nerdgod.com

A friend and I were discussing This madness when I pointed out that advertising the amazing flavor properties of different salts is pure madness… Then a punchline fell from heaven, that only foodTV types will get…

 <nerdgod> they might as well advertise homeopathic salt
 <ct> fleur de sel is what you use when you cook at French Laundry
 <ct> which
 <ct> by the way
 <ct> has a "salt course"
 <ct> a small dish of diced hard boiled egg white
 <ct> and four small piles of different salts
 <ct> complete with description
 <nerdgod> If the French Laundry jumped off of a cliff....
 <ct> if Thomas Keller jumped off a cliff, people would pay $125
   prix fixe to stand in the spray of his entrails at the bottom

You know, before we had weblogs, we had a little thing called “Finger”. Now, with “Finger” (or more precisely, finger, lower case), one would check if another user were online at a certain host, and, if not online, perhaps read a brief message they had left for you. This is how things were done. You’d post some interesting thoughts in your .plan file and people would see that when they … *ahem* … “fingered” you.

Of course, this could never work out, a) because it let people discover user names on a host, to attempt login brute-force attacks against, and b) it lead to discussions like the one I had once with a fellow geek, before a mystified and mildly horrified third party:

Geek1 “So, can you just finger anyone?”
Geek2: “yeah, assuming you know their name”
Geek1: “Anywhere?”
Geek2: “Most anywhere, some people are paranoid and don’t let you finger them”

…as you can see, this leads directly to the formation of weblogs.

QED