Personal
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Feed Time
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E… Continue reading
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Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called… Continue reading
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What shall I call my newsletter?
I’ve been blogging since 1999, first at weblog.searls.com, and since 2007 here. I also plan to continue blogging here* for the rest of my life. But it’s clear now that newsletters are where it’s at, so I’m going to start one of those. The first question is, What do I call it? The easy thing, and… Continue reading
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Why the Celtics will win the NBA finals
Marcus Smart. Photo by Eric Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Back in 2016, I correctly predicted that the Cleveland Cavaliers would win the NBA finals, beating the heavily favored Golden State Warriors, which had won a record 73 games in the regular season. In 2021, I incorrectly predicted that the Kansas City Chiefs would beat the Tampa… Continue reading
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Remembering David Hodskins
A hazard of aging well is outliving friends and other people you love. For example, two of the three in the photo above. It dates from early 1978, when Hodskins Simone & Searls, a new ad agency, was born in Durham, North Carolina. Specifically, at 602 West Chapel Hill Street. Click on that link and… Continue reading
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TheirCharts
If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them. I have four (correction: five*) MyChart accounts… Continue reading
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Remembering Kim Cameron
Got word yesterday that Kim Cameron had passed. Hit me hard. Kim was a loving and loved friend. He was also a brilliant and influential thinker and technologist. That’s Kim, above, speaking at the 2018 EIC conference in Germany. His topics were The Laws of Identity on the Blockchain and Informational Self-Determination in a Post Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Era (in… Continue reading
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Going west
Long ago a person dear to me disappeared for what would become eight years. When this happened I was given comfort and perspective by a professor of history whose study concentrated on the American South after the Civil War. “You know what the most common record of young men was, after the Civil War?” he… Continue reading
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A happy 75th anniversary
My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. I would have posted something then, but I was busy—though not too busy to drop something in Facebook, where much of the readership for this blog, plus the writership of others listed in my old… Continue reading
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Speaking of character
It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of Doctor Dave, my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk, whose nickname at the time was Czuko (pronounced “Chuck-o”). Alex is an artist, techie and (now literally) old friend of… Continue reading
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Enough with the giant URLs
A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google: The result was this: Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this: https://google.com/search?&q=doc+searls+privacy That’s 609 characters vs. 47, or… Continue reading
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Be the hawk
On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered:::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was at the top of the bell curve, and they put me in the smart kid… Continue reading
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Digging in Radio.Garden
Radio.garden is an amazing and fun discovery, perfect for infinite distraction during life in quarantine. (James Vincent in The Verge calls it “Google Earth for Radio.”) Here’s a list of just some discoveries I’ve made while mining that Earth with Shazam open on my phone: CIAU/103.1 in … not sure where this is, except in… Continue reading
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Remembering Freddy Herrick
The picture of Freddy Herrick I carry everywhere is in my wallet, on the back of my membership card for a retail store. It got there after I loaned my extra card to Freddy so he could use it every once in awhile. As Freddy explained it, one day, while checking out at the store,… Continue reading
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Remembering Freeman Dyson
By his own description, Freeman was a frog: Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the… Continue reading
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Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In… Continue reading
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Journalism without Twitter
So I’m taking live notes at Blockchain in Journalism: Promise and Practice, happening at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, in the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, to name the four Russian dolls whose innards I’m inhabiting here In advance of this gathering, Linux Journal, which I serve as editor-in-chief… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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Enough Alreadies
I just unsubscribed from Quora notifications. Reasons: With my new full-time gig as editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, I have close to no time for anything else, even though many other obligations do take time. Some of those also pay, and so require that I cut out as many distractions as I can. The filter bubble thing works… Continue reading