Tom Morris

Dave said something interesting.

So did Mike Arrington.

Guy Kawasaki! Robert Scoble! Jason Calacanis! Steve Rubel!

I'm going to talk about them all, but not point.

Because links are no longer sexy, despite their extreme usefulness.

If you wish to send me a comment, you have a choice.

If you are a new and sexy person, scribble down your thoughts and send them to me via carrier pigeon.

If you are old-fashioned and unsexy, send me an email or click the blue comments button below. Unfortunately, both require you to use links.

Can somebody explain the point of this silliness to me?

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On my way to the train, I hopped in to a Subway in the City to grab some late lunch, and was rather surprised with the new technology they've introduced.

They now have a touch-screen ordering system, where you tap in what sandwich you want, they print out a ticket, prepare the sandwich for you, then call the number. You then pay, and it's done.

It's pretty nifty, and also accurate (if they have run out of stock of, say, a certain bread or topping, they won't list it on screen).

I briefly chatted with the woman there, who said it will speed up their queues at lunchtime and other busy periods. I'm sceptical. You still have to wait while they prepare your order, and while you pay. It just separates the operations, so that if one gets delayed, the others don't get delayed.

I guess they are either testing it, or have tested it and are implementing it.

There is another advantage - you don't have to talk to anybody. This has a benefit: they can put the best English speaker on the till, and the people who don't speak English so well can prepare the sandwiches.

They could even print out the order reciepts in a different language, presumably.

It satisfies one of the tickboxes of modern technology - preventing conversations. The iPod does it, the mobile phone really does it very well.

Presumably now, the marketing verbiage of having it produced "in front of your eyes" is now irrelevant, since you don't order it with a person, you tap it in to a box.

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Randy Charles Morin is trying to find out why people use MySpace. In return, he gets nothing but spam. There's only one reasonably intelligent response, and even that's not particularly readable:

THE my space its a connection its no different from AOL but the connection to people it feels so right to be on myspace. My space MY SPACE.  it just feels right to be there if they put t..v. an a way to order pizza i dont think i would be able to move from it. From it FROM my space

Conclusion 1: The next generation are too lazy to use the bookmark functionality of their browser.

Conclusion 2: I'm scared. The sort of people who are now hanging around on MySpace are going to grow up and become doctors and lawyers. If this doesn't scare you, stop what you are doing and read what I said again. MySpace users given scalpels and responsibility. Don't you realise how bad that is?

Conclusion 3: Randy has some really strange Google-fu if he can bring so many idiots in with so little text. I want some.

To answer the question: why do teenagers love MySpace? Well, think about it. They like it for the same reason they like shitty music. They don't know any better, and their friends like it.

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I've improved the comment code, y'all!

Before you had to enter a seed word, but I've hacked that out.

Basically, I thought that Dave is rendering that up in the buildRss code (an area I'm somewhat familiar with now, having recently hacked it up to make Haloscan look presentable).

What now happens is that it's taking the headline, pulling the punctuation and spaces out of it, and adding the random number on the end (as in Tibor/Kosso's code).

This way, you only have to click the button to render the comments up.

How does this work? Well, if you look at the code, what it's doing is selecting the parent node, getting the text, then going back in to the first child, then going down to the bottom. This is the code that makes that work:

op.go (left, 1)

title = op.getLineText ()

op.go (right, 1)

op.go (down, infinity)

The next bit of the code is a butchered up version of the bundle in dotOpmlSuite.blog.buildRss. The variable names are the same, see.

The final two lines have their ancestry in the Tibor and Kosso code.

This function fits nicely in to my philosophy: it should be easier to blog than to masturbate, otherwise nobody is going to bother. (Almost all blogging software fails that test). It removes another layer of day-to-day complexity.

The code is here. Here's what you can do with it. If you want it to appear in your right-click menu, go to "Tools > Edit right click menu". Make a new entry, then double click on it. Copy the code in.

If you are using a personal menu, then simply choose "Edit menu" from your personal menu, make a new entry and copy the code in.

It may cough up if you include hyperlinks or character-coded items in the title. If this is the case, do it the old fashioned way (or stop putting hyperlinks in your title!).

You may wish to modify the last line in order to do different things with your code. wp.insert, op.insertAtEndOfList and op.insert do different things. All are documented over on Docserver. You can also modify how the insert happens, so if you want it to appear differently, you can do so. Don't worry about breaking anything, as the code is up and can be retrieved if you mess it up too badly.

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