Saturday, March 25, 2000
mr t 0wn3z.
btw, ns4 scores a -41.5 on dave baron's css tests.
i fixed the netscape float bugs for my images by making the img align left and adding two line breaks to even out the spacing. i did some searching to try to find out more on what's going on and if there were any less kludgy fixes, but unfortunately i wasn't able to find any pertinent solutions. i'm dreading debugging this page. the sad thing is that these float bugs, while obviously having to do w/ the styles are happening on my unstyled elements! anyway, before i go on another rant, i'll just skip to the end: netscape sucks.
people have been lining up in front of the shrine (1 block down) for the oscars since last week. it's been getting pretty crazy out there. don't they have anything better to do? of course, it is a really nice day.
+1000 words according to haughey logic. ;)
Friday, March 24, 2000
baby duct-taped to wall. i think the title says it all. wow.
Press and Personal Website Coverage of the 2000 SXSW Interactive Festival.
i finished my skull a bit early in sculpture class today so a spent a few minutes and made a nice little clay rose and threaded it through.
i did a cool little vector piece in a demo version of the now apparently discontinued fractal desgin (metacreations) expression. unfortunately, the demo version didn't allow saves, but i'll probably dig out the print version i have sometime. i remember i got it published in my high school literary mag, so i must have a copy somewhere...
cam made a mention of packet video. i'm sorry i missed them at sxsw. rob tercek was supposed to talk at one of the last panels i was at, but was a noshow. i remember briefly meeting him when he used to teach the sega games class while i was working at the interactive media lab in the usc cinema dept.
i wanna dot the 5k compo, i have some good ideas. just... no time.
Thursday, March 23, 2000
get your red hot fruit-fly genome right here folks!
instead of work, i've been reading old penny arcades. they're all pretty good, but this one split my sides. the slashdot one is good too.
did i mention i got the abyss: se dvd in the mail today? it's a kickass 2 dvd set w/ both the theatrical and director's cut, and tons of extras, like the complete screenplay and storyboards, mutli-angle stuff, concept art, and documentaries. now if only i had a working dvd player...
i wanted to finish writing a late paper tonight, but i ended up spending 4 hours in a coffee house unsucessfully studying for a fa350 midterm (art theory and criticism). semiotics and critical theory, wee. de saussure, beaudrillard, derrida, lacan, oh my. the cool thing is that i met a ucla (no link there, nope nope) 3rd yr graduate art student who coincidentally enough was writing a paper on barthes / freud / lacan, etc. (psycho-analysis). was able to get some (different) perspective on how all the theorists and theories interact. ok, well, i'm gonna be up for a looong time tonight. blech.
randomness: i got dope wars (based of of the original drug wars - ahh, amber screens and warm fuzzies... memories) for my palm in january, and played it for about 3 straight hours. i got a high score that night $26,482,227 which i've yet to beat since. unfortunately, my lowest high score is $3 million+, which can get frustrating when i make over a million and still not be rewarded properly. incidentally, i've calculated it will take me 11 years to make my first million if i save $30,000 / yr assuming a 20% avg rate of return. if i get cracking this summer, i should be able to become financially independent by 2011.
obviously mentioned everywhere, the web economy bullshit generator. the cool thing is that a lot of the words that me (and everyone else in the biz) suggested last week ended up on there this week. yay. the scariest thing of course being that all this jargon sounds frighteningly ... uh real. reminds me of the old trek technobabble generators, ahh, the wonders of fidonet. i'd dig out the original, but unfortunately i lost all my bluewave logfiles in a hd crash in 1996. wow, that was a while back ago. old skool. ;-)
while i'm babbling, i got the m$h sndtrk (corrected order) from cdnow today. i must say, that stateless (ra) is a frickin' awesome song. so different, yet so u2.
i have a hitbox account and should really use that instead of extreme tracking for ths stuff i can't get webalizer to cover (and that i'm too lazy to set up analog for) but th hitbox icon is just too damn ugly.
well that took a long time to type out. so that's where all my time goes. c'est la vie.
Wednesday, March 22, 2000
i've almost forgotten how frickin hilarious suck can be.
jason will flip over this, mr showbiz has an interactive pets.com sock puppet.
i've been relistening to the u2 salome boots this morning. as much as achtung baby rocks, some of the unreleased stuff was even better.
funky. try out leonard($foo). this is based off mediator software, part of critlink. the author of those apps has also written an interesting an interesting issue tracking system in python.
Tuesday, March 21, 2000
metaphysical conceits are neet.
random rant: hate it when you leave a cd out and it gets scratched at it starts skipping. when i get a better cd drive i should rip em onto mp3 to avoid that kind of thing. need to get paid first though... maybe then an ultraplex would be good.
i'm gonna take a step back until i clear some stuff off my todo list. hopefully i'll be able to get enough done that i can have some fun this weekend. rent.net actually works. too bad bookmarking is such a bitch (crappily designed cgi), and the interface/organization/navigation sucks. i'm kvetching again.
hmm, blogger, crapping out again. time to get some more boxen, burn that venture capital!
automotive industries has a ton of info on the honda insight. i want to like the car... maybe the next gen will be good enough (when i dump my languishing buick). ai has a dec99 feature on the insight and prius, also there's a guy with a dedicated insight log / site.
What’s the future hold? Soon after you read this, GM will unveil its hybrid-powered Precept, the automaker’s bid for the 80-mpg “supercar” jointly developed under the government’s Partnership for a New Generation Vehicle program. Precept breaks so much new design and engineering ground that the team’s motto was, “This is rocket science.” Expect a feature on Precept in AI next month — and an equally advanced PNGV study from Ford. Both concepts will be drivable by 2003, though GM has yet to prove Precept can achieve the 80-mpg bogey. By that time, the critics may see Insight and Prius in a different light.
here's the january 2000 precept article. pretty frickin cool. “We eventually adopted two mottos: Yes, we must reinvent the wheel, and yes, this is rocket science!”
ever get that realization that you have not enough time to get everything you need to get done done? sucky feeling, huh? i left behind while i was chillin in austin, and picked it right back up now that i'm back in la.
Monday, March 20, 2000
hmm, ramen recipes (/usr/bin/girl). i dunno, looks too complex. i'm way too lazy when i'm cooking ramen...
stare and gawk: a woman's guide on how to pee standing. yes, armageddon is nigh, so says the supersmart alien dolphins. suck it!
net companies running out of cash? some big names there. somehow i don't think they're just gonna fold, but whatever. interesting diversion. back to trying to work.
so, this is the versus project. never knew about this before. sorta like the #pixel compos.
i've begun using dot notation for my nested block comments. i'm such a nerd.
Dell: We laugh at your puny Net devices.
the constructor is an amazing java applet. also via metafilter.
woohoo, netscape 6/mozilla beta release in 25 days! tickle me pink.
I am the KeyMaster!
XUL!!!
reading metafilter's comments on bennetton's most recent ad campaign. also interesting is bennetton's colors magazine. their monoculture critique reminded me of the supersphere stickers up all over austin (mouse and crossbones). now there were some smug assholes. anyway, the bennetton stuff makes you think: corporate conscience or viral backpacking, taking advantage of all those poor art students who will be forced to discuss the ad campaign in class.
i was looking up a book of ablum covers (techno style) i saw at the sxsw trade show floor, and i ended up finding a grip of cool rave/flyer design stuff. neet. i'm going to design an open-source version of blogger just so i can type ctrl-shift-p.
i find myself agreeing w/ a lot of matt's thoughts, definitely capturing the whole introducing yourself to ppl who you know but don't know you (my end).
i don't think blogger is as limiting as some might thinkabout publishing long tracts. ie, you can easily set it to show one piece at a time, without a timestamp, etc. (like matt's and brig have done) in fact, the main limiting factor of bloggin is just that you can't change the text area by draggin either the window or frame/area. nothing that some dhtml wouldn't solve for ppl w/ modern browsers (mozilla or ie). plus, add in a little cookie action and it would remember your preferred window size... or you could do it the old fashioned way and type it in a word processor, but who wants things like spell checks, grammar, and cogitation on the web? heheh. (proof reading is for sissie) ;-P
it just occurred to me that jz has been doing both a blog (daily report archives go back to july 97) and big stuff forever. of course, some ppl are just awesome like that. i just found myself changing the word guys -> ppl. how pc of me. oh, and there's a line between inspiration and copying which i find strange jz might have missed. some of the designs that he mentions in his mar 15-19 post are more descendents of some of his design memes rather than rip-offs. not to mention, it's a bit amazonish claiming ownership of solid borders and multi-tone solid colors in rectangles (which is the natural shape for tables). still, i suppose jz may feel a bit like rms sometimes, ie getting a bit shafted. don't worry, we love you jz. 3.7 million hits and counting.
while i'm brainfarting (i always am, now that i think of it), i got my cdnow order while i was in austin. actually, i got 2 or the 3 cds. instead of getting the mdh soundtrack, they sent me nin's pretty hate machine. of course it's the cd that i really want that was screwed up. i'm enjoying the kcrw: rare on the air vol 4 cd. some kick butt tracks. a real cool thing is i finally found out that this lick that i really liked from the boxer trailer is actually by a song called st. teresa, by joan osbourne. (btw, the links to amazon only speaks to how difficult and crappy it is to link stuff to cdnow, seeing as they don't modularize and put the sid at the end like amazon--i'm still on the boycott until the patent thing gets resolved. this means more than posting a carefully designed letter making pandering, empty promises. when they finally do what's right, i'll be able to shop with them again, until then, the wishlist builds -- random complaint: wtf with moving all things on the home page i'm used onto the right side? and their still sneaking their ugly redesign. <sigh>).
wow, this turned into a monster. unfortunately, this half an hour came out of time i should have been doing work.
hard to believe there was a time when i didn't like $ signs in front of variables. even harder to believe that was only about 2 yrs ago. now they seem to make perfect sense.
Sunday, March 19, 2000
De Icaza opened with a lesson for the monolingual among his audience: "In French, you have two words for "free," liberté as in "freedom," and gratuit as in "free beer." In English, you only have the one word, so the ideas get confused sometimes. Free software is about liberté."
also on peterme, peter talks about the interface culture panel and also mentions scott mccloud (author of the awesome understanding comics). the latter made me think back to the animation, comics and film: narrative on the web panel at sxsw that taylor moderated, and which unfortunately sucked all kinds of ass. a very rich topic that had tons of potential instead became a stupid clipshow. wtf? in fact, i don't even think there was a single discussion on the panel about narrative on the web. nothing about how interaction plays a part, or the shift from low to high bandwidth, or about the uniqueness of the computer-based screen medium, about experimentations with narrative, the combination of audio and visual data, how hypertext and dynamic data changes and effects how narrative needs to be considered, nada.
now, on the other hand, i thoroughly enjoyed the interface culture panel, as matt predicted, it was (for me at least, i overheard some people hating it) the best panel of the conference. tons of issues discussed, the most interesting being about creating webs of trust (an interest of mine for the past half-year or so). an issue for me was trust of the trust broker. it occurred to me that unfortunately, for most sites, you aren't given the algorithms or exact composition of your web of trust. sort of also related to the profile that's built about you by a company like amazon, which may or may not even be accurate. two thoughts occurred to me: when i doctor gives me any kind of exam or care, the medical data is mine, why then, for profiles that are accumulated on me that can be even more personal, is that information owned by the company? and 2) if i were to accumulate all this data and were able to keep it with me, how would i store it? ideally, i'd like to see some sort of transparency, ie at least if they collect all this data, i should be able to see it. perhaps, it might be possible for a personal profile to be formed that would reside at a trusted source. this is leading back, perhaps to a /. post that i mentioned earlier...
i was looking at the page through ns4, and saw that the image i posted was screwing everything up. i took a long hard look at the parse tree, but for the life of me couldn't spot what was wrong. <shrug>
hmm, i recently set up a search for my site w/ atomz.com. it seems to work pretty well. the only problems for me is figuring out somewhere to put it. i have it on my archive page right now, but it doesn't look right anywhere i tried to place it on my front page. here's the actual search box that i style. i'm not sure if looks right up on top (this link only works w/ ie4+).
right now i'm considering either putting it up there and letting it be hidden, or just making it a dhtml popup from the top bar. i really want to keep the simplicity of the design. it's getting a bit crowded as is.
well, it looks like the secret is out on who made the superfriends commercial
<rant>who is anyone to tell me what i can or can't do on the web? i don't think that ben made a good point at all when he basically said: if you aren't publishing in my format (as opposed to any other) then you shouldn't be doing anything in the at all. those were prett much his exact words at the sxsw roundtable discussion and i will tell you that rarely have i ever been so disgusted.
so, maybe his comments were good for some, but what he advocated was no better than what he decried. (oh yeah, this is the kind of self referential stuff that steve was complaining about, also at the same sxsw panel).</rant>
now that i got that out of my system, some more thoughts: it has occurred to me that while some people are longing for these big monolithic projects that used to be all the rage, what they are wishing for really isn't what the medium of the web is most conducive to. when artists, creative people, started getting on the web, by and large they were coming from a screen medium - cd-rom projects. as time goes on, the web has acquired it's own voice, which includes big experimental stuff like erik loyer's marrow monkey, long tracts in word or the fray, but also communally moderated forums like slashdot, and other network-based (the natural mode of the web) models (amazon.com, epinions.com, etc.). weblogs seem to fall in between those two areas, having the important aspects of content (personal voice), and also functioning as a means of collaborative filtering.
now may also be a good time to mention some of my reservations of weblogging as a phenomenom, especially in the sort of celebrity / weird cliquishness it seems to engender. i can't quite put words on it right now, and i really do think that any sort of self publishing on the web, whether it be the now passé homepage, journals/weblogs (it has a new name now, but people have been doing it since the web was put up) , but i'm sure that something will come up eventually. anyway, my brain is still fried and i have a crapload of work to do, so off i go.
the inderma looks neat. web browsing through mozilla, 100mb ethernet, hdtv output, game support, and mp3/vob support to boot. hopefully these guys will be able to market it correctly. (and if in addition it did tivo stuff / dvd playback, it could kick major ass)
how sweet it ... wasn't. spent about 4 hours walking around, looking for ppl, and chillin w/ some friends. things started to pick up around 2am, where i met a bunch of old faces. dissapointed w/ how much wandering was happening vs.musical enjoyment, but i was able to catch: junior sanchez, dj hype, dj dan, doc marten, derek carter, sniper, and a bit of mark farina (plus hearing thee-o scratch was awesome).