I thought sports columnists were appointed for life, like Supreme Court justices, no matter how irrelevant they become, and yet I see that the Los Angeles Times has just dumped J.A. Adande.

Well, by golly, that’s a good start!

I can’t think of a single print columnist, at the Times or elsewhere, who’s remotely relevant anymore. There are dozens of sports websites (not that one — start at Deadspin and follow the links) with at least an order of magnitude more energy, insight and wit than you’ll find in your local print rag, which is why newspapers are going the way of the 8-track tape, the buggy whip and whale oil.

The next in line to go at the Times should be fatuous blowhard T.J. Simers.

Simers positions himself as a pot-stirring wiseass, and the line on him seems to be that if people don’t like him, he must be doing something right.

Actually, nobody likes him because he’s a dull, uninformed, solipsistic clod, whose “style” consists of run-on sentences, juvenile name-calling, and endlessly repeated in-jokes and shout-outs that were never funny in the first place.

(That’s a better sentence than Simers ever wrote, if I say so myself.)

The competitors: Windows Live Search, Yahoo! and Google.

I was looking at some really nice maps of Washington, DC, last night on Live Search. I’m not totally up to speed on the latest advances in mapping technology, so I wondered if Live Search had totally leapfrogged the competition with this stuff, or if I could do the same thing on the other map sites.

Here’s what I found:

This is the best view I could get of the Jefferson Memorial on Yahoo!

Google is able to zoom in quite a bit closer.

But Live Search can do this!

Thank you, Bill Gates!

The killer feature (obviously) is that Live Search gives you an oblique view into the scene, instead of just a flat, looking-straight-down view. Plus the image resolution is a lot better.

Final Ranking:

1. Live Search
2. Google
3. Yahoo!

The privately held Craigslist has been approached about installing text ads on the site, and the potential revenue is “quite staggering,” [CEO Jim Buckmaster] said.

But, Buckmaster deadpanned, “No users are suggesting we run text ads.”

— Associated Press

Craigslist is an exception to the rule that a lot of Internet companies talk about putting users first, but when it comes down to a tradeoff between what users want and a boatload of money, they go for the money.

As for Hitler, he comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it justified, in my opinion — but at least he did something with his life. He didn’t just sit around laughing at pictures of cats, like a simpleton.

— Harry Hutton

In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: ‘Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!’

— Javier Marias, Written Lives

Sun Microsystems Inc. said co-founder Scott McNealy will give up the job of chief executive to the No. 2 person at the company, Jonathan Schwartz, a historic transition for a computer maker facing stiff pressure to cut costs and boost revenue.

— The Wall Street Journal

So long, funny man!

Continue reading Sun Microsystems Circles the Drain

The job ads on the right were dropped into a business article I was reading last weekend. Evidently the job titles get truncated after 24 characters, which is probably a bad idea, given the unintended consequences . . .

The Globe and Mail reports that a “small but determined group of computer geeks [is] trying to translate open-source software into African languages, in an effort to reach the continent most isolated by the digital divide.”

Continue reading Into the Digital Abyss

According to a survey commissioned by the Gospel Music Association, only 10 percent of born-again teens believe that copying CDs for friends and unauthorized music downloading are morally wrong . . .

I get about 200 emails a day — 90 percent junk — and 90 percent of the junk is targeted at human weakness, weariness, disappointment, regret and self-loathing.

Continue reading Prescription Drugs by Email!

After my son got close to 50 items on his Amazon Xmas wish list, I said it might be helpful to add a comment to the stuff indicating which things he wanted the most.

Now most of the items include one of the following three comments:

1. favorite
2. extreme favorite!!!!!!!!
3. very extreme favorite!!!!!!!!!

With varying numbers of exclamation points . . .

The netscape.com domain, which is owned by AOL, has replaced its Netscape-Enterprise servers with AOLServer.

Repeat: netscape.com no longer runs on Netscape servers.

Also: netscape.co.uk now runs Apache, while in France, netscape.fr runs Microsoft-IIS.

Most people learn to be programmers the same way I did: take some classes, write some code, compile it, hand it in . . .

The kind of projects you get in a programming class are pretty homogenized, and a lot of things that are very important in real life are either simplified or ignored: scope management, risk analysis, time/feature/resource tradeoffs, and so on.

So when I got my first job, I could write code in several different programming languages, but I hadn’t developed the discipline or attention to detail required to write software that companies could actually rely on to run their business.

Fortunately, I was able to work with managers and senior developers who had developed a professional discipline and were able to pass it along to me through training and mentoring.

There was a seasoning process that new developers went through, and in a few years, I had learned enough to be able to mentor junior developers myself, and the cycle began anew.

At that time, a senior developer might go on to become a lead developer, then a project manager, then a software development manager, a process which, unless you were some sort of a prodigy, would take about 10 years.

That Was Then . . .

A few years ago, there was a tremendous boom in the software business caused by the fact that every business, group, organization and enterprise in the universe suddenly had to have a web site.

The demand for developers outstripped the supply, professional barriers to entry were lowered and new people poured into the industry.

This influx of people at the lower levels pushed everybody up. People were promoted at a wartime clip and unfortunately found themselves in positions where they were expected to mentor others in a discipline that they had never had the opportunity to learn themselves.

So they did what they knew how to do — what everyone starting out knows how to do — write code, compile it and hand it in.

Professional software development became one big class project, with sadly predictable results.

It took clients a while to catch on to that, to stop funding it, but when they finally did, the industry went into a death spiral that we haven’t yet been able to pull out of . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

• Kmart Files Chapter 11
• Amazon Posts a Profit

Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale is disbanding his venture firm, the Barksdale Group, after two years of operation.

Many of the firm’s investments received favorable publicity mentions, none actually made any money, and some are defunct.

This guy is the kiss of death . . .

This is a story about customer satisfaction in the Internet age.

Today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley brings this provocative item:

Problems with Webvan? Mercury News reporter Joelle Tessler would like to talk to former Webvan customers dissatisfied with the company’s service. If that’s you, please drop her an e-mail at jtessler@sjmercury.com

Is this for real?! Well, there’s one way to find out . . .

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:35 PM
To: jtessler@sjmercury.com
Subject: webvan

Are you preparing an article on dissatisfied Webvan customers? How do you know they’re dissatisfied before you’ve talked to them? Who can the *satisfied* Webvan customers talk to? I’m in no way affiliated with Webvan, nor was I a customer, but this doesn’t seem fair.

Apologies in advance if I’ve misread your intentions.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:39 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

I have been working on a story about Webvan for about 6-7 weeks now (have spoken with more than 40 people who worked there) and I am learning that they had some pretty serious problems in the Oakland warehouse. Because it was so highly automated, things would break and everything would come to a halt. I keep hearing about orders that never made it out the door, orders that were hours late or cancelled altogether, orders in which half the totes were missing and so on. This is all coming from the couriers, customer service representatives, warehouse workers, etc. But just about every customer I have ever spoken to loved Webvan and I can’t figure it out… If I can’t find dissatisfied customers, I will say that in the story.

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:54 PM
To: Tessler, Joelle
Subject: RE: webvan

Wow, what a quick response! Here’s a theory for you: It doesn’t take perfection to satisfy people where Web technology is concerned. They still have such low expectations that they’re amazed when it works at all.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 3:11 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

Well, some of that was cut and pasted since I’ve had to explain this over and over… You’re probably right. A lot of customers have written back to say they did have some problems, but still loved the service.

Notes from the Rainbow Hotel Casino, Wendover, NV:

Belongings in a U-Haul in the parking lot.

I liked the Bay Area, but it was indifferent to me.

I sold online ads for an Internet company. I wore shorts to work and still made a lot of money.

Then in October, the executives called a meeting and told us the company was closing. We had an hour to leave the building.

I was really sad.

I got another job selling ads for LookSmart. But LookSmart wasn’t as smart as it looked. In January, they laid off 30 percent of the staff, including me.

There was good news too. I could always find 12 friends to go bowling on a Friday afternoon because they didn’t have jobs either.

Now I’m going B-to-C.

Back to Cleveland.