cooped up
Odd to be cooped up. I want to find something but can't leave, can't read, can't remember. Angels are in the eye of the beholder, right?
January 2001
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January 30, 2001
January 29, 2001
Napster
I suppose we all knew after the Bertelsmann deal that Napster would at some point be going the straight and narrow, and that time may be this summer. Napster's chief executive Hank Barry has told BBC News that users will soon be charged a membership fee.
January 27, 2001
I get dizzy
Odd to be cooped up. I want to find something but can't leave, can't read, can't remember. Angels are in the eye of the beholder, right?
It has been a bit of an adjustment. I still cannot focus my left eye all that well, and I get dizzy. Of course it interferes, but it also forces me into other places, somewhat calming, reflective.
January 26, 2001
Cartome
"Cartome, a companion site to Cryptome, is an archive of news and spatial / geographic documents on privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence -- communicated by imagery systems: cartography, photography, photogrammetry, steganography, camouflage, maps, images, drawings, charts, diagrams, IMINT and their reverse-panopticon and counter-deception potential. Cartome will employ technologies to minimize image file size, and these rapidly developing technologies themselves will be covered."
January 25, 2001
I spent most of yesterday blind
I spent most of yesterday blind. We did the surgery again, this time under general. Two hours later I felt someone shaking me, telling me to breath deeply. My left eye had a patch on it, and I couldn't open my right.
"Keep breathing," said the voice, "Take deep breaths."
I did, but my eyes stayed shut. Donna and the nurse got me out to a cab in a wheelchair. I didn't think to would be quite like this, hours lying in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, feeling my way down the stairs to use the bathroom, all in the dark.
January 24, 2001
sinceritybird
The comely kate from sinceritybird calls it like she sees it:
i came to your page to see the "creativity and risky expression" and the "something that challenges" but i'm not having much luck. ?
January 23, 2001
openp2p.com
O'Reilly has just launched a new site about peer-to-peer networking, a la Napster, called openp2p.com. And a lot of start-ups are getting into the act, like Toronto-based OpenCola. Can the genie be put back in the bottle?
Easy credit card fraud
For only $5000 a bank in California sold a fellow a printout of credit card numbers belonging to nearly four million customers. Forty-nine year-old Malibu resident Kenneth Taves then submitted many of the credit card numbers to his merchant service with instructions to charge each account $19.95 for access to his porn site.
January 22, 2001
old powerbook
From Donna’s supervisor came something from the past: a Macintosh PowerBook 160, fresh from 1992. I have been trying to restore the thing, which from what I can tell has not had its hard drive defragged in nine years; I thought perhaps I would upgrade the operating system, too. But it is old, and the battery doesn’t work for more than a few seconds. It has a modem, but I have no dial up Internet account anymore, unless you count Rogers’ ¢20 a minute thing. I don’t seem to have a System 7 on floppy, if I ever did, just several CD-ROMs from various Macs I have had to maintain over the years. The thing has less memory than my Palm.
Yet there is an attraction to it, and a real beauty to the black and white icons and in the flickering of the grey screen. And it has that 80s Mac feeling of a closed world, with the edges of the things seeping in. A PowerBook 100 was my first “Internet machine” in a time when the closest thing to hypertext was Gopher. I still like the effect of rapidly scrolling text on that old LCD screen, going so fast it leaves a ghostly trail of grey and purple.
So what will I do with it? My obsessive side likes being able to take an 800K Mac floppy from 1992 - filled with my strained love poetry or the usual polemics- and inserting it into the PowerBook, and then being instantly transported to that miserable, cramped Guelph apartment and those wonderful days of online exploration, right on the edge of this new time. My more practical side is not so sure.
I have an old friend
I have an old friend, not really a friend but an acquaintance, and he has a single-mindedness around success that I both envy and despise. In wrestling one would say that he is always "trying to put himself over," always trying to promote himself and little more. He writes me emails and I always feel that I have answer with something like, "Yes, you’re doing great." But I don’t. But he knows what he wants.
January 20, 2001
dot.crash
I have been reading about the dot.crash. Over the past eighteen months I was recruited reasonablly heavily by some US companies, and people in Toronto. It was an odd sequence of things for me because after my one surreal trip to San Francisco I said, "I'm there," and then that company reorganized, and then all the other calls were from the midwest or New York or Toronto, or the job wasn't quite right, or they wanted Cold Fusion, or it wasn't Yahoo. It took me too long to figure out something like what I wanted (something I am still doing) and I didn't want to take off with D in the middle of her Ph.D. So now I'm not laid off, but without the accompanying adventure.
I am one guy who just cannot take a compliment
I am one guy who just cannot take a compliment. That is a proven fact.
January 19, 2001
Uptown Girl
Yesterday afternoon on the same damp bus I was standing behind two younger women:
: Janice's former boyfriend whenever he got mad he'd sing Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl." It was his protest song, with the fist and everything.
: "Uptown Girl"?
: At his high school, the mascot was a huge, chocolate-covered peanut.
: Reminds me of Mr. Hankey...
: He had this mascot costume that he had to wear at the games and one day he lost it but they made him do the dance anyway...
: A mascot?
I'm not making this up.
January 18, 2001
Easyworm
An Internet worm cobbled together from generally available hacking tools could infect portions of the Net with its high-bandwidth searches for vulnerable servers, researchers said Wednesday.
January 17, 2001
macromedia buys allaire
Yesterday, Macromedia announced that it was merging with Allaire Corporation. Given the troubles Allaire has been having in the past year, I'm not too surprised. Allaire is the creator of Cold Fusion, a rapid application development language that has been around for a few years now. It's easy to build things in CF, and that was the whole point for those of us who in 1997 were sick of hacking Perl code from Matt's Script Archive.
But Cold Fusion was also Allaire's only big product. Allaire released Spectra, a Web content management system (CMS) that ran under Cold Fusion, in late-1999. Allaire has eschewed the usual CMS business model by selling Spectra relatively cheaply (around USD $15,000) and leaving development contracts to partners. It was a risk, and it didn't work. Many of the same one- and two-person development teams that had used Cold Fusion to build discussion forums and address books found Spectra complex and buggy. And while Spectra was falling flat, open source was doing an end run with PHP and JSP (very CF-like templating languages) and Zope (a simple but expandable CMS).
Macromedia has had its own challenges. For a few years now the company has been attempting to leverage their Web development tools to access the Web application development market, first with Drumbeat, than with UltraDev. But the leverage didn't work, I expect because Web design has become specialized to the point that designers who use Dreamweaver don't have that much influence on the development side.
One of the healthiest things for John Q. Webmaker has been the competition among Macromedia, Adobe, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft around bottom-up Web development tools. The Allaire purchase ups the ante a bit, which I think is good for everyone.
The Torch
Funny thing this morning: I was riding the damp bus up Bank Street, which is not the usual thing but in the slush my shins start to get a little sore. I had this week's Pro Wrestling Torch, and ended up sitting next to this neo-Goth who would put me in my one-time glory to shame, but maybe not Caro, "jelly donut" she. So while I was thinking that I was being uncool reading this, neo-Goth taps me on the shoulder and asks me where I got it. So I wasn't uncool at all; I was actually the opposite.
'infiltration'
There is a growing movement of urban explorers/adventurers who go where they are not supposed to be and document their experiences online. Call it 'off-limits tourism' or 'infiltration'. It's not exactly breaking and entering but, rather, visiting boarded-up ruins and underground steam tunnels and the roofs of forbidden buildings.
January 16, 2001
The excuse of youth
It has all been quite interesting. There is no longer the excuse of youth. I wonder if this is it. This morning in the snow that never seems to know when to stop I saw all the folks in there nice coats and their kids bundled up. A calmness and the same thing but of course it is me on one side of the glass, them with no glass at all. Don't go to glassdog to see ego. Come here.
Infiltration.org
Online and underground: Thanks to the Web, the sport of infiltration -- creeping through abandoned buildings and unused subway tunnels -- is thriving as never before. Infiltration.org "offers a mix of the practice and theory of urban exploration in areas not designed for public usage. This site is the online companion of the paper zine about going places you're not supposed to go."
Blogger directory
I wish oh I wish that I could be listed in the Blogger directory.
Sense of loss
I am trying to hold on. It is a mental exercise. I don't know if I have strong opinions. I know I have a sense of loss.
January 14, 2001
Sunday
Sometimes writing is very hard. Sometimes doing simple things comes with a lot of baggage. Sometimes I want to relax but don't know how. Welcome to Sunday!
January 13, 2001
About once a month
About once a month I punish myself by eating at McDonalds.
Identity Card Concept Project
Identity Card Concept Project: "This collection of sketch ideas uses the business card to explore possible future value systems. Themes explored include privacy, the value of the physical, experience, the moment of exchange, disposability, and customization."
January 12, 2001
Neilson makes a fundamental error
Nielson makes a fundamental error in treating usability as if it were a modernistic, mechanical problem with a clear solution that simply has to be discovered. A more useful approach is to recognize that what is evolving is a visual language, or, more accurately, a set of Web-centric visual and textual languages with a large number of dialects, constantly changing and feeding off one another. There will never be a single "correct" grammar for the Web; language warps to allow individual expression that "breaks" the rules while still being understandable. That's why Nielson comes off sometimes like my grade 6 English teacher, trying to impose a single, useless standard grammar.
I have found that usability (and design language generally) that works with current North American Web visitors might not work well in Europe, probably certainly won't work well in Japan, and might not work at all in Africa. What I expect to see is the continuing evolution of a variety of Web visual language dialects, as is the case with industrial and institutional design in various parts of the world.
Nielson has been lately describing a future in which all sites begin to look similar; he's half right, because the visual language continues to be created, with vocabulary tacitly agreed upon, but we'll also begin to see more clear differences based on culture.
16 hours in the home depot
HD Bet Weblog: "Many people asked what it was like to spend 16 hours in the home depot. For those who want to know I provide you with a transcript of the journal that I kept during the event. It is raw and unedited so be warned. Due to the state of insanity that I was in on this strange day I take no responsibility for what I wrote."
The Bus
One thing that is obvious about the bus is that people try not to look when they are looking at you, and you do the same. In a roundabout way, that's why I like it here better than Truro.
end of the beginning
End of the Beginning: It is interesting to look back at the past five years, at all the hyperbole and the odd bubble that inflated around the Internet. I think the spirit of it infected anyone who was at all a risk-taker, even though one had to know that so much of it wasn't going to work. But unlike the relics of past follies, there is not much left at Desktop.com or Sixdegrees except 404 errors. No one should think that this is the end of interesting stuff on the net, anymore than the Web was the beginning of it. It may be a return to a more bottom-up Web... but we'll see.
January 11, 2001
But that voice!
I have a phone message from a woman in London and she has such a nice voice. But she's looking for a Cold Fusion developer to work on what I think is a wedding site. But that voice!
January 8, 2001
2001
Many years ago, 1978 I think, my father took me to Centennial Cinema in Truro to see a reissue of Kubrick's 2001. I was a wee thing and didn't know what the hell was going on. There were all sorts of flshing lights at the end; it seemed to go on forever. But it didn't.
Nightmares
Nightmares last night. I planted ideas in my head about how old I was and how many years it had been since graduating high school. I don't remember the dreams, but they ended with someone, I thought it was Donna, knocking on the door and waking me up. I yelled out something, but I don't know what. No one offers to bring me out of it. I have to go to work, though nothing right now motivates me to do this.
January 7, 2001
tranquileye.radio, Media, tech, culture site
Site notes: tranquileye.radio.1 is now all ambient and wild at Live365. And new Media, tech, culture section
page up, so new stuff underneath pokes head through snow.
page up, so new stuff underneath pokes head through snow.
January 5, 2001
Project Censored Yearbook 2001
Project Censored Yearbook 2001: The 25 most important stories from the year 2000 that were undercovered or ignored completely in the US mainstream media.
save blogger 2
More on Blogger: The request for donations on the 2nd spawned one of the longer threads in Metafilter's history, with many people supportive but a few confused about their role in supporting a community from which they benefit. Tragedy of the commons, anyone? This isn't BOO.com,remember?
January 2, 2001
Holy Blood
"The Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant may have been hidden by a secretive religious order of crusaders, the Knights Templar, on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm some 830 years ago, according to a new book." It's good to see Henry Lincoln is still beating this dead horse. I thought the Grail wasn't really a cup and the ark was at Rennes-le-Chateau. But what do I know? Writes Dean_Paxton at Metafilter:
The grail, of grail legend, in one theory was not either, but a cauldron. Medieval lore is littered with cauldrons other large vessels that are referred to as grails.These are intended to have magical properties such as rendering unlimited supplies of food, ressurecting the dead, and empowering potions for spells and such.
The first grail legend was written by Chretien de Troyes (1180-1190) that we would associate with our sentiment towards the concept of the holy grail... however, to him Grail was often called Sangreal, which literally means "Holy Grail"... hence, the reference to the sanguine, or blood. In his story, the grail is not a cup, but a large platter or plate....
It is from the french poet Robert de Boron that we get the first description of the grail as a chalice in which Christ took wine at the last supper. Also, in his version... at the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of Christ with it.
So, there are an awful lot of ideas about what the grail actually was... we do, however, know it to be a creation of one man's mind... it could be argued that he collected the spoken tradition and put it to words that we now possess, but then again... the entire bible is written based on that construct as well, which is faith. Therefore, I don't feel that this is any more myth than the bible, or other tennant of faith.
The Templars and other groups entered into the picture much, much later (1250-1310)... therefore have been able to create their own interpretations of this myth.
save blogger
Jakob Nielsen says that "2001 will be the year that website operators come to their collective senses and start charging customers for service." And that may include our fave indie ASP, Blogger. Blogites have been finding the service deadly slow for some weeks now as the simple content management gizmo buckles a bit under the weight of success. The solution? Make a donation!
