Knightcrawler

I don't know who came up with it, but one sagacious definition of "leadership" is finding a parade and getting in front of it. That's what I'm doing with weblogging. {grin}

My old (in both senses of the word) friend Don Fox is largely to blame for inspiring me to hop on the weblogging bandwagon, and no sooner have I done so (without even consulting him about it), but he turns around and starts asking me for advice about software to run his weblog on. Presto! I'm the person to turn to for all your web-publshing needs!

So it's not entirely a coincidence that both he and I are now using Movable Type, he on his Mac and me on one of my Linux boxes. Think about it: Although he's certainly more tech-savvy than the average AOL user, he's no Comp Sci geek. And yet the boy is running an entire electronic publishing system from a stylish piece of consumer electronics sitting on his desk, dependent on no one but the people who ran the cable to his house to provide him with internet connectivity, and his local electricity utility.

This to me is one of the great things to happen on the internet: people sharing technology to empower each other. And it's to the credit of people like Apple, the various Linux and BSD factions, the developers of (to spotlight one of several weblogging systems) Movable Type (and the software it runs on: Perl, and Berkeley DB or MySQL etc.), and let's not forget the contributors to Gecko and KHTML (the rendering technology behind Netscape/Mozilla and Safari, respectively), and for heaven's sake Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the WWW and then declined to patent it, but instead has given that tech to the whole world)... nearly all of which is freely available to anyone who wants it. If you're so inclined, you can even roll up your sleeves and change it to work the way you want it to. (And yes, that "nearly all" includes Mac OS X; you can't get the full package free of charge, but the core of it, the part that Don's using to run his weblog - an OS called Darwin - is as free and open as Linux.) With so much great software available and interchangeable between operating systems, allowing each of us to do our own thing with it, who the fuck needs (or wants) Microsoft?

But I Digress. I was talking about "nitecrawler". Or "nightcrawler". Or maybe it's "knightcrawler". He can't seem to make up his mind how to spell it. In addition to inspiring me to start weblogging, "nytecrawler" helped to deflower me, bring me out, and teach me radical thinking back in the waning days of that dark period known as the 1980's. Read his weblog "gnitecrawler". You'll learn something. Just remember: I taught him everything he knows... or was it vice versa?