About kdfrawg

... is a writer of books, blogs, bios, and software. Thirty years in the software business burned me out on programming languages so I'm working on proficiency in English. I term myself monolingually challenged. The good news is that novels don't have to compile. :)

The Good, The Good and, well, the Good of App.net

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There is much good to be said about App.net, and very little bad. It is, like many new and as yet comfortably small things, a pleasure from start to finish, with just a few raw spots. The biggest selling point is the people; App.net has not as yet been overrun by marketers, spammers, celebrities, and similar “personalities.” The place is full of early adopters, very bright early adopters. At the beginning, as the name would indicate, the site-slash-service was developer-heavy, … Continue reading

Conversation-Centricity and App.net (Part 2)

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Yesterday’s column explained why Plurk is useful for intelligent discussions and picked out a few of the main reasons. Just to recommend another angle, think of the way forum threads tend to work. Again, they are presented by subject, and all the responses to a specific subject are presented in order underneath  subject header. There is a reason for that. It works. App,net (ADN) is faster-moving than a forum and has a slightly different default format than Plurk. It is … Continue reading

A short mind-dump about “Conversation-Centric” and App.net (Part 1)

Timeline

I have now been sort of active on App.net (ADN) for a few days and have made over 700 posts, most of which were replies. That proves that my Plurk ratio of 263,759 responses to 12,553 original Plurk posts is going to hold true. It also proves to me that I like App.net; it is a very bright place in the generally dim universe of social networking. I have been involved in a number of conversations there regarding Conversation-Centricity; App.net … Continue reading

App.Net: still basically Twitter at the interface level

As one of a distinct minority who feel that Plurk provides a much more human, conversational experience than does Twitter, I tried to distill my feeling in this area down to a brief quotation way back (lol) in 2008. That quotation still holds true: Twitter is for announcements; Plurk is for conversations. I have now been around App.Net for a month or so, having happily paid my way for a year in order to help that growing site along. I … Continue reading

Reprehensibly low common denominators

Americans, and much of the rest of the world, seem to be functioning under a guiding principal which requires that the world operate at or below the lowest common denominator. Thus, in a major debate leading to what was once the most powerful job in the world, we find that the best that either candidate can serve up is a thin gruel of heavy spin, misdirection, and lies. Instead of inspiration and leadership, we get unreliable numbers and opinion, rarely … Continue reading

Our government is being dissed because it deserves to be

I have often wondered why aggressive, dangerous driving is becoming more prevalent than it once was. A case in point is the Philadelphia commute hour, where I would not be surprised to find machine guns being used to blast a way through traffic. As interesting as this is as a social observation, I find it even more interesting that law enforcement wants no part of even trying to make the commute safer. This latter observation may be part of the … Continue reading

Big-Ass 2012

On the way home from breakfast this morning, we noticed a car, an otherwise easy-to-overlook object, just another poorly maintained American-built automobile. I did notice, however the poorly-executed, multicolor, hand-painted sign on the back window, which declared the status of the occupants as graduates of a local high school class of 2012, to wit: Big-Ass 2012. Clearly, these persons wasted the last several years of their lives, those years during which society was supposed to impart an ability to reason, … Continue reading

The nature of random

Programmers know something about random number generators. For the edification of civilians, the simplest of those generators can be asked for a random number between 3 and 5, for example, and with a certain level of precision, say 5 digits, and will immediately respond with an answer like 4.28694, always randomly. The next time the number might be 3.74812. An almost unlimited number of possibilities exist. The random number generator is useful for programming most games of chance and for … Continue reading