You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you'll know by.
-- Crosby, Stills, Nash

Tip: Apropos of Something

WHILE MOST OF HER FELLOW DEMOCRATS are trying their worst to save the country from Republicans, it is nice to know that Barbara Boxer has decided to Heal the Entire Planet if re-elected. Some things defy parody. Here is the complete text of a begging email sent by Boxer2004.org to the more deeply addled members of her constituency. At $1000 - $2000 a pop you might say it lacks the common touch -- except of course if your sole purpose in life is perfecting your asanas next to the pool in Tiburon. Ah, the Party of the Little People.

Give Your Support to
Senator Barbara Boxer
in her fight to Heal the World

Varda and Irving Rabin
and Friends of Barbara Boxer
cordially invite you to attend
a day of healing activity to celebrate
the joy of healthy practice

featuring
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen
author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Wisdom

Classes with Master Teachers will be offeredin the following disciplines:
Iyengar Yoga
Jin Shin Jyutsu
Qi Gong
Aikido
The Art of Tai Chi
Chinese Herbal Medicine

Host Committee:
Janie and Don Friend ~Nancy Goldberg~Maribelle and Steve Leavitt~Joyce Linker~Lisa Stone Pritzker~ Carol Traeger~ Howard and Diane Zack

Partial Practitioner list:
Teja Bell~Elliot Blackman~Annpurna Broffman~Michael Broffman~Issac Eliaz~Jacqueline Gerson~Iris Gold~ Jill Holden~Lonner Holden~Steve Katz~Michael McCulloch~ Scott Phillips

Saturday, June 12, 2004
9:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
An organic vegetarian lunch will be served in the garden at 12:30
$1,000 guest
$2,000 sponsor

At the home of Varda and Irving Rabin
3825 Paradise Drive
Tiburon, CA
For more information and to RSVP, please contact:
Kat Woodruff (415) 734-9040 katw@boxer2004.org

Ah, yes, veggie burgers and Barbara Boxer in a leotard perfecting her plow and down dog while the mantra "Bush Lied" leads all assembled to higher chakras. There's an exciting afternoon.

If they offered to take you off this mailing list for $3000, they'd stand to make a lot more money.

RETURN WITH US NOW TO THOSE THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR:

"The games you get today,
They might be very flash,
But they will never beat the thrill
of getting through Jetpac.

Just click: Hey Hey 16k

Easy, convenient, right at your fingertips. Compare odds with http://wap.oddsexchange.com wherever and whenever you want! -- OddsExchange.com

Via:NTK

Plus, from the same source, Trouble in Primitive Piercing Paradise

WHY MUSCIANS SHOULDN'T TALK, EXHIBIT A: bobschneidermusic.com.

Hi. This is the new record, "I'm Good Now." Some people might think that that refers to me like kinda finally getting it together finally... but it actually refers to being dead, the whole idea behind it is, "Life sucks but now that I'm dead I'm good now. I wasn't doing so good, but now that I'm dead its all gravy..."

Attitude and message aside, it's not that bad a record.

Great looking site doesn't hurt either.

A "Correction" from the New York Times.

An article last Wednesday about South Africa's wine industry referred incorrectly to Thabani Cellars, a winery there. It is not minority-owned. (As a black man, the owner, Jabulani Ntshangase, belongs to the country's majority.)

-- Spotted by raelity bytes

DEPARTMENT OF CREEPING MALE OBSOLESENCE: Welcome to Lids Off

Now you can take the hassle of opening jars out of your hands with the all-new Black & Decker® Lids Off Automatic Jar Opener! It's the easy new way to open jars fast!

With the touch of a button, the new Lids Off Automatic Jar Opener loosens lids in seconds. No more hitting. No more prying. Opening jars doesn't get any easier.

Phantic despairs that "They're strapping belts of Semtex around their waists, and we're spending 40 bucks on a device to uncap jars. "

If this wasn't the perfect gift for a newly married lesbian couple, we'd agree.

Powell Unable to Make Headway in Mideast

The 99 cent Powerbook: "He wanted a Powerbook. We gave him a p-p-p-powerbook"

Highly clickworthy, but place all hot beverages far away. Scamming the Scammer

ALAS, THE ONCE WONDERFUL WRITER KURT VONNEGUT has forgotten to get off the stage after the lights dim. His incoherent rant Cold Turkey -- In These Times is rife with gems such as:

"And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals."

We will forget for the moment that the Roman numerals joke isn't even close to original. You'd think that loving and caring editors would have stopped their author from making a fool of himself, but perhaps they were lunching at the time and could not be bothered to look up from the expense account trough.

Vonnegut's "He" is, of course, the President. I wonder if there is an editor anywhere within telephone range of Kurt that could call him up and inform him that it is highly unlikely the President is upset over algebra. The hole at the tip of Manhattan should clear that up. Somebody should drive Kurt downtown and let him have a look around.
==
UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments, the joke is not only old and unoriginal, the facts are wrong:" Zero -- Its existence in the West is probably due to the Arabs, who, having obtained it from the Hindus, passed it on to European mathematicians in the latter part of the Middle Ages. The Maya of Central America and probably the Babylonians also invented zero." zero. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001

YESTERDAY THE "COMPANY" BEHIND MOVABLE TYPE removed all the radiation inhibitors in their single product with one single announcement of a fantastically complicated and extortionate pricing scheme. The result: a meltdown of their core ... market that is. Now, in the tradition of Three Mile Island, they are attempting to put the genie back in the bottle by -- making things even more complicated in the minds of their core customers: Six Log: Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition

The question of what a "weblog" is is somewhat muddy, but the basic answer to the first question is that, if you're using multiple "Weblogs" in Movable Type in order to build 1 site, that only counts as 1 weblog towards the license limits.

In our licenses, we now address this with this language: "Weblog" means a single Web site viewable at a single URL (Uniform Resource Locator), consisting of one or more weblogs as generated by the Software via the "Create New Weblog" function of the Software.

To be clear, sub-weblogs that make up weblog sites shouldn't be counted toward your weblog total."

Well, that's clear enough, but really when wasn't it? The real muddy question all this raises is "Who do these people think they are?" There are a lot more "explanations" and sidestepping going on in this posting, but really, the damage has been done.

SixApart, probably steeping in a hot cup of "How Cool Are We," forgot the first principle of dealing with a userbase and indeed a customer base of any kind: KISS, or "Keep It Simple, Stupid." Instead of thinking through their business long term -- that's the thing called 'Let's keep these customers who are actually bringing us new customers, who are in fact the only thing that is bringing us new customers, happy, satisfied and unconfused" -- they looked at the Sum Cell on their spreadsheets that said "X thousand users @ X hundreds of dollars = Bonanza" and completely lost their minds. To do that they announced an utterly unrealistic pricing scheme in a complicated structure that only said to most people "You will now pay and you will pay a lot. No matter what you pay, you will pay more in the future once you are really locked into the app." This may have worked for Oracle but Six Apart ain't Oracle. They have zero market lock and now they have less market share. The rot will continue.

The "clarification" released today will not stop the rot. Once you have alerted your core base to the fact that they will need alternatives to keep from being gouged, it comes as no surprise they will start the search for alternatives. Many will find them and competitors in the field will not be slow to welcome them.

Case in point: The Expression Engine is now offering free apps to the first 1,000 people that affirm they are moving from "another application." Their inbox runneth over.

The last few days of 'communication' coming out of Six Apart to alienate its user and developer base is not an isolated incident. The company has always been aloof and uncommunicative. This is their way. Regardless of the "clairifications" all the user base can now be sure of is that in some way, on some day, Six Apart will screw them. It didn't completley work this time, but there's alway tomorrow.

There are two good things to come out of this. The first is that elegant and workmanlike substitutes such as Dean Allen's elegant Textpattern and the solid group hack WordPress will get the attention they deserve. The second is that those VC's foolish enough to back an app whose founders are hopeless sunk in the "aren't we cool" culture, will probably lose a lot of money.

THE USUALLY SANE AND ASTUTE JASON KOTTKE has been bitten in the brain by the Dave Winer web virus today with his note titled The end of free (kottke.org)

The bottom line, as Dave suggests, is that MT 3.0 is worth charging money for. Period. The fact that it was free up until now is largely irrelevant...except that for 2 1/2 years Six Apart has provided people with a very powerful, flexible piece of software for free and will continue to do so in the future. Those bastards!

Sigh. That's the problem with reading Dave Winer without your surge protector duct-taped to your forehead. You might think, for a nanosecond, that Winer is making sense, but that's only because your are forgetting that everything in Middle Earth is but a prop in Dave's Neverending Epic Backstory starring Dave. In this case, you've forgotten the massive Userland meltdown when pricing began and, surprise, GOT IT WRONG. Like the Web's rutheless attack on Dave over RSS, his remorseless strangulation of his cat, his ascension into the realms of Harvard, his self-canonization as the inventor of blogging, his compulsion to inform you that today is his 3,746th day of not-smoking, and his decision to "move to a swing state in November so my vote counts!" (announced yesterday)... yes, you have forgotten that you cannot separate a Davism from Dave. The Dave endures.

Kottke then recovers some semblance of sanity when he goes on to say:

The one thing I do think 6A got wrong is the pricing structure for personal users.

HELLO! Earth to Jason. That is exactly what all this is about. It is not, as Dave so dumbly decrees, about getting something for nothing. It is about the price of that something. Few MT users have been moaning about the end of free, but a lot have been, as you note, made very nervous by the

Tiered pricing of software based on the number of users was designed to make sure large companies paid more for software than did small companies...so that a company like Wal-Mart pays $3 million for a database application for 20,000 users and a smaller company like Nantucket Nectars pays $30,000 for the same software with 250 users. The same pricing structure doesn't make sense for personal users. I know they priced it that way so that someone can't install MT and then host weblogs for 50 of their friends. I can understand that...that seems like an abuse of the "personal" license to me.

Jason then goes on to state that if he jumped on this pricing model under his current configuration he'd be shelling out $700. That's only for starters.

What's clear to me is that, as they have in the past, Six Apart got stupid with the way it handles its core users. It also got stupid with the way they used beta testers and then tried to upsell them. It was stupid again with the way they announced their move, and stupid before that with the way they set their pricing. Indeed, they state they are 'trying to get their pricing right.' What does that mean? Are they beta-testing their pricing? Will it go up if the market will bear it? Will it come down if it will not? If it comes down, will early adopters get a refund?

Seems to me that 6A has depended on "the kindness of strangers" in plugin development and software support since day one. Seems to me that they've more than once revealed themselves to be stumblebums at doing what their software is supposed to enable -- communicate clearly and effectively. For this small flaw they will also join the group of people invested in Movabletype -- yes, they too will pay.

==

Side note to Kottke: When Dave Winer thinks something, take a hint from Apple and think different.

So long, suckers.
Thanks for the fish.

SMILING MENA TROTT'S little note about their new "engulf and devour" pricing scheme -- and "scheme" is the right word for it -- has caused no little consternation in the blogsphere. Well, 'consternation' is a little soft -- 'rage' and 'betrayal' and 'greed' are also mentioned in some of the 450+ trackbacks.

Indeed, Mena's little note has probably set a new trackback record for a single post in all of the blogs that use Movable Type. Written in the sweet, dulcet tones that we have come to know as "pure Mena" this little note is not the first time SixApart has proved to be hamhanded in dealing with its large userbase.

Mena's Corner: It's About Time
Ben and I are incredibly proud to see that Movable Type, the product that we first developed in our spare bedroom, has now enabled us to become a company that not only allows good people to have jobs that they (hopefully) enjoy but also a company that remembers those who got us here.

Translation: "We'd like to thank all the little people." Yes, indeed, they remember by walking straight up to a lot of them and picking their pocket. They seem to forget that it really isn't MovableType and SixApart that made the app dominant in their little world, but the endless work of people creating plugins that give the app the functionality that it should have had in the first place. Plugins that really patched up the shaky software that MovableType was at its inception and continued to be right up through the last release. Oh yes, and all that free advice freely given over the years from one blogger to the other on their forums.

While nobody doubts the right of SixApart to profit from their work, many rightfully doubt the business sense of this fledgling company in the current fantasy pricing structure. Indeed, with price tags for various configurations going to the north of $700, their "strategy" seems to be to give as many members of their sophisticated user base away to their competitors as fast as possible.

It would be hard to find an example of a dumber idea passed off in such a breezy and Scarlet O'Hara manner than we see here. I guess that the SixApart couple just jumped back into that "back bedroom" for some warm pillow talk and came out with a business plan they think will buy them the Gulfstream soonest.

Sigh. If this decision was any dumber I'd have to say that Joi Ito had a hand in it. Oh, wait, he does, doesn't he?

A backhoe, a sledge hammer, a thin steel rod, and a trusted co-worker. What could possibly go wrong?

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• Teach Your Children Well
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• We Bought It to Help with Your Homework
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