Our technology choices were so primitive. And here in the 21st century I’ve done a fair amount of HTML to PDF generation. I’ve even created ebooks with them. It was fun to live in a time when things were so unformed.
From comp.infosystems.www.misc, the question thread, from March 20, 1997:
Anyone have a decent way to print a web page? I’d like to get a nice color printout including background images and such.
Printing it from NS or IE leaves out the backgrounds and doing a screen capture results in unsatisfactory output.
Any other ideas?
My answer, from March 21, 1997:
I've done this - but it requires some work: 1. Load up the page in your browser how you like it. 2. Do a screen capture 3. Crop the non essential parts of the screen capture. 4. Print out the result. 5. Done. NOW! I hear you saying, "BUT JOE, THESE PAGES ARE TOO LONG?!?!?" Chill monkeyboy ... listen up... 1. Load up the page in your browser how you like it. 2. Do a screen capture of the top part... Scroll down... Do another screen capture... Scroll down... Do another screen capture... (you see where I'm going here). Repeat until done. Add honey glaze (DOH! that's my girlfriend's ham recipe!) 2a.Load up your favorite paint program (like Photoshop or some wannabe Photoshop), open each image and tile/splice them into one image) 3. Crop the non essential parts of the screen capture. 4. Print out the result. You should be done now. That's how I've done it, but there may be other opinions. The issue of HTML --> PS to relaibly print from the web is still open, as far as I know.
“Interactivity of personal sites and webmentions” is a terrific piece by Jo on the upsides and nuances of webmentions. The thing it does really well is remind folks of this key thing…that on the #IndieWeb, YOU get to choose how and what you share and how and and if what may come back to you is displayed.
She says:
“be the change you wish to see in the indieweb”
Yes indeed!
A renaissance and rebirth of a social web means human community. With people comes friction. Intentional and unintentional. Human societies contain friction and individuals in that society are responsible for themselves and to be mindful of the needs of the larger community.
As a programmer, I find focusing on the technical aspects of programming: markup, databases, API calls, can lead to missing out on the “social,” the human, the most important part of social software.
I plan to revisit writing about “the ‘net” and the social aspects of living online.
Anyway one of the niceties I added was a year indicator on the results. The older the post the darker the colors associated with the year. It helps distinguish relevance for something technical for example. I don’t think many of my programming posts more than 15 years old are relevant to anyone. The first search engine I put on this site was called “ht://dig” and it appears not to exist anymore. Even the domain is dead.
Autocomplete may be overkill for this, as I’m not propagating the text to the search field. It’s possible what I really want is just an Ajax based search. For now I’m content with the results.
It’s rare for me not to sleep great. And… I’ve not slept great the last few days. The rain prevented watergoing for a few days. And now it’s persistent wind preventing ocean swimming and bodysurfing. Yes, I need the water.
I mentioned The Magic Mike wetsuit in April last year and now that my prior wetsuit really is giving in I’m wearing it. I got some good ideas for how to affix the zipper to the collar in the sewing channel of a Slack I’m in and feel hopeful to fix it soon.
I have tab backlog! I don’t let it get too big usually but when I’m not on my grind things back up. Time to digest and share some links that have evaded sharing.
I bookmarked whatpwacando.today a few weeks ago and have played a bit. Pretty amazing how much a mobile browser can do. I have been toying with some code to use the Web Share API.
I didn’t share the surfboards I made in CSS a few weeks ago. I don’t think I added the expanding checkerboard either, which has gotten some positive acknowledgement on CodePen. For that one, make your browser plenty tall.
gRegorhas been working on an indieweb book club (GitHub) — I love the idea but my overall appetite for reading longer form text is not what it once was. That doesn’t prevent me from acquiring new books and comics though. Speaking of gRegor, his post from 2013 when he first encountered the IndieWeb I still vibe with, very mucho.
There are some great third-party services that make it easy to create and interact online, but then you are at their mercy. Companies go out of business — or are bought and shut down — and the content disappears along with them
And while I’m mentioning friends and colleagues who are smart and sensitive let me point to James’ post Notes on facilitating technical discussions in meetups which is a thoughtful peek behind the curtain at one of the IndieWeb’s best meeting hosts:
A significant part of my responsibilities as host is ensuring that everyone feels included. Nobody wants to join a meetup that they think is interesting and then feel like they don’t quite fit in. For this to happen on the account of perceived knowledge one must have — often an impression made by discussions being too technical, or using too much in-speak — is a failure.
I developed similar skills when I was a kid. But it was at San Diego City College when I realized that skill could be more formal. The class “Broadcast Studio Operations” taught all the skills in a tv studio. We learned to all the parts of directing a tv show, and part of the formal process was to direct camera operators to move to the person talking. To do that the director had to be aware of not just the technical staff but the conversation happening on a “talk show.” With a 2 camera set up you had to listen and be ready for an answer. If Camera 1 was on the interviewer and Camera 2 was on the guest, you listened to the interviewer setting up a question and over the audio channel for the team I would say “Camera 2 go to a closeup on the guest” and then the technical director to “Ready Camera 2” and then to “Take Camera 2.” And when just one person is dominating conversation there’s nothing to do. If the show is a conversation there ought to be a give and take, at least in a show like that. This very technical aspect of making what we called “television” (is it still that?) actually let me hear the flow in a conversation and made me (a bit) less likely to dominate conversation. I still am a loquacious dude, but I can usually tell if I’m running on and on and I am trying to figure out how to complete my thought, I swear.
James is usually in Scotland, and this Rock map of Scotland is just charming. Maybe I’ll make a similar one of California. Or at least Southern California cf. beachgoing
Ramona Fradon died last week. Read abouther. Cartooning into her NINETIES. May we all be so blessed.
Speaking of ol’ Webhead, Mark Evanier talked about his primary creator Steve Ditko, regrettably seldom mentioned, and said this:
What I would have written (and may yet some day) would have included my opinion that Steve Ditko was one of the ten-or-so great creative talents in the kind of comics he did. His work was usually quite brilliant and quite popular and I doubt I’ll hear from anyone who wants to argue the point.
I have somewhat less respect for Ditko the Philosopher and many of his stated principles. And I really don’t understand how someone takes a vow of silence about his career, refuses all interviews, finally writes a little many years later, then expresses shock and outrage that the history of his collaborations with Stan Lee has been written Stan’s way. Gee, I wonder how that happened.
jwz notes, frustrated, that links suck these days. Well, I click links.
He also shared this Leap Day Bugs which is appalling overall. Dealing with dates in the archives pages of this site and at my last gig with insurance policy terms, renewals and modifications and calculating elapsed policy terms I am sympathetic. But the solution is to test, test, test your code. Unit tests, people. And include those weird ass cases like Leap Day. Leap Days exist!
And here’s an oddball article with terminology I feel skeptical about but I definitely think of myself as an expert generalist in things in a web technology vein.
And Al wrote again, I enjoyed his piece on digital relationships for the IndieWeb Carnival for February.
Manu’s wrap up piece is masterful and splendiferous. His blog is so spartan and elegant it has even me, the packrat, trying to sort out how to minimize some of the frippery on my site. Gorgeous site.
Andrew Soria’s Welcome to the Neighborhood is a lovely series of collages that give the feel of the look of (mostly westside and downtown) Los Angeles spots. I lived in Koreatown and then Cheviot Hills for a number of years and despite them being surreal, or maybe hyperreal they give me nostalgia.
And can typography be political? V is for Vocal Type answers: yup. Design, communication, typography are not abstract purely cerebral fields. They live in a complicated and often unjust world. Typography can absolutely confront that.
And my local favorite Burn All Books (I’ve participated in some anthologies with my comics) does too. A Black Lives Matter print lurks behind The Iron Giant in a New Robot Day post of mine from 2020.
And I’ll end with a link I just read today Lynn Fischer’s case study on the site refresh she did. I have loved playing with CSS custom properties and this is next level. She’s been an inspiration for a while and that’s not letting up.
One of my favorite pieces of writing, technical or not, is called “I don’t like your examples!” by Steven Feuerstein which he first published 2 decades ago on the O’Reilly website [internet archive link]. It has a publish date of 11 October 2000. In the essay, he writes about his book on PL/SQL for Oracle. Database programming is an important topic for programmers and anyone who manages data, and Oracle was the top-of-the-line tool in 2000.
Why does this piece of writing stay in my mind? Here’s an excerpt:
Now, I expect it’s not every day you pick up a technology text and read a charge that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal for the secret bombing of Cambodia. The examples I used in this book, in fact, were dramatically different from my earlier texts–and from just about any technology book you can buy. Here are some of the other topics I incorporated into my text:
Excessive CEO compensation–and excessive, destructive layoffs
Thanks, Joe, means a lot to me. Fun moment in my writing career. Now available on my personal blog! http://feuerthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/09/blast-from-past-i-dont-like-your.html
Go read the essay. No, really, do it. Or I’ll excerpt it again:
It seems to me that one part of having a true and vibrant democracy is the free flow of ideas and active debate among neighbors on the crucial issues of our day. Does that go on around you? I sure don’t experience it in my neck of the woods. On the contrary, I find that, in the United States, very few people are willing to talk “politics.” It is, along with the topic of money and sex, generally veered away from in trepidation. Better to comment on the weather and sports.
Where would such an attitude come from? Much of any individual’s behavior in society is patterned after what she or he perceives to be acceptable. Most of us do not want to stand out as different, and certainly not as “troublemakers.” What determines acceptability in our society? To a large extent, the mass media.
Reflect on the television, radio, and print media reports you receive: How often do you see real political debate, crossing the entire spectrum, taking place? How often do you hear a member of the media truly challenge politicians and business “leaders” to justify their policies and actions? I believe that very little real debate ever takes place and our journalists, especially the high-profile ones, treat those in power with kid gloves.
The world is better, incrementally, but it’s not near enough. From the excerpted list above, union activity today is increasing but still far below US highs. Police brutality in the US continues. We’ve not solved healthcare in the US but it’s improved slightly since 2000. Guns are still endemic in the US. Civilian bombing occurs by many actors in many venues. The prison-industrial complex persists. And the first one on that list: “Excessive CEO compensation–and excessive, destructive layoffs” — wow, that’s not changed at all.
I take this as a challenge. I have written very little on current state of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia or on the ongoing war and atrocities taking place in Israel and Palestine. I’ve refrained mostly out of sheepishness that what more can my voice add? when really folks might just want to look at toy robots and pictures of the beach.
Personal publishing has not solved our political problems. Technical writing neither.
I fear then I give the impression that I have no opinions on these matters. And if I don’t write on my writing platform, that’s a fair impression for a reader to get. We are in a small sense complicit. The more important thing we must do is reach out to those who represent us politically and make sure they know that what we wish is for them to do something about these issues. That’s the operating system of a functioning democracy. We are the components of that system, and if we don’t agitate our reps then nothing happens.
I feel frustrated, and not everybody wants to talk about it. And many who want to talk about it are straight up lying and misinforming. My wish would be for writing like Mr. Feuerstein’s can help us find our voices to speak truth to power.
There’s a quote about newspapers–that they ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” You can read more about that here. That seems like a quote worth thinking about.
I have no conclusion to draw. But it has been a difficult few years for most of us and I suspect my aim is say I want a better world. And I’m here to report that if you’re reading this you must reckon with what you can do to get to that better world.
I credit XOXO Fest back in 2019 with a great deal of revitalization of my soul and spirit. My divorce was not final. I was adrift. I was seeking meaning. And I found quite a bit of it in Portland. Smart and creative people making their way in the world and kicking ass.
At that event I attended my first IndieWeb thing, a IndieWeb / Mastodon meetup. Pretty sure that was 40 pounds heavier ago in the photo of me on that page. Oof.
Portland was a great place to visit, though. And rideshare bikes were still happening (I can’t do the scooters) and worked great for me to get around during the event to the various meetups around town.
I spoke with an acquaintance there who I hadn’t seen in 10+ years. That was cool. But his primary memory of the last time we had talked was me being a jerk. Our words and actions from decades ago rightly linger in peoples minds.
It’s coming back this year. Fresh new website too, just announced this morning. The website is a bit like a game: 2024.xoxofest.com. Click it!
And I see gRegor is quite happy to see they’re taking COVID seriously. He attended a different year from me, but it makes sense that he would have gone too, as he’s a great creative sensitive smart-type person. 😊
I don’t know if I’ll attend, or be able to attend this year.
With this letter, we request Meta take immediate action and substantially increase its investment in account takeover mitigation tactics, as well as responding to users whose accounts were taken over. This is crucial not just to protect your users, but to reduce the unnecessary resource burden being placed on our offices to handle these large numbers of user complaints. We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company. Proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory.
It’s all about moderation. And the big silos refuse to spend enough money, that is to say, hire enough moderators and customer support, to get this right.
Just this morning I saw that an acquaintance of mine’s Instagram account suddenly is shilling a Bitcoin scam. Completely frustrating to see this kind of thing happening.
Account takeovers are not a new phenomenon. This issue affects all social media platforms and other online accounts as well. However, the frequency and persistence of account takeovers on Meta-owned platforms puts it in a league of its own.
For example, in 2019, the New York Attorney General’s office received a total of 73 account takeover complaints on Meta platforms. That number rose more than tenfold to 783 complaints by the end of 2023. In January 2024 alone, the office received 128 complaints.
It’s possible to lose a website to fraud, of course, but my experience has been it’s possible to get support from hosting companies and domain registrars when it happens.
Whereas when this happens in Instagram or Facebook I see people pining for a way to get help with calls like “do you know anyone who works at Facebook who can help me?”, which points to a failure of management by Meta.
During my sabbatical I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve done is made it easier to create new pages on my website at artlung dot com. I use #WordPress with a theme and plugins I wrote myself. I’ve got 20 years of posts and photos and it’s easy for it to get lost. So yesterday I made a page that I can update periodically, and as I add new cosplays, for example with a hashtag of #qcosplay it will show up on this page. My intent is to show off more of my PHP development, comics, drawings, and toy robots this way. As much as I appreciate Instagram, I wish it were easier to do this kind of thing for my posts on IG, but a website YOU control is the only way to control the way you present yourself and whether you can reach people you’d like to reach.
The backstory for this is that I used to make custom greeting cards. Some watercolor. Some customized blank cards. Christmas cards. Easter cards.
It turns out one of those cards played a part in my uncle’s 25th Anniversary.
…
As you likely know, I keep stuff forever in case I may need it which often becomes true. Anyways, I seemed to remember in my
stationery drawer some cards with pets and wildlife images and WITHOUT text already on the card.
Then I thumbed through them and I found this AWESOME card with tulips on the front– opened it up to make sure no text and
there was none– this card is PERFECT for what I need. Then out of curiosity, I turned the card to the back side. It read: “artlung”.
I put the card in my printer and printed out my message, and 25th Anniversary Valentine’s Day was complete!
I still don’t remember if you gave me the card to me personally, I recovered it from my mom’s drawers after she passed, or I just
really liked it and stole it from someone. Anyways, your creativity was a big deal in this case– so a quite belated Thank You is in order.
I mentioned before the wetsuit that wouldn’t stay zipped in waves and would “Magic Mike” unzip. A little hackery based on some good advice and all is well.
This past weekend there was a camp in Brighton 5000 miles away in the UK. It looks like it was great!
My only reference for a beach town in the UK would be “the Beach at South End” which Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect hallucinate improbably when they are first exposed to the powerful probabilistic forces of the starship Heart of Gold.
Later, they start to deconstruct and turn into a penguin before achieving normality.
But even back as a kid, I thought I knew about beaches. But I didn’t, really. Despite being to several: Santa Monica, and San Diego’s Pacific Beach and La Jolla. And I had been to Batangas in the Philippines during the filming of Up From The Depths. (I had it on DVD as of 2012).
When I think of UK beaches I also think of the line from Morrissey’s “You’re The One For Me, Fatty”:
All over Battersea / Some hope and some despair
Battersea isn’t a beach as such but has a great oceanic name.
An hour or so on the I-5, or 2 to 4 hours on Amtrak (buses). The Amtrak Pacific Surfliner is having issues right now. California, it seems, tumbles into the sea.
So the car vs transit trip estimation is backwards for California. We’re working on it.
When Kelly and I stayed in San Clemente I loved seeing kids getting off the train with surfboards to go surf. Someday I’ll take the train to San Clemente to bodysurf.
San Clemente is right across the county line into Orange County. Orange County is where San Juan Capistrano is, which I learned I had family connections to last month..
And conferences like that remind me that I have been to a tech event or two in Orange County. The first one that comes to mind was a webOS event in Fullerton. preDevCamp at CoWorking Fullerton on August 8, 2009. A webOS event! I Never blogged about it but I did post a photo to Flickr. I learned a lot at that. webOS lives on in smart devices. Huh.
A good morning to stretch into my memories and imagine possible futures.
Let’s have some fun this week.
Oh, and in researching Brighton, I found a page about Brighton that included the word “mahoosive” – references say it’s informal British slang for “very big.” And So: Have a mamoosive week!
I was a the guilty party responsible for hastening the end of Tales back in 2011. I thought and still think MAS’s series is a funny, well-observed slice of life. Satiric, yes, but true. MAS was a person who I’d read for many years by that point, and here more than a decade later he’s still in my RSS feed.
On that fateful day I posted his site to Metafilter. It did not go well. I regret it still. You can read about the end in his post “Tales From the Glitter Gym – The End.”
His readers were indignant, but MAS took the criticisms in stride. In the comments that day he said this:
Their opinions are valid. If you didn’t know me and skimmed a Glitter Gym post quickly – you might think I was a jerk too.
I enjoyed writing Tales. No regrets. I wrote a new edition of Tales a month ago, but thought it was too mean to publish. So I never did. Mean only works if the funny content exceeds the mean. It didn’t.
That is strength of character. Thought so then. Think so now.
I never read his posts and thought that the mean exceeded the funny. But it was an object lesson that a sudden influx of readers may disagree. As much as I’m excited for the blogging renaissance that’s happening right now in the IndieWeb, I am very well aware of the negative attention that can come from attention.
One of the earliest usages of my site was for small projects. One kind of project was participating in Viridian Design Contests. What were they?
The contests are were opportunities for graphic or conceptual creativity. Logos, posters, teapots, lamps, that sort of thing. We do this to amuse ourselves, and to give some coherent form to our ideas. Images and symbols are every bit as important to the Viridian Movement as our constant outflow of rants.
There’s a Viridian contest archive. You can see from this site that Viridian design entries are not necessarily professional-level efforts in postindustrial design. Rather, they’re a fun opportunity to show others that you not only “get it” == you have the strength and energy to give it back.
You enter a Viridian Design contest by placing your entry on a website, and sending the address to the moderator. The site must be up for the length of the contest. The winner of the contest receives a prize via snailmail. The prizes are modest: generally classy books and/or nifty gizmos.
Viridian was mostly a mailing list run by Bruce Sterling, a favorite writer of mine now and since the 1980s. And his regular thoughts on all things climate and design always made me think.
Ever wonder what happened to that movie that was announced but never came out? Saw a great animated film but learned it completely bombed in the box office but you thought it had promise? While those movies probably won’t ever be given a second chance, they each can have their own spotlight here. DRAWING FOR NOTHING is a free ebook compiling the artwork of the world’s canceled and troubled animated films. Animation reels have been scrubbed, portfolios scraped, books scanned, interviews conducted and resumes analyzed to present this. Some movies within this book you’ll know pretty well, but there will always be at least one you’ve never heard of. The purpose of this book is to not only properly appreciate the work put into things that never got the chance to be appreciated, but to give artists another source of inspiration. Yeah, there’s a ton of things to be inspired by now, but what about the stuff that never made it? The stuff that was deemed too risky or not good enough?
My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two.
But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella.
The Bronze Age of Robots is all about franchises. Movies, TV, comic book and especially, TOYS! This is the time of the SF products: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Doctor Who, Buck Rogers, etc. etc. Sure, there are a few superheroes still at it, but the Science Fiction series are king. The top of the pile for robot creation is 2000 AD, the British SF weekly: Judge Dredd, Sam Slade, ABC Warriors, and so many others. Only the toy companies seem to put out more: Transformers, Starriors, Rom the Spaceknight, Shogun Warriors and so on. There hasn’t been so many tin robots around since 1939!
Herbert’s story of a teenage boy from a peripheral desert planet who learns to control people with his voice, wields a blade, and brings down a galactic empire bears a suspiciously close resemblance to George Lucas’s Star Wars — down to the hero’s mystically adept sister (Alia in Dune, Leia in Star Wars) and the villain with a feudal title who turns out to be the hero’s grandfather or father (Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Lord Vader in Star Wars). On seeing Lucas’s film, Herbert became furious and listed 16 points of “absolute identity” between his novels and Star Wars, from its “spice mines” to its “dune sea.”
In a way we’re collectively creating a world of our own evidence, the way each of us does individually with our memories, pruning and changing the truth of the past, and forgetting a lot. We rely on documentation, not memory, when possible, to understand what really happened in the past, but now our collective, largely unintentional record deletion is creating a cultural amnesia — a cultural dementia, in a way.
From Ironic Sans, now a newsletter, writing about something that happened many years ago on his blog, and how it lingers into the now. The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock:
In 2008 … I wrote on my blog about an idea I called “The Bulbdial Clock”:
The Bulbdial Clock has no hands — just one pole in the center of the clock, and three light sources of varying heights which revolve around the pole casting shadows.
…
I wrote a lot of “idea” posts back then, and my blog had active commenters who frequently used them as a jumping off point to imagine how they might be even better. I loved that. Sometimes I even held back some of my own thoughts in the hopes that someone else would have the same thought and chime in — a subtle way of fostering conversation in the comments.
I was a the guilty party responsible for hastening the end of Tales back in 2011. I thought and still think MAS’s series is a funny, well-observed slice of life. Satiric, yes, but true. MAS was a person who I’d read for many years by that point, and here more than a decade later he’s still in my RSS feed.
…
As much as I’m excited for the blogging renaissance that’s happening right now in the IndieWeb, I am very well aware of the negative attention that can come from attention.
That’s the answer. “I wanna go pirate some Hollywood movies and keep ’em for myself, please!” And the reaction is: “Gee, our customers are criminals! They must be spied upon, lest they hurt us, and one another!”
The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that’s not a market economy. That’s not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on. Mussolini used to give the people of Italy free radios. But they would only tune in to the fascist station. This was supposed to be the only kind of radio that people in Italy understood. This was the entirety of Italian radio as a medium. Mussolini’s radio had just one big dial on the front that said “Radio Zone.”
The web is a place to be creative. To share your ideas and perspectives. You can do so how you want: with images, poetry, blog posts, collages, music, and more. Optionally, you can code, too! (But you definitely don’t need to code to have a personal website.)
Viridian was science fiction writer Bruce Sterling’s effort to report on and think about climate change and what design might do about it. He declared himself “Pope-Emperor” of Viridian. With 500 Viridian Notes over 10 years, from 1998 to 2008, he wrote, and I learned about climate science, news on extreme weather and design across the planet. It was terrifying, edifying, and inspirational. I entered 5 Viridian Design contests. Never won, but these were great exercises for my developing Illustrator, PhotoShop and web skills. This is “Greeny Megawatt” a modernized Reddy Kilowatt. As part of revisiting EVERYTHING on my site artlung dot com I’ve updated the pages they live on and integrated them into my #WordPress custom theme. Fun time capsule.
oldweb dot todayallows a person to use the web (rather slowly, which is how it usually worked) as it was from the past using old browsers on old websites archived by the incredible Internet Archive, which some folks call “The Wayback Machine.”
But where does it get that name?
The Wayback Machine or WABAC Machine is a fictional time machine from the segment “Peabody’s Improbable History”, a recurring feature of the 1960s cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The Wayback Machine is a plot device used to transport the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman back in time to visit important events in human history.
And so, how well does https://oldweb.today work? It works pretty well! Here’s the front of my website from January 1, 2001, browsing with Netscape Navigator 4 on Windows.
It’s a bit on the slow side. That makes sense though, things were often slow on dial-up. But Netscape Navigator boots up fine. I’ve still got the pictured header, made in September 2000:
I started blogging in February 2001. Fast-forward to June of 2001. Here’s the site using a Mac and Netscape 3. I can see the blog in the sidebar. There’s “Rosie O’Donnell on Math” originally posted via blogger. I published via FTP from blogger, and then used PHP to include the current blog on the main page. I didn’t have comments, but I did include a small call to action “What do you think?” which linked to the feedback page to solicit comments.
And I really still like this header, made from a webcam photo and photos I took digitally at The Flower Fields in Carlsbad. The first time I’d been there.
That design was very much a product of its time. Creating Killer Websites was inspirational to me, though much of what was profound in that was also horrendous from a markup standpoint. But there was no CSS to speak of! I had been exposed, on mailing lists, the ideas around accessibility and so I made an effort to have proper ALT and TITLE attributes on images when I used them. Though I’m pretty sure for those triangles at the top I used slash and backslash to represent them. Not terrible, but not really helpful to a visually impaired person.
Here’s are images of different parts of the site from that era in non-mainstream text browsers:
I’ve always tried to create readable and maintainable markup but also create visually appealing work. I’m not a designer but have worked with so many terrific designers. It can be a real joy to implement great design. Here on my own site I get to create my own space in my own style. That’s something I don’t see changing. When I think about what “IndieWeb” is and isn’t, my own space on my own terms is definitely my style.
And efforts to preserve the legacy of the web like The Internet Archive are so vital, they enable us to go back in time in ways that are extraordinary.
This morning, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the U.S. government, said Israelis need to call new elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, Schumer said, “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Schumer, who is a strong ally of Israel and who also blamed Hamas for the crisis in the Middle East, warned that the deadly toll on civilians in Gaza under the policies of Netanyahu’s government is “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
For as much power as it seems the United States has in the relationship with Israel, we are far past time for using that soft power and material power to get it to STOP KILLING CIVILIANS.
The politics this year are dismal and depressing. Keep letting your representatives know what you want to change in the world. Even if it seems like it’s all being directed to /dev/null.
Currently seeking work and quite enjoying the process of interviewing. Getting to know what problems people want to solve. It’s a two-way process, interviewing. They get to learn about me. I get to learn about them. And if there’s a match, we give it a shot.
Color schemes on all pages now flow, via CSS custom properties into the designs of pages.
The Blogroll now has its own page, and includes a link to some WordPress code for capturing feed urls. You can get OPML for it too.
The Contact page now has a contact form on it. Over the years I’ve called it “Feedback” or “Message Me” or “Contact Me” and also includes other social media links.
I also maintain a Links page, for those “Link In Bio” links on platforms which somehow are on the web but aren’t like web pages at all.
‘Imagination to power’, as the French students said. ‘Be practical, do the impossible’, because if you don’t do the impossible, as I’ve cried out over and over again, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do. And that impossible is both in our own conviction and in our shared conviction with our brothers and sisters, to begin to try to create, or work toward a very distinct notion of what constitutes a finally truly liberated as well as ecological society. A utopian notion, not a futuristic notion.
Quoted in their talk at SXSW:
Description:
Join award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert as they talk about the process of developing, creating, and releasing their surprise hit movie that took the world by st— okay, look, if you’re still reading this, we should tell you that we’ve run out of new things to say about Everything Everywhere All At Once, so although we’ll try our best to stay on topic, we’ll most likely go on a bunch of tangents about the state of the world, the impending climate crisis, the collapse of consensus truth, the rise of AI, the importance and impossibility of self care, and our collective responsibility as storytellers to confront the issues of our time, because that’s probably going to be what’s on our mind, but we can’t make any promises, but at times we don’t feel qualified to talk about any of that stuff, anyway we hope you enjoy our SXSW keynote!
I consider M.O.D.O.K. a pinnacle creation of comics. I look forward to March each year to enjoy the variety of interpretations at marchmodokmadness.blogspot.com.
MODOK is simultaneously terrifying and pathetic. He could only have come from the minds of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1967. The 2021 stop motion tv series had its moments, Patton Oswalt did great. But I was delighted by his appearance in the 2023 Ant-Man movie, which captured the duality of his murderousness ridiculousness.
I’m taking a risograph printing class soon so I need to design something for it! 😳 I’m allowed to use two colors so I’m looking for some interesting ways people have used that restraint.
I have really enjoyed working with Riso! I’ve done comics that way (though mostly I’ve reformatted 8-1/2″ by 11″ for the web using scans of the printed work) – perhaps I should take my stuff down from Gumroad or at least put the PDF up also on this website. Hmmm. The prints in the merch area were done that way (one 3-color, the other 4) — by Burn All Books. I did the artwork in Procreate and sometimes PhotoShop to make the decisions about the separations. The beach toys one was a super fun challenge to do separations for. The result is variable.
And some of the work I’ve seen in Riso is just astounding. Recently I bought some prints from Natalie Andrewson whose work is amazingly playful.
And I’m always looking for tools to help previsualize the layers for Riso output. There’s a Mac app called Spectrolite. With it one can choose a palette. BAB has a number of colors, but not all colors to play with which makes for interesting constraints. Also I was warned that the more colors one chooses, the more likely the printer is to soak the paper in ways that might dull the image. Constraints seem built into the method.
I chose a pink and a pale blue green:
Which results in layer files in grayscale:
And the app also helpfully shows a preview of what it might look like when printed:
And here are some old tweets of mine on the subject of birthdays:
The birthday playlist today: Floyd Norman/an animated life; Beauty is Embarrassing; Letterman/Seinfeld interviewing each other; Late Night with David Letterman 10th Anniversary Special; El Norte. (March 20, 2022)
I’ve seen 3 cars tooling around San Diego this summer with the greasepaint message “it’s my 21st birthday buy me a drink VENMO ______”
Two distinct life insurance advertisements in my paper mail today, both of which mention my upcoming birthday. In case you were wondering where I stand, demographically. And actuarially. (March 1, 2021)
For my birthday last week my sister masterminded me getting sung to and it melted my heart
Very proud to share my birthday with Mr. Rogers, Spike Lee & Lee Scratch Perry. March 20, 2019
Complete irrelevance of Google Plus indicated by lack of birthday greetings using Google Plus. Social networks need birthdays to thrive. March 20, 2017
My usual measure of Facebook vs Google+ is birthday message count. Facebook continues winning by terrifying margin. March 20, 2014
You know who I miss? I miss MC 900 Ft Jesus, that’s who. Do we celebrate his birthday? If not, why not. np: “I’m going straight to heaven” December 8, 2007
I just had the last of the amazing strawberry cake my mom made me for my birthday. March 24, 2010
And that was the last strawberry cake my mother ever made.
I will definitely be re-watching Floyd Norman: An Animated Life and Beauty is Embarrassing today because those movies inspire me. Animated Life in particular is about defying expectations and age and creating no matter what.
Lastly, here are past blog posts I made on my birthday
Classmates dot com I guess will continue inflicting yearbook photos on me. It’s cool.
My own high school annuals were lost in a theft of a storage locker in Moorpark many years ago. I got some things back though, which was nice.
Probably having a website and being highly findable on the web made it possible for me to get things back. On March 6, 2013 while traveling to Virginia I got an email reading this:
You don’t know me and I don’t know you , but I believe I found some of your personal belongings on the side of a road outside of Mojave Ca. There are some DVDs, and a lot of degrees, certs for Respiratory Therapy. There was also something for LeahPeah. This is what caught my eye. All this stuff has been lying on the side of the road for the last week or so and I stopped to look at it and I believe it might be yours.
I didn’t really believe it, but of course the fact that he mentioned specifically my degrees and certificates for respiratory therapy stuck out as highly specific and made me and Leah queasy.
Indeed, after some correspondence he sent photos, including this one:
…which certainly proved that he was not lying or trying to scam me. I met up with this nice thoughtful person a week later at a Starbucks in Lancaster California.
Anyway, not found by the side of the road were my high school yearbooks.
I am a packrat, both physical and digital, and this was a blow.
Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh, I was meandering through my mind.
I had a great birthday yesterday: low key and did the same stuff I do on the daily. Applied for some jobs, improved my websites, went to the beach.
gRegor rewatched Space Camp and mentioned that there’s a robot in it, named Jinx.
This is a fact I was not aware of.
I just added Jinx to my list of “seeking” robots on my spreadsheet of robots.
Looking at eBay I don’t see anything in the way of merchandise related to a toy of Jinx.
Other robots without official toys: Sam the Robot (the Super Automatic Machine) from Sesame Street, Dot Matrix from Spaceballs; the mechs from Robot Jox; Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters’ Heartbeeps characters. For some there are custom made figures or 3-D printed toys but that’s really not the spirit of my particular collection.
I remain fascinated by robots. Culturally and in every way. They can be pet, partner, slave, and oppressor. Or indeed, the same fictional robot can end up all 4.
So thank you gRegor for the mention. I will add it to the pile of things I would like to watch. I’ve not seen the movie.
And this morning as I wait for the surf to come up a bit more I’ll share my current robot collection guidelines. You can have your own rules, these are mine:
No robot toys over 12 inches high (or wider than 12 inches)
Robots can’t cost me over $100 (shipping and handling excluded in special circumstances)
Avoid duplicating robots
Avoid too many of the same franchise (I could only collect Transformers or Star Wars toys and have just as sizable a collection)
“Jaeger” (piloted robots) are ok but the more a robot is a powered suit or piloted the less robotic I consider it
No cyborgs (most common suggestions which don’t interest me: RoboCop, Krang, the Borg)
Nancy Meherne, 92, lives a simple life by the sea in Sumner, New Zealand, gardening and hitting the surf on a board made by Christchurch’s legendary gumboot-manufacturing Skellerup factory. The surfboard – made in the 1970s – is a little worse for wear, but Nancy – made in the 1920s – exudes an infectious amount of joy riding the waves on her vintage piece of foam.
Indeed, I feel excited when I write, and proud when I have written, a HTML document. The process is relaxing. I can think about what I want to represent — lists, paragraphs, italicised text, and so on — and explicitly state what I want and where I want it. Then, I can start thinking about CSS, but that is another kettle of fish entirely. At the end, I have a web page that shows my content that I can share with others. I really do love HTML.
Surf report for south San Diego is dismal this morning:
It’s a total mess out there this morning as potent storm front continues to blow through the area. A new and strong WNW swell has moved into our areas and is overriding what ever swell activity is out there. Shoulder to overhead sets are the norm with top open areas seeing more solid well overhead waves. Strong rain pockets with a nasty onshore WNW wind means dirty waters and badly blown out conditions. Continued strong High to Low tidal swings just add to todays woes.
I added code the other day to add minimal og:image tag to my site today. I was tired of posting links to my website on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Facebook and other external sites and having it not make great choices about a feature image. All it takes is a single image to be added.
So a preview, here’s one from yesterday, looks like this:
This happens behind the scenes, as long as I set a featured image for the post in WordPress.
Apparently a lot of folks claiming little green men and alien contact were lying. Unsurprising.
One of the things that is continual bother to me is the extent to which Instagram shapes what we see there. Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram from February. This past week saw several people point out there’s a new setting in the app which is defaulted to Limit and that setting is for showing political content.
If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.
Frustratingly, it’s not easy to tell whether posts from accounts I have followed have been suppressed. Instagram remains opaque in terms of what we see. I know that in those rare occasions I mention something political the tendency seems to be for those posts to get less comments and likes. There’s a good deal of perfectly plausible deniability by parent company Meta about shadow banning posts in that way.
This is why I prefer to get things from websites people own, and their own RSS feeds. That way, I can see what they post and there’s no mystery.
In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that “FICO scores are legitimate discriminators” as a universal rule, just as “diverse skin tones and genders” is not a universal good, especially when “diverse” is not even a well-defined notion unless you specify a geographic area or culture.
This mistake that Google made was not a coincidence, by the way. It’s a result of a combination of laziness (as in, they just didn’t think very hard about this) and capitalism (as in, it would be expensive to do this right).
That aspect of technology companies to want to spend as little as possible to do work is the most insidious. That lesson from all five seasons about the truth of human institutions: they want to do more with less, and for many things, you can’t do more with less.
The class “Broadcast Studio Operations” taught all the skills in a tv studio. We learned to all the parts of directing a tv show, and part of the formal process was to direct camera operators to move to the person talking. To do that the director had to be aware of not just the technical staff but the conversation happening on a “talk show.” With a 2 camera set up you had to listen and be ready for an answer. If Camera 1 was on the interviewer and Camera 2 was on the guest, you listened to the interviewer setting up a question and over the audio channel for the team I would say “Camera 2 go to a closeup on the guest” and then the technical director to “Ready Camera 2” and then to “Take Camera 2.” And when just one person is dominating conversation there’s nothing to do. If the show is a conversation there ought to be a give and take, at least in a show like that. This very technical aspect of making what we called “television” (is it still that?) actually let me hear the flow in a conversation and made me (a bit) less likely to dominate conversation.
I have a photo from that class! Low light. No flash. Mediocre photographer (me):
I had taken a B&W Photography class and dropped it. But I had that Tri-X film and took photos. Years later I had the negatives scanned.
None of it much better than ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA I do like ELIZAs that will hit the edge of their usefulness and handoff to a human.
Microsoft Agent enables software developers and Web authors to incorporate a new form of user interaction, known as conversational interfaces, that leverages natural aspects of human social communication. In addition to mouse and keyboard input, Microsoft Agent includes optional support for speech recognition so applications can respond to voice commands. Characters can respond using synthesized speech, recorded audio, or text in a cartoon word balloon.
The conversational interface approach facilitated by the Microsoft Agent services does not replace conventional graphical user interface (GUI) design. Instead, character interaction can be easily blended with the conventional interface components such as windows, menus, and controls to extend and enhance your application’s interface.
Conversational interfaces keep happening. Will they ever be big wins? Well, surely eventually, maybe. Or not.
There is a connection to The Wire. Season 2 was set at the ports. David Simon, humanist and writer and creator on The Wire, tweeted this:
Thinking first of the people on the bridge. But the mind wanders to a port city strangling. All the people who rely on ships in and out. The auto-ship imports, Domino Sugar, coal exports, dockwork, whatever container traffic we didn’t lose to Norfolk. Industries. Jobs. Families.
The collapse in Baltimore got me thinking about local bridges here in San Diego. And the main one we have is the Coronado Bay Bridge. San Diego is no longer a major port city. We do have some shipping but most cargo comes into the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. I don’t think much San Diego manufacturing, or even Mexican manufacturing, leaves the Port of San Diego. Many fewer lives depend on San Diego’s Coronado Bridge being in place than on the Key Bridge.
I am from San Diego. I grew up here, in increments. As much as I identify with this place I spent only 5 of my first 18 years here. But I heard the folk tale that the Coronado Bay Bridge “floated.” Wikipedia calls it an “urban legend.”
A decades-old local urban legend claims the center span of the bridge was engineered to float in the event of collapse, allowing Naval ships to push the debris and clear the bay. The myth may have developed as a result of the hollow box design of the 1,880-foot center span, combined with the low-profile barges that made it appear to float on its own during construction. However, Caltrans and the bridge’s principal architect, Robert Mosher, maintain that the legend is false.
The bridge itself has an unusual profile. It’s very tall and very high and very thin. So that lends itself to speculation as to why. The other part of the natural speculation is the broad importance of the US Navy to San Diego’s growth owing to Naval Base San Diego. That is, what if 32nd Street is attacked? If a foreign power blew up the bridge how hobbled would the Navy be? And so the answer to “why would it need to float?” would be “because if the Soviets blow it up, we’d have to clear out the debris quickly, so of course when it was designed it was for that purpose. So the logic goes.
A bridge connecting Coronado to San Diego was first proposed in 1926 by the J.D. and A.B. Spreckels Securities Company of San Diego, but Navy opposition (should the bridge collapse, more than one hundred navy ships would be trapped in the southern part of the harbor)
And this:
…Navy opposition began to wane, though as recently as May, 1962 the navy had proclaimed it was against the bridge because “structural failure, sabotage, or disaster” could trap more than 300 vessels, including 120 active-duty ships. IN September the Navy said its worries would end if a second ocean-entry passage were channeled at the South end of the bay. The following month Navy Undersecretary Paul Fay stated that although the Navy would continue its opposition to the bridge, if one were built, the Navy would not curtail its San Diego operations, and if it felt the community really wanted the bridge, all objections would be withdrawn.
And apparently there has been a rumor of explosives planted in the bridge, and also along the strand, to allow naval vessels to leave the bay in the event of catastrophe. Matthew Alice addressed this question in The San Diego Reader on April 13, 1995: Explosives planted in the Coronado bridge: How ships will escape from the bay in case of sabotage. The response is pithy and not full of detail, but those Alice columns always strike me as authoritative:
Most of [Coronado] has been unhappy about the bridge since San Diegans first started discussing it in the mid-1920s.
Even back then, the Navy had real concerns about ships being trapped in the harbor if the bridge were sabotaged. So of course, there’s a contingency plan. Special units of the Navy are trained to clear bridge debris in case of a collapse, and that does include placing explosives in predetermined locations to break up the fallen structure and make it easier to remove. All this was considered during the bridge design, but there’s no dynamite actually built into it.
The 1982 story is a wonder of local and state politics. It also describes that upon opening the bridge the regular ferry service shut down. There are still ferries that run from San Diego to Coronado, but they don’t carry cars. That ferry had been running since the 1880s.
As it is the most important ships the Navy has here in 2024 are aircraft carriers and submarines, and neither category of ship berth in San Diego Bay past the bridge. The carriers berth across the channel from our (civilian) airport. That base is at the northern end of Coronado. And subs berth facing Coronado along Point Loma at the sub base. The 32nd Street base–which I remember as a kid as a bustling base where my grandfather bought ice cream in gigantic cardboard tubs–is less important now than it was then.
Unequalled in operational scope and complexity, NBC provides a shore-based platform for helicopters, aircraft carriers, SEAL Teams and other ashore and afloat commands for access to a comprehensive quantity of ground, sea, air, and undersea operational and training space. NBC accommodates the requirements of 16 helicopter squadrons, 2 fixed wing squadrons, two aircraft carriers, four SEAL Teams, Navy Expeditionary Combat Command squadrons, and other air, surface and subsurface commands.
Presumably not having to deal with getting hemmed in by debris or needing to blow anything up to exit the bay is part of that mission statement.
MovieBob has a new video series that is astounding and wonderful: “THIS MOVIE EXISTS”: GINGER (1971), THE CRUSADES (1935), HAPPILY EVER AFTER (1993)–all three are weird and surprising in many ways. I love learning about films at the edges of moviedom!
James shares his self-doubts in a way I find brave. Evening listening:
Asking yourself the question “what can I make next?” is good until it’s not. I am excited by the premise of building something new unless days pass without ideas; then, things get more stressful.
I can’t help with stress beyond expressing the fact that I feel that at times too. But when he shares:
But I am left feeling like I need to explore music from more 2000s rappers, and R&B music.
James blogs on tech nerdery but he’s also among the most rawsharers blogging right now. And heck yes I have hip-hop some hip hop recommendations. Truly many of them are more late 80s and early 90s but still. If you want R&B more generally that’s a far vaster history. You might want to his some soul music along the way. But James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder’s 1970s work, Marvin Gaye are all pretty perennial. James if you ever lack for musical recommendations I’ll try to step up!
Mark Evanier writes about Hollywood Boulevard in his post The Street of Disappointment. I remember well visiting World Book & News (now defunct, mentioned in February) on Cahuenga right off Hollywood in the 1980s and when I worked on Sunset Blvd in the early 2000s I would walk Hollywood on my lunch hours. It’s not the center of entertainment, but it is very Los Angeles and very specifically Californian. From Musso & Franks‘ classic restaurant to Frederick’s of Hollywood‘s huge selection of trashy lingerie (not to be confused with the actual Trashy Lingerie store further west on La Cienega). Oh, and probably those last two links would be inappropriate for work. I do love L.A.
Pablo shared bravely this month. I have had the honor of having a fair number of people come out to me in the 1990s and I always felt honored when they shared that with me. And my ex-spouse as part of our slow-motion breakup learned a great deal about their own sexuality and I was always encouraging of them sorting out how they are and how they would like to live. People must be who they are. I’m proud of you Pablo!
And I have no place to put this, but I don’t care for these words: collab, inspo, sammie.
It’s true that the world doesn’t need another think piece. The world doesn’t need to hear your thoughts on some topic. The world doesn’t need to hear what you’ve been up to recently.
But you know what? Screw what the world needs.
Even if you talk about a sammie collab–that might be inspo for others, like and subscribe!
Minor post-session adventure. Surfer got hurt in the water, approached me, side of his head pouring blood. Walked out of the water. Tourist gave up his shirt to use to stanch the blood. I carried the bloody board and we walked to the @lifeguardsofsandiego main lifeguard tower. As always lifeguards were professional and got the fella bandaged up quick and the guy called his wife with his watch.
I’ve also gone back and reacquired unpublished Lola Blanc pop music. Her work on Angry Too is brilliant. But when she was writing light pop she was as good as it gets. Recently acquired what are basically bootlegs using youtube-dl were Bad Tattoo, Like Beyoncé, Ooh La La (which she wrote for Britney Spears, though I prefer her version), and her cover of Ginuine’s Pony.
I’m not linking to any of those, they are not likely to be stable links. But check out her music. She’s also now a director of horror short films and a talented actress. She’s got a website at lolablanc.com.
I also ran across the band Scary Pockets which does funk covers with a variety of vocalists. Not challenging, but technically proficient and I feel happy listening to it.