The Web Archives
Yesterday Netflix announced that it was discontinuing the Profiles feature that allows users with one account to keep separate queues and ratings of movies and tv shows. This absolutely sucks. I have come to rely on this feature and will be looking for alternatives to Netflix before the feature is eliminated on September 1st. I will look at DVD by mails services like BlockBuster or Intelliflix as well as on-demand services like cable/satellite providers or Apple TV. And yes I would switch regardless of the fact that it is likely that no other service offers this feature, just because of the way this has been handled.
What is even worse than the dropping of this feature, however is the way Netflix has handled it. Today I received this email:
We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.
Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.
While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
They aren't giving any indication as to why they are pulling the feature, just vague allusions to making the site better.
There is a petition to show Netflix that there is support for the feature. Not sure how far that will go in light of recent claims by the company that is is the "final decision". Here is more from the Hacking Netflix blog.
While discontinuing the Profiles feature is not desirable for the passionate folks who use it, the decision will ultimately benefit all Netflix members. By discontinuing the feature, we will be able to put more focus and resources site and service improvements that benefit everyone, consistent to how we have grown the service over the years.
Netflix makes it sound that only a few passionate users will be affected by this and perhaps the feature was under-utilized. And maybe the folks who use that feature and will be pissed off by this are not the most profitable customers for Netflix (i.e. they watch more movies and so cost Netflix more money) but they are forgetting an important thing here. These customers are the Netflix evangelists. I have told countless people about how I love Netflix since my membership began in August of 2000. I know I have been responsible for at least a half dozen people signing up and who know how many people have read my write-ups here on Alt Text.
Netflix is making a big mistake in killing the Profiles feature but are stepping into an even bigger blunder with the patronizing messaging around the decision. Read more on MetaFilter.
Come out to O'Gara's tonight for the 3rd installment of Minnesota's Demo Camp event, MinneDemo. As word of these events has gotten out the past two years attendance has been steadily rising. We might need a convention center for next spring's MinneBar event. Seriously, I am getting worried :) If you know of some space we can check out for next year's (un)conference please let me know by emailing me (ben ut alttext dat com) or posting in the comments.
There are plenty of iPhone reviews out there. This is not another. This post is just an observation as to why the iPhone is so different and inspires such goodwill from those who use it. It is simple really, but Apple has taken tasks that on most (all?) other phones are cumbersome, non-intuitive, and often just plain crappy and made them a joy. I am not really over stating this, the iPhone is really fun to use. Browsing the web is not reminiscent of the "real" real web, it IS the real web (ok a web without Flash - for now). Google maps works just like Google maps should. Email is great, not some crippled version, and the phone, despite what some have said, is very nice too. Almost all the interfaces are easy to use and it is easy to know where to go and what to do to make things happen. My previous Windows Mobile phone and my Palm PDA phone before that, took a while to master and it was only because I learned their backwards way of doing things was I able to manage on those devices.
This should serve as yet another lesson from Apple that design matters. Make interfaces (both physical and virtual) that are fun and intuitive and people will enjoy using them and tell their friends.
A couple other observations - No wonder there is a 10% restocking fee if you return an iPhone. With the amount of plastic they use - wrapping everything multiple times in their way. It would take a while to wrap all that stuff back up, I imagine. And what is up with the industrial glue used on the bags they put the phones in when you buy them. Not sure if it is the same at Apple stores but at the at&t store the clerk put the phone in this bag and then pulled away a strip between the two insides and the bag sealed up tight - had to use keys to rip a hole in the bag to open it. When we asked him about it, he said Apple was making them do that. Think different, I guess.
With a lot of help from Dan Grigsby I finally have the venue for minnēbar ‘07 nailed down. The site is downtown Saint Paul in the Lowertown area. The "Railroader Building" as it is called is the site of the event - actually a vacant, 2-level office space that will pretty much let us have our way with it.
I am very excited, for this year's event (its on the 21st of April) and is the all-day variety of the (now) year long series of (un)events. For those of you who were not there last May, minnēbar is Minnesota's very own Barcamp and is free to anyone who is interested in participating in discussions about the web, technology, design, etc.
Add your name to the wiki to participate (you get food, drink, and a shirt too!).
This is what I have been wanting to do with RSS (and a whole lot more) presented in one of the slickest ajax-y sites around. Creating powerful and useful dynamic RSS feeds in a Visio-style interface (that doesn't even do it justice) is awesome. Try it out, it is one of the best web apps I have ever seen.
The Java Developer's Journal has published the results of it's end-of-year poll of various Internet technology players which makes for some good reading. Here are a couple I found interesting:
Jason Bell, Editorial Board Member, Java Developer's Journal:
Incremental mainstream adoption of Ruby on Rails
It's going to happen, isn't it? Keep an eye out for Sun's offering of JRuby. Whether this is the death of other open source scripting languages like Groovy remains to be seen. Ruby has been a wake-up call and has now drawn the line dividing serious scripting languages from "hobby" languages (ones that wouldn't see enterprise adoption). For me, my job just got a whole lot easier, a whole lot quicker.
David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of (Ruby on) Rails:
2007 will be the year where LAMPers finally decide to stop being neutral about the WS-* mess and pick the side of REST: the next wave of Web APIs will stop supplying both a SOAP and REST API and just go with the latter.
Gary Cornell, Founder & Publisher, Apress:
-IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
-The AJAX bandwagon will gain even more speed.
-Ruby's momentum will slow down as Python and PHP frameworks to combat Rails grow in popularity.
-The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.
-Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.
-Ultra lightweight notebooks based on flash memory with instant on/off will start coming out in large numbers.
I agree that so-called dynamic languages and frameworks will make big gains in '07 but feel pretty optimistic about the prospects for non Ruby on Rails flavors too. Groovy and Grails is primed to be pretty big and while I don't think it will overtake RoR in the next year, there are significant advantages that make the prospects for Groovy and its framework Grails to become very mainstream, look very good.
From a press release on the new book: The Definitive Guide to Grails:
Ruby on Rails is hot, but it seems that more recent noise from the Java community has been focused on Groovy and its framework, Grails. Taking inspiration from innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or the likes of Django or TurboGears, Grails makes simple things simpler, harder things possible, and brings back the fun of creating web applications. Continuing to affirm the hype, Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König, remark "Grails definitely has an ambitious name for being the Holy Grail all application developers have sought so far. But more than a mere ambition, Grails fulfills its promises by letting you be more productive than you could have ever thought possible."
The Grails Framework is an open source, lightweight, agile Web development framework that leverages Groovy, an open source, lightweight, agile and dynamic Java-based scripting language, and complements Java web development. Grails is the ideal framework for developing in the web tier for Java developers and exemplifies the power of the Groovy language and its APIs.
I for one believe that there are too many Java developers out there (their community still dwarfs the next largest one) that are very interested in lightweight frameworks and rapid development but are not too keen on "throwing out" years of experience with the most popular language out here. Groovy in combination with the Grails framework offers the best of both of these worlds and I think people are just waiting for someone to really take up and champion Grails as David Heinemeier Hansson and 37signals have done for Rails.
If you are new to Groovy or Grails, this interview with Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge is a good primer for learning about Groovy and Grails and where it stands in its current development.
We are just two weeks away from the Twin Cities' best platform for launching a new idea and getting feedback from others in the local web/software development and design communities. Dan and Luke have done a great job in getting these quarterly DemoCamps going. They really serve to build a lot of excitement and solidify the community between the larger MinneBar events.
So get out to the wonderful Acadia Cafe* and interact with some geeks showing off their goods at MinneDemo on Monday December 11th.
* Hats off to Dan and Luke. Great work on getting this venue as it has a cafe area and a nice theater for the demos and will certainly work better than the summer event.
...the website of the same name is actually quite good. I am rather enjoying reading Modern Life is Rubbish. Their Web Typography Cheat Sheet and a rundown on current trends in blog technology and more style are great. and I just like the way the site looks (well except for the huge Google ad in the middle of the page). The site offers some fresh takes on stuff we have been posting about for years with many new insights. Bloody good show, Stuart!
I have to say a few words about the nice but, perhaps misused Hemingway Theme for Wordpress among other blogging applications. The growing popularity of this theme cannot be questioned (there are nearly 440,000 results for "Powered by Hemingway".)
I believe that the layout for individual post pages using this theme is very nice. There is a very good delineation between post, post meta info, and comments while still allowing the comments to flow like a conversation from the original post. The site meta info and additional links at the bottom also works on this page type (assuming that this information doesn't get out of hand). Where this theme tends to break down is its implementation for blog homepages. People can (and have) debate about the merits of fewer or more blog posts per page and I could be persuaded either way depending upon the context and type (and frequency) of the posts, however, what is not argued as often is the convention of having chronological blog posts appearing above and below each other.
In the Hemingway theme homepage template, the most often seen configuration is to have the last 2 posts appear next to each other at the top, with links to earlier posts down below, often mixed in with other content to the point where it is difficult to determine where to go next for more "content". In addition to this shortcoming, the other problem with Hemingway is that, if abused, the footer section at the bottom of each page with "about" text, and recent post listings, becomes unwieldy and ugly. Not to pick on a couple friends but the theme that seems to work so well for post pages, breaks down on home pages as shown to varying degrees.
The designer, Kyle Neath knows this and takes care to only show samples that are neat and clean. Minimal meta data and navigation in these screenshots maintain clarity and make finding what you need in the footer, much easier.
I never like to criticize without suggestions and positive feedback and so here is some:
- Keep the information in the footer simple. Keep lists of things to 10 or less
- Visually differentiate the part of the footer that contains links to the recent posts as that is what people will want to find the most.
- Write longer posts so that the posts at the top don't look funny. (this one is hard, I know)
- Failing #4, at least try to keep your posts about the same size (also nearly impossible and impractical)
- Drop the second, recent post down and just show the most recent post at the top (refer to #4)
- Move post of only links to another area of the site (perhaps the footer?) as they look strange in the top section.
The web has come a long way baby. You don't need "fancy" software from Microsoft or OmniGraffle to make flowcharts, diagrams, and the like. Now you can use online tools such as the Flash-based Gliffy or the css and html, ajaxio. Both are very cool.
From a List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts (Vitaly Friedman's Notebook).
An old post at Slashdot resurfaced, for whatever reason, and caused quite a stir about how non-compliant (with CSS standards) Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser will be. People can split hairs about this or that relating to IE7's standards compliance but when it comes down to it, it either will be or won't be.
In a good conversation with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft, Richard MacManus at ZDNet asks some pointed questions about IE7's plans for CSS compliance and gets some honest answers.
The bits about standards compliance versus backward compatibility were interested, and there are suggestions that the IE7 team is prioritizing standards compliance ahead of backwards compatibility. I also thought Wilson's characterization of many (most) of IE's user base as 'non-enthusiast users' was dead on (and funny).
I think backwards compatibility has always been a big challenge for us and certainly today it's a huge challenge. Particularly for IE, as we have a lot of what I'd term 'non-enthusiast users' - my mother is always my canonical example here. And for my mother, if I automatically upgrade her machine [its IE browser] and suddenly one of her sites breaks or looks a little funny, she's going to be upset about that. On the other hand if she were to install an alternative browser, and it looks different in that browser - she could probably understand why that would happen, because it's a completely different product.
More at Chris Wilson's blog.
[Source: Slashdot]
Luke Francl and Dan Grigsby have done a great job in putting together a follow-up event that plays off the success of minnebar and the strength of the Minneapolis / Saint Paul web and software communities. I think that minnedemo will be a huge success and can hopefully be replicated a couple times a year to show of some great work people are doing and to keep the momentum going in between annual minnbar events.
Some people may think that LOST is just a hit show on ABC. Those people don't know about the huge amounts of fans that debate its theories - yes there are LOST theories. LOST is actually something of a phenomenon. Just take a look at the number of sites out there - there are over 40 million results in Google for "LOST ABC". There are several very thorough sites like LostPedia and, …and found. LostPedia has over 6,000 total pages in its database. There have been a total of 12,214,121 page views, and 48,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 8.02 average edits per page and 253.24 views per edit.
There is a great timeline presented at LostPedia and an outstanding extension to the timeline here.
Major new sources have got into the act, furthering the theory frenzy and speculation. Here is one of the best (according to some) but certainly one of the most elaborate.
In addition to the TV series, there has been a real concerted effort by the shows producers to fan the flames of these fans (or fanatics). There is a real novel: Bad Twin, written by fictional Gary Troup, one of the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815 (the flight that crashed in LOST. It is even read on the show by one of the characters and fans believe there are clues hidden in its pages.
Not only that, but there are websites set up for companies in the series, such as the Hanso Foundation and Oceanic Airlines, each with plenty of intrigue and speculation of clues contained within them – seriously, view the source of the Oceanic site and really explore and interact with the Hanso site – there was some real time put into those.
4, 8, 15, 16 ,23 or 42 – this is the ever-present sequence of numbers from the show totaling 108 - this post was made today because LOST Season 3 will begin in exactly 108 days just one day after the October 3rd release of Season 2 to DVD.
Today I received the 100,000th spam email in the past 30 days. I feel very honored that so many people consider me a great candidate for refinancing my mortgage or investing in the hot new stock. So many busty blonds want to meet me but I feel that they would be surprised to find that so many others seem to think I can't get it up and that I may need C14L5 or \/14gr4. If you have sent me a message to which I didn’t respond, please take heart in knowing that I most likely did not see it – you should send it again – unless it's you, Bedwyr Miguez or even you, Thorbjo Desrosier, I got your messages.
At the minnēbar conference in May I presented a session titled Agile Design (slides) and a great discussion ensued. The talk centered around the concepts and ideas of the Agile Method, but, you guessed it, as it related to information and visual design. I have had a great opportunity in my current role to help to define and evolve our process and practices surrounding software design and development. I love the team I work with and hope to continue breaking new ground with them.
I also wanted to post a bit about some ongoing and upcoming projects I am involved in so you know what I have been up to and what to expect.
First, I am planning to launch a new site with some peers of mine that will be focused on the agile method and particularly how it pertains to the development of "web 2.0" apps. You might think of it as a Signal vs. Noise type blog with less of a marketing spin.
I am also helping to plan OpenBar for the fall of 2006. OpenBar will pick up where minnēbar left off but its entire focus will be on open source software, using open source in your business, and is aimed at developing, enriching, and bringing together Minnesota's large but disjointed open source community.
I also have a Minnesota blog aggregation site brewing slowly, but my decision to write in Ruby and on the Rails framework (as my first foray into such technologies) is retarding my progress. Hopefully, I will post more on this soon.
Lastly, this site is on the verge of another facelift. I really like the new visual design a lot, but am more excited by some of the ways the new site will be organized as well as some of the additional features and content I will be adding. Not sure when this will happen, but I am hoping for a June launch.
The new improvements made to the Flickr UI are great and well worth the wait. When you go, what you won't see are drastic changes to colors or brand, nor should you. What you will see are subtle enhancements (except for maybe the more radical improvement of the Organizr) that shouldn't confuse veteran users too much and should allow for new users to more quickly utilize many of the more powerful features of this great social photo sharing application.
Here is a small set of screenshots and discussion of the changes.
minnēbar was great. It was interesting, active, creative, technical, loud, hot, and fun. It is over for now. So far the feedback both in person and on the wiki has been overwhelmingly positive. There were some issues with the wifi staying up and we were pretty much at capacity with over 110 people attending. I plan to write a recap soon, but for now you can browse some of the Flickr photos tagged with minnebar (there have been so many that minnebar is a hot tag right now). And here are some links to the people posting them:
Jesse Ross
Sopheava (aka Margaret Andrews)
Tim Wilson
Mark Danielson
Ethan Galstad
Jamie Thingelstad
Peter Fleck
me
After attending a presentation by Google about Google Earth, Google Books, and Google Scholar and came away with some very interesting back stories of each of these and a bit on insight on where they may be headed. While the presentations were interesting, the chance to get into the new Minneapolis Central Library was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. The few photos I took don't do it justice. It is a beautiful building and is going to be a great resource for many, many Minnesota residents. You can read more on the library here.
Some stories are coming out that point to Microsoft attempting to purchase large amounts of Yahoo! stock. The spin on this is that Microsoft wants to compete head to head with Google more effectively. This logic strikes me as a bit, well illogical. I can see Yahoo! wanting to secure the financial wherewithal to compete with Google on a larger scale but Microsoft has always had the option of doing as much or more than Google but has seemed content (until recently?) to not really get into Google's core businesses of, information, search and advertising.
Some ideas have Microsoft spending nearly $2 billion in the coming fiscal year toward building an ad-supported online service business, or selling its MSN network to Yahoo! for a minority stake in Yahoo!
This type of a merger makes a lot of sense, though I don’t think I would like to see it be more than an infusion of cash into Yahoo! or an elimination of MSN (in favor of Yahoo).
I have put the new Google Calendar app through its paces and like many people, have found many things to like (invite features are looking good. I think evite is in trouble and Skobee is likely DOA) and some to dislike (still very buggy with refreshing itself after certain actions and there are some issues with duplicating entries for the same shared event). The purpose of this post, however, isn't really about those things. It isn't really even about Google Calendar. It is about what's next for Google and the glimpse they have given us within this new application.
It is obvious that they will soon integrate their calendar and mail apps. My thought is, though, that they will not stop there. I think the time is ripe for them to unleash their first version of an integrate office style suite containing search, mail, calendaring, and word processing. I mocked up some screens as to what I think it may look like when it comes, posted them as a Flickr set and added notes to them as well. Here are some thumbnails:
With 90 participants as of about 5 minutes ago, minnēbar is really gaining momentum. Now I fear the venue will not be able to accommodate this mass of geeks, hipster designers, and open-sourcers all in one place. I think all this pre-conference excitement will really boil over to some great discussions at the conference. I hope everyone can check their "Minnesota Nice" (aka introversion) at the door and really participate.
The idea for a Fall event has already surfaced, this time with a focus on open source and open solutions: OpenBar. I will keep people updated on the event status and will post a review and such after the event. But with less than one month to go, I just hope I don't have to turn anyone away.
Let's find a place that can accommodate 200 next year. Any ideas?
I have a lot of take-aways from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but one of the most exciting was the rather unexpected discovery of barcamp. A collaborative (un)conference where everyone participates in discussions and sessions is a great idea and an ideal setting for meeting interesting people, growing community, and exchanging ideas and is something that I decided I wanted to bring to Minnesota. So I have picked a date (May 6th), a venue (local shop Catalyst Studios), some sponsors, and some great participants and started planning for minnēbar.
All the details are at the minnēbar wiki so for now I will just say that this will be a great event and if you are interested in participating add your name to the wiki and, if you want, please add what you would like to speak about or learn about.
Daniel M. Harrison at blogcritics has been all over the potential sale of Sun to Google and what it might mean. He, along with some others, have proposed a Google move into the financial services and healthcare industries.
"Google is going into Financial Services and Healthcare!" he exclaimed over the lengthy conversation. "This is the last stage of the Java project!"
This could also be the true start to the "G-drive platform" or GO-OS (Google OS) and could also mean the open sourcing of Java? This last part is intriguing especially as other platforms and languages gain ground* on the reigning king of the enterprise application.
This claim is, however speculative and not proven true by poor indicators such as book sales and various internet pundits.
Here are couple quick observations from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006:
1. Don't wear your goddamned bluetooth ear piece the whole time - not sure why I get so irrationally annoyed with this, but I do.
2. Newsflash: Apple overtakes PC laptop market with strong 70% share - or so it would seem by the looks of things here.
3. There is nothing sadder than a bunch of full-grown "hard-core" programmer types forcing themselves to fake their excitement about now doing JavaScript coding.
4. Some men can apparently pull off wearing a skirt - oh sorry a util-i-kilt
5. Web 2.0 means "we realized that crappy looking interfaces weren't selling and so now we hired a designer".
I had the good fortune to accidentally sit down to lunch at a table with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals and lead developer of Ruby on Rails and Rich Kilmer of RubyForge who had begun a discussion of the things you might expect, Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and the like. Then Phil Windley (who has some excellent posts about a couple tutorials here at eTech) and Rohit Khare of CommerceNet Labs added to the mix some discussion of microfomats, JavaScript, and some ideas that definitely push the envelope of what those things have traditionally done such as, mini-ml and some JavScript talk during which I was treading water so it wouldn't go over my head. Finally, fellow Minnesotan, Dan Grigsby of SiteGoFaster infused some more energy into the ruby on rails discussion as it eventually turned to a preview of David Heinemeier Hansson's tutorial about how with Rails 1.1 (coming this weekend?) you can create great AJAX apps without writing a single line of JavaScript.
Just finished up a two day conference in San Diego on Strategic E-HR - yeah that's what I said. It was better than it sounded. Really. I am going to stick around for next week's Emerging Technologies conference from O'Reilly and so I have some time to kill in between. What better way to spend some time than taking photos around town. Check them out at Flickr.
In a move that surely indicates boredom and a disregard for original thought, area blogger, Ben Edwards, blatantly rips off the new CNN International style. The style change could also have been said to have influences from Magnetbox.com and adhesive label tape. News at 11.
Why does this bother me so much? I have been a big supporter of Netflix and had
even suggested something similar to the Friends features they have rolled out. But to have a trademark on the term friends? Come on! I understand it may only be for Friends used in this manner but still. Ridiculous!
I have been playing around with Google's new chat in Gmail (surely in beta) this morning and I am pretty impressed with some of it's features. Google always suprises me when they release new features and products for which, seemingly, no one has asked.
Maybe this will be another way to pull users toward Gmail from the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo. It could work. I am looking for anyone out there who wants to switch and chat with me.
If I am a liitle late to the party on this you can blame a lot of people but you can only blame Mark for me actually participating.
Four jobs I've had
- Stocked shelves and helped people feed their consumerism at the very first Target Greatland store
- Called cabs for drunkards at the long defunct Mississippi Live group of bars and clubs
- Decided the fates of small, short-term student loan applicants
- Part of a team of people, who if together today could be doing really great things, that helped two less brilliant people make fistfuls of cash
Four movies I can watch over and over
- Any movie containing at least 15% hobbits
- Blazing Saddles
- Army of Darkness
- Rushmore
Four places I've lived
- A room in a house shared with a crazy, roid-rager who would throw his furniture around in the room next-door.
- A small room atop a run-down fraternity house in Minneapolis
- A large concrete co-op (where I served as president) in Dinkytown (Minneapolis)
- Mexico for 4 months, 3 weeks (cumulative)
- A town home in New Brighton (Minnesota) where I spent the first nights married to my beautiful wife and playing with my crazy puppy. (those were separate occasions)
Four TV shows I love
- Arrested Development
- Lost
- The West Wing
- The Daily Show / The Colbert Report (not cheating as one is basically an extension of the other)
Four places I've vacationed
- Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, Bruges)
- Wisconsin Dells
- The Dominican Republic (where I proposed to Jena)
- Hawaii
Four of my favorite dishes (soooo many things!)
- Dark chocolate truffles and milk
- Lobster scampi
- Sushi (though not sashimi)
- Authentic Mexican tacos (al pastor)
Four sites I visit daily (I am assuming mail.google.com doesn’t count)
- Bitterpill.org (I enjoy disappointment)
- Flickr.com
- RobotWisdom.com
- AltText.com (I am kinda of a narcissist)
Four places I would rather be right now
- On vacation (New Zealand, Africa, China, Cuba top the list)
- In bed
- Playing basketball, volleyball, kickball, tennis or nearly any team sport
- Anywhere with my best friend and wife (having that be the same person really saves on expenses)
Four bloggers I am tagging
- Cam
- Casey
- Dack
- James
Google Local should allow users to enter their own locations into the Google Local databases. There have been plenty of times when I know of a great restaurant being left out of the listings and I think plenty of people would add info to this service. Google need look no further than Wikipedia to see that such a system can work and work with very few errors and flaws. Is there more room for exploitation in Google Local (changing competitor's info, etc)? Perhaps. But the benefits of a living system of data continually being updated and checked over has overwhelming advantages. As it stands Google Local hardly returns any useful results in the cities I live (St. Paul, Minneapolis) and what's worse, often returns inaccurate results.
Looks like TiVo is rolling out new features at quite a clip. Some have reported that they now have support for podcasts ad I have seen local weather and traffic and other features in conjunction with Yahoo! There would also seem to be sharing of photos with Yahoo! (Flickr integration coming soon?) Maybe this Yahoo!/TiVo partnership is going to be more worthwhile than first speculated...interesting.
More features being rolled out:
- Browse movie information/buy tickets from Fandango.
- Discover new music on Live365.
- Overlap priority (for those shows that begin or end at strange times)
- Movies on demand with Netflix (ok so this one is still wishful thinking)
TiVo is still a ways ahead of the competitors in features. Hopefully they can stay that way and somehow make a profit.
- Patent Room is a very neat site showcasing drawings submitted with patent applications of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
- I really need very little reason to post a link about Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael Jason's post/mini review of it seems like reason enough. I have been thinking more and more about these issues lately. These things go in cycles.
- Flash + Evangelical Christianity + Kirk Cameron = A maddening desire to kill
- Nice CSS dropshadow technique that doesn't use CSS hacks or javascript.
- If you saw any of the following: Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, A Knight's Tale, The Animal, or The Patriot in a theater you may be entitled to your money back (pdf). Looks as though Sony used a made-up film critic named: David Manning to hype those films. God, if I could just get the same deal for: American Psycho, Blade, Congo, The Haunting, Malibu's Most Wanted, and Mr. Deeds.
- Snopes' list of unanswerable questions they have received that have a sense of urgency to them. Some favorites include mention of: Cat's eating a dead person's face off, hickies, penguin eggs, bananas, witches, and Corona among many other bizarre requests. Some of the requests however really give Snopes a lot of credit. Here is my favorite:
if anyone understands what im (sic). saying please e-mail me at this e-mail adress (sic).
does anyone here bilieve (sic) that there are aliens in other planets? who really made us is there really a god? im not saying there isnt (sic). but who made god? seriously please answer back at me
- Ever wanted to compare Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth side-by-side?
Atheist. Agnostic. Thanks to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, I now have a new label to use when describing my views: Humanist
Here's a few bits of news and links I have been collecting the past few weeks, relating to my home state of Minnesota. Don't ever say I don't represent!
- Christopher Riley plays Radiohead in a piano concerto at Minnesota Orchestra Hall.
- I almost forgot. MNSpeak is a great (new?) website that pulls together a ton of news pertaining to Minnesota. Who would have thought there would be so may posts to peruse?
- The Chicago Tribune has a great article comparing downtown Minneapolis with the Mall of America. "Minneapolis has 30 live theater venues, including two that have won Tonys...The Mall has 32 shoe stores." People who get upset by the those visitors guides to the U.S. that mention only one stop in our poor "fly-over" state, will take heart in this article.
- Because "more people live in a revitalized downtown Minneapolis today than, we're told, live in downtown Denver, Dallas, Houston and Indianapolis combined" (quoted from ChiTrib article above) this will be needed: The Nicollet is a huge new residential building set to go up downtown Minneapolis soon. It will still be a foot or two shorter than the IDS Center. Come on!
- hourcar is up and running in the Twin Cities and with prices as low as $2.95/hour and
$0.39/mile it may just convince a few to forgo the cabs or sell their second car.
- A Prairie Home Companion is filming now so there have been several Lindsay Lohan sightings in the cities. I can't believe this is being made into a movie! But with Robert Altman and now Paul Thomas Anderson taking the directing roles can it be less than good?
- The Minnesota Center For Photography has, what looks like, an amazing exhibit that opened this weekend called: Musicapolis: scene & seen 1965-2005 that chronicles the rich musical history of the Twin Cities from performances by the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Prince and Snoop Dogg. Here is an accompanying story from the Star Tribune
- Battleground Minnesota is "hip hop documentary musical starring Chris "Shakademic" Johnson, Glenn Scott, former Vice President Walter Mondale, Senator Norm Coleman, Senator Mark Dayton, and Governor Tim Pawlenty." If that description doesn't get you interested, this preview will.
I must admit that the new design of Alt Text is a bit limiting to me, especially, when considering the way I want to post. I am trying to figure out some ways to get around it, but right now Alt Text just isn't set up for the type of linking to interesting things that I have been doing lately. Of course, I knew this while I was designing and implementing the new design but I thought that I would just expand on a link here and there and turn them into real (single) posts (rather than in bunches). Then a strange thing happened. I wanted to post more often than once per day, introducing yet another drawback of this design...it is harder to browse backwards through entries, as well. I am going to make it easier on the archive pages and so on, but I need to figure out a more global solution, and soon.
Here are some posts I have been holding back on because I wanted to have at least 3-5 for aesthetics:
I may try out a new thing here on Alt Text where I showcase some great interactive work I come across. I figure there is no better day to post such finds than on Sunday, as I don't normally post on Sunday and so it can serve as a bonus post if you will.
The first bunch of featured sites are all the creations of the kids over at wefail.com and are linked from their cool sofake.com site. These guys push Flash to places Macromedia didn't see it going - and they do it well.
bobschneidermusic.com
bobschneidermusic.com/captainkirk/
billyharveymusic.com
hungout.com
amplifier.com
Check these sites out - they are worth exploring and really looking at the thoughtful intracacies these guys put in - they are full of almost easter egg-like content.
- The Polaroidonizer - I think this is pretty neat - give any image url to the Polaroidonizer, adjust some settings and it cranks out Polaroid® looking image complete with drop shadows and tilting like the image at right.
- James Mathias is The Shavior - Mathias' experiment in facial hair aside, the rest of his site is pretty good and so I am going to be adding it to my rotation.
- Kick Ass Kung Fu - I want this - Use your own body - both movements and likeness - in a game where you can kick the collective asses of whomever is loaded in. Video games and fitness you say?
- File Me Away - Another nice looking site, added here for diversity.
- HousingMaps.com - what do you get when you combine housing listings from Craig's list and Google Maps? HousingMaps.com is what.
- Zombie dogs - Despite the sensationalistic title and terrible photo this story actually shows some promising developments in science aimed at treating critically injured people by replacing their blood with icy water. Seriously.
- Power Failure - A look at how the proposed energy policies by the GOP fall far short in their dealing with issues of oil.
- Virus present in 80% of the population kills cancer cells - Why is a potential "cure" for cancer such a under-reported story?
While there are already 300 to 400 Internet hot spots operating in the city, Minneapolis looks to make wi-fi ubiquitous to better serve both its citizens and its services.
The city also wanted to replace expensive cellular radio communications used by police cars with a cheaper and faster wireless data network. There also was a desire to provide broadband to an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the city's population that either isn't served by high-speed Internet access or can't afford it.
While the access won't be free, unfortunately, it may be a much cheaper (and faster) alternative for many seeking faster access than dial-up provides.
Sony has announced that it is getting into the movie on demand game by offering downloadable movies via Movielink. Unfortunately, Firefox users will get an error when attempting to go to the Movielink site that states:
"Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.
We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
Is this a Microsoft partnership deal? They do only use Windows Media Player format.
Shoddy technology decisions aside, this is just a poor business model from beginning to end. They claim they are modeling the service after iTunes, but it is really not anything like it except that it is distributed online. Most movies I saw were downloadable for between $4.49 and $4.99 (though they claim there are some for $1.99 I didn't see any that low). The thing is, this just buys you a viewing - and you must complete that viewing within 30 days of purchase and within 24 hours of beginning to watch the film.
Who do they think their audience for these things is? Anyone who is downloading movies to view on their computer is or would be a Netflix or similar service subscriber before they would do this. With Netflix you can keep a movie forever and can start watching a movie in 2001 and complete in 2005 if you want. AND you can easily watch it on your TV.
Maybe they think their market is people who normally get pay-per-view movies. They are delusional if they think this is smart. Pay-per-view movies are available immediately in most cases without waiting 30 to 90 minutes to download, they usually cost between $1.99 and $4.99, and they too can easily be watched on TVs rather than computer screens.
Here's an idea for Movielink, given free of charge. When people pay for and download movies from your service, they should either pay a bit more ($12.00) and own them just as iTunes users do or they should pay less ($2.00) and be able to watch them for a specified period of time.
Since first seeing the video of the "fat kid" grooving to some catchy techno-pop (which admittedly was not long ago) I have been obsessed with finding out more. I wanted to know who this kid was (Gary Brolsma - his site), what that song was (Dragostea Din Tei originally by O-Zone [mp3], later by the Italian group Haiducii [mp3] which is the one used in Gary Brolsma's video.), what the lyrics meant, and why it seems to be such a phenomenon (featured on The Tonight Show, CNN, VH1, Good Morning America, and The New York Times).
It would seem I am not the only one who is fascinated:
A classroom watches and participates in video.
A site with more links than this post.
The online game World of Warcraft apparently has a filmmaker’s guild comprised of people who make films based on "footage" they get "in game". Oh yeah, they did an in-game version of the video.
Napoleon Dynamite dancing to Dragostea Din Tei.
Other stuff:
O-Zone's Video.
Wikipedia Numa Numa page
- These "averaged" photos on Flickr produce great art. I want prints!
- Backpack - another product from 37signals I'll probably be using soon.
- What a beautiful website! I have always wanted to do something with leaves on Alt Text but it always seemed hard to get good images. Looks like John found a way - create them.
- Synthetic Biology - "specifying every bit of DNA that goes into an organism to determine its form and function in a controlled, predictable way...The goal...is nothing less than to "reimplement life in a manner of our choosing. And some potential applications? "building organisms, like supercoral that sucks carbon out of the biosphere and puts it into building materials, or an acorn programmed to grow into an oak tree - complete with a nifty tree house. And there's the opportunity to add new chromosomes to the human genome, ushering in a panoply of human augmentations and enhancements."
- Bacteria from space can eat radioactive waste. - This was a story from late last year that I was just reminded of on a more recent Wired article...
At the halfway point of SXSW I am pretty pleased with what I am getting out of it on the panel and speaker side yet disappointed that I have not been (through much of my own fault) able to connect with people as much as I should.
I have some great take aways regarding semantics, css, and microformatting as well as some great design tidbits, techniques, and resources. I plan on posting more this evening. Until then, Sam Felder (who I found via my iTunes url idea) seems to be following me to each panel and has some more insight.
I, along with many of the folks whose sites I visit each week, am descending upon Austin, Texas for the love fest (now with 33% more love) that is SXSW. I am returning after a year hiatus with a renewed enthusiasm for the web, blogs, technology, and the future. I get the impression that many of this year's participants are feeling this way too.
From Dave Nunez's unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005:
Here's how you can tell if you have not had the full SxSWi experience:
- You find yourself back in your hotel room for the rest of the night right after the last panel of the day.
- You haven't shaken hands with people who look and act nothing like you
- You haven't had dinner with complete strangers.
- You've stuck only to your clique of people that you see daily back at your hometown.
- You haven't attended the EFF / EFF-Austin / Creative Commons Party on Monday night (free drinks! free food! live music! delicious food! (I should know, I'm responsible for getting it))
- You left Austin without fifty business cards of new contacts you expect to email at some point soon.
- You left Austin without the intention of calling 3 new contacts to meet up within 2 weeks of getting home
- You haven't crashed every clique you see
- You aren't smiling and smiling BIG
- You are talking more than listening,
- You haven't had a conversation or at least said "hi" to me, David Nunez.
- You don't have an orange, happy face sticker on your badge.
Amen. So here is my official welcome to anyone who wishes to come talk to me as well as my official apology for busting into your conversation to introduce myself. I am offering a special incentive to those who introduce themselves to me: a free Alt Text Tshirt*. Now I just gotta get me some of those stickers.
* While supplies last.
I would be remiss today as both a blogger and a friend of Jason's not to mention his new endeavor (and the talk of the "blogsphere" today): full-time blogger at kottke.org Inc. I wish Jason the best and hope he is successful with this. I encourage everyone who has enjoyed Jason's site in the past to donate a small sum. In fact, don't think of it as a donation as much as an advancement of the art of blogging. I for one can't wait to see what it is he is going to unleash on the blogging world next.
A couple weeks ago I posted a suggestion for a Share with a Friend feature for Netflix. In addition to posting these thoughts here on Alt Text I sent a note to Netflix regarding it.
Today I received an email from Netflix inviting me to a sneak preview of their new "Friends" feature. Now it isn't what I had in mind - as my idea focused on sharing a DVD with people who are not Netflix members.
You've been selected to participate in a special preview of our Friends feature that will give you a new way to discover great movies. You'll be able to check out what your Friends think of a movie, exchange movie suggestions with your Friends, and leave your two cents worth on a movie for your Friends to read.
I don't know how valuable this new service will be, it does show that Netflix is trying to improve their service all the time. I will be checking it out in the next few days and reporting on it here.
I think a great feature to add to the Netflix service would be a Share With Friend feature that would allow me to send a DVD directly from my Netflix queue to a friend I think may enjoy it. Netflix could wrap the DVD in a special envelope directed at converting those who try the service (through sharing) to becoming members.
Of course there would be some restrictions to curb the potential for abuse. I can foresee three basic rules: 1) Members can only share with any given friend (address) once per year. 2) Members can have only one movie shared at a time. 3) Members are responsible for loss/damages of any shared movies.
With these rules in place and a willing user base this new feature could be a boon for Netflix's existing viral marketing efforts.
I mocked up some screens of how this feature may be incorporated.
- TiddlyWiki - this is a great "non-linear personal web notebook" tool. Jason is correct that it is one of the better Wiki interfaces.
I was going to post something interesting on the ICANN Meetings in Kuala Lumpur, which are, in part, to discuss the possibilities and options for a non-Roman character set (or at least) a character translation technology to allow non-Roman characters in domain names and the like. Unfortunately there really isn't anything interesting to say about this as the creation of a common Internet language has already been completed. Your are reading it now.
Maybe this 4-minute story on The World (WMA - Windows Media File will be more interesting.
Malaysian ICANN Meetings site.
Instead of posting I have been busying myself with minor tweaks to the interface (which I assure you there are more to come) and plugin work to add some things I have wanted for a while. All of this is going to (hopefully) be thrown out at some point as I make a clean break for version 6 of Alt Text, due out sometime in late '04 to early '05.
In addition to (and partly the source of energy) I have been tooling around the web much more recently and have seen a great many things. I have contemplated on the merits of WordPress and even considered switching. I have decided to wait for one or two more releases and try to gauge the activity level of the six apart team to see what they have up their sleeves before I make up my mind. More about this as it unfolds.
I have also marveled at the "new" Blogger — ok so its not so new. I never checked it out when it relaunched itself because I really never had any interest in it. I set up a trial blog in under a minute (seriously) and I was very impressed by the interface, speed, and elegance of the application — it is a great example of what web applications should be. More on this too in the weeks and months ahead as this is very much in line with what I am doing professionally at the moment.
This morning (yesterday I guess) as I made my rounds on the web and came to Jason's site I was once again amazed at the amount of time that boy spends on his site. Now gainful employment has its perks, but the ability to post dozens of links and make several planned out posts has got to take a serious chunk out of your day. I would bet Jason spends 3-4 hours of time in his site or on other sites finding links for his site each day.
I may be wrong. Maybe Jason is some kind of webloggin' idiot-savant.
If he does spend that kind of time, however, we really ought to find a way for him to earn some cash. I started thinking about the idea of selling ad space as some weblogs are now doing but the idea seems to make me ill, plus it really clutters up an interface. Then there is the selling of the wares. Jason could sell T-Shirts and mugs, perhaps Silkscreen can become shareware?
Then it came to me — product placement. Maybe Jason could write about his walk home and how he got a craving for a Chalupa from Taco Bell. Perhaps he could tell the world that he just bought a new Trek mountain bike. Each time he would make one of these posts, even if the product is only mentioned in passing, Jason could make some dough. So why not take a little cash on the down-low for a quick word about a sponsor's product?
In fact, I suspect that this is already the case in the "blog community". I find it interesting that 95+% of the personal computing market consists of PC users, yet, I challenge you to find a non-Mac user on Jason's link list. Most of my friends in the web design/development industry have "switched" to Mac after being PC zealots.
Maybe this is not a coincidence? Maybe it is part of a grander, more sinister plot by Apple to "infiltrate" well-visited weblogs and buy their support with shiny new titanium iBooks and iPods — an elaborate campaign that uses the influence of culture creators at the grassroots level.
Though I have not upgraded to Firefox 0.9 yet (actually I have but have found it very buggy and less stable) I do want to take some time to sing the praises of 0.8 and some if the great features of this browser.
First off let me start by saying that I am not a Microsoft basher by any means and have never had problems with Internet Explorer since version 4.x except of course for the security issues (which I believe have less to do with inferior code than with the desire by many to "take Microsoft down" and of course Microsoft's insistence that the browser is integral to every aspect of their OS — but that is another post).
I have used IE exclusively (except for testing) for several years now as both Netscape and Mozilla (and Gecko) all proved to have issues and problems that IE did not have. Furthermore IE was fast AND (not to be too hypocritical) I liked the seeming "integration" IE enjoys with Windows and how many of my web-based tools (Movable Type as the most notable, used the DOM of IE and Windows to provide additional control over things, such as allowing me to highlight a word and add a link to it or format it how I see fit.
A couple things have changed in the browser world however — the biggest of those changes are tabbed browsing as I have become sick of window pollution for various browser windows. A natural progression for me was to try a IE based browser variant with tabbed browsing. I chose Avant Browser and thought I had found the solution. Well, Avant proved too buggy for me and soon outlived its welcome on my desktop.
Just about this time a nice little browser called Firebird. I had heard some about it but after having tried Mozilla, the new Netscape and Gecko I was not impressed — at least on a PC. In addition, I did not (nor do now) understand the convoluted development roadmap at Mozilla and how every initiative fits together. But I like to try new things and Firebird (previously Phoenix and now Firefox due to legal issues) sound like just the thing.
Continue reading "Of Fires and Foxes"
This draft post is actually a running list that I would keep moving each month so I would remember some issues and links to post about for that month. It would seem I stopped moving it late last June but some of these items are much older than that. New comments are found in ()
Affirmative Action - still needed
House (presumably mine)
War - Means to a Noble End? (could be but not likely very often)
Food? (was I questioning the need for food? was I simply hungry?)
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www.kuro5hin.org (must have wanted to link to this site as it is pretty good)
Very pessimistic view of the advertising industry
(one that I was inclined to believe a few quarters ago - though things look to be picking up)
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New Zealand's Mixed Member Proportional electoral system
The evolution of democracy. (The lionk above spurred me to want to start a thread about th evolution of democracy but ralized I would nee dto research much more. This idea however resonates with a recent desire of mine to read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States. I am both amazed and appalled at myself for never having done so — though I am most assuradly not alone. Oh yeah, and I was still very bitter about W "winning" the election)
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blogs to add to the list:
www.hypergene.net
www.notsosoft.com
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SCiNet · The World Trade System
Miniplants (Mini-plants could be built in mobile containers and shipped anywhere in the world — especially to developing countries. "The mini-plant system is designed in such a way that all the production machinery is fixed on the platform of the container, with all wiring, piping, and installation parts" built in.)
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http://www.frontoff.host.sk/adrift/index.php (so long ago had I meant to post about this blog that the domain has changed)
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Al Jazeera the clear winner of the War on TerrorTM
As I am sure most webloggers do, I have accumulated a multitude of half-finished, half-baked posts that appear doomed to linger in draft status for all eternity.
In this, the new year, I am going to start dusting them off and publishing some of them. Some I might add to — make them more compete, others I may just post as is. Here is the first one circa July 2003 posted more or less as it was — entirely incomplete and lacking in context:
See the extended entry for definitions of objectivity.
Continue reading "Recycling Old Entries (or digging through the lost and found bin)"
With all the hubub over Google's "Florida" update it now seems like Google is becomeing more evil. The update changes the way only certain words and phrases come up in the reults, only the most popular ones, that have commercial value to people. Speculation is that by unseating sites from positions they have held for years, you increase the competition for the highest rankings in those words so they can sell more Adwords and make more money.
Want to see how the reults would be if they weren't manipulatd by Google? search for the same terms or terms and then type -uybvlizwyfbszilhfsgkfbsf (or some equally unique term) after it.
Interesting & Related: Search for "Miserable Failure" at Google and see what comes up.
I am a little late to the party perhaps (in fact so late that I can't even comment on his weblog, but cut me some slack I have been on vacation.) but I need to give Jason props on his continual (or maybe it's herky-jerky) evolution of Kottke.org. Once again Jason blazes a trail (can snails blaze?) that makes it easier for the rest of us to follow. While I do think the movie banners are a bit overbearing I love the fact that Jason is separating types of posts in the main blog area. The inability (or at least the prohibitive difficultly) to aggregate different types of posts with different types of data is one thing that has been holding me up for a couple years now. I would have loved to bring over my movie reviews from BenOnFilm.com (no longer affiliated with me - RIP) and write more but I really wanted the data to be presented differently than a regular post. I too have several blogs (Links, Lists, etc) aimed at segregating data of different types but have not tried too hard to bring them all together as Jason has.
I really like Hiromi's new site - so much so that I may have to copy it. Nice.
This sounds crazy and so it probably is. Robert Cringely throws out an idea and waits for the bobber to go down. Cringely suggests the following (greatly paraphrased):
1. a company should buy one copy of every CD on the market. (100,000 CDs at $14 each requires $1.4 million)
2. the company has to be a public company
3. measures would be taken to maintain a stock price of roughly $20 - at which price all users would own at least one share.
4. because each share carries ownership rights to those 100,000 CDs it also carries the right to download backup or media-shifting copies
5. wild success follows.
Could such an idea work? For about 10 minutes - which is about how fast the record industry would take to get an injunction against the company. I just don't think the solution to the recording industry rests on this sort "loophole" - there really needs to be a change in the mindset of media licensing and ownership.
I am inspired again to do some design. I think I may simply redesign some company sites to practice - and don't be surprised if you see a new Alt Text sometime soon.
I have a new information design for Amazon's product pages I am about ready to share, ala 37 Signals.
Sites like this one take an idea that I have wanted to make reality for so long - selling design templates - but go further and cheaper than I could. At least the inspiration is free.
A precurser to my upcoming writing of why the Internet is not shit:
"Well, the internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack through redundancy."
"Waaaaiiiit just one minute. Are you trying to tell me that we could lose the entire Eastern seaboard... and I could still look for pictures of Mandy Moore? Yes, thank you, I knew that."
--A serious guy, and a mock-movie-drama-serious guy, at Fuddruckers.
[In Passing]
It should come as no surprise that I am very interested in how web logging and the web in general will shape the future. Yesterday's post at Will Femia's Weblog at MSNBC was about weblogs as potentially being the CB Radio of the late 90's and today. While I had heard this analogy before - it was always in conjunction with an explicit negative connotation. Femia brings up the point that many CB Radio enthusiasts adhere to the belief that it was their beloved technology that served as a jumping off point for bigger and better technological breakthroughs. That got me to thinking again about what weblogs will lead to.
"Are Weblogs not an end but means to some larger goal like the democratization of the media or the supplanting of government as spokesman for the citizenry?"
I hope to post about some of the great things (and not so great things that weblogs can lead to in the coming days. And while I have a much less cynical view of the present web than this guy, I think we both could agree that there is much room for improvement and a bright future ahead for weblogs and the web in general if we collectively address some of the mediums main shortcomings.
While the author of the above site may feel he "can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling" or "go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle" I would claim the reverse is true as well. The wealth of information available on the web is truly astounding. I think the author hits on the main strength of the web by trying to label it is as self-perpetuating, machine churning our lies and misinformation. The web and all of its content is valuable because it is not simply an encyclopedia of knowledge, reporting facts as truth. Truth, it has been argues is only relevant when perspective is taken into account anyways - and what the web definitely is - is millions of perspectives on our world.
This point leads nicely into something Anil posted on July 2nd about the atomic nature of individual entries of a weblog. Essentially a weblog, if broken down to its most basic elements, the post or single entry or idea would be the base component. Essentially then the web is simply made up of numerous ideas held together (in some cases loosely) in weblogs or groups of weblogs.
Erik Benson has become some of my favorite writers on the web. With essays such as There Ain't Nothin' On TV and posts like Good Ideas. He is beginning to rank right up there with Todd Levin, of Tremble.com as one of my favorite web writers.
It would be great to combine the thoughtfulness of Benson with the humor of Levin - and of course the link mining of Ben at Magnetbox. I guess the most I can hope for presently is to make a post at all. I really need to get my computer setup at home - not to mention any sort of internet connection there.
Right now I am not holding out much hope for this to happen soon. I have a pending order outstanding with Qwest (i.e. the worst telephone company in the world) and this is the order status I get after loggin in:
The new BlogShares market is up and running - now out of beta and operational. Now I must claim Alt Text:
Anil pointed out one of the slicker web applications I have seen in a while, BrowserCam takes screenshots of any URL you give it in any of the many browser/platform configurations they support (which is a lot). Now you can see what your site looks like in Safari 1.0b on Mac, Konqueror 3.0.5 on Linux, and Netscape 7 on Windows 2000 to name just a few. The best feature however is that the site will create a layered Photoshop file with each platform configuration as a layer so that you can easily see the minor differences in rendering on each.
The pricing is pretty aggressive at $10.00 for up to 10 URLS or $39.95 per month (unlimited use) but it is a very useful tool. Plus there's a free 8-hour trial! (I'm not kidding - I have like 6 hours and 57 minutes left.
Alt Text's current valuation of a paltry $338 on the BlogShares Index is pretty pathetic. It says I have only 4 incoming links which is completely untrue - I have 5. Seriously I have many more than that - the number is only in the hundred's but still.
<Pathetic grovel="Please Help"> I need all you bloggers out there who enjoy my site to help me out. Help me get to the $1000 threshold for going public. If you currently link to me from your site. Visit BlogShares and make sure your site is registered. If your site isn't showing up be sure to have your site pinged by Weblogs.com</Pathetic>
Side note: How can Blogger's valuation be so high: $212437? Is Google goodwill that strong out there?
I am assuming that this is related to the current date. I don't know why it disturbs me so.
No I have been looking for other April Fool's day jokes that sites are playing. But I cannot seem to find too many so far - just some African news outlets getting in on the act.
Here's a possible prank relating to yesterday's post.
Some Requisitioned LinksTM from Kottke.org: Rounded Corners in CSS and Usabilty Myths, Debunked.
While I am on the topic of links and Kottke.org I should commend him in always thinking of the little things that make his site so good to visit. By first creating his "Remaindered Links" list and then moving it over into its own permanent home, Jason has create a slick way to provide much more "content" without the need to comment on each and every link. There are plenty of things I would like to post about or point people to, but I either a) don't have time or b) cannot think of anything that is insightful/hasn't been said before on that topic. These little links and tidbits then tend to just get lost in a seas of draft posts destined to never see the light of page. Kudos Jason - you keep doing the thinking and we'll keep using it.
"How did Tyrannosaurus Rexes even reproduce? I mean, I can't picture them getting it on with out a little death or dismemberment."
--One teenage kid to another on the bus.
Heard In Passing...
From Jish before he disappeared: Reinvingorate is a neat stat tracking package that I too am trying out for a while. I think the real time tracking is a nice feature - it sounds when someone visits your site. I have my own stats program installed on the server of course, but these are nice and would be a great alternative for folks who’s ISP's stats are poor or non-existent.
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If I get any time tomorrow, I plan on working on some new features for the site. I plan on standardizing everything a bit more in terms of how it is presented and where it is stored, and then I plan to update and add content here and there, as well as, redesign the look. Any suggestions?
I am the coolest stud at the MIT univeristy. I hacked an old-school telephone handset on my cell phone. Now I walk around Cambridge MA, looking like a phat pimp!
[link via What Do I Know?]
"Dude, did you just call your girlfriend a router? That's terrible."
"It's not like I said she was a hub in promiscuous mode or something!"
--A girl and a guy talking on Shattuck Ave
[In Passing...]
"It cost $400 to put the stitches in! I don't have health insurance, and I don't have another $400 to get them taken out."
"I'm just saying, man, your own face isn't exactly the best place to start dabbling in cosmetic surgery."
--Two guys at Triple Rock.
[In Passing... again]
I didn't notice that CraigsList had come to Minneapolis. I hope it catches on, right now it is a bit pathetic.
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I am not sure what the fascination is with Home Star Runner but I guess there are a couple of funny bits in there. Particularly in the Strong Bad Email section.
Meg Hourihan posted this today: Weblog as journalism and I was excited to see commentary by one of the minds behind the Lafayette Project, about how weblogs could really serve a purpose in journalism. Instead she used her journalistic qualities to report on breaking news. While I was disappointed not to hear more I am excited about her project and how it could change the way people view both the media and weblogs.
When I first heard the ideas behind the Lafayette Project described to me, my first inclination was to point to sites like BlogDex, Technorati, and DayPop and say "it's been done", however I think there could be bigger things in the work for this project. While I have no real inside information of this project I do hope it brings us down some of the following paths:
Provide an aggregate look at the "hottest" weblog topics in a variety of categories
Allows users to see data associated with all weblogs being "scraped" so that global viewpoints can be ascertained
Provide information in the form of reports of meaningful information back to the producers of weblogs included in the project
Hope it adds something unique and new to the weblog and media scenes, not just remixes of the top weblog lists we have all seen
This is a topic I am very interested in as it pertains to our industry, and thus my vocation, and one of my favorite avocations, weblogging. I hope to make weekly posts about this and related topics as I get more time to sort out my thoughts and ideas (i.e. after my house is done).
...are in order for Jason Kottke for his recent Lifetime Achievement Award (read his acceptance speech) and to Little Yellow Different as the runaway winner of 4 Bloggies including Weblog of the Year.
What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else is an article (actually more of a declaration) by Doc Searls and David Weinberger at World of Ends. The idealist in me loves quotes like these:
...when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.... To connect to the Internet is to agree to grow value on its edges. And then something really interesting happens. We are all connected equally. Distance doesn’t matter. The obstacles fall away and for the first time the human need to connect can be realized without artificial barriers.
The government types who have confused the value of the Internet with the value of its contents could realize that in tinkering with the Internet's core, they're actually driving down its value. In fact, they maybe could see that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open markets in history.
This is actually a pretty interesting read, I would recommend it. [via MagnetBox]
I like ESPN's spirit. The folks over there have always had a sense of adventure and humor. They continually are tweaking and redesigning their site - but it always stays consistent with their messaging and brand. The latest? ESPN Motion.
It's half internet, half television. Some off the finest quality video you've ever seen online... with no buffering EVER.
As soon as new video is ready to view, the clickable ESPN Motion icon will appear in your system tray.
ESPN Motion always keeps the most recent videos available for your viewing and deletes them as new ones come in.
I am not sure what to think of the
required download but the results are pretty nice. The video quality is superb and the feature is integrated very nicely into the rest of the home page. It will be interesting to see if this sort of thing catches on. I would hate to have to download a new little app for every site, however, so let's hope there is some standardization on the way.
I have been using Opera 7 for the past few days and I really like it. It's a lot like Mozilla but without all the crashes. It is very standards compliant. Related: IE 6 seems to be slightly more standards-friendly than its predecessor but I still need workarounds to get CSS to look similar in Mozilla/Opera/IE 6. Ugh!
Ironically, I was planning to post about NASA's newly designed site on Saturday. I even had a post pre-written for the day. NASA has set up this page to distribute info on the crash and the lost crew members. I don't really think I need to say anything more about that.
Though I would like to believe I am watching an anthropological experiments when I watch shows like
Frontier House,
1900 House, and the new BBC production
Surviving the Iron Age, I know they will all soon most closely resemble Jerry Springer. I even have the same dirty feeling after I turn off the set. [
Related site]
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Men's Fitness Magazine recently
ranked Minneapolis, MN as the 11th fittest in the nation, which leads me to believe that we are one fat country. In Minneapolis, according to their findings, people watch less TV than in any other city, and have the highest levels of exercise and sports participation.
This isn't helping
New York's ranking ;)
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Group offers $200 for drug addicted women to be sterilized. [
NY Times]
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I think this is a great idea:
Servas (
U.S. Affiliated site). You can host travelers in your home and build "credit" for when you want to travel. This will resolve a huge issue for me when I travel –not meeting local people and learning about their culture. Tourist attractions are all well and good, but I would like to at least get a small hint of what it would be like to live in the place I am visiting.
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I am primarily linking to
this site now so that I remember the
URL when I actually get around to updating and ranking my Amazon wish lists. The original source of this was
Kottke.org but I do not like Jason's new Weekly remainders idea as the links tend to be gone when I go back to look for them.
The folks over at Sakebomb have worked on the Being John Malkovich website and worked closely with the makers of the new Spike Jonze film, Adaptation in the past. Now they have made a series of short "mockumentaries" about the making of Adaptation - as seen from production assistant, Lloyd Rice. "We asked him again to deliver his journals detailing the experience. We then took these journals, edited them, hired actors, and adapted everything into several mildly-dramatized "behind the scenes" short films for an internet audience." It can all be found here.
There are more photos of the house up in the
Insulation and Drywall gallery. We pick out cabinets this week and pick up the tub for the master bath.
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Froogle, the latest development from
Google is a search engine spcifically for things being sold online. Not the newest idea but when its from Google it makes me think it is going to be much better than the current offerings out there.
I would like to see them add
c|net-like price comparisons at some point - the narrow by price isn't going to cut it.
On a related note, next year is the year I do all my x-mas shopping online. I am very sick of stores. Of course I have been saying the same thing for the past 3 years.
One of the first things I ask someone in my industry (web) when I meet them, is whether or not they have a personal site. I am usually very disappointed when people do not. Most of the time I mentally "mark them down" as someone who isn't very serious about what they do? I mean why wouldn't you have your own site to experiment with and express yourself on, if you were *into* what you were doing. I can see not keeping it up when you get busy, but to not even have a domain or a place you can point me to see some of your work or thoughts? - It's just disheartening.
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I have posted some new
photos of the house building experiment I am a part of. The photos are of days 10-16 (I only count business days) and show the progress (or lack thereof) of completing the foundation, weatherproofing it, and backfilling against the outside walls of it. It is all very exciting stuff. They tell me the framing is supposed to start this week. I guess sub-contractors are like mogwai and can't get rained on lest they turn into gremlins. Framing could be completed next week. Wow.
I can already say that I am not entirely pleased with the house we are building. It is kinda crazy, but we are too far into it to change much and I don't think I will *love* the way the house looks once it is completed (the first phase anyway). This statement is very unfortunate seeing as I am likely going to live in this house for the next decade or more of my life. I am not really sure how it happened - I guess I fell in love with the inside features of the house, then had to scale back on what we could do right away (due in part because of the expense of the lot and in part due to the extreme costs of building a nice* home these days. We just weren't expecting our small little custom home to cost so much to build. Anyway, I am still very excited about the house and all the features we are building into it. If it's ugly for the first half-dozen years of its life then so be it. We are planning an addition at some point in the next 5 years. This may sound ludicrous but we just can't afford to do it all right now and it happened that our house plans could be phased relatively easily and without much waste in the future.
* For my purposes a
nice home is defined as a home that is built with care out of high quality materials and does not fall into the category of home where the builder says "here, pick between these 4 layouts".
Jason
expands on an idea that was
brought up recently by
Justin Hall, and countless others, that personal websites like Alt Text,
Kottke.org, and
Links.net can serve as efficient vehicles for getting to know its owner/operator post haste. This idea is on track and has both positive and negative aspects to it. From reading Justin's site I (and many other people) may feel a little *too knowledgeable* on some aspects of his life. But that is the nature of the web today and always and I wouldn't have it any other way.
It is for this reason that I have been pushing a couple of people I work with to start sites. I enjoy talking to them sure, but I find reading what someone actually "deems worthy" for post on their site very interesting. I can't do much more than buy people their own domain (which I have done) in order to persuade them. At some point the desire to express oneself has to come from within.
On tap for tomorrow: more thoughts on these ideas.
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It has been slow-going on the house building front. They have been waiting to start framing and backfilling against the foundation. We have to decide what general color scheme to use for the house and I really don't know how to decide.
Need to get caught up on the house-building process? Here are some links:
It used to be that working in the web industry was fun and exciting. People didn't know what it was when I told them what I did, and the folks that did had the same energy for what they were doing as I did. Those days are long gone and now there are "mainstream", non-snow boarding types doing web design. These days there are courses at community colleges teaching "web mastering." These days money must be had, and people don't care, and project budgets get smaller, while expectations grow. These days it just isn't as much fun. These days I don't have people I can count on, people who are dedicated as I am. As I am? I am...
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Is the love gone away then? Mostly, yes. For the first time ever I considered shutting down Alt Text - well maybe just an extended hiatus - what, it already isn't on hiatus you say? No, but I am cheating each and every visitor of my site by not being in love with what I do - not being in love with sharing with everyone.
The new look we developed for the new
client website was approved at 4 pm yesterday afternoon. After giving the "go ahead" to develop the site, the client asked that it be completed and launched sometime the next day. Needless to say I wasn't thrilled. The 3 weeks of design revisions/scope creep that led to the designs not being approved until a day before this previously unmentioned deadline wasn't fun. Of course then I went ahead and put the design in place anyway.
This was made possible by the letters "C" for content (being the same as it was and not needing changes), "P" (for the client promising that they will do a "real" redesign soon and that we can fix all the garbage and assorted poor aspects of the site later) and by the number "2" (the number of templates - more or less - that were needed)
It remains to be seen if we can ever get our hands on totally reworking the Galyan's site, but feel free to look at it as is - just remember we didn't get to touch the content (defined here as anything in the white area) this time around.
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Getting my "hands dirty" and coding pages again breathed a much needed life into my work life. I needed that fast-paced, deadline-driven project to get my mind going and in the process my project partner and I came up with some ideas for cool technologies that should be available to us now.
1. The first thing we thought of was a need to be able to compress and optimize different parts of the same image in different ways. I don't necessarily mean that there could be jpg compression in one part while using 16 color gif optimization on another (though that would be nice) - I guess we were just looking for a way for images to be smarter. Good news is the png format is now supported in Mozilla/Netscape and Internet Explorer and so I am going to start using them soon. Watch out now!
2. The second thing we thought would be cool and make QuickTime VR movies more realistic is if you could have layered QuickTime movies where different elements of the scene could be placed at different depths and so would "move" in relation to the viewer at different rates like they would in real live. I think that this could be done - I wonder if anyone has done it yet?
The good ol' days of the web? You can have them again at
DejaVu.org. At Deja Vu you can surf today's sites with yesterdays browsers without all the hassle of installing them on your computer. Through the magic of "emulation" you can surf Yahoo the way... well the way it is still designed to be surfed.. with an old browser. Choose from NCSA Mosaic, Mosaic Netscape, Netscape Navigator (1.0), Lynx, Internet Explorer (2.0), HotJava, and something called a line-mode browser that was even before my time. Pretty cool.
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I am starting a
fund for new computers for the FBI. Yes the largest U.S. investigative bureau in the U.S. is currently using "50's and 70's vintage computers", use no mouses (or is that mice?), and do not have email or internet connectivity, in large part.
I
heard about this on NPR [
Direct link to Real Media file] and was shocked at what I heard. I have computers collecting dust in in my garage that look like supercomputers (are those still fast?) next to the average FBI agent's computer.
So in the interest of national security, please, donate those old 486's and Pentiums now, those poor agents cannot stare at those green monochrome screens much longer. Drop them off at a
field office near you.
I apologize for bringing old news, I have been without internet access at home have stopped watching TV, and do not get the paper. Even so I would have thought
news of a proposed (passed) group of citizen spies equaling nearly 1 in every 24 U.S. citizens would have made it to me somehow. Why wasn't there larger coverage of this in the news media or among bloggers?
The focus of the recruitment efforts for this, STAZI-like new citizen "watchdog group" will be people with regular access to people's homes, businesses, and transport systems -people like mail carriers, utility employees, house cleaners, and truck drivers.
If you have problems with the link above please use
this one.
This is all part of the administration's development of the
Citizen Corps and I just do not like it. Look at that
site, full of propaganda and "patriotic images." The breadth of potential involvement opportunities is unnerving. I can imagine neighbors reporting neighbors, or old women reporting "those suspicious people with darker skin" and I fear that not much is going to come from this that will be beneficial- just more fear, suspicion, and less community among neighbors.
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I was quite surprised to hear it when an otherwise rational, mostly intelligent (except of r that whole Republican thing) friend of mine told me that the closest thing he has to religion is what he sees on the
John Edward show. He was actually planning to fly to the show to be on it - to surmise if it was real or not.
Now, this friend of mine claimed Mr. Edward doesn't do the whole "pshycic"-asking-vague-quesstion thing. But my research into him tells me otherwise.
This article covers an appearance on Larry King Live in which Mr. Edward uses the tried and true "I am getting an 'S' or maybe a 'T' type thing. I just cannot respect his "powers", sorry Jeff.
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A family was kicked off a plane for asking if the pilots were sober. [from
MetaFilter]
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It seems the folks working on
MIT's Blogdex project are remaining busy. I don't know how long they have been working on the
Social Network Explorer, but it seems that it is still a work in progress. It is somewhat interesting though with the whole concepts of "friends" of sites and then recommendations for surfers based on those friends most likely.
Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy is now available on DVD. So is
Kids In The Hall - Same Guys, New Dresses
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I like many things about the
new concepts created for the site of the World Trade Center towers, (nice little site by the way) but I do not think they are being imaginative enough with the high rise buildings. Maybe you can't be, but I would like to see some structures that are as fanciful as the name "skyscraper". That being said, I like the
Square &
Garden concepts best for the structures and the
Plaza and
Triangle concepts for the use of garden/plaza/park space.
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The micro machines shown in
these photos are no toys - they are much cooler. They are being shown next to tiny mites to show just how small they are.
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HIV muppet causes Republicans across the U.S. to grab their bibles and start condemning them thar bad people with the HIV. They should first try to understand the situation in South Africa. South Africa alone it is estimated that in 2002, 300,000 people will die of AIDS" and "40 percent of women of child-bearing age there are infected with HIV". Of course if lawmakers gave a damn (read: if this epidemic was in Europe or not concentrated among Africans the racist right might actually care to spend some of their recently insider-traded money to help the situation) there may not be such a desperate situation now.
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MoveOn.org has
published information on the
President's Vice-President's finances. Some things seem a bit shady. There is of course the making of over $36 million in the year 2000 but also the fact that the minimum size of the "accounting irregularities" that occurred while Cheney was CEO was $100,000,000.
[All of the previous links were found at
MetaFilter and reposted here as real live content]
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After years of promises that the oil refineries built on their land would benefit all the citizens of Escravos, Nigeria but seeing none of those promises come to fruition, hundreds of Nigerian women storm 4 Chevron stations and hold them until more jobs we given to local workers and improvements to the living conditions in nearby villages were made. [Story from
Yahoo News]
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After reviewing my own stats I am convinced that designing and developing for IE 5 and up and Mozilla 1.0 (5.0) and up is the correct decision.
Google's June browser distribution info further bolsters my view. Their
stats on operating systems make me feel like not spending too much time testing for Macs either but for the fact that many of my friends in the "online community" are using them. Plus I do respect Macs a bit more now that OS X is in wider use. From what I have seen it is a huge improvement over all other operating systems out there with the possible exception of XP (I still like XP's interface much better - but don't get me started on its layer-over-layer, outdated architecture it still uses)
With that said I am doing some housekeeping and you may notice some minor changes to the Alt Text. You may also notice the similarity between some of my modifications and some that
Jason has made. I swear these are mostly coincidental.
I would like to go on record that
Mozilla is now my default browser. All I have to say to defend myself is: tabbed browsing is da bomb.
[Web stat images from
Google Zeitgeist]
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In other news Alt Text and Amazon.com were finally able to put an end to their hostilities. With Amazon's announcement that it is opening its
new web services, essentially allowing developers and site publishers from using Amazon's data in ways that better fits their needs. This doesn't erase all past wrongs (especially as far as their patent stances go) but it does go a long way towards opening things up a bit. Plus it is really hard to hate them while admiring their site for so long.
UPDATE: There has already been a new site created that looks and acts like
Google but has all the data of
Amazon: meet
Amazon Light
Geeky quotes form IRC and instant messaging software are fun.
This site's QDB (Quote Database Home) is a collection of such quotes. Here are
some of the top quotes. Some are really funny. Some, I am thankful, I do not understand.
Some favorites:
one,
two,
three,
four,
bonus
These remind me a bit of
this AIM conversation that I posted last year.
Alt Text has been included as one of 10 weblogs in a study/project in developing an open source search tool called
latent semantic indexing (LSI). From what I have seen it is pretty promising. Some of the results may not contain the keywords you entered, but use the LSI algorithm to determine relevancy based on like words and topics.
There are still some holes in it as it is in development. It works with keywords only - there are no phrase searches allowed. Words that appear in only one post are not indexed, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, but it is a very cool idea that I hope spreads.
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My dad on
President W's recent surgery: "They are looking for his head."
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Electric SUV coming (to California) from Toyota
Here are some links I was too busy/lazy to post about throughout the week:
It would be very interesting to see
this on a PC.
EtherPeg is quite a cool idea. A
Linux version called Driftnet (though done independently was made too.
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Fingerprint readers flawed says study. They can be fooled with $10 of supplies and a little bit of work.
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Is
this the new dating scene? "Honey look over there. Don't we know that pair of pasties from college?"
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URLizer.com will turn those long unruly links into shorter unruly links suitable for sending in emails. [Source:
broomeman.com]
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How to Piss Me Off 101: Lesson 3:
Bring in a corporate mentor consultant type to have us "bring 5% more awareness to our feelings".
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I know that this site:
The Rainforest Site is lame but if they really can really preserve 11.4 square feet of rainforest each day I click, from the fools they sell banner ad space to, then more power to them. [Related, of course, are
The Hunger Site and
The Breast Cancer Site]
Minnesota is set to be the battleground for one of the biggest election fights in state history. Senator Paul Wellstone is the
primary target [Source:
Cursor.org] for republican money and power. Oh yeah and there is a person (albeit a slimy one) running against him too: Norm Coleman. There are only a few politicians I despise more than Coleman. This man will do and say anything to get elected and he is just so damn fake.
Conversely there are few politicians I admire more than Paul Wellstone. Being a target isn't new to him. Many have sought to take his seat and all the republicans on the hill hate him, not only for his stances on the issues (usually very far to the left) but for the fact that he knows how to win on those issues. He has held up and successfully blocked very conservative legislation and through it all he does what he knows is right rather than what polls or big business money says he should do.
If you live in Minnesota, I encourage you to make sure your voter's registration is current and that you get out and vote for
Paul this fall. Even if you think he is too far to the left on many issues (as I do) it doesn't matter because there are plenty of other politicians that have migrated towards the middle - too many if you ask me. I think our leaders should be strong and have ideas, rather than always cow tailing to the special interest groups with the loudest voices/deepest pockets.
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Ads.com is a poor man's
Ad Critic but, if
Ad Critic comes back and isn't free it may be the common man's only place to check out the latest commercials out there.
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I don't know why but it bothers me when friends of mine and/or people whom I work making websites with, do not have sites of their own or do not maintain them anymore (you know who you are). I am not sure why this bothers me - or at least I cannot pinpoint it. Maybe it's that they should be more excited about the medium they are helping to build or maybe it is that I think they are interesting and want to know more about them, or that I think others should be able to experience their humor and wit, or maybe I just need someone to link to when they send me something to post on Alt Text. Maybe it is a combination of all of these or something else entirely.
I wonder if my current employer would pay my tuition to the
Adult Webmaster School. Yes this is a real thing. You can learn from the best because this guy has "sat down with the best webmasters in the world". Who are they? But the AWS seems very trustworthy. After all, "AWS is a legitimate learning institution with textbooks, other students, and a faculty consisting of highly-skilled Adult Webmasters". Look ma textbooks!
From the site:
"Becoming an Adult Webmaster is a great career, especially once you realize you're literally getting paid to look at porn! Plus, no bosses breathing down your neck, no commuting to work, no more wasting the rest of your life. Imagine making a salary equivalent to a doctor or lawyer, without the stuffy office and the daily 9 - 5 grind."
First thing I would ask is if I could get back pay for the "work" I have already done.
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Also I apologize for the server outage this morning, construction workers or someone had to shut off power to our servers for some reason.
I would like to see more Flash used in this way: A neat "broadband documentary",
Becoming Human makes use of still photography and voiceovers in a way a documentary movie would, but at a fraction of the bandwidth "cost".
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After the 29th, if you see the
The Fellowship of the Ring (again) you will also be able to see the preview for the next movie,
The Two Towers, due out in December. In all time box office news, I see it coming in 6th (edging out Harry Potter), all time for US box office returns (About $330 million) and as high as 4th all time on the worldwide box office chart with a total near $920 million.
I will be offering up a more thorough review of the 2002 SXSW interactive (and film) conference, hopefully, this weekend. Until then I can update everyone on the status of my home building. Right now the blue prints are being drafted. I will post the preliminary plans tomorrow for all to see.
Until then you can amuse yourself at the new
Google News search site.
It's quarter to 3 in the morning and I have just returned from "breakfast" with some very interesting people. Prior to breakfast, I was able to attend a party with some more interesting people at a very nice house and as a result, I am pretty "happy"*.
Up until today (wait...yesterday) I hadn't been feeling too good about the conference, but today - hearing Josh Davis and talking with many good people, I was really energized and feel I am ready to return to Minneapolis with a new sense of purpose. I plan on really throwing myself into my job and giving myself to the tasks at hand. In addition, I hope to work harder on personal projects and get some things I have been planning for months, out the door. But my enthusiasm isn't confined to the web.
In
a post a couple days ago, I was lamenting the problems I have been having in maintaining and starting friendships. Then I get an email from
Brent reminding me of
this post at
kottke.org (your site for inspiration) stating: "The only way to make a good friend is to be a good friend."
This is really true and I realized that I need to be a better friend to people. So don't act weird if I call you up out of the blue, or invite you out.
* Happy in the traditional sense yes, but also in the sense that I have imbibed 7 beers/wine/drinks and also a capful or two of Vicks NyQuill - oh yeah.
Do you think there sometimes are events that happen that are meant to help us? I am not sure from where this help is issued, but it certainly seems unlikely that coincidences are simply that. Case in point. After returning home from
Fray Cafe (photos), I was sitting at my computer attempting to add captions to some of the photos I had taken. In particular I was trying to remember the name of the guy who runs
praystation.com. Now of course I knew his name, but it was just slipping my mind. I had just heard him and dozens of others tell stories from their past, it was 2am and I may not have been altogether "with it". I was just sitting there in my underwear, in front of the computer, ESPN on in the background, trying to focus and remember the name on the tip of my tongue, when the sportscaster on ESPN tells me, Josh Davis. Of course he was speaking about a collegiate basketball player from Wyoming,
Josh Davis, or was he? Maybe he was speaking directly to me in that moment of consternation I was feeling - not remembering a name I knew I knew. The world may never know.
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Up until this week I had visited
praystation.com and enjoyed the content with a
but. It is is pretty,
but, it's not functional. This is cool,
but, not very usable. Wow that is remarkable,
but, not very practical. I had heard of Joshua Davis but knew little of him. I created a picture of him that was similar to that I have of the various skate/snow boarding, young web designers I have met in my day, but I wasn't prepared for what Josh actually was like and the life he has and is living. I wasn't prepared for him to be my new *hero*.
In his 31 years (much older than I thought he would be) Joshua has done many things and had many experiences. He has been addicted to heroin, been a sponsored skateboarder, had conversations with Buddhist monks, traveled all over the world speaking about the web and design, is an exhibited artist, and on occasion has been a professional cross dresser. All of these things have coalesced to make Joshua Davis a unique and interesting individual, but these things are not why he is my hero. No, it is his attitude, sense of humor, and my new-found understanding of what he is going for when he makes his art, his sites. I may go into this more in future posts or may not. You could ask me more and I will expound or you could go to
praystation.com and find out more.
I like Austin - it has some dirt under its nails. It isn't uptight about how it is perceived, it just
is. Its people maybe aren't as nice as in Minneapolis but they aren't mean either.
Having just returned from Fray Cafe 2 (photos coming tomorrow) I am pretty tired (it's 2 am) and so will not write long here. I will say that if I ever go to Fray Cafe again (like for next year's SXSW) I have promised myself I will share a story.
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Some random observations, comments, absurdities:
What would be the reaction one would have to overdosing on children's chewable vitamins? I ask this for no reason - there is no proof of a problem lest you count the half empty bottle of Flintstones vitamins here in my hotel.
Do you think people - once they leave college and maybe work in their first job - do you suppose that they determine that they have made all the friends they are going to make and sort of put a cap at that number? Maybe the reasoning being that additional friendships will be more work then they are good and it would then be too hard to maintain all of those friendships? I guess I always felt that I would continue to make friends throughout my life but somehow it seems much harder than it used to be to start friendships. Damn its even hard for me to hold conversations it seems. It wasn't always this way. At least I am pretty sure it wasn't.
I don't have a lot of time to post my thoughts and stories of SXSW just yet but here are
some photos of the happenings here in Austin.
You could also check out
So New Media a Ben Brown venture.
This
new show, The Osbournes looks to be pretty funny. I may have to remind TiVO to record it.
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T-minus 4 days until
SXSW gets underway. Be sure not to look at me too weirdly if I come up to you and say I love your site. I will be staying at the Homestead Austin - Downtown at 507 S. First St. Look me up or call me (512-476-1818) if you have a hankering (I have to start talkin' like a Texan)
What happened to
AdCritic? They can't make enough money to pay for their massive hosting and bandwidth needs is what happened. I have a solution. Charge a membership fee of $2 per year and weed out the casual viewer. I would happily pay a small fee for such great content.
I am contemplating taking on some additional work in the coming months and also thinking about actually trying my hand at building up a content-oriented site. I know that is a very bad idea and has been proven not to work with solely ad revenue but I like the subject matter and have some "extra time" right now.
I like
this site.
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Stop Outlook from rendering HTML email that is sent to you with this
handy plug-in. [Source:
Camworld]
Count me among the unimpressed with the unveiling of IT/Ginger/
Segway. It is not really that the new device is not cool. I am sure after riding it I would be impressed by it. It's just that you cannot hype something to the extent that this was hyped and then unveil a new scooter for lazy people. I want it to run on hydrogen, to hover, or otherwise be revolutionary as was promised. Unfortunately, from what
I have seen, this looks very evolutionary to me. [Source:
Kottke although I would have posted about this today anyway.]
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Also from Jason today is a reminder that
corporations and partnerships are stupid.. Apparently the accounting/consultancy firm
KPMG does not like people
linking to
them without permission. When will these folks learn what the Internet is for?
After what seemed like years of waiting for
The Tick to hit primetime TV, I am now officially disappointed in the first 2 episodes. They simply are not playing as well in live action as they did in animated format. Despite my loving PATRICK WARBURTON Patrick Warburton in the title role I just do not find it very funny yet. I am still going to give it some more chances to get the kinks ironed out, I just hope Fox does too. I remember many shows that were never appreciated until they were gone (New Radio, My So Called Life, Cop Rock :P )
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After watching and enjoying the original
Iron Chef shows I could tell people were going to be sorely disappointed. The elements from the original that make it great are the ridiculous voice-overs and the stoic chefs doing crazy things. The Japanese are just plain weird, they don't have the hang-ups that their American counterparts do. I was hopeful with Bill Shatner being cast but I just knew they couldn't pull it off. Too bad.
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I just beat the buzzer for registration for
SXSW yesterday. Sure you can still sign up but now it will cost you a bit more. I will be attending the Interactive and much of the Film festivals and will be in Austin from Thursday March 7th to Wednesday the 13th. Please let me know if you plan on being down there, I would love to meet you.
I tend to think that a corporation that is asking for donations to maintain the viability of their product is a tad ludicrous. I think that the people who may be donating their own money to help out
Pyra labs' Blogger product would be vehemently opposed to paying additional taxes to keep a professional sports team in their home town, but this is the very same thing.
What kind of company cannot raise $5000 to buy new servers, anyway?! A company that is going to be around in a year? I think not. No offense is meant to any of the good people working at Pyra. I think they have a good product; would I donate money for that product to stay afloat a little while longer? Probably not. I would probably start looking for a new product.
~~~
Can Russia afford to build an
underwater tunnel between Siberia and Alaska? It looks like they are going to try. Prediction: they'll get 1/4 of the way through and we'll have to pick up the tab to complete it. Wouldn't it be cool to travel from the tip of South America to the South end of Africa? [from
slashdot]
The "Everywhere Network" in an article at Forbes.com. UC Berkley researchers trying to come up with a truly distributed internet solution - a web without firewalls.
Well that
dotcomguy debacle is finally over. Like anyone noticed.
Is this going to far?
.com All Ye Faithful - a theatrical play with a .com in it?
Did you get a load of the
CitySearch site. It is a real good example of a design taking a step backwards.
~~~
I have been reading a lot of fiction lately and it has inspired me to begin writing once again. Those who knew me in high school, knew that I was actually a pretty gifted writer. Unfortunately, those of you who have known me since or read this site, know that is not always the case. Spelling and grammar aside, I just haven't felt very creative in my writings on the web for some reason.
I am hoping to change that. I am going to write some short stories soon that I may or may not publish to this site. We'll see.
This very true commentary is from
The Onion... The Onion is funny.
"AOL Acquires Time-Warner In Largest-Ever Expenditure Of Pretend Internet Money
DULLES, VA--In the largest merger of imaginary assets in corporate history, Internet giant America Online last week acquired media megacorp Time-Warner for an unprecedented $161 billion in pretend money. "This merger will revolutionize the way invisible amounts of non-existent cash are transferred," said Steve Case of AOL, a company whose actual revenues are a tiny fraction of its make-believe valuation. In an effort to keep pace with AOL, website blairwitchproject.com is expected to acquire General Motors sometime later this week."
~~~
Also, if you are using Netscape, stop. Its for your own good. Sites load faster and look better in Internet Explorer.
In the somewhat old news category:
Wouldn t it be great if you had a great domain such as coke.com, or newyorkyankees.com? Think of the traffic, think of the exposure, think of the money! Think again. Because Coke and the Yankees are thinking of those things as well, and now so are the US District Courts.
Here s a Wired Article about this.
More later, hopefully.
So I guess a bunch of merchants, companies and government agencies are shutting down their sites this weekend or already have. Here are the cowards I could find:
Got more?
Please let me know
The lunacy of the precautionary disconnect is so great that I am surprised there aren't mass suicides by IT leaders across the globe. Because you know there was weeks of memos and discussions directed to "management" from the heads of IT at all of these companies attempting to explain why the site going down is a dumb idea. Then management reads an article in Forbes about security and mandates that everyone turn the power off on their computers throughout the company. Hadley!
Here's an article about the precautionary disconnect.
And just remember, there's a whole year left in the 20th century so don't buy into all this 21st century crap just yet. I hate Y2K hype.
And for everyone's (well at least geeks) pleasure here is the freshest "yo mama" joke I have heard in a while:
Yo momma's so fat she makes emacs look like pico!
I guess it could be considered a sad commentary on me but some commercials are like art to me. When I found this site I was thrilled:
adcritic.com
If a domain name or two is on anyones shopping list, don't wait in lines and pay more than you have to at Network Solutions. Get your domains at
IDR for only $60 for 2 years.
If you are into trademark searches check out the government's search site get your @ss trademarked before some big company does.
this site is the sake bomb. Funny shit if you have time to explore it.
DotComGuy is a true opportunist. He is moving into an empty house January 1st with only a laptop and a credit card and not leaving it for a year.
Read more about it.
the subconscious stirs
I have regained some feeling for the web lately and am working on several redesign efforts. Look for a new strategic direction for all "my" web "properties": Aberratum,
Alt Text,
Rear View,
Red Couch
epinions. do it. please, for your own good.
Other news (well psuedonews). This site will be going away in its current form soon and be replaced with something different. (and more spellable) I hope it will also be more easily updateable and interesting to all, too.
I am getting so sick of the web. I am tired of journals and weblogs (what the fuck is the difference! I am sick of "e" and commercials about companies that don't even make money. I am fed up with
epinions, ecommerce,
and ebay.
I am tired of using 216 colors, and looking at the world through a 600 x 400 pixel box. I am tired of dithering and aliasing, and verdana. I am bored by the "web-culture" out there, and of clients choosing the worst designs.
I am soo over this site and all my sites and
all my friends' sites
I am tired of ranting and I know I feel like this every once and a while.
I need something to fall in love with again. I need to work outside of the industry for a while. I need to get time for my own thoughts and ideas to grow and evolve. I need the kick in the ass to really learn the programs I used often. I need inspiration to take that first damn art class.
I need to quit my bitching.
