June 2001

What blogs / journals do I try to check regularly?

It’s hard, because you can spend all day and all night reading blogs and never get any work, play, or necessary family, spousal, or anything else—done. But here they are.

In alphabetical order: backupbrain ; camworld ; captain cursor ; matt haughey / matt haughey ; joel on software littlegreenfootballs ; memepool metafilter ; robotwisdom ; scott andrew ; zeldman.

That’s all for now.

The Strategians / WebSanDiego.org / Techniquelle Bonfire.2001! has hit fifty RSVPs. Too, too cool.

Controversy du jour: Microsoft ‘Smart Tags’ Could Violate Law – Attorney – via littlegreenfootballs blog

Based on this line of reasoning, valley url , dialectizer , et. al , vischeck color blindness simulator , lynx viewer , or even babelfish could be interpreted as “derivative works” and get the law on their asses.

The problem is not meta-manipulating content per se. The problem is when it’s only microsoft allowed to do the smart tagging. A nice thing might be to be able to choose your smart tagging engine. So maybe I can choose a finance specific engine so I can go to real estate and investment sites and understand that stuff better.

And Smart Tags themselves are not bad. The W3C’s Annotea seems to be the same damn thing, but without the Microsoft control, and without the bundling with the browser.

And the bundling, sports fans, was the key problem in that antitrust issue.

I got a postcard from RT Temps in the mail yesterday. Very tempting to go off to some exotic locale and travel and do respiratory therapy. Or even just go traveling and work.

Of course, I’ve not practiced my Respiratory Care license in a few years. But it’s nice, especially in what are presumably bad economic times, to have a fallback position.

Q: What is AAAFNRAA?
A: Anything, anytime, anywhere, for no reason at all
See: Time Magazine Frank Zappa Obituary

Many people know me only via email. I have always been a little obsessive about my .sig file. I just made another change of my .sig, and retired the old ones. No particular reason, just felt like it. I’ve been getting more done than usual, and maybe that warrants a “reboot.” Check out the old .sigs here

One week to the Bonfire! —I can’t wait. Can you?

Zappaism: AAAFNRAA—Anything, anytime, anywhere, for no reason at all. I think I’ll add it to my personal SIG.

Today I have realized that three of my favorite movies are war movies. Stalag 17 [imdb | amazon] , Three Kings [imdb | amazon] , and Lawrence of Arabia [imdb | amazon] .

It may be a stretch, but they all share a common thread. They feature profound cynicism about the military, and about the politics behind them. They also are unflinching in their portrayal of the brutality of war. Stalag 17 and Three Kings in particular put heroism, idealism, and unparalleled cynicism into their protagonists—Sefton and Archie Gates. Those two characters share cold and honest assessments of how the world works.

July, 1997, when I first heard of Jakob Nielsen. Probably when I started to smarten up about the web.