February 2000 Archives

Goodbye videotapes?

Tivo has just dropped in price ($100) and now sells for $399 for the 14 hour version. It is pretty damn cool on will likley make my christmas list this year.

Here are some of its highlights: You can...

• pause live TV during interruptions - up to 30 minutes
• fast forward and rewind with three speeds: 6x, 12x and 60x
• view slow-motion at 1/4x speed
• create your own instant replays: rewind and play back in slow motion
• go a frame forward and a frame backward
• digitally record your favorite shows on its hard drive so there's never any videotape to wear out
• enjoy instant access to all your recorded programs - no more scanning through tapes to find the show you recorded
• start watching a recorded show while it's still recording
• cut out all commercials while you are watching a live program
• record with high quality MPEG II
• select settings on either a show-by-show basis, or globally within the Setup menu
• you can browse programs by Name, Time, Channel
• recorded automatically every week or whenever your favorite shows are on
• rate the shows you're watching by pressing the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down button on the TiVo remote to teach TiVo what you like
• have TiVo searches for shows you've told it to record, it will also look for shows that match your preferences and get those for you as well

More Mullet Fun

One such company: Diversa has an ... interesting product... here's more:

"...While Pets.com concentrates on selling yummy things that go into animals, Diversa plans an IPO on Friday based on its plans for the not-so-yummy things that come out of them. Red Herring's Tom Davey wrote that Diversa hoped to raise $150 million, all for a company that "scours the earth for life forms to extract DNA for commercial purposes." We're not talking Bacon Bits here; we're talking microorganisms and slime."

"Davey wrote that the 7-year-old company has just one product on the market and has never turned a profit. Sound familiar? But the promises from Diversa's partners total $69 million. The last company to try a big play in the solutions-from-nature field, Shaman Pharmaceuticals (SHMN) , is now trading over the counter at $1.22 a share, after a 1-for-50 reverse stock split. Diversa wants to be smarter: Instead of seeking wonder drugs, it's mining enzymes for industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical uses."

Some excerpts:

"The competition on Sand Hill Road for the best mullet deals is out of control," says Roger McNamee, general partner at Integral Capital Partners in Menlo Park, Calif. "As mullet portals move to the mainstream, they'll provide keiretsu leverage to venture firms unlike anything we've seen since Yahoo and AOL."

When asked about mullet-related deals, America Online (AOL) spokesman Nicholas Graham clipped the conversation short: "AOL has a corporate policy of not commenting on market rumors or potential deals or acquisitions."

and

"As long as the National Hockey League, Nascar, long-neck Budweiser bottles and male porn stars thrive on this planet, the mullet – and sites devoted to it – will never go out of style."

True, true.

With a promise of allowing

The latest is a commentary on how XML has so far missed its intended audience of the web but how that could be changing. I plan on writing some comments on this later.
XML at A List Apart

Then there is an interesting article questioning our current ideas of usability (take that Jakob!)

A synopsis:

"It's a question of shopping for opinions rather than products – a hard concept for E-tailer executives to wrap their heads around, obsessed as they are with IPOs, shipping costs, profit and loss."

Use this article at A List Apart

Word Spy is a site dedicated to recently coined words and thier definitions.

Some of my favorites:

The English language is not there for you to abuse, mister!

Although there are plenty of forces working against the language, one of the biggest things that bothers me currently is the use of words from one realm in another. Here's what I mean:

The use of technology words to mean things in everyday conversation. For example: "I'll ping him later to get that report" meaning I'll call him or contact him. Or another example is the use of the word interface to describe a conversation. "I am interfacing with the team this afternoon."

Something that is potentially more damaging to the language, however, is the proliferation of the notion that when we speak or write we should use the most common and general words. The argument is that the purpose of both speaking and writing is successful communication. The theory being when you use common, simple words it is easier for the receiver to decode the meaning of what is being conveyed.

While I agree that successful communication should be the goal of writing and speaking I will use an analogy of the art world to attempt to illustrate why using simple, common words is not beneficial to this goal. If the same philosophy were to be applied to artists then they could not use symbolism or anything abstract to convey their message or idea. They could not use subtle colors in all available hues. In effect we would reduce all art down to still lifes and portraits in primary colors.

In the same way, if we restrict the words we use to describe things in life, we lose the subtleties and nuances certain words can convey over other words. Here's an example (a bad one) of what I am saying:

You could easily say "The man saw the crime scene," but what does that mean? The man could have witnessed the crime, or drove past it seeing it briefly, etc. By using other, less common words that are similar to saw we can convey additional information about the man and what he did. "The man observed the crime scene," or "The man surveyed the crime scene," or even "The man beheld the crime scene." In these simple examples a more specific action is more easily communicated. The man observing the crime scene most likely is looking at it more passively that someone surveying it. The use of the word beheld connotes a greater degree of surprise or shock that the man may be experiencing.

Granted this was a pretty simple and stupid example, but it should serve to illustrate my point well enough: by dumbing down the language we use in everyday conversations we rob ourselves of additional colors in the palette of our language, in effect we limit ourselves to the 216-color web palette and anyone who has designed for the web knows how limiting that can be. The english language has too many words to settle for using just a couple thousand each day. I emplore you to use the language, all of it, or we risk losing more obscure yet wonderfully descriptive words forever.

The new Aveus (formerly Aisle

First off they use a lot of types of navigation in an attempt to help the user at any point within the site.

From the site:

"1. Identity Navigation These are pages we think you'll want to see based on the identity you selected or were assigned. Click on any page you want to see.

2. Page Navigation These are pages we think you'll want to see based on the page you are currently visiting.

3. Global Navigation Using this navigation, you can get to any page on the site with one click. It works like your desktop - just move your mouse over the page names and click the page you want to see.

4. Breadcrumb Navigation Scroll on the arrow to see a trail of the pages you have visited. Click on any page to return to it."

I have mixed feelings of the breadcrumb navigation concept. I feel that overall this is a good thing, but then again the browser's history does the same thing. But I do like having it there, especially with no context menu (example: company/about/employees).

Suck is funny.

Would you go back and get that for me?

One of the things I have pondered has been time travel. If it were to become possible how long, do you think, would it take for humankind to destroy itself?

If, lets say you could travel in time as easily as taking a flight to another country, I contend that we would all be extinct in a matter of weeks at most.

The world we would be living in would be devoid of history as it would always be being rewritten. The whole matter of any one individuals existence in the current time would depend on an innumerable amount of conditions and occurrences in any number of pasts. Whether or not any one person is in existence could fluctuate from minute to minute.

Of course I haven't had too much time to think and so this really could all be garbage-talk. If anyone wants to write me and tell me something intelligent about the topic of time travel just drop me a note.

However have you ever noticed that states too, have this bicameral format for their governance even though both the House and Senate for each state is comprised of representatives from each county in that state as a percentage of the populations of those counties?

This doesn't make any sense! I always thought that it was the same as the federal government at the state level. The waste and inefficiencies presented by this state system boggles me. If I as a citizen want to raise an issue at the state level, I must present my case in front of each house separately even thought they are both made up of elected officials from the same areas in the same percentages, who get paid the same and have the same voting power.

Minnesota is currently "investigating" abolishing the bicameral system and I sure hope they do.

Maybe more later.

Doubleclick! is Evil.

Mailing lists and Web sites are ablaze these days with discussion of the recent disclosure that DoubleClick is now tracking users around the Web by name. Some are crying "Big Brother" while others are saying that they will welcome the improved manner in which businesses can target them and that privacy isn't all that important to them.

In addition to opting out of their follow-you-around-the-Web cookie, you may also send an email message to several of DoubleClick's affiliates asking them not to share their information on you with DoubleClick.