thoughtcrumbs : october 2001

From the monthly newsletter at my webhosting service (dreamhost):

"I see the entire web hosting industry moving in the direction of becoming more of a web BOASTING industry. DreamHost itself plans to move more towards a metallic greenish-blue neck and breast, purplish-blue underparts, and a long train of greenish feathers brilliantly marked with bold spots that look like eyes. During courtship, DreamHost will spread the train into a gorgeous fan as we slowly parade in front of a female Web Boast. I imagine other web boasts will have a hard time keeping up."

Yup, that's my web hosting service in the purplish-blue underpants.

"You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." Oh yeah, baby. Zork online. (Link from WebWord.com.

NEW YORK - "The XP keynote kicked off with a rendition of 'America The Beautiful' performed by a white-robed gospel choir gathered underneath a huge Windows XP banner." From Wired News.

Should I be embarrassed to admit this? I'm a big fan of The WB radio. Who cares if these fabulous songs got their starts on tripe like Dawson's Creek and Charmed?

Today Word XP's handy little smart tags offered to give me driving directions to a P.O. Box address to which I was sending a letter. Yup.

The women in the ubiquitous x10 cam ads are getting sluttier and sluttier . . .

So I suppose I should mention that I saw K-PAX last night. (It was a compromise between Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which I wanted to see, and Corky Romano, which my puerile-minded friend advocated.) And all I can say is blah. And shame on the reviewers who made it sound more impressive than it was. Shame on you. You owe me six bucks.

Like most of the movie-going public, I'm fairly willing to suspend my disbelief for two hours. Cyber-warriors defy the confines of the Matrix? No problem. Frustrated employee is hypnotized into enjoying his job? Works for me. I don't expect these things to happen in real life, and as long as the movie doesn't try to pass itself off as a true story, I'm happy with whatever version of reality the directors come up with.

So when a predictable story about a gentle alien/angel/Christ-figure (raise your hand if you've seen that before) and his dubious shrink (again) is paired with the tagline "Open you mind . . . and admit the possibility," I'm stymied. The possibility works fine for me in a movie. There's nothing unsual or difficult to believe, movie-wise, here. That tagline would've been more appropriately placed with The Matrix, but that movie held its own, even without a stupid maxim. So, as I expected something profound, I was heartily bored for two hours.

Semi-enthusiastic praise to the lighting folks and cinematographers. The camera angles were certainly superior than the plot, acting, etc. Oh, and the shrink's son, who makes an appearance at the end of the movie? He's a hottie.

"Many people (most, from what I've observed) believe that curly single opening and double opening quotes are the correct symbols for feet and inches. If you are one of these people, put out your hand so I can slap it with a ruler." From A List Apart's rant about the correct usage of punctuation. One day we'll all live in peace and harmony and know how to properly use an em and en dash. Let's hold our collective breath.

16xNINE has such a groovy website. Granted, it's one big graphic which is generally a no-no, but its self-deprecating sass (and some healthy image-slicing) makes it palatable. I mean, who else would have the phrase "click on the spermy thing (above)", or "and who made this messy website? it is such a mess. i really do not like it"?

On women's fashion:

"She felt she was choking in her blue velvet dress, with its high lace collar, its narrow sleeves, and a waist so tight that when she removed her belt her stomach jumped and twisted for half an hour while her organs fell back in place."

From The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.

From Anil Dash: This is a PHP editing add-in for Microsoft Frontpage. Total estimated market for this product? Zero.

Cool usability alert! Wells Fargo has Talking ATM machines. They have standard earphone jacks, and if you don't have a pair, Wells Fargo will send you one for free. Three cheers for thoughtful design!

Warning: stupid animal post ahead.
So, my cat seems to understand when I'm stressed, and makes herself extra cute at those times. Right now she's investigating new ways to sleep belly-up on my lap. I also discovered yesterday that I can type 70 wpm even with her stretched awkwardly over my left arm. Suppose it's from lots and lots of practice. Why am I stressed? Hint: my cat matches the wool suit I've been wearing to job interviews.

The new breed of banner ads is out, uglier and more intrusive than ever. How can this type of ad be good for the host site? It covers up a quarter of the visible screen space, including the page content beneath it - see the article links sticking out from under the Pocket PC ad? (Click here to see a larger picture of the offender). At first I thought the superimposition was a Netscape 6 layout glitch (of which there are many), but a quick peek in IE showed the same atrocity. Like Geocities' tiny square banners, this ad disappears after a few seconds, but I'm not going to wait. See it for yourself.

From the some-marketing-fiend-is-twisting-his-mustache department:The eBay Auction Game.You don't have to go online to enjoy the thrill of getting a good deal on eBay.

Belated review of the exquisite John Mayer concert last Saturday:

At the unusually early hour of 6:30 PM, three dozen preppy, professional twenty- and thirtysomethings forewent (we're pretending that's the past-tense of "forego") their last hour or two of Saturday sunlight to watch this cutie guitar virtuoso in the dark and funky Roseland Grill. The ferociously bluesy Shea Seger opened. Then, the twenty-fiveish John, who's been playing Hendrix-style guitar in clubs for a decade, and only switched to the singer-songwriter genre a few years ago, came on with a tight "Why Georgia" for an enthusiastic audience. Other fine points included a rousing "Neon" and the climactic "83" with snippets of Phil Collins, Rockwell, and Michael Jackson.

But the beauty of the concert lay in John's rapport with the audience, and his goofy soliloquies on opening a cap and sunglasses haberdashery for people with large heads, the refrigeration qualities of apples, and how his bass player was picking up chicks in the self-help section of Powell's. At one point, he picked up someone's recorder and chatted into it with his band members, while jamming on a funk riff to obscure his conversation from the audience. His bizarrely endearing puckered faces during electric guitar solos begged a sexual comparison, but here I'll just say that he looked like Tom Everett Scott on lemons. Lit, a rock band performing in the theater upstairs to an overly pierced and obviously predominately fake-ID carrying crowd, began just as John started his encore. Our ceiling throbbed several inches over our worried heads, giving a wild heartbeat to John's closing "Love Song for No One."

Exquisite rugs, pillows, and furniture at angelaadams.com. IKEA wishes it were this cool.

Word of the Day:

dog-fooding -

when designers use a product prior to releasing it to the public. A smart development term coined by Microsoft, whose PocketPC designers put their own contacts, mp3s, and email into the devices and live with them for a few weeks. Too many designers fail to user-test products prior to going public, resulting in poor interfaces. Etymology: Steve Ballmer, executive vp of sales and support at MS says that dog food companies should eat their own dog food - demonstrating that if the manufacturers can't even use the product, who can? From Software Development Online.

Auction for America, eBay's contribution to the Sept. 11 relief effort, has a rather profound goal: to raise $100 million in 100 days. Sellers donate goods for auction, and the proceeds go to legit organizations. The profound part is that both eBay and the major credit card companies are waiving their usual transaction fees. Martha Stewart bid on a set of oriental cups this morning on her show. Some gems currently on the block: a 1989 Madonna watch, 'We Are The World' on vinyl, and Harry Potter Troll Nose Glue.