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ARTLUNG a personal website ; happy holidays / december 2001

Related to Christmas Trees…

Related to Christmas Trees, I’m retiring The Christmas Tree that was a header — and we now have a New Year’s Message. It is always enjoyable to exercise my lettering muscles. At one point I was quite passionate about lettering and typography. What was once a major is now a minor.

Avid readers may remember my happiness at upgrading painter. This new New Year’s Header was made with that and my hand. I also did some futzing with drawing as well. Didn’t save anything though. Maybe next header I’ll do even more with the brush. I enjoy making these ornamental graphics. They’re useless but fun.

Coincidentally, today I got a hit on artlung.com from an altavista search for “be a cartoonist” (in quotes). Apparently I’m the #1 hit for that search. This goes to show how out of touch altavista is, I think. I have no particular advice for would-be cartoonists. Better to ask Mark Martin or even Scott Adams. I think that the search hit is a result of the exact phrase “be a cartoonist” in a blog entry from August. At the time, the blog lived on the home page, and that’s what altavista indexed.

New Year's 2002

The SDBA…

The SDBA, the San Diego Booksellers Association, has a website and guide to bookshops here in San Diego. Cool.

I don’t like Year-In-Review

I don’t like Year-In-Review / Top 10 of 2001 / A Look Back at 2001 pieces in any media. Why aren’t there pieces on “the last 7 years in music” or “15 years in journalism.” Longer time spans would help us learn more about larger trends. We might even gain a better sense of time. If we’re looking back 12 months, how will we, particularly the young, get a sense of the past? I’d be happy with “the last 3 recessions in American history” or “150 years of the history of Afghanistan” or even “the use of electronics in pop music since the 60’s.” I f I want a high-level view of the past year, I can look at 12 months of magazine covers. However, I would prefer to learn something about history.

But then, few have a gift for putting events and time into perspective. Perhaps the reason we don’t see more of what I want is because few can actually do the kind of research and thinking to put them together. Maybe I need to watch C-SPAN more. Booknotes, for example. often has smart people with something to say about history. And why? Because ideally, authors spend time and energy to compile lots of information, and sift through all of it to get a sense of what happened. I’d like more news outlets to act like historians. If they did, perhaps we’d all be better prepared for unexpected events.

Goliath is a neat free webdav client for Macintosh…

Goliath is a neat free webdav client for Macintosh. webdav is neat.

Thanks to mathowie over on the 405 now I have similar functionality…

Thanks to mathowie over on the 405 now I have similar functionality for Windows Internet Explorer users. Since the ArtLungSidebar is mostly for me, that makes me happy! The code is simple: _search=open('http://www.example.dom/sidebar.html','_search') where the first parameter is the URL of whatever you want to cram into the MSIE search pane. I wrapped it in a function for simplicity. Read more about the _search target. Nifty.

I added a Netscape 6 Sidebar to the blog…

I added a Netscape 6 Sidebar to the blog. So if you’re using Netscape 6 You have faster access to the list’o’links on the blog. The Netscape page on My Sidebar Developer’s Guide makes it seem much more complex than it is. At the heart of it all you need to call is a Netscape 6 only function called window.sidebar.addPanel() which takes three string parameters, the first is the name of the page, the second is a URL, and the third is to provide users with a page to customize the tab itself. I’m not using that, so it’s blank.

inspired by a discussion on the WebSanDiego…

inspired by a discussion on the WebSanDiego.org list:
my favorite html tags are <strike>[+] and <nobr>[+]

Mini Brain Dump!

Mini Brain Dump! wherein, I get rid of links which are crowding the sticky notes on my desktop

A Few Links on Professionalism:
Tom DeMarco: Professional Awareness in Software Engineering
American Society of Safety Engineers: Scope of a Safety Professional
Steve McConnell: Software Engineering Professionalism Website
Philip Greenspun: Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers

A Few Links on Micropayments:
Clay Shirky: The Case Against Micropayments
Jakob Nielsen: The Case for Micropayments
The w3c: Micropayments Overview
Scott McCloud: Coins of the Realm II
Jakob Nielsen v. Seth Godin in Business2.0: Micropayments Debate
The Industry Standard: Web Publishers Learn to Love Micropayments
The Industry Standard: Amazon’s ‘Honor System’ to Handle Micropayments for Other Sites
NYT: If You Like This Story, Click Here to Pay Me
Current King of Small Transactions: PayPal

A Few Krazy Kat Links:
Krazy Kat: The Coconino County Home Page
“Some Say it With A Brick”: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
A Krazy Kat Strip Archive

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