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December 1999
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December 30, 1999
December 25, 1999
Holiday Time
So the Holiday passes slowly as it always does for me, now that I claim adulthood. Slowly, as if remembering might bring back the images of childhood, but fails.
So where are the gifts? So unimportant, when the best gifts we can give are to our future, and the future of our children. Doomsday Eve, only six days off, the end of this world and the beginning of the next, but that's each day, anyway.
We have so much future, too much future, and the past becomes harder to keep, and what is kept, more difficult to understand.
How many of your hard drives have crashed? Are you like Iain, who saves email for a moment, or like Paul, who saves it for twelve years? Which of them is accumulating knowledge?
I bought a Macintosh which was made in 1990, not quite a replica of my Mac SE. The shape is familiar, but it looks so out of place, odd against the skyline created by a dull Power Mac and a zippy Dell. But the danger of upgrading to Mac OS 8: old disks are no longer read. The disk drive mechanism is still the same, but the software now chooses not to read my miserable plays from 1986, or other miseries. That is little more than ten years.
So we have a future, but not a past.
Perhaps we need to create a gift for our collective future.
December 23, 1999
My very own Y2K bug
The writers who created the popular Books of Lists in the 1970s, a sort of pre-Web compendium of marginalia, also put together a Book of Predictions, which appeared in 1981. Experts in a number of fields were asked to make their predictions for the coming ten, twenty, and thirty years. The results are stunning if only because of their near complete inaccuracy. It is impossible to choose a few to list as most seem about equally absurd. Given the range of predictors - scientists, psychics, celebrities, business people, and others - one would expect that, simply by chance, someone would get something right. But all we get are near misses. No end of the Soviet Union, no Internet, no compact discs, no Dow 10 000.
That's a bit frightening. We look to the future and see... well, we see the continuation of current trends, and very little else. No wonder the future seems to loom over us like Kong. It is not only unknowable, but avoids all prediction and exploration. It is a slippery thing.
If there is a formula for our future anxiety, and it is written out Y2K. Given that there has been, for many years, a thriving industry around supposed and imminent economic collapse, and that such a collapse has yet to occur, it is easy to understand why people are buying this stuff hook, line and sinker.
Will there be a Y2K crisis? Given the huge number of bugs in a typical piece of contemporary software, and recognizing all the other date glitches and complications which can arise, my own take hasn't changed too much. Sure, some systems might fail, but unless the media finds them and plays it up, it will be a normal day at the office. Isn't software crashing all the time, all around us? Windows NT can't seem to keep itself alive for more than a few days at a time.
I have been dealing with my own Y2K bug: a particularly nasty pneumonia-like virus which has been kicking my ass since the day of my defense.
December 17, 1999
resource clock updated
I have been working on and off on the resource clock, and it can now be found at here. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions; I'll try to incorporate them when I can next sit down and work on it.
Yes, I did defend successfully, and want to thank Prof. Buxton, who taught the first class I told in the MA back in 1994, for livening things up with his critical questions about international development. As Iain said, I'm now a "professional," and not just any sort of professional, but an "XML professional."
December 14, 1999
Defence!
Tomorrow I defend my thesis project at Concordia. I learned while I was teaching that the best preparation is an outline and a can of my fave cola. Zoom!
December 13, 1999
Dr. Watson
"Dr. Watson is a free service to analyze your web page on the Internet. You give it the URL of your page and Watson will get a copy of it directly from the web server. Watson can also check out many other aspects of your site, including link validity, download speed, search engine compatibility, and link popularity."
December 12, 1999
HypertextNOW
HypertextNOW presents articles and other resources on structuring documents in hypertext from Eastgate Systems.
December 10, 1999
Etoys versus etoy.com
Charging Trademark Infringement, the online toy retailer etoys.com (with the's') has found a Southern California judge to grant a preliminary injunction against etoy.com (without the's'). Despite the fact that etoy.com was registered in October 1995 and etoys.com didn't register a domain name until November 1997. Etoys sucks.
December 7, 1999
Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web
"Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web is a clearinghouse of World Wide Web sites that have applied or adopted standard classification schemes or controlled vocabularies to organize or provide enhanced access to Internet resources. Beyond Bookmarks is compiled and maintained by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Science and Technology Department, Iowa State University Library, and Curator, CyberStacks(sm), Iowa State University..."
December 1, 1999
diarist.net
Diarist.Net, a comprehensive starting-point for both writers and readers of online journals: new content every week, features, etc.
