life sucks, and you're the straw.

Sonntag, März 18, 2001

A month between blogs! It just proves, we are just not suited to the blogging lifestyle. For myself, I have this deep seating feeling that no one really cares about reading these little jottings. I may be wrong about that, and would love to be proved so.

In the meantime, I am kind of having these guilty feelings. About Blogger that is. Blogger is so convenient, yet ultimately it's not that customizable. Since we are not exactly dummies, we could build our own blogging solution. But as I see more people actively encouraging other people to abandon Blogger and say, use Greymatter, I feel this funny sense of loyalty. Not that Blogger has done much above and beyond, and I'm not even sure if I got those stickers yet, but still. (and what do I do with a bunch of Blogger stickers anyway?)

The space key on my Powerbook is going fast.
--mi 3/18/2001 03:14:33 PM | link

Sonntag, Februar 11, 2001

It's a sunny Sunday, lalala. Some Mac humor from the vaults: iBrator and the ChiaMac which reminds me, better order those veggie seeds for spring.
--mi 2/11/2001 11:02:06 AM | link

Donnerstag, Februar 08, 2001

I ended my ALA article about how PRODOK got to this point with this sentence: "And the view from my current office, out to my garden with the hills beyond, is much better than my old office wall." Well, this is true. All true. Except that when it comes to high speed connections, we are screwed.

We are across some hills from the biggest city in Switzerland, Zürich. Zürich is as wired as any major city in the world, if not more so. (all those banks and stuff.) If we lived in Züri as we like to call it, we could have ISDN, T1, anything we wanted. But, we are living in the Sauliamt, aka "Piggy County". The only high speed access we have available for a less than bank-breaking price is the cable modem connection from Swissonline. And, I must restrain my language as to what I think of Swissonline's service. OK, it sucks. They are right now doing some kind of "maintenance", in the middle of a working day mind you, so that I can't get online. They go down frequently. For this, we pay about $150 a month for something that people in the US can get for less than $40. I can get online via modem, but I can't get my mail. Oh, I'm on our backup modem connection right now, which costs me about 1 CHF per minute (for the phone). We both need to be online to do our work. Lucky Max, he's in Heidelberg today with a new customer. Otherwise, there'd be two of us tearing our hair out. (that's why Max has no hair, too many aggravations with Swissonline.)

If anything's going to force us to get an office in Züri, it's going to be this issue. I don't want to go back to commuting, but we may have to. GRRR.
--mi 2/8/2001 01:41:34 PM | link

Montag, Februar 05, 2001

I often forget to turn my Napster off - doesn't bother me since it's running on my Windows laptop which I only use for browser testing and games. (and is running separately from the critical stuff anyway.) It's kind of entertaining in a strange way to see the people grabbing stuff from my files too. I especially admire the patience of people getting say, an 8 1/2 minute version of Mr. Gorgeous (Smoke City) with a 14.4 connection. It takes about 2 hours. There still seem to be a lot of those within pinging distance from me. It's also kind of amusing to get the occasional chat request/proposition/dirty message. It's like a whole city of unknown people riffling through my stuff and leaving graffiti.
--mi 2/5/2001 02:19:48 AM | link

Sonntag, Februar 04, 2001

Making the rounds: Windows Cement. hehehe.
--mi 2/4/2001 10:06:20 AM | link

Speaking of mailing lists, I stumbled upon this old gem: about mailing list manners on Tidbits. Well worth reading and many things apply to regular email too.
--mi 2/4/2001 10:04:53 AM | link

Mittwoch, Januar 31, 2001

A bit of musing on mailing lists, newsgroups and other online community formats.

They operate like nations in a sense.

First, you have the anarchy mode, which is the worst, and can happen when there is no list mom. Many Usenet groups are anarchies, which is why so many are turned off by them. Then there are the dictatorships, with the benign list mom-dictators. They keep a varying degree of control over the site; some are more lenient than others. Most lists fall into this category, such as webdesign-l (vigorous dictatorship mode) and Wise-Women (fairly hands-off until flames need more than a hose mode).

Some fall into the republic mode: these are the ones with a list of administrators and moderators. The committee is not necessarily elected, so they are not democracies. Many of these lists do work ok, such as the Web Designer's Forum.

The defunct (for now) list mentioned below was unique in a sense that it was more like a kingdom, with the list owner as the ruler. I think this was because 1) people were there primarily because of the list founder's reputation, and 2) he treated it like that, albeit in a very gentle way. No traditional list momming in the sense of reminding people not to quote multi-layers of messages, yet best not to disagree with him either.

My ideal community would not need traditional list momming (because the members would be intelligent enough), would have a free exchange of ideas without fear of flames, and be totally organic and free to express anything.

I prefer mailing lists over other formats, though they also have their merits. lists are far more organic and alive to me than the comment/log type of interchanges, such as Metafilter. The disadvantage of lists, though, is that you have to hang around a bit to get used to the atmosphere and figure out the unwritten rules. While with the comment format, you can kind of jump in any time.

Forums are somewhere in between the list and the weblog. The interface of a forum can do a lot to influence how much organic interchange takes place too. The best example of a forum with organic exchange is Table Talk at Salon which, of course, uses Web Crossing...but the reason why Table Talk is good is because it is actively monitored by moderators, who I am sure dump the occasional baddie.

When I was sysoping on Compuserve, that was one of the big reasons why we could keep a community of 15,000 strong relatively civilized: we grew from 4 sysops to about 30, all of whom were diligently moving around threads, deleting questionable ones, and so on.

This is, of course, censorship of a sort; yet moderated forums are in a way gentler than mailing lists, where committing baddies can get you thrown out on your ass fast (depending on the tolerence level of the dictator/moderators.) But the rather sad fact is that for a civilized online exchange, some form of censorship is needed. (Even well run chat rooms have moderators or "ops".)

There is no point at all to this rambling, but I am and have always been fascinated by online communities. Now back to work.
--mi 1/31/2001 01:24:03 PM | link

Dienstag, Januar 30, 2001

Very interesting reaction to design theft. Even more interesting is the fact that he has also (without warning) shut down the companion mailing list, which the last time I checked had about 80 members. I'll reserve further comment though until more details come out, if that will ever happen.
--mi 1/30/2001 12:52:41 PM | link

Samstag, Januar 27, 2001

A small yet significant development at the ever influential ALA: they have stopped using the "four horsemen of invalid code", leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0", which designers have been using for the last 2+ years to get rid of those annoying browser offsets. If you look at the ALA pages in Netscape 4.x now, you will see that margin around the main table elements. Instead of the 4 horsemen, Jeffrey Zeldman and co. are using the valid and elegant body {margin: 0} style. Bravo! Now maybe my man Nick will finally stop bugging us with

But it doesn't work in NN 4.08

comments. No Nick, it doesn't! heheheh.

At the same time, the bugginess of Netscape 6 is really annoying, and is in all likelihood alienating legions of unsuspecting downloaders. For example, in my copy of Netscape 6 running on a Pentium III/Win 98, whenever that #$%^!@! "Password Manager" window pops up, I cannot get rid of it. I have to cold boot the PC. I finally got rid of this by disabling the Forms junk since I simply have to have Netscape 6 working on the PC for work. The Forms junk is highly annoying when dealing with server side scripts, and totally unnecessary in my view. The most annoying "feature" is that cover-your-ass warning about security. In addition, suddenly we can't run Mozilla 0.7 or Netscape 6 on one of our G4 Macs, even though they are both running fine on another one. It's really hard to be an advocate for such buggy software, despite its many good features.

I just hate browsers most of the time.
--mi 1/27/2001 07:49:29 PM | link

Montag, Januar 22, 2001

I think I'm going to be sick.
--mi 1/22/2001 09:43:28 PM | link

Sonntag, Januar 21, 2001

Thoughts on family

Recently, I was talking to a friend who was having a lot of problems with her family, especially her siblings. This made me think about my two sisters and the relationship I have with them. Although we are scattered all over the world (Mayumi is in Tokyo, and Meg, my baby sister who's 10 years younger than me, is in New York) we have a pretty good relationship. We all tend to be a bit lazy about writing - I'm the worst of the bunch - but we know we are there for each other.

Yesterday, I got a message from Meg ending with this:

you are like my best source of info!!  if i was on "who wants to be a millionaire",  you would definitely be my 'phone a friend'  lifeline!!  write me back anytime when you're not busy...thanks again, you're the best!-meg!!!

That really made my day! I think I'm very lucky that despite past problems, our family does get along pretty well. Also, when I see the relationship that Max has with his mother, and the way he turned out, I really think about the power of family stability.
--mi 1/21/2001 10:27:15 PM | link

Donnerstag, Januar 18, 2001

Wow. I just realized that the screen saver on my Sony Vaio X29 laptop (newly acquired in December) changes color depending on what time of the day it is! Right now, it's about 5:30PM, so it's a beautiful sunset color. I tried changing the system time to 9:30PM and sure enough, it turned into a starlit night color. Very cool. It's definitely the prettiest Windows PC I've seen so far, even though it can't compare even to my old PeanutButter PB (back from the dead with a new salvaged logic board).
--mi 1/18/2001 05:28:35 PM | link

Mittwoch, Januar 17, 2001

Sometimes, interesting and strange news make it to the airline news sites, such as Airwise. Apparently, some days ago, a mouse of unknown nationality was spotted on a Balair jet approaching Zürich... However, after reading the article, I wondered if the former method were not more cost effective.
--Max. 1/17/2001 06:55:29 PM | link

Montag, Januar 15, 2001

On a sidenote, I am quite happy that Blogger has seemed to solve its problems for the moment, especially since I sent in some sticker money. :) Kudos to Matt H. and everyone at Pyra.
--mi 1/15/2001 07:14:00 PM | link

Visor notes

The search for an alternative cover for the Visor Prism is over! I was looking for something that would just protect the Visor's screen and buttons when I carried it around, but would still allow me to put it on the cradle to sync and recharge. I already have a very nice blue nubuck snap case from Handspring, which is good for going on the road, but is a bit inconvenient for daily use. Well I found the Flip-Lid from Tactilis. It's a clip-on lid that goes over the Visor's front, with the cradle contacts still exposed. It doesn't interfere with the clip on area for attaching inside the nubuck snap case either, so I can use them both at the same time.

I got the Indigo one. It's translucent blue and doesn't quite match the Prism's blue color perfectly, but will do. I like the translucency because that makes it possible to see my BugMe alarms and such through it. It more or less solves the biggest disadvantage of the Visors compared to the Palms or the Sony Clié, the lack of an integral cover.

This reminds me that I want to write up a list of the things that I have installed and use on my Visor. A project for my new personal site I think.
--mi 1/15/2001 07:01:11 PM | link

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