i suck at computers

03/01 New Blog

I've finally taken the jump away from Nucleus to Drupal. I've created my new blog on my other new (stupid) website www.unethicalblogger.com.

This site will stay up until I figure out a good means of migrating content over to Drupal.

In theory, you should be redirected shortly.

02/01 Bribing Bloggers, Better

I very rarely actually read other blogs (Chris Hanson, and David Young excluded). Ever. I have it hard enough wasting my spurious freetime between work, bleep work, actual open source work, stupid hacks, and half-finished projects, let alone throwing in the cavalcade of technology related blogs out there that aren't mine and happen to provide insightful commentary on MacHeist, too Heisty?, or Leopard's secret ingredient!, or Tim's latest LSD-induced Mac rumour?!, or any number of inane topics that are either 100% speculation, or 95% speculation, with 5% google ads. While I try my best not to agree with Todd Manning on anything (including music), he captured my feelings about the "Web 2.0" shtick perfectly when he said: "I hate the web, the web sucks."

With that quasi-disclaimer out of the way, I found Joel's post on Bribing Bloggers marginally interesting in his ideas about the ethics of accepting gifts for free press (bloggery). While reading his entire post however, I couldn't help but think "no shit." It's unethical for the same reason offering your Senator a nice fat christmas goose on behalf of your corrupt megacorp is unethical, or giving Dick Cheney a free (brand-new) shotgun on behalf of Exxon-Mobile and then pointing him in the direction of a bio-diesel sales rep, sending the judge presiding over your DUI case a fine case of Johnny Walker blue-label. This of course all rests on one absolutely ridiculous assumption made about most blogs/bloggers: that they are journalists.

The bribing bloggers "scandal" only exists if you allow yourself into thinking that anybody that's writing a review on SomeHardwareSite.com or TimsBlogAboutWindows.co.uk, etc is somehow "supposed" to follow the same ethical guidelines that an actual journalist is "supposed" to follow. I can't even trust FoxNews, CNN, the New York Times, or the Washington Post to be objective, why on earth would I expect a faceless blogger amidst the crowds on the interweb to be somehow more objective? While I think it is unethical to accept free "stuff" in exchange for blogging about a topic, it's a per-case issue. If JoeBlogger builds a reputation for offering objective reviews for software/hardware/juice/arabian oils/etc, then it is up to that particular individual to maintain his own integrity in not accepting free stuff. If some other fellow blogs about the wonders of the Intel Core Duo's performance in his intel iMac, is it that bad if an AMD rep sends him a evaluation machine to check out the latest AMD64 chips for comparision? What if he discloses the link? As with anywhere else in life, no issue is ever black and white.

I see no ethical dilemma if Parallels approaches me with a free license for their software, for example, with an email stating "how can we make this better for you." Of course I would blog about it, I would also disclose that I was given a free license, and maybe an unreleased beta of Parallels etc, in spite of my ever-so-obvious bias towards VMWare. Regardless of "actual" journalism, or pretend-blog journalism, nobody (except me of course) is ever objective, there will always be biases on a story/review, the diference between reputable sources and those that aren't is in the disclosure of those biases.

"As a former resident of New Orleans, the destruction left by Katrina has an emotional pull for me, that's why ...."
"Up until recently, I've been a die-hard .NET developer, until I purchased an Apple and started looking into Cocoa..."
"While Windows Vista performs adequately on the top-of-the-line machine I received from Microsoft, for most average home-users ..." (I'll let you fill in the blanks on that one)

They're just soapboxes, get over yourselves.

[tags: joelonsoftware, bribery, burberry, bilberry]

01/01 Kernel Panic At The Disco

VMWare Fusion isn't all teddy-bears and bunny rabbits, it has it's own respective WTFs to share with us all.

I do most of my work on openSUSE, so this bug is a cute one to put it lightly. Grumble.



[tags: vmware, parallels, fusion, opensuse, suse]