The Occasional Blargh

So, should I place a cryptic link here that readers won’t understand unless they hire a private eye to make sense of things? Nah, that’s not me. It’s just that I just read an interesting story on how IBM has blocked Siri because they fear she’ll leak secrets to Apple, and now I have an excuse to post another Zatanna picture. Honestly, I’m surprised that this story is taken as a surprise.

Now, if I’ve somehow gathered new readers they may be wondering what is going on where I’m not writing all that frequently. To those readers, I must confess that sadly, those long sabbaticals between posts are the norm around here. That said, I am in the middle of a move, which may be followed by a second move (because I can’t do anything the easy way). So for this time, I do have a excuse for not posting. I haven’t burnt out yet.

Still, given how I always make the “I can retire” joke when I find any other blog or site that tries to cast a critical eye, I can see how others can be concerned if I will abandon this place, too. I joke about it, but I know the feeling that can come when it feels like the hope of improving the conversation has faded visible and that you’re just snarking into the aether. It does help to step away, not to do this every day. (It’s funny that the point of this blog wasn’t initially to be the tech press critic, but I just stumbled into it.) I guess the above picture fits this statement as well.

I have returned from New York which was a trip dedicated to having some fun. Though I now will prepare to leave for Detroit for a more solemn occasion, to say farewell to my father. After four years, he had succumb to cancer. As such, you likely won’t see new posts for a while.

Good morning, readers. I am in beautiful, frozen New York on a brief sabbatical from the infuriating tech press. Thanks to a victory from a Twitter raffle, I will get to attend a preview of Justice League: Doom, from which the above picture comes from. (And that is the excuse I’m using to post a pic of Wonder Woman here.) The direct-to-video movie, written by the late Dwayne McDuffie, is an adaptation of the JLA comic book miniseries Tower of Babel written by Mark Waid.

Batman has been secretly coming up with plans to take down other members of the Justice League. You never know when Superman may go rogue, or just become a dick. Of course, you may never know when the league’s enemies will get those files. (OK, honestly, that’s the type of thing you’re not supposed to write down.)

Still, I’m hoping it is a good show. It’s one of the last things written by the beloved and acclaimed McDuffie, and it is a sort of reunion for the vocal cast of Bruce Timm’s Justice League animated series. (Timm now produces these direct-to-video movies, as well as the upcoming Green Lantern animated series.)

The movie goes on sale on February 28th.

I don't like to go into my personal life here, but for anyone who was curious as to why I have been inconsistent in writing here, last month my father had suffer further complications and finally succumb to cancer.

Now, you know why I missed the interesting reactions by the Apple press to the sweatshop stories breaking through into the mainstream press. (Sending it over to Raging Thunderbolt who raged in real time. I'm sure Daring Fireball dared him to in real time.)

Ambivalence is today's and this week's second most searched for word at Merriam Webster. I'll be vain and think it is because you all missed me. I'm told people prefer bloggers with inflated senses of self-worth and vanity. I'm doing it for you.

It has not been a great week personally. Dad had been in the hospital for a week and a half for unspecified reasons that wound up remaining unspecified (meaning they couldn't find anything wrong, so neither he, the doctors or I could get any piece of mind that comes with solving a mystery). Imagine an episode of House, M.D. that never reaches a resolution. With that said, here's some things...

• This is a tiny blog. Single-digit page views are the norm. Except today where I had something like 100 visitors. It looks like now that I've been mentioned by prominent enough bloggers, I now get 4th-degree of separation traffic whenever MG Siegler says something really stupid, as he did yesterday. It's probably too late to pile on, but I'm probably going to anyway.
• With that, I actually now feel guilty for not posting more frequently for the anonymous strangers who may get the impression this blog gets updated regularly. (It's really not.)
• Apple has done something to partly invalidate a post I was working on, and I'm happy. They (Samsung, actually) has been reported to use a Texan factory to manufacture the processors for the iOS devices. For anybody who is concerned about worker exploitation, outsourcing, and the general bad corporate citizenship of tech companies like Apple, this is a good start. But this should be just a start. The post may still come, though.
• I was not reading tech news all that much these two weeks, but I did see the dumb poll MacSurfer ran asking if Steve Jobs was snubbed as Time "Man of the Year". Entertaining such a thought would be ripe for mocking via the Twitter meme #FirstWorldProblems.

A Forced Migration

Well, it's official. Vox was shut down, and Six Apart was sold to some outfit called VideoEgg. The combined company is now called Say Media. I'll comment on that later.

The shutdown of Vox happened in a rushed and not very organized manner. As Vox was attempting to be a social media destination rather than just a blogging service, people using Vox had made connections to each other. Unfortunately, the shutdown broke much of that, as the preferred migration path -- Typepad Micro -- lacked such features, and all other migration paths were manual jury-rigged export/import of data. Worse of all, most former sites on Vox were obliterated as of September 30th. Visit a site, you're likely to be redirected to this closure notice. People who opted to migrate to Typepad got a basic forward. Had I had any faith that my suggestion would be listened to, I would have suggested they have extended this option to everyone, no matter where they chose to host their blog, which they could configure and reconfigure at any time. (Who knows if Typepad will remain in service.) Many blogs could have been saved from loss thanks to that.

Worse than the blogs lost because they moved to new hosting are the ones that are lost forever, whose content was deleted thanks to the closing. Obviously hosting and bandwidth was the concern; otherwise, Six Apart/Say Media would have kept the archives up. Sadly, they never thought of enlisting anybody else -- perhaps the Internet Archive -- to hold the archives, like was done when Yahoo closed GeoCities. It's a shame Six Apart planned the dissolution of Vox so poorly.