January 2001

Seen on blackbeltjones: Professional ‘voice of reason’ Jeff Veen on the broadband myth “You know what’s really striking, though? I heard a VP at Yahoo talking recently about the speed of their site. He said that even corporate users with massive connections within the enterprise complain about slow sites. They’ve got all the bandwidth they…

Am I GEEK or NOT dot com. I love how the Internet is helping us explore our deepest insecurities.

As someone born in a territory formerly ruled by France, Bill Clinton can run for President of that country.

“TomPaine.com seeks to enrich the national debate on controversial public issues by featuring the ideas, opinions, and analyses too often overlooked by the mainstream media.”

Hey, I’m posting from Blogger’s new server. Neat. Speedy. A good value for the donation.

Send them a picture and get a custom-made action figure in your likeness. I’m thinking these would make perfect wedding favors. via eatonweb

Doing my obligatory 404 page research, and I noticed Wired’s minimalist approach is almost an exact replica of Yahoo!’s. I don’t think copying in this case is a bad thing; if someone found a great way to do it then let’s stand on their shoulders and move on to conquer our other tasks.

The Palm mutates in the hands of Apple industrial designers? via Signal vs. Noise

I’m pleased to see MTV is struggling with and acting on their indiscriminate choice of music in the past, including Eminem’s misogynist lyrics. I’m not in favor of music censorship; but MTV is neither an artistic entity nor a publisher, they’re simply a distributor. And by distributing hateful music in the past they’ve promoted it,…

Blogger started asking for donations, which made me think about other free services we take for granted. For example, who types in all that “CDDB” track information that tells my computer what CD I’m playing, and how do they pay for it? That’s a company called “Gracenote” and they make money a few different ways.…

“A black, steel monolith nearly three metres high has mysteriously appeared in a park in the American city of Seattle.” Brilliant.

I swear every time I turn around IBM is doing something really right. They’ve actually established an “Institute for Advanced Commerce” to study things like how well people compete against computers in auctions. It’s interesting research, it may give them an edge in future ecommerce, and applications like this one may actually make our lives…

I’m finding more reasons to sympathize with Tog’s dismay over the MacOS X interface. In the original Mac UI guidelines they offered wisdom like Colors on gray and Beware of Blue. And what does Apple do? Come out with a system called “Aqua.” :-o

Sony came crawling back to Kioken after having been fired as a bad client. What makes Kioken so bad? Check out this prototype (quicktime, and not for the bandwidth-impaired). It’s probably a bitch to download, but structuring your web site like an application solves so many navigation issues.

Word of the day: argy-bargy \ahr-jee-BAHR-jee or ahr-ghee-BAHR-ghee\ (noun) : a lively discussion : argument, dispute There’s also a slightly older variant, “argle-bargle”. I think I’m in touch with my feminine side, but I have trouble imagining myself using “argy-bargy” in casual conversation without feeling insecure.