So, I have been playing with Twitter the last couple of days, and I have become completely addicted. If you want to see how boring my life is, you can check it out here. As a more useful use of Twitter, I played around with the API, and you can now track the postings from ZDNet blogs on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ZDNetBlogs.

So, I was playing around with ZoomInfo, and I found a link to a profile of me that was put up when I worked for a cool Web 1.0 startup called Newmediary.com. Here’s the Profile in its entirety:

John “Puff Daddy” Potter happily works at Newmediary.com as a Software Engineer. He often strides in well before dawn and goes right to work, then waits for hours until someone else makes the coffee.

A recent haircut has restored John’s boyish charm, which faded during his recent years at Community NewsDealers Inc., a division of The Boston Globe, where he worked as a Programmer / Analyst.

He is the co-author of this year’s groundbreaking book, HTML User’s Interactive Workbook, with Newmediary colleague Alayna Cohn. The book is skyrocketing up the Amazon charts … why not give it a nudge.

All time not spent in his cube is occupied with attempting to turn the mud patch around his house into a lawn.

And, here’s the ZoomInfo link.

So, one of the things that I find annoying about my Mac is the lack of an insert key. Luckily, I ran across this tip somewhere (I can’t find the link any more). Function+M is the insert key on the Mac. Also, Function+Period is the delete key.

The profile of Matt Mullenwegg for which I was interviewed is now available online. You can see it at either the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age (Brisbane). Dan Skeen, the author gives me a shout-out at his blog

Kanchan on Deck

Mallika at Bat

Kanchan at Bat

It was a beautiful day for the first games of the year.

I was interviewed yesterday by a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald for a profile of Matt Mullenwegg he is writing.. Don’t worry Matt, I said nice things only :). He also asked a few questions about our use of open-source, Google, and some other related topics. Now, I just have to wait to see how it comes out in print.

We finally moved the new BNET out of beta yesterday. I have to say that it is the best looking site that I have ever been associated with.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild is a brief, readable account of the movement that ended slavery in the British Empire. It’s worthwhile, because it makes two points that are too often forgotten. First, that all the tactics of organized social movements (boycotts, pamphlets, petitions, etc.) that we take for granted were pioneered by the anti-slavery movement. Secondly, that when the movement started in the 1780s, the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants were slaves by any meaningful definition. Too many things are still wrong in the world, but at least that is no longer true.

I have been on a Philip K. Dick jag lately, triggered by the release of the new movie A Scanner Darkly (I will write a review of it later). Anyway, mixed in with a serial re-reading of his novels, I took the time to read the excellent Dick biography I am alive and you are dead. Although it does an excellent job of explaining the source of Dick’s obsessions with alternate realities and surface deceptions, the real value of the book is the numerous, often amusing, anecdotes that illustrate Dick’s character. A visiting French intellectual insists Ubik is one of the five best novels ever written, Dick assumes he must mean, at most, one the five best sci-fi novels ever. When the visitor insists that he really means one of the five best novels ever, the humble Dick is left baffled. Dick is convinced that Stanislaw Lem is part of an elaborate Soviet plot to lure him to Poland to brainwash him, and prevent him from revealing God’s ultimate truth to the world. Dick cannot understand his wife’s anger at his modeling of the controlling, insensitive, domineering wife in Confessions of a Crap Artist on her: “It’s just a book,” he keeps saying. Unfortunately, for Dick, it never was.