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This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far more attentive and consistent. I’ve lost track, but I’ve probably wiped the slate clean and started over seven or eight times since I first registered dissociatedpress.net. Most of the restarts have been intentional, but a few were not. More than a few times I’ve wished to recover things I’d written here (and elsewhere), either to put them back on the web or just to have them as reminder how truly bad my writing used to be. (Yes, once upon a time, it was worse.) ...

Doom: Eternal is a pretty good name for a franchise that keeps getting ported, updated, and rebooted more than 25 years after it first launched. Though I don’t do much gaming these days, the siren song of Doom was just too much for me and I caved and bought a PS4 and a copy of Doom: Eternal a few weeks ago and have been playing it off and on for about a week. Here’s one old guy’s take on the reboot so far, after completing several levels and maybe 15 hours of gameplay. ...

Pink Floyd responded in part to the punk rock movement’s fast, short, and aggressive tunes by… putting out an LP with five complex and relatively languid songs, three of which are longer than 10 minutes. And it is awesome. 1977’s Animals is an album that’s best experienced as an album. I suppose you could play “Sheep” or “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” as stand-alones, but why would you? If you’ve never listened to this one, you need to clear an hour (actually about 45 minutes) and sit down and give it some attention.

A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it has released PowerShell under the MIT license for Linux (and Mac OS X). Perhaps surprisingly, this has brought a number of folks out of the woodwork to gripe about Microsoft… releasing something as open source. Microsoft isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but this is not Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. This isn’t Bill Gates’ Microsoft. The days when Microsoft and the open source community are mortal enemies are behind us. (At least for now, anyway. Companies don’t always move in a straight line.) The company still has plenty of flaws (its position on software patents, its Windows 10 update policies, for example), but the knee-jerk “anything Microsoft does is terrible!” attitude needs to go. ...

Bachelor No. 2 is the album that, if Interscope had its way, wouldn’t have been released at all. Instead, Aimee Mann bought the rights back and released it on her own through her website – a gutsy move in 2000, but it paid off for Mann and her fans. Most of Mann’s albums make me unreasonably happy, but Bachelor No. 2 is wall-to-wall awesome. Let’s start with the opening track, “How am I Different?” It’s a perfect album opener, starting just with acoustic guitar, light drums, piano, and Mann’s voice. After a couple of verses, the music swells and carries you away. I love everything about this song, the melody, the bluesy guitar, Mann’s voice, and the lyrics. “Just one question before I pack, when you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”

There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate Leonard Cohen, and those who are wrong. I present as evidence Cohen’s eighth studio album, I’m Your Man. Released in 1988 with heavy use of synthesizers and drum machines/electronic drums, I’m Your Man should sound dated. Indeed, if you focus on the backing tracks for the songs on this album, you’ll notice the distinctive sound of cutting-edge mid-80s technology. But it’s the songs, the lyrics, and the voices that propel I’m Your Man – and Cohen’s voice, the lyrics, and his backing chorus are timeless.

One of the popular responses to the outcry over HB2 has been to suggest that unisex or single bathrooms are the “answer” or a “middle road” (or “common sense”) to avoid conflict over transgender folks using the bathroom that best fits their gender identity. Really, it’s a dodge that doesn’t solve anything socially, and is logistically and fiscally unrealistic. First, I would love it if all public spaces had private, single-person bathrooms. Not because I’m in any way uncomfortable with transgender folks — but because I’ve never really loved public bathrooms to begin with. Who wouldn’t prefer to be alone when using the bathroom? (And don’t even get me started on urinals…) ...

Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!) This doesn’t mean developers have to do double-duty as marketeers and public relations folks. Well, not if they can pass the torch onto interested contributors who are happy to do it for them, anyway. It requires a little coordination and effort, but why put all the work into a project and then not get the attention of the users (and potential contributors) you’re trying to reach? ...

Email is a fantastic tool, when used correctly. It almost never is. Rikki Endsley asked me if I’d like to write something for USENIX ;login; logout, and it happened to be right after processing a slew of terrible email: people sending two-line replies at the end of several hundred lines of text, inexcusable top-posting, HTML-ized email sent to lists that reject HTML email (rightly), etc. Practicing a little courtesy when doing email takes a little extra time, but it makes it so much easier for the people who have to read your email. ...

I think Lawrence Lessig puts his finger on it pretty well with this post about the problems with Apple’s “communication” strategy about bugs/feature removal in upgrades: But the argument I want to advance here is different. It is that in the “hybrid economy” that the Internet is, there is an ethical obligation to treat users decently. “Decency” of course is complex, and multi-faceted. But the single dimension I want to talk about here is this: They must learn to talk to us. In the face of the slew of either bugs or “features” (because as you’ll see, it’s unclear in some cases whether Apple considers the change a problem at all), a decent company would at least acknowledge to the public the problems it identifies as problems, and indicate that they are working to fix it. ...