general

The year everything went mobile. I used to like Andrew Leonard's column but this essay is shameless keep-up-with-the-Joneses hard sell: "If you are in business, the ability to exploit the world’s rush to mobile makes or breaks careers and decisively shapes the fortunes of even the mightiest corporations." Most workplaces are still using Windows XP or 7 -- Leonard needs to spend some time poking around the slow lane where you don't get press junkets.

I don't want to download your app. The wisdom after the dot com crash was that websites became too complicated with exotic bells and whistles that allowed designers to show off but buried the information you were looking for. Hence, Blogging, where the newest content is right on the front page. Over the last ten years we've had feature creep, and the transition to mobile and "apps" is taking us back to that balkanized state of many possible designs where it takes longer to get what you need.

Is not joining Facebook a sign you're a psychopath? This writer seems not to consider that Facebook is a private-sector company looking to turn a buck (and off to a somewhat rocky start) -- it's not a state issuing something like a driver's license. These fear tactics are beyond the pale as a way to nudge consumer choice.

Lee Dorman of the '60s group Iron Butterfly died this week.
YouTube has a song with one of his characteristic bass lines, "Soul Experience" -- a time capsule of West Coast psychedelia, with heavy spring reverb and echo-delay.
Content-wise, it has one of the stranger disconnects between verses and chorus.
It's not hard to imagine the singer (Doug Ingle) being a Manson-type crooning to one of his women. In the verses he softly and sweetly tells her to "live a little" and "don't bother painting your face." Then in the chorus the music becomes atonal and weird and he starts wailing like a horror-movie psycho: "JUST BE YOURSELF" with everything about his intonation saying "Just follow me - and Charlie doesn't like snitches."
The song perfectly encapsulates the 1960s mix of groovy slogans and mind control.
Anyway, bittersweet tribute to a man who just passed away but this needed to be written down.

Update: R. Stevie Moore, characterized by AllMusic as mixing "classic pop influences, arty experimentalism, idiosyncratic lyrics, wild stylistic left turns, and homemade rough edges" did a cover version of "Soul Experience," so there you go.

View of dump.fm main room with Ghostery plugin installed and Facebook cookies and plugins blocked.
You can choose what ad sites' and other parasites' code to block; the purple box listing blocked and unblocked plugins is optional. Am going to keep mine on for a week or two as I surf around. It's interesting to see which sites are promiscuous trackers. Salon has 23 plugins; Eschaton has 32; Bloglines has 2. My site has Google Analytics. Have never been that concerned or paranoid about being tracked around the web as a potential customer but lately it's getting annoying to view a consumer product on, say, Amazon, and then start seeing ads for the same product showing up on sidebars of other websites. How stupid do these people thing we are? Don't answer that question.

Update: One more whack for the day (frog by Matt Furie):

A story about Facebook shutting down various political sites (that shouldn't have wanted to be on there in the first place) got me motivated to finally start blocking Facebook cookies and plugins that hit my browser as I surf around.
It's not enough to just not be on Facebook -- would like to be free of its slime trail.
Am trying out a plugin called Ghostery that selectively blocks trackers but also gives you a list (if you want it) of all the various third party presences on the sites you visit.
One of the items I'm now blocking is called Facebook Exchange -- this Wired article makes it sound about as creepy as you'd expect.

(According to Ghostery that Wired page is Facebook plugin- and cookie-free.)

Sometimes people are reactionaries because they're stuck in their ways and hate change.
Other times it's because "new and improved" means change for the sake of change, or, you're about to give up something.
With that preamble here's The Old Reader, which the creators say mimics features of Google Reader (RSS feed reader) before Google changed it to integrate with their attempt at Facebook, Google Plus.
Not an endorsement, haven't tried it (The Old Bloglines works fine around here) but offered to say merely that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is not the same as Ronald Reagan-esque, Morning-in-America retro-vision.