:Archive Of November 2000:
Monday, November 27, 2000
- 7:37 PM -
Interesting. The polls have now closed in the Other Federal Election, north of the US. Throughout the campaign media has been reporting general voter apathy and resentment over this early election call. Well, the CBC website has just buckled from requests for information. You can't get anywhere past the first page. I'd say a certain segment of the population isn't that apathetic.
- 11:41 AM -
"In art school, you are solving personal problems, but in design school you learn to solve public problems. "
Interview with game designer Lauren Goldberg.
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
- 6:59 PM -
This on the other hand, is such fun.
- 6:30 PM -
Pig-headed rant begins:
I am having a hard time taking Netscape 6 seriously. Everyone seems to have had to install it more than once. That alone, never mind the long list of bugs, and designers having to rewrite sites ... that alone should kill it. When is the net going to grow up enough that when a mainstream product ships it performs flawlessly all previously known functions, and only stoops to "pretty good" on new ones? Not be mass of bugs. Surely we're past that point. Netscape is the product of a really big company. Adobe wouldn't dream of shipping a product like this. Why should it be okay if it's Netscape? Why are they being cut slack appropriate to highly experimental projects?
I really hope it fails. I hope the new non-technical majority of net users --its main market-- utterly ignore it. I want it to collapse in on itself in such a big way that the name Netscape becomes synonymous with Titanic among professional software companies. A dark looming fear that keeps them from releasing until their product runs like a Swiss watch.
End of rant. Sorry folks.... This Netscape release really gets me grumpy.
I'm going back to working on a personal project now. It's buggy and experimental and it's not going to run on all browsers or all humors. There's a place for these things. They're close to my heart. Like Mods on chopper Vespas. But Netscape is a Chevy Malibu sedan. Dull and solid. It's not acceptable to have to tinker with a family car every five blocks.
- 9:27 AM -
Mentioned in the k10k news this morning,
"Speaking as a professional web designer for 4 years now, the International Herald Tribune site just revolutionizes everything we ever knew about news websites and portals. The layout, the usability, the fact that it's only written with advanced DHTML, it's just fantastic. A new way of thinking on all levels..."
And it crashes my entire browser when I close its window. I'm using a stock msie5.01/win98 combo. This is why I still twitch when I hear things like "only written with advanced DHTML". Are we there yet? I dunno. I'd like to be.
Possibly related: there's a small handful of Flash sites I can't navigate. Possibly this is a javascript problem. I note Zannah has the same trouble on one of her machines.
These are the things that give me pause about introducing advanced methods to mainstream sites. Meanwhile, does anyone happen to know what this glitch is?
Monday, November 20, 2000
- 8:13 PM -
Evil Robot Manufacturing Corporation. I have no idea what this is about. Anyone?
- 12:32 PM -
Corner Store MoMA. Neat idea, neat stuff, lousy web site. [Thanks to urs/bin/girl.]
Saturday, November 18, 2000
- 12:30 PM -
Rory's back.
Friday, November 17, 2000
- 12:34 PM -
Wait a minute, Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, Jakob did!
“In the future, first of all, websites will be designed by my guidelines ... for the simple reason that if they don't, they are dead.”
All this time I thought he'd been making structured observation about what works. I had not realized t'was His voice in the burning bush, His words carved on the stones brought down the mountain by our prophet. Oh I am a wretched sinner. But my eyes are cleared now. I am a Born Again designer.
Sheesh. Filthy little HTML nudist, that's what I say.
Next I expect him to spout, "Guns before butter." Has anyone done a Quotations Of Chairman Jakob yet?
Thursday, November 16, 2000
- 10:56 PM -
Possibly one of the most important artifacts of the 20th Century. Ladies and Gentlemen, Freud's couch.
Wednesday, November 15, 2000
- 2:45 PM -
Er, whups. Well, I had a link to a great version of the Palm Beach ballot modified by Amazon to navigate their site. However they've yanked it and now redirect you to a dull political book selection. I wonder how many people ended up there and wondered why I [and others] had blogged it?
Boo, Amazon. Act one was very cool. Act two was just dumb. Final score: I don't want to buy my books from you.
- 12:44 PM -
I am resisting the temptation to install browser detection that redirects Netscape 6 users to the Netscape bug report page. Must ... resist ....
- 11:38 AM -
Slashdot points to OSHA's new regulations on ergonomics. Important stuff. And under their banner of "Ergonomics - Real People, Real Problems, Real Solutions", you will find a bunch of PDF documents.... #@%!
I can't be the only one without a honking big monitor and a pricey printer. Was it Cam who called PDFs "the real cancer on the web" ?
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
- 10:00 PM -
Yay! The favorite Sodaplay has been updated with a spanky new interface and a zoo.
Thanks to Invisible City for making me go look again. I've got it bookmarked of course, but is there a better way of forgetting something than that?
- 7:55 AM -
"Some assembly required." What a way to wake up... reading bug reports about Netscape 6. Six. It's version six and they're still shipping junk. Big sigh.
Monday, November 13, 2000
- 8:55 PM -
So.... I found the Useit Redesign Contest and B!FF#S K3WL H0M3 PAG3 within three clicks of each other. This speaks to me.
Sunday, November 12, 2000
- 11:10 PM -
Solved! The toy I could not completely remember was the Super City building set by Ideal. Ugly, isn't it?
- 9:02 PM -
That's it. I'm going offline for a bit. Everywhere I look tonight I'm finding wonderful stuff I can get lost for hours in. Take a look at the beautifully done Room*301. Get into the photo collection via the studio.
- 8:33 PM -
Asteroids on the net! Works every bit like the original. My space-bar is going to be mulch by morning.
- 8:15 PM -
Tokyo Trash. (Someday I'll learn Japanese. Someday I'll go to Japan. Sigh.)
- 7:52 PM -
Hey wow. Good design about good design. Tribu-design. And check out the Flash house.
- 2:50 PM -
Okay, what I'm really trying to find this morning, inspired by a flip remark I made about mid-century modern houses done in Lego, is an early sixties toy I had as a kid. There actually was a "Lego" for making mid-century modern buildings. It used soft plastic frame elements for grip, and a variety of clear, opaque, and translucent panels. I remember pieces somewhat like this,
It's also the only childhood toy I've never found a reference to on the net. Anyone? What was it called at least?
- 1:03 PM -
*twitch* More design links than I can hope to deal with right now.
- 12:32 PM -
This is terribly sad. Click For A Cause just closed. I'd been doing all my searching via Google via them.
Saturday, November 11, 2000
- 9:18 PM -
"Last year, I had the opportunity to meet Salman Rushdie on a television program. Not knowing where to start the conversation ("So how's exile been treating ya?" was definately out of the question), I told him about playing hockey in China. This led to a discussion about Rushdie's beloved Tottenham Spurs football club."
from an unedited chapter of the new book Tropic Of Hockey (My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places) by Dave Bidini, who also happens to be part of the great band Rheostatics.
- 8:35 PM -
Oh, you want more do you? Take that.
- 8:22 PM -
An entire gallery of Airstream trailer photos.
- 10:12 AM -
Oh my gosh. Forget about RIAA and Napster for a bit and remember what MP3 and FTP are good for. Robert Munsch has put some of his story telling on the web. (Thanks to Jared for pointing to this.)
What I remember about these stories is they were available in beautifully illustrated tiny kid-sized books for a single dollar each, and these were displayed at the check-out of our local grocer. What an easy way to get a child something they'd treasure.
Thursday, November 09, 2000
- 9:27 AM -
Someone at xplane reads this log?
Fun! Thanks for putting the word out on that one folks. I only get about 20 hits a day here.
Wednesday, November 08, 2000
- 10:07 PM -
Well that's kind of an enlightened approach.
I've been cruising the CBC website trying to find details on a show I listened to yesterday. While I'm finding the lack of subject specific inter-linking maddening, it's interesting to see that each program has been left on its own to make a website. There's a real broad selection of styles and ideas.
I'd expected a top-down management style dictating a single look and structure. Not so. Taken as a whole there's a wealth of comparative examples for web design discussion here.
Tuesday, November 07, 2000
- 9:01 AM -
Score 5, Informative. A rambling interview with Paul Rand.
"The fact that you can use the computer and all the systems, the Quark, all that other stuff, it is very unimportant compared with the problem of understanding what you are doing as a designer. Because the computer will not teach you how to be a designer. NO WAY! You know that when the typewriter was invented its greatest accomplishment was that it destroyed handwriting. If you look at early handwriting manuscripts before the typewriter existed you will see what I mean. I think, and I am not Nostradamus, but I think that is going to happen largely with the computer, in terms of art. I think that relationship is adverse. I could be wrong, but that is what I think."
Huh. I'm not sure I agree with that at all. The computer also gives us a spectacularly advanced pen over what we had in the caligraphy days. I think I disagree with Rand here because I see the human love of beauty as capable of expressing itself in many ways, and it's not defined by the media of the moment.
But he has the guts to dig into floppy issues and tell you his experienced opinion.
Sunday, November 05, 2000
- 11:41 PM -
I'm looking forward to getting to the stage where we don't say "website" much. It's a path, a husk. Let us refer to the content, not the novel container. Sometimes I think we're trying too early to define the medium by what can be said in it. It's way too early for that. At this rate of growth there may actually be no limit.
- 11:19 PM -
Saturday, November 04, 2000
- 9:12 PM -
Silly old bear. He's eighty on Wednesday, you know.
Friday, November 03, 2000
- 9:15 PM -
Wednesday, November 01, 2000
- 6:28 PM -
Hey, this is good. Design-Engine zine. (thanks to xblog)
- 10:56 AM -
Desktop not big enough for you? Go decorate a motel room.
Owen Briggs ©2000, 2006
