I'm sure you could have guessed that Maggie Berry has exemplary handwriting. It looks like one of those handwriting fonts. I think she might be a robot. I can't think of any other suitable explanation for such consistent kerning and x-height.
Googlecooking is the way new thing:
"...shortly before supper time I look around for some combination of foods I've got on hand and which seem like they might go together. Then I 'google' them and browse through the results until I find a recipe that appeals to me."
via Meg.
Kottke.org roving reporter Ben Brown checked in earlier this week with the following news:
Neal Pollack has a weblog. Mr. Pollack is probably most well known as the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, which, depending on who you talk to, is either pretty good or not so good. I don't know because I haven't read it (Neal, I'll read your book when you read mine).
So New Media has released the 3rd issue of Words! Words! Words! Ben claims that W!^3.3 is the first literary magazine with a naked centerfold. What about Penthouse Letters? And I'm almost sure I saw Pamela Lee straddling a mechanical bull in the last issue of The Paris Review. But anyway, Words! Words! Words!, good writing, illustrations by that Exploding Dog guy, naked chick.
Caterina has compiled a nice list of sketchbooks. Feels a bit odd looking through them, this private art not intended for public consumption but ultimately offered up for anyone to view. A search turns up links to more sketchbooks (image search), including one to Angela Martini's sketchbook.
I used to read Angela's Spacegirl site religiously back in the day. Sites like hers, the diaries on ChickClick, the Swanky journals, Suck, and Stating the Obvious were the primordial goo out of which kottke.org grew, much more so than the often-cited sources of weblog inspiration laid down in the gospel.
As an addendum to Monday's post about the availability of We Blog at Amazon, it is also available at Amazon in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. People around the globe can enjoy the tasty treats of We Blog without paying for costly international shipping. Well, as long as they live in one of those countries...and read English.
Meg's book (and Matt's and Paul's) is out! Finally, finally, finally. I got a chance to look at a copy of it on Saturday...it's nice to see it in its final form, the product of several months of hard work and aggravation. It's a wonder any books get published at all, what with the lack of interest that (certain) publishing companies show in getting them out into the world.
Anyway, it's out now and congratulations all around. If you read this site and wonder what's involved with doing your own site like this, We Blog might be a good investment for you. If you need any extra prodding, the authors have set up a Web site to accompany the book at blogroots.com. The site includes discussions about weblog-related issues, sample book chapters, and several resources related to weblogs.
In theory, the fact that any random person on Earth is connected to another random person on Earth by on the order of six links is amazing. Like the song says, it's a small world; everyone, more or less, knows everyone else. In practice, with smaller groups of people, all the interconnections wreak havoc with weekend party planning.
You obviously can't invite so-and-so and whats-his-name because they used to date but now they hate each other. Those two worked at the same place and had a falling out so we can really only invite one of them. Whats-her-bucket made disparaging remarks about something someone else really cared about. Whosits laughed at a joke he shouldn't have and we can't have any awkward silences as a result of that (oh, and his girlfriend can't come either then). She fired him and now he works at the same place with this other guy that recently divorced this woman that everyone else adores...can any of them come? A misunderstanding from three years ago festers still; two of the three involved will be uninvited.
Solving GRE logic questions are easier. Tom is Anna's sister's great-grandmother's daughter's stepson's cousin's aunt's neighbor's gynecologist's mistress's favorite football player. If Anna is Frank's second cousin thrice removed, what relation is Tom to Frank's dentist? Piece of cake compared with the matrix of possible party guest list permutations.
As a friend told me recently, "I'm too happy in my life right now to deal with all this." Amen sister.
Just about every time I talk to him, Rael askes me what I'm reading, aware that friends are often the best source of potential new reading material. In the last few months, several people I know -- who all have fairly different interests and backgrounds -- have independently recommended that I read some David Sedaris. Buckling finally under the intense pressure, I've added Me Talk Pretty One Day to my wishlist in the hopes of actually purchasing it some day soon. (I've noticed my wishlist isn't so much a wish for products as it is a wish for time, time to read all those books, time to watch all those movies, and time to make the money to purchase them.)
Meg has an article on O'Reilly today about What We're Doing When We Blog. It's a look at how the format makes possible the type of interaction we see when people use weblogs, regardless of what the weblog is about. The last line of the article is a great one: "As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it." I don't know if I completely agree with that, but it's an interesting perspective.
The time for talk is over. Leslie and Sippey are all set to battle it out to see which one of them is the top PowerPoint Master of All Time Forever and Ever Until the Heat Death of the Universe. Sources close to the contest say that Leslie has a slight edge over Sippey, partially because the rules forbid him from putting any pictures of his adorable child into his presentations.
It all began innocently enough with a book. As Meg read The Soul of a Chef, she kept interrupting me on the plane, "Thomas Keller is a perfectionist freak. We have to go eat at The French Laundry. It sounds soooo amazing." I smiled and nodded, going back to my reading each time, not really knowing if she was serious or not. For Christmas, I got her The French Laundry Cookbook. Soon after, the French Laundry Fund was started, saved pennies, quarters and dollar bills with an eye on going to Yountville to dine on Thomas Keller's perfections.
Dollars and coins piled up in the Fund jar. A reservation was made two months in advance, the soonest they take reservations at the restaurant. Friends were enlisted to go along. It was to be an event. We were going to eat art.
It was the best meal I have ever had. Twelve courses in all, each one a little bit of perfection leading you smoothly into the next course. I ate things I generally don't care for -- carrots, lobster, sea bass, and bone marrow -- and I couldn't get enough. The service was great as well; course, pause, course, pause, bread, pause, course...it was well-timed without seeming mechanical. Our server had worked in the kitchen as a chef for a couple years so he entertained us with little tidbits about the food, Keller, and the inner workings of the restaurant during our 3 1/2 hour meal.
As we were reluctantly leaving at the end of the meal, our server followed us out to the foyer. "Would you like to go back and meet Thomas?" We huddled by the door of the bustling but oddly quiet kitchen, watching Keller plate two or three courses for the dining room. When he had a free moment, Meg went over and chatted with him for a couple of minutes, showing him her Fund jar and telling him how much we had enjoyed the meal. As good as our dinner was, seeing the childlike sparkle in Meg's eyes while she talked with Keller was the high point of the evening. It's not often you get to meet your heroes.
Jim Romenesko is auctioning off a copy of the November 13, 2000 issue of the New Yorker which includes Rebecca Mead's You've Got Blog.
Internet navigators think small. One of the most interesting talks at the Etech conference was Clay Shirky's presentation on the User Patterns on LiveJournal. In it, he noted that on LiveJournal, people tend to tightly cluster into small groups which are themselves more loosely clustered into larger groups (and so on). When he studied this data, he found that groups of ~12 people are different than smaller or larger groups. There's a satisfying user experience that happens at that size: the group is big enough to have a variety of viewpoints and opinions but small enough so that everyone knows each other fairly well.
Today's mini-interview is with Nick Sweeney. You might say Nick has been around the block once or twice when it comes to online culture and community. He's got what the kids call "perspective".
Q: You've spent a significant amount of time participating on Plastic and MetaFilter, both prominent online community sites. Anything you can tell us about the differences between the two?
A: Actually, I wouldn't call myself a 'participant' in Plastic, which is probably an advantage: as one of the editors (although I'm speaking strictly for myself here), I'm meant to be both 'outside looking in' and 'inside looking out'. It's an interesting contrast to my time at MetaFilter, to say the least.
The editorial element is the biggest difference, of course. It's an attempt to introduce a kind of horticulture to the community's growth: to weed out the duplicates and the flames and the links to the Usual Suspects, and introduce a kind of distance to the slavish news/meme cycle which so often cripples MeFi these days. I think it's a smart way to manage communities that have reached the size and stage of evolution that Plastic's at right now. And the discussions from users within the submission queue are a great way to assess how a submission comes across.
I still check MeFi on occasion for the same reasons I read Wired magazine: the occasional piece inspires nostalgia; and I'd read many of its contributors, regardless of the forum. In its heyday, the erudition and diversity of knowledge on MeFi always went well beyond anything I've seen on Plastic. It's not quite as 'group-smart' now, simply because seminar-size discussions don't scale to lecture theatres.
Matt's always been very trusting towards his membership, and in general, receives the respect that's deserved by such trust. I can't help thinking that it doesn't accommodate 13,000-odd members: partly because the times don't lend themselves to seminar-style discussion; partly because you're dealing with the friction between oldbies and newbies, and their different conceptions of what the place is, was, and should be. 'Member memory' is a vital aspect of community sites, even ones which profess to deal with the transient meme-feed, and I think it's much stronger at MeFi than Plastic: so that when you have members who take perhaps two years' worth of discussion into the day's discussion up against new arrivals, it's bound to create the same kind of frustrations as a USENET September.
[ For comparison's sake, you can see something of that frustration with Slashdot, which, though working from a somewhat similar codebase to Plastic, has ceased to be a community for anyone with a long memory of the place, given that most discussions are essentially 'read-only' within hours of stories going live. That said, MeFi still retains an implicit quality threshold, with its emphasis on providing supporting links and challenging easy polarisations. (Whether that rule's honoured more now in the breach than the observance is another thing entirely.) ]
Plastic doesn't quite yet seem suited towards that kind of discussion: there's still an instinctive tendency towards raw opinioneering and snarkiness, though that's definitely changing. And you can't impose intellectual discipline on a community: it has to come from within. (Although as a plain old poster to Plastic, I do try to set a half-decent example.) What's bizarre is that Plastic is the one with the moderation system. But perhaps that's because moderation tends to favour both the well-considered posts and the cheap shots.
What I do like about Plastic is the way in which the mechanical aspects of the site -- that is, the combination of submission, peer review and moderation -- tend to promote a climate that's suited to media literacy. And because the more trollish or flamebaiting submissions don't make it past the queue, you'll get topics that create space for people to address in more nuanced ways than the 'partisan tennis' of an unmoderated system. (For instance, there was a recent well-regarded submission on school funding, property taxation and racism which turned into a fine discussion.) It's that kind of thing that I hope (and expect) Plastic can continue to support. ::end
This year's 5k contest is open for entries. Nanoprogrammers, start your text editors.
More business weblogs are starting to show up on the Web. Macromedia is having employees keep weblogs related to their new product line, a friend is backing an upcoming tech weblog, Kausfiles is being bankrolled by Slate (following Romenesko's lead of more than two years ago), and I've been on the hunt for a job writing a weblog for a few weeks now (I've got lots of ideas, you should email me if your company is interested). I think it's great...weblogs are a good way of publishing information and connecting with customers at the same time (among other things).
In particular, Macromedia's effort is impressive, letting individual employees provide information and customer support rather than completely relying on a personality-free support forum and Web site. It's not really surprising...Macromedia has been very smart about using the Web, newsgroups, email, and mailing lists to do guerilla support and marketing. As Meg notes, they have a few issues to take care of, but they'll soon get the bugs worked out.
What the Net might look like in the overregulated next millennium: Snailmail from the 21st Century. As inaccurate as most gazing-into-the-future is (just read some old entries on kottke.org for proof), Mark did a pretty good job with this one from May 1997.
This mirror shot by Alison reminded me of a shot I took in Berlin at the Camper store. (Hmm...the Web site has been redesigned recently...)
I was looking at the What's Related list in Rael's right sidebar and noticed that both kottke.org and Megnut are listed using old titles. I changed mine slightly a couple weeks ago, and Meg modified hers a week ago. Is Google using old data for its API? Update: No, they aren't. They seem to use older data for their "similar pages" searches: pages similar to www.oreillynet.com/~rael/.
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?
Question of the day: does calling something "not a weblog", even though it is a weblog, make it not a weblog?
Hello, and welcome to the first stop of the virtual book tour for "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard," the surging juggernaught of virtual book tours. My name's Greg Knauss, and I've commandeered kottke.org today to pester you into dropping six bucks for a big wad of dead tree. Jason will be back tomorrow, ma'am, please put your shirt back on.
"Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" is a collection of stories about kids -- birthing them, caring for them, confusing them for your own petty amusement -- that originally appeared on An Entirely Other Day. There are plenty of good reasons to buy a book composed of Web pages -- several of which revolve around bathroom accessibility -- but I'd like to start with a reading, to give you a flavor of what you'll find inside:
[Cough. Clear throat. Sip water. Read aloud. Lament my ineptitude at producing MP3s, and rue this lame substitute.]
Imagine how much better that would have been on paper, away from your computer, outside in the sunshine without all that pesky money weighing you down! Yes, "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" makes the perfect gift! Unless the person you're giving it to has children, in which case it will make them cry.
We're scheduled to begin the question and answer portion of the event here, but I'd like to say a few words to those of you who haven't been convinced to buy a copy by the reading:
C'mon, you weenie! It's only six bucks! If you don't want a book about kids, look at the rest of the So New catalog! Buy something else! Buy "Help Wanted" or Words! Words! Words! or "The Brick." Or Little Engines, which isn't even from So New Media. Or buy Macros, or back issues of Beer Frame, or, God, something other than another freakin' Grisham novel. How many of his books have you read? Six? Eight? Can you even tell them apart anymore? Here's a hint, sparky, the youngish white male lawyer is the good guy! You dropped six bucks on that, why not spend it on something that isn't extruded from the ass of the publishing industry like crap from a horse overdosed on Metamucil? Instead of your next Big Burger Value Pak, how about you grab an apple and some independent media? Huh?
And, now, Q&A:
You're a complete hypocrite, aren't you?
Yes. Total. Today at lunch, for instance, I'll be finishing "A Painted House" over a Western Bacon Cheeseburger.
But you still want me to buy your book?
Oh, yes. I did -- I bought six copies. You should, too.
Six is an awful lot, don't you think?
Yes, you're right. So I'll cut you a deal: order in the next ten minutes, and I'll only make you buy three.
These aren't real audience questions, are they?
No. It turns out that the Web is about as interactive as a box of cereal. But if you've got a question, please mail it to greg@eod.com, so I can answer it when the "Rain Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" book tour pulls into Stating the Obvious tomorrow morning. See you there!
Except for you, ma'am. No, you can't camp here until Jason comes back. Yes, I'm sure he'll like the embroidered pillow. And, please, put your shirt back on.
David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined (which title is the best four word description of the Web, ever), has written a kids version of it called What the Web Is For. More kids versions of "grown-up books" should be written...I imagine such an exercise could help the author focus their arguments and improve the end product.
In keeping with the photo analogy theme of the past few days, Nick offers his view of the Web circa 2002, complete with historical comparison.
And Mike expresses his feelings about dealing with ISPs right now.
David Gallagher is looking for some input on a story he's writing: "Why hasn't the Internet made more people famous? The number of people who have entered the pop-culture mainstream purely as a result of their Internet activities is very small. There's Mahir, Drudge and... anyone else? Why does Internet "stardom" so rarely cross over into mass-market popularity?"
Rebecca Mead strikes again with Shopping Rebellion in this week's New Yorker. Her description & analysis of Japan's fashion culture reminds me generally of several other threads floating about in the popular ether: mp3 ripping/trading, the weblog circle jerk, Web-enabled hypercollection, DVRs, the idea of a creative commons, the death of scarcity. The mantra of the moment seems to be "rip, mix, burn, consume, repeat, faster!" It's always been like this, but technology and our cultural evolution has shortened the lifecycle of the process so that the time from "rip" to "repeat" is a few minutes or hours instead of a few weeks or months, meaning that sometimes we can't tell why we're laughing at something anymore.
If you're heading to SXSW and taking in some panels, why not share your notes in the Notes Exchange. All conferences should have something like this.
Due to what I am assuming to be a glitch in the system, I am now a celebrity judge for the Iron Webmaster Showdown at SXSW (Sun @ 3:30pm). Ben and Dana will be heckling everyone in sight, including the contestants, so it should be a good time. I will have my full Iron Chef Judging Panel shtick going, so don't spare the foie gras and truffles.
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.
Excerpt from Stagette:
"As we approached Nob Hill, Fratboy One told the cab driver to pull over at an all-night grocery. He and Fratboy Three ran out of the cab to buy some beer. The cabbie turned around to talk to me.
'Those boys crazy. You seem like nice Asian boy, not like them. You are Filipino?'
'Yes.'
'I have many Filipino friends," said the cabbie, who was Chinese. "They all musicians, like you. But that not your real job?'
'No, I'm a computer programmer.'
'That nice job, even in hard time like now," he said, nodding. "You friend with these crazy gwei lo?'
'No, I met them tonight.' 'Duuuuuuude!' Fratboy One yelled, coming from the store holding a 24-pack of Sam Adams over his head. 'Let's roll!'
'And gwei lo say we can't hold liquor,' muttered the cabbie."
What a great story.
kottke.org remixed by Google. I got this idea from David Gallagher. What's that name again? That's right, David Gallagher.
Former co-workers Michele (as Meg) and Kelly (as me) recreate this Jezebel's Mirror Photo:
While I was saving that photo to my miscellaneous images directory, I ran across this blast from the past, sent in by a reader with way too much time on his hands.
I bet if I link to a bunch of people here, that most of them will link back to me. They'll look at their logs and say, "hmmm....this Jason guy linked to me" and then they'll write about it in their journal or weblog. Let's see what happens. And if I linked to you and you're reading this, there's no harm in playing along, is there?
New site designs: CamWorld and Stating the Obvious.
The new CamWorld design is going to take some getting used to; the old design had more personality. Also, the movement of the often used sidebar links from the right side to the left side means more back and forth mouse travel. Content is still king on CamWorld though...it's still very readable and easy to use.
The Stating the Obvious redesign is much sharper, IMHO. It's clean, consistant, and simple without being boring. I just wish Michael would keep it more up to date. <sigh>
I love nostalgia...tomorrow sucks and last week will always be the "good old days". With that in mind, here are some screenshots of a bunch of old GUIs. A friend of mine, when he left his last job, wiped the drive clean on his machine and installed Windows 2.0 on it...just for kicks. It hauled on that Pentium.
Speaking of the olden days, before I put up 0sil8, I ran a site called "Some Web Space". One of the features on this site was a page with a bunch of alternate lyrics to Alanis Morrisette's Ironic (done by myself and two friends). Enjoy.
Had lunch with Ariana today. She pointed me to the excellent Straight Dope, a site for people who want to find out stuff like how they get Teflon to stick to the pan. It's also the origin of this great bit:
"In some ways we know more about what happened in the universe's first tenth of a second than we do about what goes on in the interval between 'Your place or mine?' and deciding who sleeps on the wet spot."
Having trouble picking that new domain name? Glassdog's new Who Toy? can help you. Pick a catagory (GeekFest, MyURL, PornDog, or Randomizer) and then let Who Toy? do the work for you. Better hurry, kids...I've got my eye on zooknob.com.
A nice companion toy to the Who Toy? might be the What Toy?, a little mission statement generator for that sparkling new domain name. Throw words like "collaborative", "portal", "weblog", "personal", "culture", "links", and "rant" into a randomized pulldown thingie and there you have it. The beauty part is that if you've got zooknob.com all ready to go, but the What Toy? tells you that it's going to be "a collaborative vertical portal for the Linux community", you can always throw that one back and spin it again...until you have something more to your liking, such as "a webzine focused on pop culture, featuring links, rants, and a weblog." Now there's a mission statement that puts the "you" in "unique".
Finally, a new episode of 0sil8: The Great Mother's Day Car-Be-Que of 1999. The splash screen took forever for me to design...I didn't like any of the others I came up with and this one is just OK. Take some time to click through the pictures though...it's a neat little story.
It's Nichol's birthday today! I know most of you don't know who she is (she's my best girl), but if you could take 3 minutes out of your busy schedule to send her a birthday greeting, that would be great.
OK. Like an idiot, I forgot to include Nichol's email address...you can't very well send her a card if you don't know her email address. Here it is: nmcgrane@yahooSPAM.com (take out the "SPAM" part of it for best use). Thanks to Haidi for catching my mistake.
Glassdog has a new design, complete with DHTML sliding sidebar navigation. So much for my plans for a similar scheme on kottke.org...everyone will just think I'm copying Lance. <sigh>
SXSW kicked ass. It was great seeing old friends again, meeting online friends IRL, and meeting new people. I also got a mention on Wired News. Here are some photos and commentary from the weekend.
I read two nifty articles today.
The first is a piece written by Leslie Harpold at Smug concerning the increased proliferation of information and our attempt to keep up with it.
The second is a Salon article on bombs in online mailing lists.
And have you seen that Jetta commercial? Groovy music and a slick car. This advertising speaks to me. I want one.
0sil8 is a finalist in the SXSW Interactive Web Competition in the personal site catagory. I'm competing against two friends, a Flash-based Gabocorp ripoff, and a site which really isn't a personal site. Godspeed to Maura, Flaunt, and, if I may be so bold, to 0sil8.
Come one, come all to the Metababy chat on Friday, Jan 15 at 3pm CST. Just send email to metababy@metababy.com to participate. It'll be fun...tell your friends.
At 4 minutes 'til midnight, they started playing Prince's 1999, just like I had predicted. And I didn't mind....even though I thought I would have. The dance floor was packed and everyone was jumping and swaying and screaming the words to the song.
"Gonna party like it's 1999!"
Actually, it was probably the most fitting venue for the song, the very same First Avenue nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed and where Prince himself used to play.
I did a small piece for {fray}: my resolution for 1999.
Have you ever had that feeling that you're at peak mental performance? Your thinking is clear, concise, and accurate...you can do no wrong? I had that feeling about 7 months ago...and then I lost it. My thinking has been muddled of late. I have trouble organizing my thoughts...good ideas come hard these days.
But as I think about it, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Being a little muddled makes me work harder. It doesn't allow me to get complacent. Hopefully, after a while, some good ideas will pop out of the fog.
P.S. Alt Text has some good stuff.
I got my first ever case of frostbite this morning, and let me tell you...it's not a lot of fun. It happened when I was out in the frozen tundra this morning putting anti-freeze in Nichol's car. In my rush to get the both of us to work in a timely fashion, I didn't put on my gloves - even though it was about minus 10 degrees F this morning - and my thumb got all numb...and not in a good way either. It's just now thawing out, four hours later...most of the feeling is back, and it hasn't turned any funny colors.
Which is good.
"AOL Drops Backing From Film For Lack of Product Placement!" is playing over at the Drudge Retort. It's about that film "You've Got Mail". I love writing fake press releases and news articles.
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.
Greg Knauss launched a brand-spanking new metababy. You can post HTML to it by sending email to metababy@metababy.com. The interesting thing is that no one has done anything malicious to it yet.
As requested, more 0sil8 foolishness:
Jesse steals part of 0sil8 and puts it up at Quasistatic.
Caroline doesn't know what she's going to do with this, but here it is. She is also running Croon, which is a really great idea for a site.
Jason blithers and blathers about design on Glassdog.
It's come to my attention that there are certain former overlords out there that don't "get" 0sil8. I couldn't be happier.
Plus, I'm turning 25 in two days. And I'm getting the best gift in the whole world. :)
Ladies and gentlemen, The Ride™ is dead. Let's all observe a moment of silence.
What is The Ride, you ask? The Ride was my 1981 Pontiac Bonneville...quite possibly the longest car ever to roll off of the production line. It was huge and a huge crowd favorite. Kids and adults alike came from miles around just to take a ride in it. It brought people together. It loved us all.
But The Ride got too unreliable. Finicky fuel pump. 1 quart of oil every 100 miles. Inoperative gas gauge. One missing "bright" headlamp. No dome light. Missing rearview mirrow. Flat spare tire. Idled too fast. Wouldn't run right in traffic or when it was hot. "Check engine" light on all the time. Clock didn't work and displayed 12:00 when the blinker was on. Clock also displayed 12:00 when the bass was loud on the radio. Leaked power steering fluid. Radio tuner knob inoperable. Broken air conditioning. Among other things.
So it was time to get something else. My "new" car is a 1990 Nissan Sentra, formerly (and solely) owned by a minister. It's not spectacular, but it works well and it's mine.
Anyone out there ever done any shingling? It's pretty fun...and a welcome change from the computer. You're outside, getting a tan, wind in your hair, pounding nails, scraping up your knuckles on the shingles until they bleed, hoisting 75 pounds of shingles on your shoulder and climbing up a ladder. Ahhh...that's the stuff.
Also, go see Hey, Geek Girl. It's a perfect idea...advice for geeks from one of the coolest and smartest geeks I know.
My mom has email now. The Internet has officially Arrived™.
I just finished reading Tom Clancy's new book, Rainbow Six. It was OK.
The Avengers is possibly the worst movie I've seen since The Fifth Element.
Go rent Good Will Hunting. You know who you are.
I bought some drawstring pants. My unemployment experience is complete.
I will be gone for the weekend.
I'm going to Web98 in a week. I'm pretty excited. I get to: see San Francisco for the first time, meet a bunch of people F2F that I have corresponded with via email, go to a big Web conference for the first time, and be part of the Cool Site in a Day event. Representin' east side style. Word.
In other news, 0sil8 should be up and running again before I go. Now, I'm not promising anything, but that's the plan. So, look for a new episode by the end of the week.
And someone mentioned that I never name names in this little document. That someone is Nichol McGrane. So much for not naming names.
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.
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