Jason Scott's Weblog
As is often the case with Reddit, some random user randomly linked to one of my weblog entries. In this case, the Fuck the Cloud entry. And as is often the case with Reddit these days, it smeared any previous record of hits I ever got on the weblog, ever, since I started doing this, [...]
So this is what my job is and that’s pretty goddamned great. I am currently in a project to gather up scanned copies of every computer magazine or newsletter that has gone out of print. That’s what I’ve mostly been up to, and that’s where I am. As of this writing, I have put up [...]
There’s good and bad in the Star Trek franchise, but certainly The Next Generation had some mighty subtle portrayals buried in among the episodes, especially as things got a bunch of seasons in. One that has always struck me, personally, is a short scene in the beginning of an episode called The Chase, where the [...]
We had a little discussion on one of my mailing lists about the origin of the phrase “LOL”, which has a couple claimed fathers – but I thought I’d throw this into the mix. Reprinted from The Annals of Hygiene, Volume 6, published by the Pennsylvania State Board of Health. Official date of publication: 1891. [...]
Let’s get the numbers out of the way immediately before they’re misreported. Archive Team rescued, roughly, 20 percent of all the profiles on Friendster. This took us many months and reflects the sheer mass of Friendster’s data, well into the 70-80 terabyte range, behind custom software, and which they summarily deleted from their user accounts. [...]
On the post I did about Floppy Disks, that’s gotten a lot of attention in its own right, there was a comment the weblog software marked as suspicious, and possible spam. The content itself was rather innocuous and in theme: I will always keep a few floppies and a 3.5 inch drive. Can’t install older [...]
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now. I’m talking about Floppy Disks. And I mean the five-and-a-quarter (5 1/4″) floppy disks that [...]
OK, now that I’ve gone pro with the archiving and I’ve been at it pretty hardcore for a few months, my programmer brain has kicked in and I’m trying to find inefficiencies and kill them so we end up with a ton of cool stuff online. I already know what I am and what I’m [...]
So the initial experiment with Chuck Benton turns out to have been pretty successful – the resulting video is clear, clean, well-mic’d, and provides you pretty much all the relevant statements on the subject of GET LAMP-related ideas. Someone mentioned a cut-off here and there, and unfortunately it’s been too many years to know why [...]
During the shooting of the GET LAMP documentary, I generated what appears to be my stylistic mass of footage – over 120 hours of people talking about text adventures, early home computer software industry, inter-company politics, and a range of things about writing interactively. It was a huge range of subjects and of course only [...]