Subject: DoyenThanks for the elucidation. I think my slight misinterpretation was due to the fact that I've been frequenting an obviously substandard online resource which apparently only offers a single, gender-neutral definition of the word. Even before my initial jolt of brown liquid fuel, I'd like to share my first thought of the morning. The word doyen is used to describe an expert or authority on some subject who is generally female. Even though the word itself is not gender specific, I have only come across a couple of examples of it being used to describe males. For example, both the comfortably masculine Terence Conran and the increasingly Yanni-esque Kai Krause are referred to as "design doyens". Is it just my own preconception that the word "doyen" sounds effeminate? When you get right down to it, it's more like the sound that an cartoon anvil makes bouncing off Wile E. Coyote's head - doiinnng...
Date: 30/08/2000 04:37 PM
From: Joshua Benton
To: Grant Hutchinson
Grant: I enjoy the blog. I just thought I'd point out that you're confusing "doyen," which is the male form, with "doyenne," the female form. The female is the much more commonly used, but the "doyen" form is used every so often (and more often lately, I'll agree).
According to Dictionary.com:
doy·en (doi-n, doin, dwä-y) n.
A man who is the eldest or senior member of a group.
doy·enne (doi-n, dwä-yn) n.
A woman who is the eldest or senior member of a group.
"This year, Adobe.com will take its own creative journey to Burning Man. A small team will present digital video, art, and stories from the playa. Each day, noted photojournalist Rick Smolan and Adobe Senior Creative Director Russell Brown - dressed as Aladdin and outfitted with his patented Flying Carpet Cam - will present a short video report of their desert visions."Maybe Mike will do us all a favor and salvage a bit of the original Burning Man shimmy by whacking Russell upside the head with a six-foot cardboard representation of an original Photoshop toolbar. One can only hope.
"These throwbacks to computer science sophomores are a bane to civilized discourse. The only reason they exist is to accidentally erase the form you've just spent ten minutes filling out, because they are inevitably placed a hair's breadth away from the submit button!"How can something so obviously useless still be found as a standard form element on so many pages? Good question indeed, because I'm guilty of using them too. Remind me to update that page before the next code rollout. Oh, it's been a very silly day. Overheard only a minute ago while I was desperately attempting to get my butt out of the office to go home, was this little nugget. "Who'll look after my Tina Yothers glass while I'm away at Burning Man?" A friend just told me that he has a StockByte photography disc in his bathroom covered in Vaseline. He tried to explain exactly what his reasoning for this impromptu interpretive sculpture was, but he wasn't allowed to finish because of the chorus of disgusted groans that suddenly circulated through the room. Did I really need to hear this revelation in the first place? I think not. After nearly two months without a reboot, my server was in the shop momentarily this afternoon for some unscheduled downtime. No matter, since it gave me a chance to install a couple of WebStar plug-in upgrades that had been languishing on the hard drive, and I was finally able to empty all those locked files out of the trash. Whoopee. Here's to another two months.
"Wands can provide both added features as well as changing the application's appearance. A wand is just another window, but that window doesn't have to be rectangular, it can be circular or any shape you want, it doesn't have to have a title bar or anything like that. It is a roll-your-own hyperlinked window."Functionally, this sounds like a really solid way to customize your own toolset out of the vast assortment of googaws and whatsits packed into the new Interarchy framework. Having direct access to all of the functions within the application via a syntax that works like a regular URI not only makes sense, but is incredibly powerful too. But having unlimited user control over the interface to accommodate this flexibility feels like a cop-out on behalf of the developers, doesn't it? Couldn't the framework of the application include some standard GUI bits for the user to specify like preferences, rather than letting the inmates completely run the asylum? Can you imagine trying to handle technical support for a product that you wrote, but that has had a completely foreign, user-specific interface slapped onto it? Now that I think about it, this do-it-yourself hyperlink junk drawer concept is starting to sound and awful lot like Cyberdog riding on top of Apple's OpenDoc component-based software architecture. I get into work this morning, and the second thing Duane says to me is that he's disappointed that I haven't written anything about my vacation yet. Yeesh! Anyway, here's goes... For the past few years we've travelled out to the Shuswap area of British Columbia basically to plunk our butts on a quiet, sandy beach and throw the kids off a nearby dock into the crisp spring-fed lake. A couple of years ago during a somewhat dreary, overcast string of days, I started piling and balancing rocks that I had found along the beach on top of one another. Hundreds of them. These precarious rock sculptures have since become an annual project for me, part therapy, part artistic outlet. I was originally inspired by a self described rock-balancer that was doing his boulder twiddling gig at our annual excuse to wear ill-fitting western garb, the Calgary Stampede. I don't know if it's the same guy mentioned in this North Country Times article, but you get the drift. It's just something that you need to do for yourself and see with you own eyes to completely appreciate. The best part about building these things is that in a couple days after I've added my initial constructions to the lake side, they seem to spontaneously reproduce. Other sculptures appear overnight, obviously created by other vacationers who stumble across the teetering piles. I promise I will post a couple of photographs of my rock balancing escapades as soon as the film comes back from the lab. The lab? Yes, the lab... Mr. Gizmo simply doesn't trust himself taking his digital cameras to the beach.
Best bit from the copy? The tagline. "Leave your laptop at home." At this point in the game the Newton was just about to be Steved, and it was to late to save it. Too bad, because I think they had just struck on something. The Newton wasn't trying to fill a new niche category called the personal digital assistant - that's what Palms and organizers are doing now - the Newton was supposed to replace your laptop. That's what it still does for me every day. If you would like to grab a larger version of this ad, I've got you covered too. It must be the week of the dumb-ass lawsuit. Now Adobe is filing against Macromedia for infringing on a patent that describes how certain aspects of customizable, dockable tabbed palettes function. I'm no fan of Macromedia's implementation of user interface anyway, but at least they were attempting some sort of environmental consistency across toolsets. Obviously thinking about the whole thing for a while, Adobe has launched a new site dealing specifically with this legal issue. In addition to the goofy corporate mugshots, they have also posted side-by-side animated examples of how the two competing implementations look.
The piano has been drinking,Yeah. The first thing I'm going to do is pick up a copy of Small Change, then I'm going to have at least one intimate listen, and then finally update my unappreciated and slightly derelict Ultrashag site. That particular lyric just seems to fit itself into the orginal idea behind the Ultrashag project. It's not always evident or obvious, but simple poetry is often incredibly inspiring. As much as I admire both Woz and Dave Winer for similar and yet different reasons, there is something about these pictures of them at a concert that is fundamentally unsettling. Is anyone else getting weird vibes off these images, or is it just me? Speaking of unsettling images, there is now a miniature grantcam image in the top right-hand corner of this page. Ain't it cute?
my necktie is asleep
And the combo went back to New York,
the jukebox has to take a leak
And the carpet needs a haircut,
and the spotlight looks like a prison break
And the telephone's out of cigarettes,
and the balcony is on the make
And the piano has been drinking,
the piano has been drinking...
And the menus are all freezing,
and the light man's blind in one eye
And he can't see out of the other
And the piano-tuner's got a hearing aid,
and he showed up with his mother
And the piano has been drinking,
the piano has been drinking
As the bouncer is a Sumo wrestler
cream-puff casper milktoast
And the owner is a mental midget
with the I.Q. of a fence post
'Cause the piano has been drinking,
the piano has been drinking...
And you can't find your waitress
with a Geiger counter
And she hates you and your friends
and you just can't get served without her
And the box-office is drooling,
and the bar stools are on fire
And the newspapers were fooling,
and the ash-trays have retired
'Cause the piano has been drinking,
the piano has been drinking
The piano has been drinking,
not me, not me, not me, not me, not me
Copyright © 1976 Tom Waits
From: Ian McDougallThe comparison is fair except for the fact that QuickTime works wonderfully and looks great on every platform it has been released on, but RealMedia simply doesn't. One of the strengths of SVG is the fact that is it open and based on XML. It's as human readable as you can get with any graphics file format. Yes, the file size bloats up a bit with SVG compared with Flash when executing the same basic visuals, but then again, most of the Flash out there today is less than optimized and could stand to be on a bit of a data diet. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that along with file size, bandwidth will also make quality of content irrelevant. You can always stuff more crap through a bigger pipe. Still on the theme of unfounded paranoid tendencies, America Online is removing a feature in Netscape because of pressure from customers regarding the potential use and abuse of support-related information being transferred between parties. My opinion is that the removal of the feature is not specifically to placate the frothing privacy-concerned masses, but is being pushed through mainly to substantiate another dot release of the Netscape software, thereby making it appear like the product is still being actively developed. Are companies getting more paranoid by the day, or are they just getting stupider? First it was the Smurfy hardware manufacturer Cobalt firing volleys at Apple, believing they have a lock on computers resembling salt licks, and now the questionably innovative automotive dinosaur Ford is flaring it's legal nostrils and filing suit against an online auto leasing firm over the name Model E. Are people really going to confuse some startup money-vacuum with America's premier maker of suburban monster trucks?
To: Grant Hutchinson
Date: 05/08/2000 03:03 PM
Subject: Re: A Milestone For SVG
"Looks like Flash is the RealAudio of vector graphics, whereas SVG is the QuickTime. Bandwidth will eventually make the differences irrelevant."
"We have a history of using the nomenclature beginning with the word 'Model' and then followed by a letter, so we do think that (Model E) would be perceived as associated with Ford."Well, most people in my family have a history of brushing our teeth and then spitting, but I imagine that others have had the same idea once in their lifetime. If Ford wants to bask in its past sub brand glories such as the Model T, fine. But honestly, what was the point of spending all that time and effort building up the Ford brand in the first place, if it's the little battles they want to fight? I guess when you're perpetually ranked number two in popularity, litigation is job one.
Hmmm... I think I‘ve seen this ad somewhere before, about sixteen years ago. It seems to me that some companies have got more nerve than common courtesy. Hey, here’s a dollar — go buy yourselves real agency this time.
A new article by Tog over at Macworld talks about the evolution of the Mac interface and underneath all the gewgaws and widgets, what really makes a Mac a Mac. I am particularly enchanted by this observation:"With the Mac, you have always had the power to move around and organize applications and documents in your own virtual space, maintaining a neat or cluttered workspace, as is your habit. Other desktop systems, from Windows to Unix, have depended more on abstraction, forcing users to remember the location of objects in complex hierarchies. In theory, all of this reduced clutter, but it really only moved the clutter from the visible desktop to the back of your mind. Since most of us work better with visible clutter than with rote memorization, our efficiency drops."I think this is one of most frustrating things I have discovered while using graphically-based operating systems aside from the Mac OS. The more restricted or limited you are in customizing or adapting the environment, no matter how good the intentions of the designer were, the more disgusted you become as you use it. The Mac has always had a flexible layer between the obvious changable elements like icons, sounds, or desktop patterns, and the underlying architecture of the file system and software functions. The fact that you can pretty much scatter stuff anywhere you see fit on your hard drive and not have anything break is fundamental to why the Mac works so well for a lot of people.
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Copyright © 1996-2012 Grant Hutchinson
