Inq7 Talking Points

.

Some hubbub going on about Filipino news outlet Inq7’s Talking Points “blog.” Heh. That’s not a blog, anymore than a guestbook is a magazine. My underwhelmed reaction is posted as a comment to Sassy Lawyer’s Mislead Us Not entry:

Corporate groupthink seizes on the latest buzzword — “blog” — and attempts to capitalize on it by implementing a half-baked op-ed stream. I couldn’t even get past the kilometric self-congratulating introductory “happy text” before losing interest.

This isn’t the first company to try and co-opt the term “blog” for its own ends. Remember Amazon’s “plog?” (Where is it now?) Inq7 had a great chance to roll out a Mefi-like weblog, to build community and enhance the Inq7 brand. Instead they have what amounts to a static email-submission page with less interactivity than a guestbook; neither compelling nor revolutionary.

More fascinating to me is this new example of the fierce protectiveness webloggers have over terminology and concept. Remember the JesusJournal brouhaha? We feel strongly about this medium and our place in it, and are quick to jump on anyone who gets it wrong. Why is that?

Next time I want lots of attention for a non-weblog project, I’m going to pull a “Talking Points” and call it a “blog.” </silly>

Inq7 tech guy Joey Alarilla defends himself, and Sassy Lawyer has yet more linkage.

Update: You know what? I take it back. Inq7 Talking Points is a regularly updated series of posts in reverse-chronological order. Sure, it only has one “real” contributor who just pastes in emails he receives, and sure, the blog lacks permalinks and commenting, and each entry ends with a word “Links” which only goes to one link, and it starts with a mile-long string of what usability expert Steve Krug calls “happy text” — but still, in the loosest, most magnanimous sense of the word, it is a blog.

Just not a very good one. Sorry.

Netscape at 10

.

I wish I’d known this yesterday: I share a birthday with Netscape, that late, great, venerable icon of the dotcom dawn. More links and input on Netscape’s Tenth from WASP and Slashdot.

Here I Stand

.

My foot is down.

It is my firm conviction that salvation from damnation is through Christ and Christ alone, that all are justified freely by the eternal redemption that is given us through Jesus’ propitiatory sacrifice, and that if a man confesses with his mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in his heart that God raised him from the dead, then he is saved. There is one mediator between God and man, and that is Jesus, the Christ and Messiah.

This also means that I reject anything which would dilute that mediation and redemption. I reject the veneration of saints and of Mary, I reject a daily-repeated, church-officiated, transubtantiatory sacrifice, and I reject indulgences and purgatory and rosaries and scapulars and apparitions and anything else which burdens pure faith, which negates the “alone” in Christ alone.

In “A Papist Life for Me,” the InternetMonk captures perfectly the reasons that I retain a soft spot in my heart for the Roman Catholic faith, while also detailing the doctrinal issues which keep me from returning to the Romanist fold for the foreseeable future.

Ironically, I find some of my sentiments best expressed by a Catholic saint: Teresa of Avila.

Nada te turbe, Nada te espante;

Todo se pasa; Dios no se muda.

La paciencia todo lo alcanza.

Quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta.

Solo Dios basta.

That last line is key: God alone is sufficient.

Additional reading: Challies.com on Marian Devotion, and the Epistle to the Galatians.

Twenty-Eight

.

I turned 28 today, and I’ve got the love handles and thinning hair to prove it. Five years ago, I was 23, in the Philippines, working 36-hour days in digital video editing, living in a tiny shared room, and wondering what goals I should set for myself. I remember clearly, writing them down:

1999: Within five years, I aim to:

  1. Move to the US. (How very Filipino!)
  2. Get a Master’s Degree in something creative and computer-related.
  3. Get a decent web development job.
  4. Settle down someplace nice.

Here I am, five years later, and by the grace of God, everything on the list is checked off. Now I guess it’s time to plan for the next five years.

2004: The next five years:

  1. Homeownership.
  2. Marriage.
  3. Build up upper body strength, arrest accumulation of waistline fat, and become paragon of masculine physique.

Yup. I’m going to pray over these goals tonight, then break out the exercise gear.

“For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

Wyclifercules

.

The more I read about what a paragon of masculine physique Wyclif is turning into since he switched to a job hefting hardware around the great outdoors, the more I wonder if I should turn my next career shift towards more muscular domains. Outside of web development and graphics, my two physical areas of focus are inline skating and SCUBA diving. Anyone got ideas for a career along those lines? Bonus points for something which combines the two skills mentioned.

Feeding Time

.

I’m a latecomer to the world of newsreaders, owing to my stubborn insistence that the old habit of obsessively clicking through my randomizing blogroll was enough for me; but lately I’ve realized how much time I’ve been wasting, clicking repeatedly on links to high-traffic weblogs, only to find that that they haven’t been updated since I last visited five minutes ago. I was dipping a virtual soup ladle into a rushing river of content, and now it was time to get a funnel. Or something.

I tried out three server-side newsreaders (not client-side, as I wanted something accessible from anywhere beyond my computer):

  • Bloglines came well recommended, but the framed interface threw me off, as did all the links and tabs all over the place. I was also hoping for a single screen where I could read aggregated posts from all subscribed blogs in one place, but I saw no such function. (Update: Okay, Dan and Chris pointed me to the folder at the top of the blog list, which should show a full listing of all blogs. I guess the Bloglines devs thought it was perfectly obvious, but I sure didn’t see it. Where’s the “All Blogs” label?)
  • Feedster appeared to have a much simpler, more direct UI, but all I ever saw when I logged in was “Unable to get the recently changed feeds for current user.” Nothing changed, no matter what I added.
  • Finally, Kinja. I had originally dismissed Kinja offhand in my “I don’t need a newsreader” denial stage, but now it seems to be best suited to my aggregatory desires. The digest collects posts in reverse chronological order, giving them to me in a unified stream, and adding and removing weblogs is an easy one-click affair. My only major complaint is that something occasionally seems wrong with the timing logic: I frequently get “strafed” by weblog posts from the same source in quick succession, apparently displayed in the sequence that they were crawled rather than in actual chronological order. It’s a minor problem — except when someone in my digest posts two dozen weblog entries in the span of an hour or two.

I’m sure a lot of you out there have plenty of reasons to recommend one over the other, and I can see how Bloglines is useful to many, but I wanted a funnel, and not a filing cabinet, so Kinja it is for me. My digest.

(My apologies for all the mixed metaphors. Soup ladles, funnels, filing cabinets, and “strafing” all have very little to do with each other functionally, but hey, if the shoe fits…)

Escalator Out

.

Dear WMATA: How much would it cost to erect and tie down a tarp over the Dupont Circle escalators, as compared to the amount of money spent on yearly escalator repairs and maintenance due to weather damage? To my experience, the south exit has never had all three escalators running for more than a week at a time.

And, in case you were wondering, this is what an escalator’s rubber handrail looks like out of its natural habitat.

Photo taken with a Sony Ericsson Communicam attachment (on T300 phone).

Madugo

.

Check out the October “redesigns” of Shaun Inman and Jason Santa Maria. As we say in Tagalog, madugo.*

* madugo – literally “bloody,” but also used in tech and advertising slang to describe a difficult, complicated, or messy project.

So Long, Superman

.

Christopher Reeve passed on today, due to secondary complications from his spinal cord injury. He’ll be missed; this guy was, bar none, the best to play Superman — and Clark Kent — on the big screen. I could never get over how he changed on screen once he put on those glasses, brushed away the spit curl, and spoke in that geeky falsetto. I don’t think any actor will ever be able to pull off Kent like Reeve. Ever.