Archive.
Thursday, September 28, 2000 Link
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Blame It on the Cube? Remember all the doomsday journalists who used to predict Apple's downfall like clockwork? Well, I think I finally figured out where they all went. They became day traders. Venomous, sore-head day traders who are miffed because Apple is having ups and down like a real company. What a bunch of idiots.
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau died today. Fuddle duddle?
Not Your Average Day: A play in five acts. Feathers are ruffled. Glares are exchanged. Positions are clarified. Arbitration is summoned. Understanding, enlightenment, and calm prevails.
Wednesday, September 27, 2000 Link
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I received an email tonight clarifying the lineage of Avaya, which of course has been freshly spun-out of Lucent. I poked a bit deeper into the Avaya site, wondering if any light could be shed on the name. Here's what I found on their About Our New Name page:
It sets us apart and captures what we're doing with the company - becoming independent, being focused on enterprise customers and going forward. The name has a certain flair to it that says action, that says we're new, we're different.
International focus groups told us Avaya sounds like a company that's agile, open-minded, spirited, fun. They said it suggested ease, speed, energy and seamless connection.
The name sounds simple, open and fluid; syllables flow into one another effortlessly. Linguists call this kind of word a word with no stops. Not a bad anthem for a company dedicated to breaking down the barriers between people, between people and content, between our customers and their customers, between platforms and applications, between the technology of the past and the solutions of the future.
Our logo is a word mark formed of letters that relate smoothly, echo and enhance one another, and move fluidly from the first letter to the last. The "V" gives the name a lively, vigorous sound, quick and precise. We chose a bright, strong red as our signature color both to announce our arrival in a commanding voice and to honor our Lucent Technologies heritage.
Our name is Avaya; the word "Communication" is a descriptor that we're using initially to help define what we do. It is not "communications" plural, which denotes technology, systems, or networks. It is "communication" singular, which emphasizes human relationships and rapport - since we help businesses build better relationships with their customers and others.
Like I said before, all the good domain names were already taken.
After the initial swing by the Adobe legal team, a punchdrunk Macromedia has filed patent infringement counterclaims against Adobe relating to features included in Illustrator and Premier. And so the intellectual property rumble continues by the corporate bike racks. I can't blame Macromedia for protecting their interests, but this battle is starting to sound like a digital pissing contest. Do any of the customers that use the products of these two companies even care?
Our current Nortel Networks Meridian phone system has apparently outlived its usefulness and is being replaced by some whiz-bang new installation unfortunately named Avaya Intuity Audix, which I'm pretty sure is Latin for "all the good domain names were taken". In just a short while I get to attend a ninety minute "mandatory telephone training" session. Ninety minutes! Let me explain how I use a phone. I pick up the receiver. I dial a number. It rings. Someone answers. I say hello. Period. Personally, I don't think I require ninety minutes to learn how to interact at that level with a telephone. If I do, it's a problem with the phone, not me.
Tuesday, September 26, 2000 Link
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What To Do When The Kernel Panics A simpleton's guide to handling cryptic errors that Mac OS X will inevitably puke all over the flummoxed UNIX newbie. And don't you just love saying "flummoxed UNIX newbie"?
My apologies to all four of the people out there who have been waiting ever so patiently for my submission to the Behind The Curtain project to be available. Well, pack up your restless anticipation in your old kit bag and smile. Here, in all of its bitmapped glory: a day in the life of me (the abridged version).
Monday, September 25, 2000 Link
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Today my wife realized - somewhat out of the blue - that we never received a renewal notice for our house and contents policy from our insurance company. Wondering whether or not we were still covered, she called them and discovered that they had no record of our file. Within an hour, she had arranged a new policy through the Alberta Motor Association, who even have a discount because we live less than two blocks from a fire station. Chalk it up to the mergers and acquisitions trend. Our brokered policies were actually with a company that was absorbed into another conglomerate. It's no wonder that our records got lost in the mix. This excerpt from a form letter we received at the beginning of the year shows what was happening behind the scenes:"On December 30, 1999, The GAN Insurance Company was amalgamated with Traders General Insurance Company, another subsidiary of CGU Group Canada Ltd. and has continued under the name Traders General Insurance Company. The amalgamated company, Traders General Insurance Company, has assumed all policies of GAN Canada Insurance Company and is liable for all of its obligations."
Apparently their obligations didn't include keeping customer records in the correct filing cabinet. We probably would have laughed off this whole situation if it hadn't already happened a couple of months ago with our automotive insurance renewal and the same company. We're moving that policy over to our new insurer tomorrow.
Sunday, September 24, 2000 Link
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Yes, some young entrepreneurial soul in New Zealand has used one of the suggestions from my domain name of the week page for good and not evil. They've launched a free web hosting site called Crash Happy which also happens to have a loosely tethered weblog entitled Thought Juice - another fine domain name from my list. Apparently the requirements for posting on this particular weblog include poor spelling, optional punctuation, mandatory use of the word "cool", and ownership of at least one disc by The Moffatts. It reads more like a fanzine chat session than a multi-contributor online journal. Oh well, always glad to be of service in some capacity.
Busy weekends are great things, but they also mean that my site gets updated only when every other commitment has been met. Spare time has been tight seeing that yesterday evening we had some friends over for dinner, tonight we're feeding and kibitzing with a passle of family, and I finally finished putting up the new baseboards in what will soon be the computer room. I was getting close to having a bit of free time hoping to work on my Behind The Curtain submission later tonight, but I just realized that I left all of the images from my digital camera on the server at work. Bummer.
Friday, September 22, 2000 Link
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Vision Command is a programmable digital camera that adds pattern recognition and visual motion sensing capabilities to your existing Lego Mindstorms set. Come on, you always dreamed of having your own automated brick sorting machine. It sure would have come in handy when your little sister dumped that bucket of bricks down the basement stairs when you were a kid. Well, now you can actually build it yourself, completely out of Lego.
Thursday, September 21, 2000 Link
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Simplicity itself. Now you too can build icons for Mac OS X using only basic tools such as a Power Mac G4, your favorite stock photography resource, a flatbed scanner, and Strata Studio Pro. Cripes. What ever happened to using a fatbits editor? I know, I'm starting to show my age. But, it just spins my head to think that a single 128x128 icon in OS X consumes approximately 50 percent more data space than my Apple II had RAM. And that was after a 16K upgrade. It's just boggling.
New rule to live by: Take something home every day. This guideline has developed out of my need to reduce the mountain of crap I have collected in my office over the past 12 years. Actually, crap is really not the right word from my perspective. A much better description would be "amazingly useful stuff I can't bare to see tossed away that most other people would consider crap". Ultimately, I am striving towards the goal of getting all of my shit in one bucket. Here's how it's been going this week:Monday: took home six back issues of the German design magazine Page, three copies of Design Graphics magazine from Australia, and the vintage Mac IIcx that used to serve this site
Tuesday: off went the prototype BeBox enclosure
Wednesday: grabbed a two-foot DB-9 to DIN serial cable that had mysteriously appeared on my desk one day, and an extra Newton power adapter I forgot I had lying around
Thursday: the Macintosh Quadra 840av without the floppy and hard drive bought at our last company equipment auction that has been sitting on top of my filing cabinet for the past several months, and my speaker's notes for The Web Reality Tour talk I gave in the fall of 1998
I also recycled a foot high stack of magazines, catalogs, and assorted bits of outdated corporate paper storm particles. The success of this plan is dependent on not only maintaining the flow out of the office, but also restricting the intake of fresh acquisitions. I'm not going cold turkey, but I am trying to be more persnickety about what I accept. I think Mike is getting a bit frustrated at the number of times he has offered me a prime piece of dump-fodder, only to have his generosity kindly kiboshed. I mean, do I really need three more unshielded VGA extension cables? Probably not.
You can tell it's the last day of summer here in Calgary. When I looked out the bedroom window this morning, I saw snow. Not much snow mind you, but snow nonetheless. On the lawn. On the cars. On the roofs. It'll be gone by mid-morning, and the sun is starting to beat its way through the low overcast right now, but it's still a bit depressing. However, not to be bullied into a sense of helplessness by the abrupt (and in my opinion, extremely premature) change in the weather, I still wore my shorts today.
Tuesday, September 19, 2000 Link
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Fumbling through my referrer log today, I found this site. Maybe it's just me, but it appears to have a blog layout reasonably similar to something I've seen before.
Driving to work this morning, I spotted a small hawk dipping and diving with great abandon over the three lanes of traffic flowing into the downtown core. Its style of flight reminded me of the swallows that lived in the silt hills and flew over the lake near our family cabin years ago. What amazed me while I watched with one eye on the bird and the other on the traffic, was the agility and nimbleness at which it was able to change direction mid-flight. Then I looked down at my speedometer. I was travelling at nearly 100 kph, and the hawk was keeping pace with the traffic. Incredible.
Monday, September 18, 2000 Link
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A note from my daughter found stuck on my monitor.
Let me explain. Molly is eight years old. She edits scans in Photoshop. She manages her site with GoLive. She drags and drops between applications without blinking. She surfs using multiple browser windows. She downloads and plays MP3s in the background. I haven't given her FTP access to my server yet.
Patent different. Apple Licenses Amazon's 1-Click
Dash it all. The Justification for Hyphenation
I've suddenly realized that the vast majority of my work day is simply not worth documenting. This will make for an extremely mimimalist series of images for my Behind The Curtain submission. Then again, maybe that's the point.
Sunday, September 17, 2000 Link
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I don't know why I didn't mention this sooner. Tomorrow I'll be shooting my little heart out for the Behind The Curtain: A day in the life of webloggers project. Oddly enough, even though I'm trained in photography and actually made a decent living at it before the software industry bit me in the butt, I've been rather nervous about producing a decent set of images worthy of displaying as part of this shindig. The nervousness generally subsides when I look back at all the crap I've plugged into this weblog over the past several months. If I haven't had any qualms about the quality of my text, why the hell start worrying about the quality of the visuals? At the very least, I promise I will have something reasonably interesting to show you next Sunday when all of the participants publish their pixels.
Saturday, September 16, 2000 Link
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I keep nearly everything. Obsolete computer hardware, software that only ever existed on 5.25" floppies, back issues of magazines, scrap lumber, and every pair of Converse Chuck Taylor high tops I have worn since 1980. People around me know this, and in some cases are moderately frightened by it. Applying this strange habitual behavior to the web, I have kept copies of every piece of HTML I have ever marked up, every Photoshop source file, and practically every directory structure iteration of every site I have ever worked on. Perhaps this is why I felt a tinge of helplessness when I read this Technology Review article entitled In Search of Webs Past."Think of the Web as an enormous, slow hard disk. Shared by the entire world, this disk holds a record of radical media experimentation, the history of a form that sprang up less than a decade ago to infect popular consciousness and transform the way we use information. Yet despite a few archival projects, no one is backing up our collective disk."
In a world obsessed with instancy, dynamism, and renovation, thank goodness folks like Zeldman are sauntering over to the digital tool shed, picking out a suitable spade, and digging through their old backups like so much code compost. Posting old pages for the public to gawk over requires a fair bit of courage, and an ability to resist the embarrassment of past designs. Maybe I'm still as attached to previous accomplishments as much as I am intrigued by new opportunities. Believe it or not, old stuff still has value. You just need to present it in context.
Friday, September 15, 2000 Link
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The office move went reasonably smooth. I have my main G3 Mac and this web server both up and honking. My scanning station is back together as well but since only two of the four network jacks are functioning right now, its a lone soul. I'm leaving my PC on the floor until Monday, and then I'll attempt to wrangle up another couple of network connections for my Newton and BeBox. The other thing I'm missing is my paper recycling bin. Some nogoodnik snarfed it, I'm sure. One positive thing about the move... I'm next door to the water cooler. One negative thing... I'm feeling extremely displaced. I hope it feels better come the new work week.
Thursday, September 14, 2000 Link
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What the heck happened to Apple's ResEdit Tech Note? All of a sudden, poof! It's gone! In fact, searches for ResEdit-specific documents on both the Software Updates and Tech Info Library sites come up bupkiss. I guess the infamous resource editor finally got a bit too long in the tooth, and Apple dusted it. You can still dig it up from Apple's FTP archive, but now there's no supporting documentation. How are the youngsters ever going to learn how to finagle their system file now?
Everything you ever wanted to know about User Interface Markup Language. UIML is an XML-derived language that defines the structure of individual interface elements and controls rather than the structure of the document itself. Via xblog
Got some spare time to tinker? Why not get Mac OS X running on an 680x0 Mac? I think I smell a full weekend project coming on. Some of the things to watch out for while attempting this Frankensteinian software upgrade? Apple 12" monitors will fry on startup due to the Quartz environment resetting the video resolution, and running Quark Xpress will erase the boot volume hard disk driver. Ah, but these are small prices to pay for the overwhelming satisfaction of proving a point.
After a brief fifteen minute disconnect, we're back up and serving. Now you can sit back and enjoy the new view. By the way, if you happen to see one of those people who are moving the furniture around tonight do anything odd, please take a screen grab of the grantcam and let me know. Won't they be surprised when they find out they've been bloggerized?
As you can tell by the current view from the grantcam, I've been busy today packing up my enormous pile of crap. The contents of the Ivar shelving unit and my four drawer file cabinet alone filled up twenty four standard issue moving crates. I'll be able to move this server over to my new corner later this afternoon, hopefully only being offline for an hour or so. But never fear... I'll string a line of Cat 5 across the floor back to the server room myself if I have to.
Wednesday, September 13, 2000 Link
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We started using BBEdit 6.0 in the shop today. Two minor things have cropped up causing us to retool our daily coding rituals. BBEdit now requires the Mac OS 9 keychain feature in order to save FTP server passwords. I understand the need to improve the security for this part of the program, but it means an OS upgrade if we want to talk advantage of it. Bummer. The other issue is that the new, robust syntax coloring of attributes within HTML tags simply makes my eyes hurt. At least we can tweak it preferences, but the default settings are amazingly unusable. Other than that, no other complaints so far. I'll be posting stuff we like about BBEdit very soon.
Three words. Want Key Lime.
Now, how about a topic which is completely unrelated to anything else I've blathered on about over the past few weeks? You see, I had this dream last night. In this dream, I was with a small group of people in a room that I can only describe as generically institutional. A door, at what felt like the south end of the room, opens and in walks Andy Partridge. (Yes, that Andy Partridge, of XTC fame. It could not have been anyone else. Really.) Andy says, with a devilishly crooked grin, "Take a look at all the great CDs I just bought..." and proceeds to dig through a plastic bag stuffed with what appears to be about 30 or 40 jewel cases. I ask Andy if I can listen to one of them, and he hands me one that has obviously already been opened and played, because the shrink wrap has been removed. At this point in the story, I really wish I could remember the title of the CD he handed me, because in my mind the cover art was extremely familiar. At any rate, I look dejectedly upon the CD in my hand and say to Andy, "But I've already listened to this one..."
Arguably one of the best things that Apple has managed to accomplish over the last few years was to poke, prod, and otherwise dissect its entire operating system strategy. Out of this examination came the whole technological circus train of NeXT, Rhapsody, Yellow Box, Carbon, Mac OS X, Cocoa, and of course Aqua. Regardless of the need to eliminate the chewing gum and baling wire holding together the current operating system and actually build a stable, buzzword-compliant foundation from scratch, Apple really should have treaded a bit lighter when overhauling the interface. OS X: Our New War finally voices something that I have been thinking about for a long time about the lickable, but not necessarily likable, new user experience."The interface is what I work in, and it's the reason I stuck behind the Mac even in the dark days. And still do. With Aqua, Apple has removed 15 years of progress and started afresh. They've put us 10 years behind, and now, we have to climb that mountain all over again."
Even with all of the differences in the system architecture and the alien (at least to most Mac users) UNIX underpinnings, a subtler, transitional interface would make migration to OS X more seamless and less painful. I've used a Mac for sixteen years (and before that, a Lisa) and the current experience that Aqua affords me is disorienting and awkward at best. Yes, I can adjust and adapt (and I will), but the point is that I haven't actually been forced to adjust or adapt significantly when upgrading to any previous Mac system software. Mac OS X, in its current state, is not a operating system that I could recommend to people if they have never used a Mac before. To be honest, neither is Windows, but that's another ball of wax. Even the existing iteration of the classic Mac OS is not as simple as it should be for a beginner (like my Dad for instance), but it's a heck of lot friendlier than OS X.
It's moving day at the office tomorrow and we're about to relocate our two physically disparate web design teams into one happy, shiny space. As a result, a group of us were wandering around like some strange nomadic tribe gesturing with our measuring tapes and navigating by floor plan in an attempt to make sense of the current rabbit warren of modular office furniture. The existing work spaces in the area where we are supposed to be moving to are a great example of what happens when people are allowed to customize their own furniture. The particular desks in question are arranged in configurations that were never intended by the manufacturer. The result is very similar to dumping a bucket of Lego® on the floor and starting to construct things at random. The only difference is that all of the Lego bricks in this bucket were black with light pine Arborite tops.
Tuesday, September 12, 2000 Link
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Ooh, Craptastic is getting a biffy buffing as we speak.
When did the art of creating simple, clearly defined linear icons transmogrify into the realm of photorealistic representation? When Apple started creating the Icons of Mac OS X, that's when. These new übericons have more in common with the airbrushed streetvans of the seventies than the minimalist pixel sweat poured into the work of Susan Kare. Just because you can fill up the grid, doesn't mean you should.
Matthew Haughey was kind enough to send me a note clarifying his opinion on Eudora's statistics feature. I certainly didn't mean to take his original comments out of context, so I feel obliged to post this feedback."When I said I was happy to see stats, I meant just that - the statistics themselves. I'm not interested in goofy line graphs and pie charts, but the statistical data is going to come in handy. I've lost track of how much mail I get a day, and always wondered how much time I spend composing messages. Email clients haven't improved as much as web browsers and other office software applications, so it's nice to see eudora at least trying new things. (Having said that, I agree the chili pepper feature is the stupidest thing I've ever seen)"
Here's my response (lightly paraphrased):"Yes, Eudora should be commended for breaking out of the email feature rut. But I really start to get riled up when the logic behind adding a new features for is features sake alone. I guess I lumped the stats in the "questionable value" category along with the weird-ass mood measurement thing. Personally, I have no interest in the stats behind the email unless it's helping me track bounced addresses on a mailing list or something similar. Then again, from my point of view HTML parsing doesn't belong in an email client either."
When all is said and done, I have to admit that I don't even use Eudora. I'm still stubbornly clinging to a slice of the past by continuing to use an early 1998 release of Claris Emailer.
We've been kicking around the idea of revisiting some of the fundamental design structures for a site I'm working on. One of the bugs in our bonnet is whether or not to move from a fixed 600 pixel wide grid to one that uses an 600x800 screen as the lowest common denominator. Certain inseparable tendencies that have been imprinted on our personalities still make it necessary for us to have massively regimented control over the layout, so a liquid design structure is not even being considered. On the flip side, we are not making this decision completely blind and tethered either. We are capturing screen size and bit depth data via some skanky bits of client side JavaScript to make sure that certain assumptions regarding our target audience are somewhat accurate. Now, you get to participate. Does anyone have any experiences or user feedback they can share involving moving a site to a wider format? I'm all ears.
Monday, September 11, 2000 Link
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My blog turned into a caustic software review portal today. Sorry about that. I'll try to expand on a few different themes tomorrow. No sense perpetuating the rut.
Maybe I'm just not getting this. Matt thinks that the new email stats feature in Eudora 5.0 is a good idea. Worrying about how much time you spend using your email client is one thing. But if you're at the point when you need a graphical representation to show you that it's time to start worrying about it, I think you've probably got a bigger problem on your hands. And while we're on the subject of software features with questionable value, they have got to be joking about this one.
I am trying desperately to find some redeeming functional value in Meeper, a Mac control panel that adds visual effects and user-selectable sound cues to system alerts. I'm not having much luck. Apparently the developers could barely scrape up a valid selling point themselves, as the product description states:"It's cool, it's fun, it's eye candy for your Mac. In addition to the fun-factor, it's useful in a high-noise environment or in any situation where simple audio alerts might not be noticed.
That's a stretch. If all Mac applications used the Notification Manager the way that it was intended, the perceived need for visual cues via twirl filters in dialog boxes would promptly go away. In addition to Meeper's blatant lack of usefulness, CESoftware has the gall to expect people to actually pay $19.95 for it. This is the kind of interface topping that might hold your interest for about ten minutes... until the novelty wears off. And that's if it was free. I can't imagine actually paying for the privilege.
Are my eyes deceiving me, or is that actually a BBEdit upgrade I see? Bare Bones has released version 6.0 of that Mac code jockey's fave rave editor and there's more than just a couple highly usable refinements peeking out from the new features list. There's no mention of it on the site, but here's hoping that they fixed a couple of the issues that version 4.5 introduced, specifically the fact that "Zap Gremlins" stopped saving your settings. Man, I hated that. Now, if you'll please excuse me, I must purchase an upgrade for our site license. I'll let you know how what the final verdict is later this afternoon.
Sunday, September 10, 2000 Link
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I just couldn't resist the urge, and lord knows I tried. From the back of the same pamphlet, I discovered this amazingly shrewd and telling example of a consumer-focused, value-chain assessment.
Keep in mind that in this particular situation, the transaction would be based on the unit values present in the 1991 herring market. The same transaction today would need to have the equivalent herring value calculated at the current rate of exchange.
Saturday, September 09, 2000 Link
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My friend went to Burning Man, and all I got was this stupid Microsoft pamphlet. A vintage 1991 pamphlet, no less. Saved from the ravages of the final cleansing pyre that is the culmination of the Burning Man experience.
It actually might have felt good to toss this yellowing, staple-bound profession of the Redmondian way into the flames. But if Mike had let it burn, then I wouldn't have been able to flip through the touching descriptions of long lost programmatic stalwarts such as Microsoft File, Microsoft Mail, Microsoft QuickBasic, and the amazingly svelte Microsoft Excel 3.0 which came on a single 800KB floppy and ran in a single, unadorned megabyte of memory. Those were the days my friend.
Friday, September 08, 2000 Link
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Yesterday after work, I had a beer and a plate of randomly fried foodstuffs with Bruce and Brad from Webcore Labs, another jiggy little design outfit based here in Calgary. I used to work with Bruce a few years ago, and although what we've been doing to pay the bills lately seems to have followed a parallel path, we really haven't stayed in touch. The staying in touch part is going to change. We reminisced about past projects and talked shop about new ones, but we also batted a few ideas across the table revolving around something else that is going to be very, very cool. I can't say anything about it just yet, but once it starts coming together I'll let you know.
Thursday, September 07, 2000 Link
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Some brainiac at your shop decided to throw a pile of geek-approved acronyms at your servers and now your faced with integrating your web design methodology with some fancy-schmancy, database-driven site architecture. Sound familiar? Instead of dealing with the dry heaves, here's a decent review of Dreamweaver Ultradev from a Mac perspective. Gasp. You'll be dragging-and-dropping your way through the ASP, JSP, and CFM environmental quagmire before you can say: "successful corporate-wide rollout of high value enabling technologies".
Wednesday, September 06, 2000 Link
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I wonder what one of these would look like in my living room?
All in the pursuit of patent-free happiness. During a quick peruse of the web this morning for resources on PNG, I discovered a few things previously unbeknownst to me. For example, did you realize that PNG is not just an alternative to GIF and JPEG? Oh no. According the official PNG Home Site, it's "a turbo-studly image format". Put that in your high-bandwidth pipe and smoke it. And besides the commonly known features such as non-royalty bearing lossless compression and alpha channel support, it has a veritable weekend swap meet of other "spiffier features", including but not limited to: unambiguous pronunciation, majorly gnarly two-dimensional interlacing, ultra-clever magic signatures, and some new chunks for cross-platform color correction. Well, now you know don't you?
Tuesday, September 05, 2000 Link
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What the hell is Shaw doing with my cable modem tonight? Every ten minutes or so the "test" indicator on the modem goes spastic and then I'm faced with a five minute wait while the "cable" light brazenly winks its luminous green eye back at me. Don't they know I'm trying to publish a web site here? Cripes.
Elephants in the Living Room This freshly-squeezed stream of consciousness from Tog identifies four types of personalities that tend to inhabit web development teams. He describes these characters (and their "elephants that trample the user experience to death") in frighteningly realistic detail, and shows how they can hinder your best attempts at producing a usable web site. Now don't get all depressed, we may actually win in the end...
If you're anything like me (and I pity your loved ones if you are), you're the type of person that just can't seem to stuff enough ephemeral Macintosh knowledge into your limited cranial cavity. Well, now is the time to start up the trash compactor because we've got to make room for the historical background of everyone's favorite keystroke modifier: the feature key."The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as flower, pretzel, clover, propeller, beanie (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), splat, open-apple or (officially, in Mac documentation) the command key. In French, the term papillon (butterfly) has been reported. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces."
This acerbically accurate observation is part of a definition from the voluminous and lovingly maintained Jargon File. If you still have a bit of space between the ears, I recommend trying to squeeze in Quinn's Big List of Wrong Names for the Command Key. By the way, here's a tip for all you BBEdit jocks out there: typing "shift-option-cauliflower-s" will let you save a copy of your current document to your ftp server.
Are you positively blue from holding your breathe waiting for the next Netscape release? Have you ground your teeth down to the gums over Microsoft's creative interpretation of web standards? Well, suck in a bit of this fresh air. CNET just put three alternative browsers to task, and guess who came out on top? That trusty, little friend of ours, iCab. Who would have thought that CNET could actually recommend a piece of software that isn't available for Windows. Say, what's that clicking sound? I must be my perception of online journalism being turned up a couple of notches.
Sunday, September 03, 2000 Link
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Ever since Mike headed down to Burning Man, I've been trying to locate a decent site for images being published from the playa. I have yet to be fortunate enough to connect to the official, yet perpetually cgi-impaired Burning Man image server. All I want is to see if Mike's duct tape and elwire equipped Land Cruiser actually made it to the playa in one piece. Any suggestions of alternate venues for viewing the festivities would be appreciated.
It wasn't as painful as it appears. I've just recently been cornered by the metonymous waferbaby. See what happens when you're not paying attention? At least I'm keeping some decent company.
Friday, September 01, 2000 Link
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For whatever reason you care to dream up, I found myself staring at the Amazon.com home page this morning. Maybe it was the new tabs. Maybe it was a serendipitous following of a link during my start of day page perusing. Absent-mindedly, I clicked on the shopping cart icon. Besides telling me that my shopping cart was empty, the page also related the following cry for help."Your Shopping Cart lives to serve. Give it purpose - fill it with books, CDs, videos, DVDs, toys, electronics, and more."
I hate to see anyone go through life being unfulfilled in their job, particularly a shopping cart. So I bought a book.
Furthermore.
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