Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I’ve had some problems with my desktop for the last few weeks. After a lot of troubleshooting, talking with others, and some searching on the internet, I came to the conclusion I had a power problem. I ordered a new power supply, turned it on, and…nothing. So I went to Altex yesterday.

Altex used to be an electronics warehouse. They always had rows and rows of transitors, resistor, diodes, switches, and other things I don’t comprehend. They are now pretty much a computer component shop.

I wanted a new motherboard. They have one that will fit in my case. For about $260 I can have a virtually new computer. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a processor to fit that board yesterday. So, I got a new battery, they cleaned up my processor and put some new heat sink paste on it, and I’m back in business temporarily. Next weekend, I’ll have a new board, with LAN and sound embedded, four USB2.0 ports (instead of the 2 USB1.0 I’ve got), and a 1.8GHz processor instead of the 433MHz I’ve got now.

Of course, in the troubleshooting mode I reformatted my hard drive and have spent the day reinstalling everything, hoping it doesn’t crash again in the interim.

Something interesting has happened in the computer world. All the new motherboards are colorful. Memory sticks can be cooled individually with various colors of sheaths, there are all kinds of lights to put inside the unit. And these new cases have clear sides. I would guess, although I didn’t ask, that the lights can all be synchronized to music or game sounds. Much more interesting than the campaign.

And a 3-1/2 inch floppy drive now costs fifteen bucks.

Another interesting thing happened on my site Friday. I checked the sitemeter and found 182 visitors in one hour. All from Technorati. All from a listing for Neal Boortz’ site. In other words, these 250+ people went to Technorati, looked to see who linked to Boortz, Bunker Mulligan was at the top of the list, so they checked the site. Why that chain of events? Rammer, you know all things geeky. I’m just a quasi-geek, and this makes no sense to me.

I just watched Secondhand Lions again.

The first time we watched it, I told my wife that when I got old, I wanted to be just like that. She told me, “You already are.”

I take that as a compliment.

James has finished Basic Training and is now at AIT. He will be posting again, infrequently at first, but it is good to see him back on line.

I absolutely must direct your attention to the logo on our left: Homespun Bloggers.

It is a small group of about 25 blogs, and Tom at MuD & PHuD collects a post from each site to highlight every Sunday evening. I would recommend taking a look at the site each Monday morning just to see the variety. And today there are some very interesting posts.

Daniel Drezner maintains one of the busiest blogs around, and also happens to be a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He and a colleague have put together their first draft of a scholarly paper, “The Power and Politics of Blogs”, to be presented this year at the American Political Science Association.

I downloaded and read it today. I think it tells some interesting tales about the relationship between traditional journalism and media and the blogosphere. One journalist commented to them in their survey:

“The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links.”

I think that, along with rapidity of response, is the most significant aspect of blogs which separates them from traditional news coverage. In editorial offices, decisions are made about what to cover (and how intensely) based on many factors, only one of which is ideology. Bloggers post what they want to post. Editors can’t fact-check quickly, and must make quick decisions based on what a reporter already has. In the blogosphere, everyone is an editor. If you misstate fact, you are told, and quickly. An outright lie may have a million lives if it sounds credible enough and a blog’s readers are all of like mind, but there is usually someone around to throw cold hard fact into the mix.

And there are plenty of editors willing to take on the task.

The blogosphere has grown at an astronomical rate. In 1999 the number of blogs was estimated at under fifty; at the end of 2000, estimates ranged into the thousands. Less than three years later, such estimates range from 2.4 million to 4.1 million. One study estimates that by 2005, over ten million blogs will have been created.

I did a check at Technorati just to see what’s going on out there. They list slightly more than 3 million that they track. A search for this site showed 56 inbound links, which puts me somewhere below midpoint. I like being average.

Even though there are over a million bloggers, posting approximately 275,000 new items daily, the median blogger has almost no political influence as measured by traffic or hyperlinks. This is because the distribution of weblinks and traffic is heavily skewed, with a few bloggers commanding most of the attention.

The main thing blogs do for political discourse is bring a variety of minds together. I’ve always felt that nobody has all the answers in anything, but if we put our minds together, we probably have all the important answers. That is the strength of the blogosphere. Those dozen or so major bloggers help pull all the answers together, and that is where influence happens.

Reuters carries this story about the time trial yesterday in the Tour de France:

“There were lots of aggressive fans surrounding the riders and I even saw two idiots spit at Lance Armstrong.”

Where is the “Can’t we all just get along?” mentality we’ve grown so accustomed to from our European friends? And what has Lance Armstrong ever done to them to deserve this kind of thing? Oh, I know. He’s a Texan and has beat them at their own game for the last five years.

Cool.

Got the lead from the folks in Montana