We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, –
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
    We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
    We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Obama has written two memoranda making it clear he intends to encourage an open environment so the public can access the data it pays to create. He wants to create an Open Government Directive to make that happen. The Office of Management and Budget is charged with recommending what that should entail. And I have a few recommendations.

If the folks developing the semantic web want to make it happen, this is the perfect opportunity. Whether you support microformats or RDF, the only way to really access this data is to get it marked up. That means people need to get in there and dig around the data that is being released. Draft profiles, sketch vocabularies, but if there is not a way to mark up this data, it will not be done. If it does not happen now, it will not be cleaned up before another administration.

There are some things that can happen immediately. Obama has released two executive orders already. It is great that he is doing work, but here is an example of data that needs to get marked up:

Section 1.  Definitions.  For purposes of this order:

(a)  “Archivist” refers to the Archivist of the United States or his designee.

(b)  “NARA” refers to the National Archives and Records Administration.

(c)  “Presidential Records Act” refers to the Presidential Records Act, 44 U.S.C. 2201-2207.

(d)  “NARA regulations” refers to the NARA regulations implementing the Presidential Records Act, 36 C.F.R. Part 1270.

(e)  “Presidential records” refers to those documentary materials maintained by NARA pursuant to the Presidential Records Act, including Vice Presidential records.

See all those references to executive positions and legal statues? Every last one of those should be a link. Each of these defined terms should be entities in this document. When those terms are later used, they should be links to the formal definition.

I am not saying it is President Obama’s obligation to mark up legal documents. But whoever is editing these drafts needs to have the tools to make it easy. But what is the way to do this now? I do not know.

Regarding passion.

There is not any “grand, magnificent, all-encompassing design” and there never was or will be.

What looks grand and designed in hindsight is the just like seeing design in the free market. There is no watchmaker. Just billions of choices, good or bad.

So fuck the driving forces, and make a passionate choice now.

Gmail IMAP + Mail.app is nice. Note that you may select the gmail Drafts, then go to Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Drafts, and so for each gmail message. You may also archive a piece of mail in the inbox by dragging it to All Mail. You may move another piece to to same place with Command + Option + T.

I’ve been a user of Harvest for a number of months now. I’ve gotten a few people on it, and enjoy it thoroughly. I’ve tried Tick, but a time tracker without a timer is (grasping for metaphor) worthless (clear language is better than colorful ambiguity, right?).

However, I’ve just given SlimTimer a try and am unsure of harvest’s future. Basecamp integration is awesome, yes. But do I have to have project constraints on my users? Estimates? No.

Of course, I could convince my employer to adopt harvest. Their time tracker is a horrible mess, but build with the same goal in mind. Estimates, employees constrained to a finite set of projects, spiffy API.

I will ponder this problem for perhaps the next month, since I just payed the harvest bill. We’ll see.

Steamboat Willie opens a gap in the New York Times. Or rather, Disney’s copyright lobby prevents access to New York Times archives.

Doesn’t it make sense to allow use if no copyright holder can be found? Trademark holders have to defend their property, why should copyright holders be any different?

Dare Obasanjo wrote about how It isn’t OpenID vs. Windows Live ID

If this SDK is providing authorization to access resources, wouldn’t that make it an authentication and authorization SDK?

People are confused because it’s called web authentication. That is what OpenID does. It’s not necessarily a SSO provider, as vidoop shows.

Would it surprise you that I use fat clients for most internet stuff? That’s right, most of the apps I use are for cocoa or win-forms. The blogs I read, the mail I send, the music I listen to is rarely housed in safari, internet explorer, or firefox.

That’s because I don’t have internet at home. I’m a computer programmer, director or leading member of a handful of local computer groups, occasional podcaster, blogger, and really bad web designer. I have been working on replacing the traditional operating system with a web operating system since 2004. Ironic, no?

But while I’ll pay to get a current of electricity and water, or some walls with a roof, I’m not going to pay to talk and listen to you. If my parents didn’t value talking to me so much, I wouldn’t have a phone. I don’t have cable, satellite, and barely listen to radio. These things are synchronous, so for them to get my attention it has to be on their terms. Same goes for instant messaging.

Synchronous info can be great. There’s nothing like being able to talk to a loved one when you can’t be with them. There’s nothing like live video when you want to watch a game, see breaking news, enjoy your favorite show as soon as it airs. But I don’t need to hear about bills, see your latest fishing photos, read the latest company memo right now. And the best way to take synchronous info and hold it for asynchronous access is a fat client, bar none.

Most people are amazed at how tivo changed the way they watch tv. But you can do the same with almost everything. Do try.

See here: Fix the Leopard Folders (FTLF or FTFLF) Or rather, He-who-must-not-be-named likes them.

See here: Glamour to the eyes of pen geeks c/o Gruber