Category: internet

WSJ.com – Commentary: Me, Myself and I

“For all the rhetorical flourish on display, many of the presidential candidates still don’t have a grip on the King’s English. That great American personal pronoun, the first person singular, which adorns nearly every sentence of candidate discourse, is still too slippery for many of this year’s White House aspirants.” – from the WSJ.

WSJ for free?

Since I talked about the NY Times site going 100% free yesterday, I thought I’d post a bit on the possibility of the WSJ going free. This article indicates that Murdoch is interested in making the site free, rather than sticking with the current $99/year fee-based model. If nothing else, this possibility will probably keep me from renewing my WSJ subscription early! (With my luck, if they do make the site free, they’ll do it two days after I renew.)

NY Times for free

The NY Times has stopped charging for access to select articles on their web site. The whole thing, from 1987 to the present, should be free now. Yay! I never saw much point to their TimesSelect service; from my perspective, it seemed like they were charging for the stuff I was least interested in anyway.

Meanwhile, The WSJ still costs a bunch. I’m not sure if I’ll renew my print & online subscription next year. Maybe I’ll drop it and try and catch up with some alternative reading material instead.

blog changes

Not that anyone’s going to be that interested in this, but I made a couple of changes to the sidebar on this blog today. First, I removed the Technorati and Spurl widgets. I guess I never really figured out what the point of Technorati was, and the little widget I had on the side didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose.

Spurl, on the other hand, is a great web-based bookmark manager. Unfortunately, it appears to be a zombie site at this point; it’s still up and running, but at reduced functionality, and, looking at their user forums, it doesn’t appear that anyone’s minding the shop — there’s nothing but link spam in the forums right now. I’m still using Spurl, but I’m thinking about dropping it, since it’s probably going to disappear at some point. (I have a mental image of Spurl running on a server in a closet somewhere that everyone’s just forgotten about. At some point, the hard drive will die, or someone will find it and unplug it, and that’ll be the end of that.)

I’ve replaced the Spurl widget with a del.icio.us linkroll. I think that’s a little more representative of what I’m bookmarking lately.

And I reformatted the tag list. It used to be a bulleted list. Now it’s just the keywords separated by slashes. I just wanted to make it more compact, so you could see it all together easily.

12 Byzantine Rulers

For some reason, I was thinking today about an article I read some time ago, about a series of pocasts on some area of history. After a bunch of searching, I think this was the article. It’s about a podcast on the history of the Byzantine Empire. This series has been mentioned in a few different places, so the Times article may or may not be where I heard of it. Either way, it’s something different to listen to, whenever I get tired of tech and comic book podcasts.

I was looking around a bit today at the stuff on iTunesU, and some of that might be interesting too. I listened to parts of a few random lectures; most of them sound like… college lectures. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not compelling “daily commute” listening. I’m tempted to listen to this Data Structures course from Berkeley, just to refresh my memory on this stuff. Maybe I can find a class on design patterns. I’m too old to have learned that stuff in college; design patterns didn’t really take off until about five years after I graduated. (Gotta keep learnin’!)