user originally came from and the operating system and web browser the person is using. Someone running the most recent Mozilla Firebird on Linux and searching with Google is likely a more sophisticated computer user than someone running a common version of Windows and the version of IE that was supplied with it and searching with MSN.

You can find out other things about individual IP addresses, aside from the clues in your logs. Visit ARIN to find out who owns the IP address. Most ARIN records include contact information, if you need to file a complaint.

Visit Geobytes.com IP Locator to map the IP address to a geographic region. I used the IP locator to determine that the guy looking for the airplane was in Brooklyn, and the Microsoft guy was in Minneapolis.

Also according to my Apache logs, the guy in Brooklyn was running IE 6 on Windows XP. The guy in Minneapolis was running Mozilla Firebird 0.7 on Linux. (Ironic, considering he was looking for Microsoft information.) It won’t hold up in a court of law, but the geographic distance and differing usage habits give at least some indication it’s two different people.

Why is there a stigma about meeting people online?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

Steve DeLassus just made a funny observation to me. He said when he talks about me, sometimes people consider meeting and communicating with people online as somehow abnormal. And they tell him via e-mail.
My coworker, Murel, has told me several times that when he was my age, the last place he would want to say he met someone was in a bar. Without making any moral judgments, I would rate the likelihood of me meeting someone in a bar and finding the right stuff for a serious, long-term relationship as very low. There are numerous qualities and values on my must-have list that you’re just not very likely to find in that kind of environment. And most of the things on my can’t-stand list that are very easy to find there.

But what’s the stigma about meeting people online? Steve DeLassus and I met on a bulletin board back in 1989 or 1990. We both had Commodores and modems, and it was summertime and we had time on our hands. The closest thing we had to the Internet in our homes those days was CompuServe. People who didn’t want to pay for CompuServe dialed into BBSs instead. I have one other friend from that timeframe that I talk to at all, and that’s about once a year. But Steve’s been one of my best friends for a very long time.

I met Dan Bowman online. I fired off a rant to Jerry Pournelle about alternative operating systems, and–these were the days when one could post an e-mail address on a Web site without fear of having 250 spam messages in your inbox the next day–Dan replied to me. And we quickly found some common ground. Dan noticed that at the time I was working for a Lutheran organization, and his dad was Lutheran. The result was, once again, a lasting and very valuable friendship.

It’s true that online you can pretend to be othing that you’re not, but it’s hard. Eventually the truth comes out. Some people are fooled for a long time, but every relationship I’ve made online that later fell apart, whether it was of romantic nature or strictly friendship, had one thing in common: My initial impression of the person was slightly wrong.

Funny. When I think of relationships that started in the physical world that fell apart, the same thing is true.

Now, some people are better at talking and listening than they are at reading. As a journalist, I had to be able to look at available information and take educated guesses about what was missing. No, not so I could print those along with the facts, but so I could go and find the rest of the story. As a computer tech, I’m constantly faced with solving problems for which there is little information. I can tell a lot about a person by their writing style and by the questions they ask me. Talking on the phone and later meeting in person tells me some more, but for me, that’s the optimal order.

And it’s easier for me to open up in writing than it is to just talk. It’s easier for me to be real and transparent and honest with someone I barely know when I’m not watching their expression or hearing their voice. Once I’m comfortable with the person, we can talk, but it’s pretty obvious when I get into an uncomfortable situation, and my discomfort can tend to overshadow anything that I might say. Plus, in writing, it matters a lot less how long it takes me to find the right words to say what I’m thinking.

For someone who’s a better listener than reader, the optimal order may be different. That doesn’t make this new way of doing things any less valid.

What to do with those e-mail forwards

Dave Farquhar net.culture , ,

Coke is unpatriotic and anti-God. Pepsi is unpatriotic and anti-God. Target doesn’t support veterans. Dennis Miller supports the war in Iraq. Andy Rooney doesn’t like the French. An atheist made the FCC make CBS discontinue Touched by an Angel.
If you actually read the 72 e-mail forwards that are probably in your inbox when you come in to work every morning, you’ll find lines like those in them. Makes me think I should be glad most people have forgotten the 1993 Diet Pepsi can scare.

Forget needles, pins, screws, crack vials, bullets, and Mercedes-Benz hood ornaments. I found O.J.’s bloody glove in my can of Diet Pepsi! Wait. O.J. didn’t happen in 1993. I must be a time traveler!

When someone told me the other day that Target didn’t support veterans, I suggested looking at Snopes. I checked myself. Sure enough, the rumor contains only a hint of truth and was originally perpetuated by someone with an axe to grind. While Target didn’t provide money to one particular Vietnam War memorial (the applicant didn’t apply correctly), according to the VFW, Target did provide money to fund another Vietnam War memorial.

The next time someone sends you an e-mail forward, you might wish to reply back with a couple of links:
http://snopes.com/info/whatsnew.asp
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