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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Friday, June 27, 2003
What Are You Doing, Dave?
So I had my first video chat with Apple's new iSight webcam yesterday. It was pretty easy to set up -- plug it in to the FireWire port, clamp it on to the top of your screen, download the latest version of iChat, and you're done. Only a couple of problems: the eye of the camera looks disturbingly like HAL from 2001. I would employ the shutter-closing device, but I don't want to arouse its suspicions.
The other problem is that nobody on my buddy list has one of these things yet. I feel like Alexander Graham Bell without a Watson. Apple's solution to this problem was to hook me up with one of their product managers; I would have said the solution was to give me more iSights to hand out to my Mac-owning friends.
Still, the conversation was revealing. Partly because it was a sticky summer day and I felt I had to rush off and have a shower before the appointed hour to chat. Is this the future of instant messaging -- constantly preening ourselves in case someone wants a video chat? There was a postage stamp-sized area in the corner of the screen where I could check what my outgoing image looked like. It was distracting. Did I look too bored when the product manager was talking? On the phone I could just murmur reassuring "mm-hmmms," but now I had to actively look interested. Take your chin out of your hand, boy.
This, you see, is why videophones never took off.
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