Month: August 2005

Aha! I’m not paranoid!

Go to Google and do a search on “persecution complex“. This site hits as #3 on the list.

You are all after me. I knew it. Here that drunken bastard Ellis was complaining about the filthy monkeys, and I knew that it was just a diversion. You were all messing with my mind, forging emails form ex-girlfriends, sending coded messages in my ATM receipts, cutting my cocaine with anthrax, having the cats whispering in my ears… and the person who reprogrammed my clock radio to play nothing but Christian radio was inspired, particularly after you put the voice modulator on there so all the apocalyptic rants came out in the voices of William Shatner and Yeardley Smith.

Getting all the dancers in the strip clubs to point and laugh was overkill, but I can see why you indulged.

And you claim that you’ve started the bag searches at subway stations to prevent terror attacks? Please. I know you just want to look at my porn and plant spiders in the hidden pouches.

But it’s not going to work, you hear me? You might have gotten to Dave Chapelle, but you won’t get me!!!

(You thought I was going to end with a bit about the Bush administration out to get me? Please. I may have a persecution complex, but I’m not so far gone to give those guys that much credit for competence…)

On the printed version of Encyclopedia Britannica

EBlogger writes:

When I tell people I work for Encyclopædia Britannica, they typically have one of two responses:

(1) When are you guys gonna get a web site?

or

(2) Do you guys still make books?

Glenn Hauman is apparently one of the latter, when he writes “they stopped publishing a paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years back.” As far as I can tell, that statement isn’t true.

This came from an article I remembered from 1999, which the Wayback Machine has helpfully archived:

Encyclopaedia Turns Its Back On Books

Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it has stopped printing books because its multimedia CD-Rom version is a far bigger seller (July 27, 1999). The ending of a tradition reaching back more than 200 years came about because the company now sells only a minimal number of books, compared with 150,000 CD-Roms every year in Europe alone. A full set of volumes costs £900 while the computerised version, containing the same information, is priced at just £89

James Strachan, the UK managing director, said: ‘There are no plans to print any more books, although that doesn’t mean we never would if consumers demanded them.

‘But the economics of the encyclopedia business mean it is far more profitable for us to concentrate on electronic publishing rather than book publishing. ‘He said far more people buy the computerised version than ever bought the books, and consumers also find it more user-friendly.

Mr Strachan added: ‘I hope traditionalists will recognise that we can’t produce Encyclopaedia Britannica at a loss. ‘I think this shows the beginnings of a revolution that nobody properly understands yet

‘What is important for us is the thing that constitutes Britannica – 45 million words – are still exactly the same. What has changed is the way people use them.

So it appears that they stopped in Britain, but not worldwide. And for all I know, they may have started up again in the UK.

On the other hand, when you consider there’s a 6000% price difference between the printed edition and the CD-ROM, you really have to wonder who’s buying the paper edition nowadays…

(And yes, I knew they had a web site. I even remember the feature they had for a while deconstructing all of the obscure references Dennis Miller made on Monday Night Football.)

Welcome, News From Me readers

If you’re coming here from this post, welcome to the fray. You don’t know this (and neither did Mark) but you’re about to help settle a point of contention.

Peter David was asking me whether there had been any traffic surge due to this article in the London Independent saying his blog was one of the quirkiest on the net, and I said I hadn’t seen any. Then I followed up with, “On the other hand, if Neil or Mark mentions you in his blog, traffic will spike.”

And now, lo and behold, Mark’s just given me a link.

So we’re going to take a day or two and see what it does to my traffic, and we’ll see if Mark Evanier has more blog juice than one of the larger newspapers in Great Britain. Watch this space.

Here we go again

A decade later, the 1996 Telecommuncations Act may be revamped [Politech]:

Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, has introduced a pretty wide-ranging (at 72 pages, it better be) bill to revamp the ’96 Telecom Act. It deals with topics such as:
– municipal broadband
– video from Verizon/SBC/etc. rather than cable co’s
– VoIP blocking by ISPs
– Web site blocking by ISPs
– Price regulation of communications services

I’ve placed the bill text here:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/ensign.telecom.bill.072705.pdf

Summary is here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1036_3-5807278.html

-Declan

Here’s hoping we don’t have to sue to get his one overturned too.

The one drawback with being known to keep late hours

Whenever you actually try to get some sleep early the way normal humans do, that’s the night everybody and their cousin calls you up because they figure “oh, Glenn’s up anyway…”

I’m going back to bed now. With any luck, I’ll have a decent night’s sleep. If not, you’ll probably see seven or eight blog posts between now and sunrise.