Daryl Westfall, the creator of the thank you for financing global terror stickers writes in to say that his ad got pulled by Google. The ad in question reads:
A Full Tank Of Terrorism?
Controversial sticker educates them while they're standing at the pump!
Here's an excerpt from the letter he received from Google:
"At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of 'Hate/anti' on our website. We also do not permit sites that sell these products to advertise on Google. As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site."
Others have called Google's rejection of ads "censorship", hoping to cash in on that term's Constitutional connotation, but Google has the right to reject whatever ad they want. It's just advertising and Google isn't the U.S. Government.
Because of Google's position as a nearly essential Web tool, it's unfortunate that they won't run this particular ad as is and I wish they'd change their mind, but they've got legal liability to worry about. Not running certain types of ads, even though some legitimate ads might get pulled unfairly, limits their liability. Hopefully Daryl can rephrase his ad and get it back on the site.
If you want to point fingers, point them instead at America's lawsuit-happy citizenry and corporations. The duels of yesteryear are outdated; there's plenty of satisfaction to be had in the courtroom and everyone from insurance companies to the families of tragedy victims to goofy Hollywood-backed cults to computer manufacturers to people too stupid to know that coffee is hot is glove-slapping the faces of anyone unlucky enough to get in the way.
Google now has this bit of text on the bottom of each of their results pages now:
"Try your query on: AltaVista Excite Lycos Yahoo!"
Click on Excite (for example) and it takes you directly to an Excite search results page for whatever term you were searching for. What's going on here? Google linking directly to competitors' Web sites? Have they gone insane?
What Google is doing here is instructive for most companies offering online content or services. Google knows their search results are good and displayed in a useful way. You want to wander off to Excite? That's ok because they know you'll be back soon. Google doesn't care about stickiness (which is a nearly unattainable goal unless you're AOL or Yahoo!)...they know that you're not going to spend all your online time at their site.
They care much more about making their site elastic: vistors aren't stuck in the site, but when they leave, Google knows there's a good chance they're coming back. Loyalty without lock-in. Elastic sites work well because they embrace the "Webness" of the Web...they allow people to interact and communicate with each other as they prefer to do in the real world. Human relationships are elastic in nature. Like a clingy friend, nothing is worse than a needy Web site sucking all of your time away and not letting you spend any time on other sites.
Weblogs are a good example of the effectiveness of elasticity; they continually direct people away from themselves yet people have very strong connections with the weblogs that they read and often come back for more. I can't possibly hold your attention here for more than a few minutes a day, but I'm fairly confident that if I am consistant in what I offer here in terms of quality and theme, you'll be back within the next week.
Many companies can't offer products or services with the quality or necessity of Google or the crack-like nature of weblogs, but they can stop worrying so much about fencing customers in like cattle and start dealing with them in human terms.
I agree, Netscape 4 has to go. Please get it out of my sight. It sucks because it's not a browser as much as it's a dirty bomb lobbed over the fence in the heat of the browser wars. If Netscape 4 were a car, they would have recalled it years ago.
But I'm not sure that Mozilla is any better. Mozilla is a toy built by developers for developers...a return to the days of Mosaic when some geeks in Illinois built browsers for other geeks around the world. Developers slobber over things like support for standards and XUL (which are cool), but end users have different needs and priorities.
Yeah, remember them? The end users? The ones that you're building the software for? They don't care about your damn cross-platform interoperability...they want fast, they want features to help them browse the Web, they want an interface that was designed by someone who knows about interface design, and they want a good user experience.
I know I'm being unfair because the developers really did build Mozilla for themselves. Mozilla isn't so much a browser as a platform for people to build cool, useful software for people to use. But the disconnect between developers building great platforms and ending up with genuinely usable software on the other end is becoming more and more frustrating. Make a Unix that my mom can use (Apple is getting there with OS X). Make a Mozilla-based browser that is half Web browser and half Watson. Turn the simple tech of RSS aggregators into Daily News Readers. Make weblog tools that don't rely on a writer's knowledge of outlines, permalinks, the word "blog", or RSS feeds. Build Wiki software that doesn't rely on a writer's knowledge of difficult posting syntax or the Wiki Essence.
Software for people, people!
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes. Even more funny (if it weren't so scary) is Jamie Kellner's remark that "your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots". I don't recall signing any contract or making a verbal agreement with NBC to agree to watch Toyota commercials during The West Wing. My only contract with regard to the TV is my cable bill, which entitles me to watch as much or as little of 50-some channels as I want. How the networks make money is their business...if advertising isn't working anymore, you need to try something else. Don't come crying to me about some bogus contract that exists only in your mind.
The downside of this is what happens if ad-supported television can't function profitably due to PVRs and such? Will TV go away? Will it become for-pay across the board with $300-500 monthly cable bills? Are consumers going to get screwed or will a better form of TV broadcasting emerge from the rubble (imagine all your favorite shows on one network)? The future is so fun that way...impossible to predict.
I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. As it happens, the subject matter of the book mirrors this business with pipe-bomber Luke Helder. Reading through the text of letters Helder left with bombs in mailboxes and the manifesto (mirror) he sent The Badger Herald, I was reminded of the writings, mutterings, utterances, and internal dialogue of C&P's Raskolnikov.
In the book, Raskolnikov writes an article for a newspaper in which he states that "extraordinary [people] have the right [that is, not an official right, but his own right] to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary." He goes on to say that great people can do great deeds, whether right or wrong, because they bring about great change in the world. In his madness (or is it?), he tests this theory and himself. Is he an extraordinary man? Can he kill and steal because he is extraordinary? What changes might he be helping bring about? Can he get away with it? Can he drop hints about his crime and still not be caught?
There are glimpses in Helder's writings that hint that he might be of Raskolnikov's mind and considers himself an extraordinary man out to change the world, preaching his gospel. "I'm here to help you realize/understand that you will live no matter what!" "You have been missing how things are, for very long." "I'm happy because I know. I often wonder why anyonewould be so content with believing when they could know." "I'm here to help you, to expose you, to inform you, to provide for you the answers for where to look, so the 'spiritually sleepy mass' can transform themselves from believing to knowing, to have an awareness to life, and to begin understanding."
(Or maybe not. Maybe Helder is just a dumb kid that smoked too much pot and watched The Matrix one too many times. Either way, the whole situation is horrible and fascinating, as was Dostoevsky's account of Raskolnikov.)
Web services is the latest buzzword that promises the change the way we ___[fill in the blank]___. Since the last buzzword that lived up to its hype was "World Wide Web", I'm naturally a little skeptical. But I admit that Web services makes me feel just a little bit tingly. Google recently released an XML-based API that allows people to access their search results without a browser. Amazon is letting participants in their Associates program use an XML API to access product information.
So what can you do with all this? How about using Amazon's API** and some XML-formatted data from weblogs.com to build a list of the most linked books on the Web (more info)? And you know what the best part is? You can use BookWatch's RSS document and Google's API to add the most recent search results for each of the books on the list, which is useful because Google searches for book titles and authors often yield links to authors' Web sites, sample chapters, and reviews.
The biggest challenge for companies offering Web services will be how to make money with them. Free and unlimited Web services would suit developers best, result in fast adoption and defacto standardization for those offering the services, and promote an explosion of innovation. But as we saw with the Web, a free product, no matter how many people are using it, doesn't necessarily translate into revenue down the road. Plus it conveys a false sense to Web users that everything online must be free, which is ultimately self-defeating for everyone trying to do business on the Web.
It's nice to see that Google and Amazon are on the right track. Google is betting that a free teaser of their API (only 1000 searches/day currently allowed) will demonstrate to developers the power of Google in their applications and hope that they upgrade to a more industrial strength version (at least, that's what they should be thinking). Amazon is limiting the use of their API to their Associates for the purpose of driving traffic back to Amazon and (hopefully) increasing sales.
** Note: I'm pretty sure that Paul didn't use Amazon's API to get the book information from them because I don't think they offer that capability yet (although they say that they are going to). I think he just screen scraped the info. Paul?
The world seems as though it's caught in a Star Trek episode, where time is looping over and over again onto itself, and there's nothing the Enterprise crew can do to avoid being trapped in the loop forever. Every time I visit a news site or look on the front page of a newspaper, I see that a suicide bomber has blown themselves and several innocent bystanders up, Israel has captured such and such a city, peace efforts are thwarted by stubborness and hatred, and business & gov't are colluding to limit the rights of the individual. Captain, we need to reverse the polarity on the deflector dish, point the particle stream at that temporal anomaly, and get us the hell out of this situation.
I want to write about this lawsuit, but I can't seem to organize and articulate my thoughts about it. On the one hand, the entire airline industry (and indeed, the entire US) has been lax about security over the past couple decades. On the other hand, these types of lawsuits make me *so angry* because many Americans are of the belief that when life hands you lemons, you sue the ever-living shit out of the person or company that will yield the most money, regardless of who is at fault. Some years ago, I worked with a woman who told me "I can't wait to sue someone and get my money". I wanted to fucking strangle her until I realized I'd just be fulfilling her dream.
As open 802.11b access points increase in number (and the canonical list of them is created), this map will get crowded and not very useful. More useful would be a map where approximate 802.11b signal strengths are denoted by color**. With the wide view (as shown), you get just the strengths with the nodes showing up as you zoom down to the street-level view. You could also toggle a setting between open networks and fee-based networks (like Surf and Sip or Boingo). (Update: Christopher writes in with a pointer to the Wireless Network Visualization Project)
The April 2002 issue of Wired contains an infographic of wireless access points across the United States. An annotated list of the wireless access points included in their statistics is available in PDF format on their site.
** Note: the signals strengths denoted on this map have no basis in reality. The map is just for demonstration purposes. Map graphic borrowed from Yahoo! Maps.
An interesting volley in the cloning/stem cells war: Dozens of human embryos cloned in China. It will be interesting to see if the US government comes to view this as a war and frees scientists in this country to pursue the matter more vigorously to avoid a "stem cell gap", like they did with nuclear energy during WWII & the Cold War.
This photo from SXSW 2000 makes me feel old somehow. Maybe it's because so much has happened since then. You can almost see the enthusiasm and hope of an entire industry and generation in the faces of these 10 people. Things went as planned for some while others found their lives following unexpected paths. Employment, lost love, marriage, depression, exuberance, shaken confidence, love, lost jobs, severed friendships, changing the world, uncertainty, new places, old hardships. Worth a thousand words indeed.
You can roughly determine the emotional health of a company by how often their internal weblog is updated.
Ecommerce sites that are slow, time out a lot, throw bad errors, and are generally not very pleasant to use tend to have URLs containing "jsp", "servlet", or ".jhtml". Perhaps that's an unfair generaliztion to make because sites using Java on the back-end can be implemented and designed properly, just like with any other programming language, but there seems to be a strong correlation nonetheless. The evidence mounts: Avis, Enterprise, National Car Rental.
I just booked a rental car online. With possible exception of Alamo, all of the online reservation systems for the major rental car companies suck. All of the systems more or less worked, but they were all slow, clunky, and had major usability issues.
Avis was the worst of the bunch. I typed their URL into my browser and got the following message: "Your session has timed out for security purposes. Please click on any link to restart." My session? I've never been to your site before. And click on any link? Well, the most prominent one is that stupid DoubleClick banner ad, would you like me to click on that one? Oops, I'm off somewhere else. Come on Avis, I just want to rent a car...I could care less about your stupid sessions.
Precautionary Principle: "It doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea. Indeed, it sounds like common sense: better safe than sorry; look before you leap. But, in fact, the precautionary principle poses a radical challenge to business as usual in a modern, capitalist, technological civilization."
I'm all for analyzing risk and then plunging forward, but I hope the precautionary principle catches on more here in America, especially when dealing with important irreversible (or nearly irreversible) processes like growing of genetically engineered foods in the wild and constructing black holes in laboratories. The level of technology available to humans has always been ahead of our understanding of it, but with the tools of modern physics, quantum mechanics, and biotechnology available to us, the level of possible danger** is rising more quickly than even the technology.
** It's easy to be all doomy and gloomy about this, but the level of possible goodness arising from our increasingly powerful technology is rising quickly as well...so all hope is not lost yet, I guess.
The whole Y2K problem has been vastly overblown. We're going to be just fine.
Print is dead. Print will never die.
The Internet is dead. The Internet will never die.
Content is dead. Content will never die.
HTML is dead. HTML will never die.
Creativity is dead. Creativity will never die.
There has to be a market out there for people who want to do auctions but don't want to deal with the icky eBay interface or installing custom auction software. A service like Blogger or Vox Populi except for auctions. They handle all the transactional stuff, but it looks and feels like it is actually on your site.
McDonald's might be offering hamburgers out of a kiosk/ATM type of thing. The world didn't end yesterday, but isn't this one of the signs of an approaching apocalypse?
Click here for Christina Ricci's bosom. Boobs sell movie tickets, kids.
People buy $25 Tommy Hilfiger clothing items for their toddlers. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.
Computers suck. It took me an hour and 20 minutes to do something this morning that should have taken less than five.
Cars, along with lots of other things, are built with parts. If one part wears out, you can replace it without having to replace the whole car. Web sites, more often than not, are not built in this fashion. Data and structure are integrated...there aren't any parts. So when something on such a Web site wears out (i.e. the site needs an upgrade), you basically have to trash the whole thing and start from scratch. I need to start building my sites with more parts.
I've grown weary of the whole iMac aesthetic. It was great once...they should have left it at that. What's next, glowing, neon-green routers from Cisco?
In case you were wondering how Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is doing against Titanic at the box office, here's a graph showing their overall box office takes by week (more info). Looks like Titanic is going to beat Star Wars by a good $150 million, if not more.
Of course, with all due respect to Titanic, the comparison is apples and oranges. Titanic was playing in the springtime with hardly any competition. People (especially the "mall crowd") went to see it week after week because there was nothing else out there to see. Star Wars, after the first couple of weekends, had to contend with Austin Powers, Big Daddy, South Park, Notting Hill, Tarzan (which took the huge kids audience away from SW), Wild Wild West, and the General's Daughter, all of which, save South Park are, or are on their way to being, $100 million movies. Titanic's competition? Tomorrow Never Dies...that's it.
Saw a story on the evening news about the first woman-commanded Space Shuttle mission. While I realize that it's good to bring attention to such stories, it saddens me that they are necessary at all.
I have one basic rule when giving out my information online: can I trust this person or company with my information? Usually, this translates to "are they going to take my CC# and buy bootleg Tommy Jeans with it or not?" Usually, large companies can be trusted with such information...most of the time. So, can I use Microsoft's Passport service and trust that they aren't going to track where I'm spending my Web time and money? Probably not. Why? Two major reasons: questionable track record and that sort of information would be *extremely* valuable to them.
I know a lot of people find it funny, but I just can't laugh at Dilbert. Dilbert depresses me because big companies are really like that. What depresses me even more is all the managers out there laughing at it probably don't understand that they're the butt of the joke...which is, of course, the problem.
Logo makeovers. In each case, except for the Grape Nuts example, the new logo was of poorer quality than the original. Especially laughable is the first example where the logo of a frame shop is butchered by adding a gradient, a 3D look, and a drop shadow. Unless it's huge (which defeats the purpose), that logo is going to look like shit on a business card. The McDonald's example is not much better. Yuck.
James Lileks over at the Star Tribune writes about those annoying severe weather warnings during tv shows. I couldn't agree more. Some of the persistant warning garbage they put up on the screen is akin to having your microwave continue to beep loudly even after you've removed the food from it. A small scrolling bit of text (and no sound!) at the bottom of the screen every once in a while is sufficient. Anything more ruins the viewing experience.
I have no patience for people with lots of kids. In this day and age, in America, it's just plain socially irresponsible to have 4, 5, or 10 kids or more. Humans are going to outgrow the earth soon enough without people breeding our race to overpopulation. It's called "birth control". Look into it.
And I don't buy the argument that birth control is against your religion. Every species on this planet has to have multiple offspring just so one or two of them can survive to propagate the species. Except man. Health care in first world countries is at such a high level now that almost every single human offspring will survive long enough to breed...and it'll be that way in the rest of the world in 20-40 years. Man doesn't need to breed like crazy to ensure propagation of the species. What mankind really needs now is a little birth control to keep ourselves from over-running the planet on which we live.
Every species must adapt and find that middle ground so that it can co-exist with its surroundings: too few members and the species is in danger of extinction, but too many and the species will use up its natural resources and have its membership dramatically depleted. Human beings are no exception. So don't worry about what your god thinks, put on a condom, dammit. He put a brain in your head so you could figure these things out for yourself...use it.
There's a record in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest time balancing on one leg. It's some insane amount of time like 39 hours. However, the person was allowed to take a five minute break every hour.
So really, the record was actually only an hour. That's not much of a record.
Whilst reading The Outline of History during my lunch hour, I came across a rough progression of how the Bible came about. The first five books (collectively called the Pentateuch) had been around in verbal mythological form for a while. Then the Jews, migrating back from their captivity, took the Pentateuch, wrote it down, and then wrote the rest of the Old Testament. Around the beginning of the first millennium A.D., the Christians decided to add to the narrative again, producing the New Testament.
It seems to me that all this is like good movies and sequels. The Pentateuch is like Rocky: a great effort that should have stood by itself. The rest of the Old Testament is like Rockys II & III: they probably should have quit while they were ahead. The New Testament is like rockys IV & V: completely unnecessary and greatly diminished the impact of the original.
I'm not even going to get into the Mormons and any further possible Rocky sequels.
Well, just like everyone in the US (and probably the rest of the world as well), I'm trying to make sense out of the happenings in Colorado. I can't seem to do it. "Senseless" is an overused word, especially by the television media, but in this case, it seems to fit pretty well.
We humans are a weird bunch...the best goods and the worst bads all in one freaky package.
I never realized just how clever the "by Mennen" jingle is. Not only are they telling you who makes Speed Stick, it's also a command: "buy Mennen." Of course, it can't be too clever; I use Old Spice.
I dislike airline food. Not because it tastes bad, but because they try to please everyone but end up pleasing very few. For instance, take a plain bran muffin. Most people, I would wager, wouldn't mind eating a plain bran muffin...especially if there's no alternative. Then, add walnuts. Some people don't like walnuts and won't eat it. Now add poppyseeds, raisins, apple chunks, and a blueberry spread. You're alienating a lot of people by throwing all the crap in there. By making the muffin more diverse, they are actually appealing to a smaller audience, not the larger one they had hoped for. Sure, the uber-muffin will probably be tastier to some, but more people will eat the plain muffin.
And let's face it, most airline travellers are not looking for fine cuisine to eat on the plane; they're just looking for something to tide them over until they can buy a $4 hot dog in the concourse at Raleigh-Durham. Either that or they are looking for something they can easily throw up when the ride gets bumpy.
So, when did the whole share-a-penny thing at the local gas station become an industry? I would imagine that a long time ago, somebody came up with an idea to put a little cup by the register so that people could drop their pennies in there for other customers to utilize when they were short a couple cents. Other people adopted the idea and now there's a share-a-penny cup at pretty much every gas station one goes to. In fact, the share-a-penny idea has advanced to the point where there are specialized cups made especially for placement on station counters.
Let's stop to think about this for a minute. This means that somewhere there's a machine (or possibly a whole factory of machines) punching out these custom penny cups. There are engineers designing bigger and better share-a-penny cups. Teams of marketing people are trying to build share-a-penny mindshare in the heads of gas station owners. Share-a-penny cup salespeople are out there going gas station door to gas station door selling their product. An army of delivery trucks are delivering these cups around the globe.
Does this seem odd to anyone else?
A random thought: do speakers & writers of British English get tripped up when they see the HTML tags <center> and <font color="#ffffff"> instead of <centre> and <font colour="#ffffff">? or do they just curse us damn Americans for misspelling it in the first place?
It's OK to like Vanilla Ice.
It's OK to eat bologna.
It's OK to acknowledge your past.
It's OK to use Microsoft products.
Isn't it?
An interesting thought, courtesy of PeterMe: Why does time start at 12? Shouldn't it start at 0? 0 o'clock, 1 o'clock, etc. instead of 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, etc.
It's a similar problem to the first year's start date...it started at year 1 instead of year 0. Except that years don't loop back on themselves as hours do, so instead of 1=0 when dealing with years, 12=0 when dealing with time. Weird.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Remember that old fable of the tortoise and the hare? Basically, the faster hare is overconfident and loses a foot race to the slower, but steadier, tortoise. Somehow, the moral to this story is: "slow and steady wins the race."
I beg to differ. The race was not won by the tortoise; it was lost by the hare. The moral should read: "don't fuck around when there's shit to be done." Or something like that.
When the last century turned, the general populace went with 1899 --> 1900 as their official transition and the intellectual establishment went with 1900 --> 1901 as theirs. The establishment won. Almost every turn of the century party was held on december 31, 1900.
As the next century transition looms, the general populace is again backing the 99 --> 00 transition while the establishment is holding fast to the 00 --> 01 switch. Who's going to win this time? The establishment doesn't stand a chance. Why not?
a. Important cultural events are no longer determined by the establishment. Pop culture reigns supreme.
b. 2000 is such a nice, round, even number that people can't resist it.
c. The whole Y2K computer issue lends more weight to 2000 being an important and noteworthy milestone.
d. No one really listens to scientists.
As for me, I won't really be celebrating anything. After all, the year 2000 is based upon some date that a monk chose way back when for the birth of some guy in some podunk town in the middle east. It's no big deal....except for the whole Y2K computer thing. Ask yourself where Jesus is when the world goes dark and the bank says you don't have any money.
I'm looking though the Sunday paper today...searching for bargains. I open up the ad sheet for Dayton's, an upscale department store, and what do I see but dinnerware by Calvin Klein. Let me repeat that: dinnerware by Calvin Klein. And Ralph Lauren makes Polo house paint. Tommy, Calvin, and Ralph all have their own "lines" of bed linen. I'm currently looking for a new car...does anyone know if I can get a Tommy car yet? If I can, I bet it'll look just like a low-end Toyota and cost as much as a high-end Lexus.
And borrowing liberally from Henry Ford, Mr. Hilfiger had this to say about the Tommy car: "they can have a Tommy car in any color they want, as long as it's red, white, or blue."
You know the best thing about mailing lists? It's the stupid people. It's the people that say "this is the way it works because I'm an expert, and I've been on the web since Lynx 1.0" and then they do something like post twice to the list with HTML code and an image imbedded in the message. Priceless. It's *so* perfect.
Oh, so what you meant to say was, "I'm a clueless dolt who can't even use my email client."
Actions speak louder than words.
Why haven't we figured people out yet? Maybe it's because we have nothing to compare ourselves against. There are no other species out there with our intelligence or verbal communication or any of the other things that make human beings unique among the creatures of the earth. Perhaps the most interesting thing about discovering intelligent alien beings would not be understanding them, but understanding ourselves.
From Wired News (side blurb on front page) concerning the sentencing of Terry Nichols in the Okla. City bombing:
"The judge said the bombing was not so much a crime against the 169 people who died and their families as it was a 'crime against the Constitution of the United States. That's the victim.'"
This pisses me off more than I thought it would. While in some cases I would agree that the interests of the govt. should supercede those of a few people, comparing the lives of all those people (and their families) to the Constitution was a huge fuckup on the judge's part. What an idiot.
Not everyone wearing a Tommy Hilfiger tshirt is selling out.
Men and women are not equal.
Ethnic group A and ethnic group b are not equal.
Big business is not always a bad thing.
There are good television shows.
Not everyone with long, nappy hair smokes pot.
Stereotypes work.
Stereotypes suck.
The way I see it, there's two ways to go about your business. Well, there's significant mixing between these two ways, but one or the other is usually dominant.
The first way is to offer a product/service (usually shitty) that people buy and they don't ever come back for seconds. How do you make money this way? You nickel and dime the customer to death until they leave screaming. Makes you lots of money fast, but no customer loyalty.
The other way is to offer a product/service that everyone likes. Your customers are happy because you're not continually jerking them around and they come back for more. And your reputation grows and you get more customers. They're getting what they want and you're having lots of fun giving it to them. And you're proud of what you're doing. Everyone is happy.
I'm currently in the midst of the first scenario, trying to get to the second. The problem with that is the first scenario is easy to achieve while the second is not.
I'm reading this book called "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. Pretty good book so far. The basic premise is that the govt. of the land which is now the United States of America functions solely for the benefit of the rich. Which is pretty accurate I guess...I agree with a lot of what Zinn has to say.
Except for the word "solely." I don't like that word. Socio-political and socio-economic situations don't deal in absolutes. Do they?
Every time I've turned around in the last week, someone's coming out of the closet. It's silly really...why do people have to do this? I know why, but it's still silly. People are the way they are. That's it.
I've thought long and hard about my attraction towards men. There is none. And I've tried to see it, believe me. Leonardo DiCaprio might be the most attractive man on the face of the earth, but I really don't want to fuck him, much less kiss him or hold his hand. And I've accepted my heterosexuality. But no one cares...society expects me to be heterosexual. And no one should care about my friends' bisexuality or homosexuality.
People say I'm a bitter fuck...and I am most of the time...but I really do yearn for a world where people aren't judged by factors out of their control (skin color, sexual orientation, disability, etc.). It pisses me off.
OK, kids. All this birthday stuff has to quit. It's getting a little...oh...over the top. First it was The Fray. Then, it was Afterdinner. Now, Glassdog.
It was fun once, cute twice, but now it's kinda silly and on the verge of becoming obligatory.
Or maybe I just don't like it because no one will ever do anything like that for 0sil8. And no one should. Please, let's all stop the madness.
People are going nuts with new interface technology. You've got sites out there like Gabocorp declaring the end of the HTML era and the beginning of the Flash era. The Smithsonian has an online art gallery with a cool little Java nav applet. And DHTML popups and nav applets are everywhere.
What of HTML? Plenty. The plain jane HTML well has not yet run dry. It's still the glue that holds the web together. People are doing fabulous new things with it every day. And I like it...better than all that other crap put together. So there.
Hypertext as a communications medium is almost an afterthought on the web today. Hypertext today consists of sidebars, navbars, and links to corporate web sites.
The real promise of hypertext is to provide more information about what you are reading. Consider the line "the meek shall inherit the earth." When reading this line, I might want to know:
- that this is a quote from the King James version of the Bible, Psalms 37:11.
- the meaning of the word "meek"
- about inheritance laws
- the circumference and mass of the earth
- the earliest recorded use of the word "shall"
Too much to ask? Probably. Why? As an author linking to this stuff, I'd have to know all this stuff beforehand...or at least know where to find it. That's a lot of work. No wonder we ended up with sidebars and shallow links to other pages.
The Web is here today...hypertext will have to wait some more.
