Alan Taylor from Lubbock, TX writes:
“You have been very persistent in not becoming a public figure, and I respect that a great deal. Is there anything you would wish to tell the fans who do not understand your wishes and why it is important to you not to claim the spotlight?”

Watterson: My impression is that those who don’t get it, don’t care to get it.”

I wish reclusiveness would become a useful marketing strategy. To not have to hear the Famous pine would be a silence we’ve not known in generations. I don’t think we’d recognize the peace for what it was.

“So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet…”

My favorite metaphor so far hails from Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast. In his editorial he mentions that the current desktop regime that got its start in the late 70s and early 80s was a development akin to road-makers requiring new cars and car manufacturers requiring new roads. The hardware got faster, so the software got more bloated, so the hardware needed to be faster. On that point, I would have to agree. There’s no question in my mind that some software bloat is totally out-of-control as well as overpriced—so much so that I made a concerted effort to opt-out about a year ago. To this day, Adobe’s software is the only software on my Mac that regularly (and predictably) crashes and I can’t stand that I can’t find an alternative for Illustrator even when I’ve found a great alternative for Photoshop. However, I digress.

The software got more bloated and sloppy and especially-so among some camps but it didn’t have to. There was very little market pressure in the OS industry and that really just made for a feature-focused attitude (read: Vista), rather than a fine-tuning attitude. Snow Leopard (Apple’s latest Mac OS version) will actually decrease the memory footprint of the OS, as well as speed it up during wake up and shut down. So it’s not by necessity that software-makers let their software get bloated, it’s that the bloat stems from misplaced incentives. When your the dominant player in the market, the incentive is to use your economy-of-scale (read more coders) to out-pace the other guy in innovations and features, not clean house. Google won’t escape this incentive. People have already hinted that as the company as moved away from its core technological expertise (search!) the search results are not as good as they used to be.

But this positioning of Google Chrome as an OS, and it’s focus on the network, still overlooks the fact that people view their own media as valuable (and as property) and keeping all your photos on Flickr is not as good as sharing photos on Flickr while still having them in some file archive on a local machine. I would predict that’s never going to change.¹ However, I also don’t think that the netbooks that Google Chrome will most likely end up on are any different than iphones (with the exception of being much, much less slick)—they’re not anyone’s first and only computer–they’re certainly not going to become the hub of the media center in a household. And just like with the iPhone and iPod, the model that naturally evolves is a cloud-desktop hybrid. There are layers of privacy to these sorts of hybrids and as people become more and more aware of threats to their media, they will want more protection. That means that some stuff, meant for my eyes only, stays on my computer, in my vault, while other material (like my twitter messages) gets pretty much permanently embedded online.²

I think the metaphor that best suits what will happen because of the Google Chrome OS is not really much of a metaphor at all. It will be a component in an iTunes-like world. I have my music (without DRM now) all on a personal machine. I can back that up. Occasionally, I allow some of it to be streamed to others in my office. I can move it up to an online back-up resource or I can move it to my iPod. (I even occasionally—with the permission of the artist—host a file for Blip.fm.) It’s not all in the cloud. It’s not all on the desktop. It is however rarely on only one device.³ Google wants to run software through the browser and that makes some sense. I think it will force software developers to re-consider their design strategies and worry more about reliability and speed and be more tentative about new features (though I hope they learn how to come out of a beta phase). But I don’t think that will at all change the fact that people will run want to run programs offline. I see no point in an online version Illustrator where I create my art (in utero) entirely online. I don’t want anyone looking at my work in its middle stages. I will want to store things locally and only locally and I don’t think Google plans to stop them.

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.

By the by, my favorite part of that broadcast is the fact that the DOW closed at around 2600. Oh yeah. Those were the days.

The candidate of change went with the status quo. In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness—inexperience in office and on foreign policy…He picked a 35-year veteran of the Senate—the ultimate insider…The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative…” (Emphasis added)

So, I wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal the following letter:

I was shocked to read the AP story about Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick in our paper–shocked because there was no mistaking the slant that the article had decided to take. The article referred to Senator Biden as the “status quo” and as “the ultimate insider” while simultaneously justifying the choice (for the reader) that the choice was because of Senator Obama’s “inexperience” and “weakness” in foreign policy.

These are not facts! These are opinions and they have no place in an Associated Press article. The AP should report facts. Joe Biden was chosen. He has been a member of the senate for 35 years. He has passed x, y, and z legislation.

Editors for the Louisville Courier-Journal should be very considered about their own journalistic integrity if they are willing to publish these editorial pieces from the AP instead of unvarnished and balanced facts. Wikipedia has less bias than this tripe.

Sincerely, Russell Warner

I would suggest that you write your local paper as well, and moveon.org has provided a fairly simple way to do it. The AP has held and distinguished and unique place in the fourth estate. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.