brentashley

Ben Nolan points me to his Feeder thingmy. Much like Feedster except, I’m told, with cunning heuristics. <Gomez>Oooh, Tish, I love it when you speak freedom.</Gomez>

I understand from my wife that if I’m a good boy, I could be in for some freedom kissing. Wow, I’d better stock up on freedom letters just in case. Maybe I should surprise her with a freedom tickler!

Ross certainly gets it about the World of Ends. Providing services on a network is all about being an endpoint yourself, but acting as a middleman between the consumer of your service and the value they seek. Tucows isn’t so much a place IN the net that is a source of downloadable files as one ON the net that acts as a proxy whereby a seeker of files can be matched up with a producer of files – an enabler of the two-way conversation.

Since, as David Weinberger discusses, a world of ends means Spam filtering must be done at the ends, that doesn’t mean it has to be done at the terminus of the conversation – interlocutors play an essential role.

Only in town for a couple of days, Doc Searls managed to find time to come and meet with a few of us who could make it out.

Michael O’Connor Clarke was first to arrive. He had a nice adjunct to the World Of Ends discussion – I’ll let him explain it.

Tim Aiello, my partner in crime on many projects, was there.

Tara Cleveland, who when not designing is driving the research for the MACCAWS group, came along.

The Accordion Guy serenaded us with a sweet rendition of (You Shook Me) All Night Long. He also managed to rank high on the nerd compatibility scale with me reminiscing about the Rockwell AIM with its 1802 microprocessor and heat-transfer printer.

Doc arrived with two colleagues from Tucows. I talked with one of them, Ross at length about some anti-spam stuff that Tim and I have been up to. Just added his blog to my subscriptions list. The other, DarrylG, yakked with Tim at length but alas, has no blog to link to.

Interesting conversation was had, some debate. Absolutely no mention whatsoever of foreign policy, thankfully. We should do this kinda thing more often.

Tim took this picture of me with Doc.

I’m arranging to meet Doc Searls about 6pm at The Academy of Spherical Arts near King and Dufferin. Come along if you can.

I understand that there might be wireless available:

Address and map if you follow the link.

I’ll try to get up on blogchat while we’re there if anyone wants to contact us.

Simon notices that weblogs.com pings don’t seem to be working from my site. Odd, I had it clicked on in MT. I’ve clicked blo.gs as well now and trackback and all. Let’s see how it goes.

Funny that this evening I happened to be yakking with Shane McChesney for two and a half hours and then check my news to find that Scott blogged about both of us on the same day. Could be eerie coincidence, but maybe it’s the Canadian connection. Umm, eh.

Poor Tim has been grappling with the fucknuts at Network Solutions. I’d laugh, but it’s a domain I share with him.

Further to my XP trial recently, I’ve decided to ditch Microsoft altogether for my new primary workstation. I went out to my neighbourhood Staples store this weekend and bought Mandrake Linux Power Pack 9.0. Just $79.99 Canadian for 7 CDs packed with Mandrake plus all sorts of commercial and open source applications. I’ve got it up and running very smoothly indeed. There will be a couple of things I’ll have to either run on my old machine or set up to work with Wine, but I think it’s gonna be a good experience – certainly not one for the faint of heart or those lacking in nerdiness, but I’m the poster-boy for such things, so no problem here.