:Archive Of June 2000:
Tuesday, June 27, 2000
- 1:06 PM -
Dear good god. This site is absolutely amazing. The equivalent of a shelf full of pricey coffee table books. Non-commercial. And beautiful. And it gets two million hits a month.
Monday, June 26, 2000
- 11:01 AM -
Modern Living has been mentioned just about everywhere. It should be. Go see it again.
Sunday, June 25, 2000
- 2:05 AM -
We have animal crackers. We have jelly bears. Why don't we have candy shaped like furniture? A foil packet of little sofas. A loveseat, a chesterfield, a settee. Or, how about shoes? Think of the drag queen market for that one. Make only two candies per thousand as ruby slippers.
Friday, June 23, 2000
- 2:33 PM -
Update: A few days ago I wrote a piece called Dream Device about a wireless flatscreen monitor / tablet that would let me walk over to the couch and read the net while relaxing on my back. Here's a shot of ZIBA's version for Fujitsu. If you can survive the marketspeak it looks like they've got some bright folks in the research department.
- 11:37 AM -
Oh. Oh, no. I'm not going to get anything done at all today. I need a cosmic ray detector. Heck, lots of 'em! I wonder if I can make a tiny one in my watch?
Thursday, June 22, 2000
- 3:07 PM -
- 12:54 PM -
Very, very cool. This bookmarklet, dosomegood, is from Rebecca's blog. It opens Click For A Cause, Clear Landmines, The Rainforest Site, and The Hunger Site, all organization that get support from advertisers just by you clicking a button. That's it. No obligations, no spam. You can drag the link into your bookmark file and use it every morning. Rebecca credits Jesse James Garrett for its creation. (He also has a great set of Information Architecture links.)
While you're clicking for causes, note that there's a Search Page that donates food every time you use it.
- 8:58 AM -
Details of Carbon Fibre Unicycle Development and Manufacture.
Carbon Fibre. Unicycles. For off-road racing. That's insane. I must have one.
Wednesday, June 21, 2000
- 5:18 PM -
I just noticed that the last time I updated the nav bar on my main site I broke all the internal links. Funny how my hit count flat-lined since that day. I either have to not touch things at 2 am, or I have to leave a note for my morning self to run the validator. Anyway, it's all fixed now, and for those who care, Stay Awake has a new entry.
Tuesday, June 20, 2000
- 9:58 PM -
Tiring of SodaPlay yet? Looking for a bit more of a challenge? Then take a look at Flap Design. The site's a sweet show of restraint, too.
- 6:29 PM -
UseIt.com (Score:5, Informative) Jakob Nielsen:
"BT did not invent hypertext: the first running software was the The Hypertext Editing System and FRESS at Brown University in 1967, and the conceptual invention was even earlier (1945 or 1965, depending on whether you credit Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson). But BT may have a case for hypertext links across a network (i.e., the Web) since all the early systems were mainframe based. "
- 1:45 PM -
Bingo. Your Customer Isn't An Idiot: Retail on the Web The one thing I learned from retail is this truth: never sell a customer on something, help them buy things. They didn't just come back, they asked for me by name. And I was just selling tools.
Saturday, June 17, 2000
- 4:48 PM -
There's talk of creating search engines that search and link by images, and I've heard of at least one person that wants to do it by sounds. So where's the blog that is entirely in musical notation? If music is the language that it is, why not just posts in fragments of work someone is playing with, expressing his/her emotion of the moment, linking by showing a sheetmusic fragment of the piece lead to?
[Somewhere I have a bmp of one handwritten line from Glass's Einstein On The Beach. It's beautiful.]
You may think this unlikely, but there is a man out there who composes only for player pianos.
- 4:27 PM -
All right, that's enough. A small marching drum band has just crossed the park. Slowly. The main instrument is a kettle-type drum. Tom-tom-tom-tom-tom. So I'm listening to jungle birds and jungle drums, while looking at an ordinary summer day. ... I swear I don't need to crack-up; the world does it for you.
- 3:36 PM -
Outside my window is a park that has become home to a few escaped tropical birds. They are being rather vocal at the moment. So my view of an entirely ordinary sunny summer day now has a deep jungle soundtrack that's 5,000 miles out of place. As if my life wasn't surreal enough already.
- 3:13 PM -
Oh bliss. The forgotten toys of childhood. Thanks, Nick.
Friday, June 16, 2000
- 11:04 PM -
Thank you Slashdot! LunaCorp's Moon Robots.
- 10:23 PM -
This is for those moments late at night, red eyed, caffinated, and out of ideas at the keyboard, when you question your own sanity:
The International Belt Sander Drag Race Association.
- 9:55 PM -
Cool. Sites with pictures of the pope-mobile. I love the web.
In a parade, in a dealership, back in 86, and Pope DeVille.
- 8:01 PM -
Buried in /usr/bin/girl is this entry:
. . . <8:56:23 AM>
I never hear my neighbours having sex. But the ones upstairs are constantly tromping on my ceiling at odd hours.
It's obvious enough, isn't it? They are particularly rare sexual deviants known as Morris Dancers.
And, yes, there is a webring. But what is less know is that Morris Dancing is the Secret Handshake of web designers. Famous dancers include Zeldman and the k10k boys. Kottke we're unsure of, but it's likely he is "Morris-curious".
- 4:20 PM -
The design process is a funny thing.
Right now this blog looks more than a little like Zeldman's creations, which is fine, BUT I had started in an entirely different direction.
I was full of Camworld and k10k and a little Kottke in the beginning. I hit upon this 70's green and the Verdana "inflight correction" while mucking about and I liked them. The yellow text area and the nav bar on the right came along after a day of experiment and a LOT of tiny buttons and icons that didn't quite work.
Then I slept on it. Then I read my morning blogs and noticed the similarity. "That's weird", said I, and made a note to think harder about Jeffrey's style.
Then, just now, I was back at A List Apart. Oh shit. It's the exact same green and the nav bar is on the right.
Goddamn heck.
I don't even like the style of ALA that much. Weird. I will never, ever, understand my brain.
Thursday, June 15, 2000
- 9:15 PM -
One of the scars of being raised by television is I have a few thousand advertisements welded to my brain, inseparable elements of my karmic whole. This stinks. One of these little beauties is the phrase "rack and pinion steering!" yelled at me from Ford truck commercials as long as I can remember. Um, thanks, Ford. We the truck buying public that makes up your raison d'etre have no idea what in hell you're talking about. Y'all done some engineering thing with the steering, huh? Neato. Well, you know, we all kinda already figured that on account you use a steering wheel instead of pulling on rope ends.
Oh but if only we could salve these lesions of our consciousness by soaking them with humour. Or: Why the heck doesn't Ford have the good grace to follow the modern trend to smart advertising and put up a webpage titled What The Hell We Were Talking About, explaining the innovation of rack and pinion, why they cared about it, how the advertising campaign was developed, how it lasted through the decades, and the rather amusing admission that it never did a damn thing for selling the trucks.
I'm actually kinda surprised I couldn't find a fan site about it.
Oh wait, here's one. [Oh dear god. It was an Australian invention. That explains so much.]
- 5:57 PM -
It's official: Powazek is not a web-star. This is a goddam web-star. [From the k10k News.]
2000-6-10 20:16 :: mschmidt
... and did I mention, that my whole upper body is covered with women's phone numbers? Yeah, it's that good - wish you were here!
- 2:36 PM -
Bob The Angry Flower. The best imaginary playmate anyone ever had.
- 1:17 PM -
Two headlines in Slashdot this morning. Am I the only one making a connection?
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