November, 2001: 38 posts.

Time to get creative about dealing with popunders? 2001 Nov 02

Time to get creative about dealing with popunders?
We all know about those crazy popunder ads which are more ubiquitous than ever- but Bill Rini of rini.org has some interesting thoughts on what we might do about them. I like this kind of brainstorming about a phenomenon that remains annoying as hell.

cross-posted to metafilter yesterday

From the land of Microsoft: 2001 Nov 02

From the land of Microsoft:
Passport hacked
Microsoft Passport Protects Consumer Privacy
Heh. Idiots.

Song of the Day: 2001 Nov 02

Night of the Living Baseheads by Public Enemy

Quote of the Day: 2001 Nov 02

Via

We’re all those things right now that you’re not supposed to be. Our management always goes crazy, ’cause we all tell how old we are, and we’re not ashamed of the fact that some of us are in our mid- to late-30s. The L.A. Times did an article on us, and our management almost fainted because we said our real ages. I said, ‘No, you don’t understand.’ We think we’re the real punk rock, because we think it’s punk rock to say, ‘Yeah, I am older than all of you guys, and that’s why we’re better than you. We’re older, we’re weirder and we’re far more jaded than any of you Gen X people could possibly imagine. We’re jaded ’cause we know and remember good music.’ I think you’ve just got to admit what you are and just go with it.

– Stew of The Negro Problem

That’s how I feel!

Quote of the Day: 2001 Nov 03

I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe – they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information needed a different program to access it.

(source) – Tim Berners Lee, Inventor of the Web [via zeldman]

Eat my eclecticism: 2001 Nov 05

My rotating playlist the other day was:

He Loves U Not (Club Mix) by Dream; Crystal by New Order; God’s Child by David Byrne and Selena; Doowutchalyke by Digital Underground; Lady Marmalade (Thunderpuss Radio Mix) by Christina Aguilera, Mya, Pink, Lil’Kim, Missy Eliot; Wonderful Wino by Frank Zappa (from: The Lost Episodes); Bamboozled by Love by Frank Zappa (from: Tinseltown Rebellion).

I got a lot of work done. I think for coding, sometimes a repetitive groove works very well. I remember writing many term papers in RT School while playing They Might Be Giants “Flood” again and again.

Note to self: 2001 Nov 05

Note to self: ImageGIF (and all related GIF functions) are not supported by pair Network’s php installation. It used to, but not anymore. It’s UNISYS’ fault. I’d burn all GIFs but it’s such a handy format.

*heavy heavy sigh*

Installled MacOS X on our iBook this weekend… 2001 Nov 05

I installed MacOS X on our iBook this weekend. Got apache and mysql installed and running. Much adventure as I explore the new operating system.

Still fooling with OSX… 2001 Nov 07

Still fooling with OSX. Keeping me busy. Hopefully I’ll have some new lab entries as a result of all this playing.

The Creative Priority is my current side reading… 2001 Nov 07

The Creative Priority is my current side reading. It’s about the essential paradox of doing great work – you must reconcile disparate forces and harness the tension of craftspeople from different disciplines – and also get people to think beyond their narrow job scope. Hirshberg applied this principle at Nissan, but the same rules apply to web development – to the business end, to the programming end, to the artistic design end (and everything in-between). George Olsen once characterized (or maybe caricatured) these forces as suit, geek, and ponytail. Creative friction is also what makes for great community. I’m only 1/3rd of the way through – so maybe I’ll have different opinions later.

Item in the New York Times: As U… 2001 Nov 10

Item in the New York Times: As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms. This is a good note. Lots of news out there, but this one should raise some alarm bells. The take-home message for me is:

Osama Bin Laden has read his Sun Tzu
He is cultivating his friends and his enemies with great care. He seeks to eliminate any means to rally global sentiment against him. He seeks to end the UN because it has the capability to act against him. The UN was to be the successor – the successful successor to the original League of Nations, which failed to prevent the Second World War.

Osama Bin Laden and his group effectively read and use the media
From the way he manages to get his message out, to his awareness of the news on CNN, Al Jazeera, and how he uses that to craft his message he is a madman who uses the media with as much savvy as any Hollywood PR man. We must understand what he’s doing, and as I have said before, we must play that game as well.

It is not enough to have justice and right on your side, you must also be able to communicate that fact. Can we do it?

Related posts on this theme: msnbc in arabic, us leaflets need better design

I have 96 megabytes of memory in my Apple PowerMac 8500 … 2001 Nov 12

I have 96 megabytes of memory in my Apple PowerMac 8500 — I think I’m gonna upgrade the memory. Here are the obtuse instructions for the obtuse process of installing memory on that beast.

This cartoon on Salon sums up image problem of the USA… 2001 Nov 13

This cartoon on Salon sums up image problem of the USA.

[ via robotwisdom ]

New header for the home page and the blog… 2001 Nov 14

New header for the home page and the blog. Noodling in Photoshop is fun!

Having OS X on a box here means… 2001 Nov 14

Having OS X on a box here means I can add some new dialogues to my collection of why email submission of forms stinks.

Quote of the day: 2001 Nov 15

Proponents of Bush’s kangaroo court say: Don’t you soft-on-terror, due-process types know there’s a war on? Have you forgotten our 5,000 civilian dead? In an emergency like this, aren’t extraordinary security measures needed to save citizens’ lives? If we step on a few toes, we can apologize to the civil libertarians later.
Those are the arguments of the phony-tough. At a time when even liberals are debating the ethics of torture of suspects — weighing the distaste for barbarism against the need to save innocent lives — it’s time for conservative iconoclasts and card-carrying hard-liners to stand up for American values.

– Bill Safire on common dreams.org

webdesign-l is a wonderful list, and has a great diversity of web literati on it… 2001 Nov 18

webdesign-l is a wonderful list, and has a great diversity of web literati on it. Sadly, the value proposition has changed, and I’m getting out for awhile. Mailing lists are such fragile clouds of activity. Leaving them always feels like that feeling of having a bar or restaurant you like go out of business. The good thing about lists is that they can turn on a dime.

Kynn is looking for work… 2001 Nov 19

Kynn is looking for work. And dig that patriotic stylesheet!

How the lie about what Clinton said spread 2001 Nov 19

See Clinton Speaks, Pundits Spin: The Washington Times and the Spread of a Media Myth

The upside of rapid communications is that it so rapid. The downside is that it’s so rapid it discourages good fact-checking, which tends to produce “news” which misrepresents what was said, leading to faulty conclusions about what it means. Several of the folks who got it wrong retracted, but not all. Kudos to those who retracted ~~they’re~~ their misrepresentations. Giant raspberries to the rest.

(Update: the ~~struck~~ text above is because I made an error)

Zoe Mozert is so cool… 2001 Nov 20

Zoe Mozert is so cool. It irritates me that there is not a collection of just her work. She certainly seems to have enough pieces to warrant a book. I would also be interested to know more about her background, and her experiences as a female pinup artist. I also think her signature is cool. This is probably my favorite of the pieces I have seen online:

More evidence of the role propaganda has played in building and fostering terrorist groups… 2001 Nov 21

His grasp of spin is chilling . . .

This is a great propaganda film – the kind that you can’t get out of your head. Bin Laden’s story of Muslim subjugation turning to resistance is so effective that I barely need my transcripts. He uses the most sophisticated western film-making techniques: it’s as if Guy Ritchie, Sylvester Stallone and Spielberg have banded together to make jihad, the movie.

Couldn’t have said it better myself 2001 Nov 23

Couldn’t have said it better myself

( happy belated thanksgiving )

From the News I Would Not Have Expected 2001 Nov 23

China to put a man on the moon by 2005

China on the moon definitely fits in with the New Bizarre World Order.

Jack Cole and Plastic Man 2001 Nov 23

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits [ buy it ] has been my bathroom reading for the past week. I finally finished it. I’m left with an impression about Jack Cole – comic artist – creator of Plastic Man, illustrator for Playboy Magazine – that he was an interesting character in his own right. Makes me want to see more of his work. His work spans gritty realism, fanciful mania, and for Playboy, delightful cheesecake. The book is shorter than it should have been because of Cole’s suicide at the age of 43.

The most powerful image in Heroes a tribute and benefit 2001 Nov 23

The most powerful image in Heroes a tribute and benefit from Comics artists to the heroes of 9/11/2001 is by Igor Kordey and Chris Chuckry. I think Kordey put down the ink, and Chuckry the color. It’s a powerful image – a POV of the terrorists — seeing the determined, but scared passengers moving to challenge men with icepicks and boxcutters. I think it’s more striking than the images of firefighters, police, medical personnel – because we have so many images of them in real life.

It’s worth visiting a Comic Book shop for. At $3.50, the price is reasonable, and it’s a good cause.

Bruce Sterling is blogging! Super-duper-cool! 2001 Nov 27

Bruce Sterling is blogging! Super-duper-cool!

Tori Duff’s online class How To Write A Killer Business Plan looks really cool… 2001 Nov 27

Tori Duff’s online class How To Write A Killer Business Plan looks really cool. And only 10 bucks! Ms. Duff is like, a real businessperson, has heavy investment and finance industry experience, and gets the online world in a big way. Highly Recommended.

Latin mass in San Diego… 2001 Nov 27

Latin mass in San Diego. That’s interesting.

Is it good, or bad to be the number 3 most highly rated link for a search of batman fetish on google? 2001 Nov 27

Is it good, or bad to be the number 3 most highly rated link for a search of batman fetish on google?

I can’t believe how therapuetic it is to listen to Frank Zappa right now… 2001 Nov 27

NP: Andy by Frank Zappa.

Gratuitous Zappa links: zappa.com, St. Alphonzo’s Pancake Homepage

Note: I’m posting this to my blogger account of course also posting this to my livejournal. I doubt I’ll maintain my livejournal though – but LiveJournal is a very interesting community in its own right – much more of a community than blogger – but blogger seems to be more flexible in how you can use the output of the tool. I could be wrong though, I have only a superficial understanding of LJ at the moment.

a new header! … 2001 Nov 27

a new header! … time for bed.

I’ve got Bruce Sterling on the Brain … 2001 Nov 28

I’ve got Bruce Sterling on the Brain — here’s some big excerpts from CATSCAN 12: “Return to the Rue Jules Verne”

These are the people who invented “la vie de Boheme.” They invented the lifestyle of the urban middle-class dropout art-gypsy. They invented its terminology and its tactics. They brought us the “succes de scandale,” the now time-honored tactic of shocking one’s audience all the way to the bank. And the “succes d’estime,” the edgy and hazardous life of the critics’ darling. The doctrine of art for art’s sake was theirs too (thank you, Theophile Gautier). And the ever-helpful notion of *epater les bourgeoisie,* an act of consummately modern rebellion which is nevertheless impossible without a bourgeoisie to epater, an act which the bourgeoisie itself has lavishly financed for decades in our culture’s premiere example of Aldissian enantiodromia — the transformation of things into their opposites.

…

The Paris Bohemians were the first genuine industrial-scale counterculture. This was the culture that created Jules Verne. It deserves a great deal of the credit or blame for origination of the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. It has a legitimate claim on our attention and our loyalties.

…

Professor Seigel’s book is especially useful for its thumbnail summary of what might be called the Ten Warning Signs of Bohemianism. According to Seigel, these are:

1. Odd dress.
2. Long hair.
3. Living for the moment.
4. Sexual freedom.
5. Having no stable residence.
6. Radical political enthusiasms.
7. Drink.
8. Drugs.
9. Irregular work patterns.
10. Addiction to nightlife.

…

In reality, these Ten Warning Signs are every bit as old as industrial society. Slackers, punks, hippies, beatniks, hepcats, Dead End kids, flappers, jazz babies, fin-de-siecle aesthetes, pre-Raphaelites, Bohemians — this stuff is *old.* People were living a vividly countercultural life in Bohemian Paris when the house in which I’m writing these words was a stomping ground for enormous herds of bison.