Once my mind was made up, I don't believe that the organization could do to anything to keep my asset from walking out the door. And is it just me, or does the phrase "increase employee retention" sound colostomically unhealthy to you?
Friday, March 30, 2001
Grab it while it's hot. The Opera 5.0 for Macintosh Technology Preview 2 has been released. This version fixes some of the "most reported" bugs found in the first preview and that's about it. The style sheet font sizes are still kerflunky, but holy crap... is this sucker fast.
When one owns a domain named ultrashag.com, I suppose one should expect to receive a certain number of email messages relating to theme implied by such a domain name. With this in mind, let's check the old inbox:Subject: care ofNew shag carpeting? Fabulous!
Date: 29/03/2001 12:47 PM
From: jolefont@aol.com
To: spew@ultrashag.com
How do I care for my new shag carpeting? In the 70's we used
a rake. Is this still advisable? If so, where do I purchase one?
Thank you.
If I was asked to choose a new career path right at this very moment, I could say with absolute authority and affirmation that it would not have anything to do with administering name servers.
Thursday, March 29, 2001
While Mac-centric media outlets and the self-inflicted early adopter crowd speculate whether or not Apple will release an update to everyone's favourite big blue box of x, I'd like to share an observation. The version number being bandied about for this update is 10.0.1, which if viewed as a binary number actually has a value of 9. As in OS 9, the version of the operating system that everyone who isn't a Mac-centric media outlet or self-inflicted early adopter, should probably keep using until the update is released.
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Perhaps it would serve me to explain the previous post. From the west coast office, our vigilant cub reporter Mike submitted the internet shorthand for "Laughing My Ass Off". LMAO, of course. Not being one to let the carpet hang on the line unbeaten, I added my own. Naturally, YAOA stands for "Yet Another Online Acronym". Let the memes begin.
YAOA. LMAO.
Since I've been going on about changes and progress and such lately, this item seems to follow the theme. Today was my 38th birthday. I just thought I'd mention it here, since I received a whole lot of smiles and salutations from a whole lot of family and friends today. Thank you all.
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
After you make the decision that you're going to be leaving your current place of employ, it's interesting what types of things catch your eye when flipping through magazines. For example, get a load of this ad for the oxymoronically named company Behavioral Technology that I snipped out of Fast Company.
Once my mind was made up, I don't believe that the organization could do to anything to keep my asset from walking out the door. And is it just me, or does the phrase "increase employee retention" sound colostomically unhealthy to you?
Got a hankering for something different this weekend? How about trying your hand at installing Mac OS X on an unsupported Mac? Thanks to a heaping helping of source code borrowed from Apple's open source Darwin project, you can go ahead and wedge one and a half gigabytes worth of preemptive multi-tasking, protected memory goodness into that old 7300 you've been using as a doorstop in the mail room. Oh yeah.
Thought for the day:"No matter how many times you bang you head against the wall, the hole will only get so big."Ah, there's nothing quite as satisfying as pulling a piece of wisdom like that out of an hour and a half worth of senior management-level rhetoric. I'm really going to miss parts of this place.
Monday, March 26, 2001
...and then occasionally, you stumble across links that have Howie written all over them. Introducing Elliot the AstroCat and Julie for your viewing pleasure.
I'm sorry, but something about this just isn't right. How long has the Best of McSweeney's been featured on comedycentral.com? It might just be me reacting perfunctorily, but I don't think I can possibly enjoy it nearly as much now that it has been sullied by crossing over into the mainstream comedic media. Yes, it's still funny, but that's not point. Harrumph.
Well, that's that. The other boot has been dropped. This morning, after several nervous weeks of preparation and a slightly fitful sleep last night, I officially announced that I will be leaving EyeWire next month. At some point, it became apparent to me that every year I go through a process of evaluating of my comfort level at work. Most of the previous evaluations resulted in a determination that I had to get out of this place. It may have been panic caused by rapid, undocumentable change. It may have been the purest form of frustration due to heavy-handed, corporate mothership decision making processes. The reason behind the determination didn't really matter because there were always rational people (like my wife) around me to help me figure out that I should probably stick it out. Sure enough, things always improved and my role within the company or the department or the convoluted, Visio-templated org chart became clear again. This time around, I didn't feel like I had to leave. I finally felt like I wanted to leave. There's a big difference in those two evaluations. It's been twelve years, five changes in ownership, and tens of thousands of hours working with amazing, inspiring people. It's simply time for a change in direction. What direction? Who knows? I'm not prepared to even start considering that decision until September.
Sunday, March 25, 2001
This was definitely a weekend for tinkering and geeking about with computery bits. I finally got around to setting up my new G4 tower with its pixeliciously immense Cinema Display. Yes, I admit I spoiled myself rotten with this particularly indulgent piece of technology, but holy crap... if you've ever had the pleasure of sitting in front of one of these displays, you'll understand why I needed to have one. My wife and kids are now using the five year old Power Mac 8500 with the upgraded processor board and the Apple Multiple Scan 20 monitor which replaced the humble LC475. The 8500 is still connected to the Shaw@Home cable modem until I get around to cancelling the service and finish configuring all of the TCP/IP settings to use the new ASDL subnet. Speaking of which... thank the supreme being of your choice for putting the boys at Sustainable Softworks and their amazing IPNetRouter on this sweet earth. Even though it took a fair bit of plowing through the sporadically confusing user manual to get the router configured and understanding that I didn't want IP masquerading thank you very much, it most certainly beats the heck out of dropping a couple thousand clams on a hardware router with comparible features and performance. And thanks to Bruce over at Webcore Labs, I have a previously loved Power Mac tower to run it on. Coming up... hand-configured DNS, IP filtering, and multi-domain mail services on a vintage Macintosh. Stay tuned.
Friday, March 23, 2001
In the earlier releases of Mac OS X, there was a curious little fellow that lived in the Fonts panel called the "Buy Fonts" button. A few eyebrows were raised and collective mumblings were shared between onlookers of the typographic variety, and then the "Buy Fonts" button quietly slid out of view and out of mind. As the fervorous vibration generated by the imminent appearance of OS X grew, so again did my curiosity. A week or so of playing with the release candidate led to the use of the Fonts panel on several occasions. Today, the aimless poking and prodding uncovered something vaguely familiar. Lo, what should I find lurking at the bottom of the ponderous "Extras..." menu?
Currently, selecting the menu item sends the user to an isolated apple.com web page of the "coming soon" variety, so it's hard to tell how this story will end. One fascinating thing to note is that Apple has changed the voice of this particular interface widget from the pure, direct marketing inspired call to action "Buy Fonts" to a street vendor style "Get Fonts." How positively quaint. Maybe the logical extension of this labelling would be the grammatic contortion offered by a "Got Fonts?" button. Pop culture reference? You're soaking in it.
Amazoning the News
A great piece on the process of telling stories, relaying information, and ultimately being successful at engaging people in an experience via the web. It may seem obvious, but a significant number of companies and individuals lose sight of the fact that writing for the web requires you to approach things differently than you would using traditional media or interaction. If nothing else, this article is a solid refresher on what the differences are and how they can be advantageous to writers, story tellers, and indeed, resellers like Amazon. The examples showing the use of the Amazon model, that is, successfully combining the five rules of net engagement and applying it to news and sports stories, is nothing less than brilliant. Via evhead
What the heck happened to yesterday? Must have been an "a" day.
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Netscape Navigator 6 Compatibility for Adobe GoLive 5
Help make GoLive a better dance partner at the Document Object Model Ball with a little help from this downloadable pile of modules, scripts, and tiny bottles of floor wax. However, given the complexity of the installation process for this "special extension", it might be easier (and quicker) to by an O'Reilly reference book and start writing more of your DHTML code by hand. You've been warned.
I'm trying to determine which of the following productivity related scenarios has the most impact (one way or the other) on my work ethic:Yesterday was an "a" day. Today was a "b" day. Currently, it's a draw.
- an extremely busy day that not only flies past in a blur of clicks and drags, but is also so numbingly uninspiring that at the end of it all, you can't recall what the hell you've just worked on; or...
- a single æsthetically challenging, yet technically convoluted project that consumes nearly an entire day, mostly because of a series of painfully slow and inescapably repetitive explorations.
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
The world is setting my log file all aflutter. The consistently, yet quietly, popular Available Domain Name of the Week page has simultaneously been Zeldman'd and k10k'd today. I hope the old Quadra doesn't start breathing funny.
Monday, March 19, 2001
At EyeWire, we maintain our massive customer-targeted email newsletter mailing lists the old-fashioned way. We use a text editor. Why? So we can break up multi-megabyte database export files into manageable chunks. Why? Because we use Excel to sort the data by locale and it chokes when you try to import more than 65,535 records at a time. Why? Because we have no other way of easily and regularly organizing the raw data so it ends up in usable form. Why? Because it's all so stupid.
Friday, March 16, 2001
For the past couple of weeks, certain parts of my new G4 that were shipped and delivered mere days after ordering have been taunting me from their comfy spot on the living room floor. I swear I could almost hear muffled laughter and sardonic comments emanating from the boxes. And I know I've been feeling a tiny bit anxious being all decked out with translucent peripherals, but without a port in which to plug them. Voices. Anxiety. I know what my wife will say to me about this. "It's just a computer you geek... get a grip." I definitely needed to get a grip. Fortunately, I received a reassuring message last night. Happy as a clam I am now that the order status page reads "shipped". Now that feels better.
Thursday, March 15, 2001
I don't know about you, but tomorrow is shaping up to be a great day for installing the Mac OS X Release Candidate on a lime-flavored revision C iMac. Unless we decide to actually do some work of course.
Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Enough With Themes Already
The ability to change the appearance of an application or operating system through themes or skins has reached the apex of stupid. I'm starting to understand why Steve Jobs kiboshed the inclusion of the alternate themes like Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and the arguably gorgeous Drawing Board in the final versions of Mac OS 8.5. For all the additional flexibility themes and skins afford the user in terms of personalizing their environment, ultimately they get in the way of the standardized means of accessing controls and information. I'm all for tailoring the user experience to suit my needs and habits, but not if it means that someone else can't find the freakin' File Menu when they sit down at my workstation. "Just click on the yellow animated fish and scroll down past the chrome skull icon until you hear the sound of screeching tires..."
Looking for the hidden agenda? It's in the credenza on the veranda.
Tuesday, March 13, 2001
But the warning lable said... "No less than four sad Kewpie dolls please."
Qualities of a Good URL
This article should be required reading for anyone who touches a web site during its design, production, or maintenance phases. I am continually dumbfounded as to why some sites require you to type excruciatingly long URLs in get to obviously popular content. Or why companies think that customers won't ever pick up a five year old magazine with an obsolete URL and try it in their browser. Believe me, they do. That's why I insist that we still support every out of date domain and link that we can. This particular example hasn't appeared in print or as part of a directory structure since 1995, yet it still redirects to the appropriate product and location.http://www.imageclub.com/objectgear/Redirects and domain mirroring aren't hard things to do. Making it easy for people to get to information on your site should be something that happens automatically as your site grows and changes. Via dangerousmeta
The switch is here! The switch is here!
This item is straight from the believe it or not department. I just completed updating contact information for sixty-two individual domains using the ever convoluted and always entertaining online forms over at Network Solutions. Doing anything sixty-two times in a row should almost guarantee that something unexpected happen. Nothing. No glitches. No hiccups. No lost messages. Nothing. Every change request zoomed through the system like methane through a cow. I must have been holding my mouse just right while I was clicking the submit button over and over and over and over...
Monday, March 12, 2001
Cadvision notified me that routing of my subnet addresses was completed earlier today. This effectively polishes off the last remaining bits of my ADSL installation. And unbelievably, it's been less than two weeks since I placed my order. Woof! Now it's nearly time to start setting up some servers. The NetGear switch is in the pipe and will hopefully be here on Wednesday (thanks Sean), and I've started hunting down current versions of my favorite Mac-based mail and domain name servers. Ah, you can almost smell the hardware warming up in the basement.
Saturday, March 10, 2001
Three dead batteries and a single black pixel. What to do? What to do...
Thursday, March 08, 2001
On a related note...To put this into a little bit of perspective, the HTML code to render the page you are currently looking at weighs in at just over 40KB. With another 17,500 bytes or so, we could have ourselves a ground-breaking software application. And don't forget to put the Fatbits in the Goodies menu, too!
Children of MacPaint
For those times when designing in single bit greyscale with only a handful of paint tools at your disposal just doesn't cut the mustard.
Did you realize that it was five years ago this month that Microsoft released their TrueType Core Fonts for use in web page design? How on earth did we cope with the sterile online typographic environment before being blessed with the ubiquitous quadratic-derived glyphs of Trebuchet, Verdana, and Comic Sans? How? In celebration of this oft-ignored anniversary, please take a moment to place this banner on your site. Like, we could possibly spread the love any further...
Take Back The Net
This self-proclaimed "crusade" aimed specifically at netizens (aarrgh... I am really beginning to detest that word...) encouraging them to purchase goods online is a bit like trying to convince Napster users to download music."Fueled by a lack of confidence, our economy is slipping into recession. If this trend continues, you might soon lose access to your favorite online store, greeting card site, music site or financial chat group. Imagine the Internet without Yahoo! or Amazon.com. But you can help the Net regain its respect. We must band together and send the world a loud, clear message that the Net will not only survive, but thrive. That's why we're asking you to demonstrate your dedication to the Internet."What? The point be moot girlfriend. I would like to think that people who read the Iconocast, in itself a resource for the internet marketing industry and the instigator of this whole thing, already spend a good portion of their waking hours using the net for things like purchasing products and investing in companies they like. If the people who are designing, building, and promoting the internet economy aren't supporting it, then how can we expect anyone else to embrace it? People aren't using an online stores or services, probably because it's easier to accomplish the same task in the analog world or the concept behind the site or service is just plain stupid. You can't persuade everyone to use something that either doesn't work or isn't needed. The internet tends to follow that rule - painfully.
Wednesday, March 07, 2001
Well, the DSL modem was installed and all the blinken lights seem to be working. I can reach the outside world through it, but apparently I still need to wait for Cadvision to properly route my static IPs. Until then, I can't see my home network from the office. The thing that really boggles me is that now I'm going to rely on a dinky pair of 12 gauge copper wires for my high-speed internet connection. At least the cable modem used coax. You know, something that's shielded and has a bit of visual beef to it. But now, it's just those dinky little copper wires...
Good morning. I'm at home, just waiting for my DSL...
The installer will be here "sometime between 9:30 and noon". My ISP must be using the same Microsoft Project Targeted Scheduling Approximation Wizard that our cable company uses.
Tuesday, March 06, 2001
Building fonts for dead computing platforms. That's what I think I should dedicate more of my waking hours to. And to start it off this evening, I installed Apple's Newton Toolkit (NTK). Along with a plethora of standard programming environment goodliness, NTK allows you to take existing Mac OS bitmap typefaces and turn them into fonts for use on the Newton. Not that it's a single step, point-and-click process. Oh no, it's much more fun than that. Here is a brief description of what's going on behind the scenes, taken from the Newton Font Specifications documentation:"Newton fonts are based on the TrueType font technology. It is important to understand that TrueType is not just outline fonts, but an entire scalable font architecture. It is possible to use many aspects of TrueType's font technology, without having to use actual outline fonts. Because the existing Newton software does not actually support outline fonts, we use a new extension to TrueType known generally as "sbit". This is a set of tables which have been defined as segments of a TrueType font. These tables allow bitmap data to be included in a TrueType font. The original design goal for "sbit" fonts was to allow small hand-tuned point sizes to be included along with an outline font. For Newton, we have gone a step further and completely removed the outline data. Fonts built for Newton contain only bitmap data."Simple no? Actually, it sounds way more daunting than it really is. You start by extracting out a specific weight (or weights) of bitmap information from an existing font suitcase using a utility aptly named the Newton Font Tool, and then you run the resulting file through the NTK, compiling it into an installable font package for the Newton. So, what does this mean for you? Practically nothing. In fact, I would be immensely surprised if you're still reading this. For me, it means that I now have Newton-compatible versions of my own typeface designs like Schmutz and East Bloc. And there's something very cool about that.
Monday, March 05, 2001
I carted a Previa-sized wad of accumulated digital flotsam away to an offsite storage facility this weekend. I've certainly been aware of how piles tend to grow once they've been sitting on the floor in my office for a while, but I never realized how much room they were actually taking up. My goodness, I have carpet...
Lucky me. I just stumbled across Jonathan Hoefler's Geometer screen font packages over at his typography.com site. These bitmapped lovelies are Mac only (natch) and positively free for the taking. Give Geneva and Monaco a rest and grab some gorgeous alternatives to the default cast of characters usually found in Finder windows and email clients everywhere.
Sunday, March 04, 2001
All Your Domain Are Belong To Us
Against my better judgment, tomorrow I'm going to be building and optimizing a framework for a new HTML-based email newsletter that our other site is sending out. Most of you already know how I feel about rich-formatted email. It doesn't matter whether it's just one or two words coloured all nice and pretty in Eudora or some bastardized, tagged-up mess puked out by some Microsoftian wizard. It's just wrong. My ears are bleeding just thinking about it. But because this email will use HTML, and that's the kind of thing I'm paid to sweat about, I'm insisting that the code be so clean it squeaks. If even one person with a marginally adequate, HTML-compatible mail client sees this message - it's going to knock their freaking socks across the room. But it's still wrong.
Thursday, March 01, 2001
A long as I've known him, Mike has curdled the Queen's English with artistic aplomb, using a stupefyingly vast lexicon of pop culture references and his own bare knuckles. But before this evening, never have I witnessed such a stellar phrase be uttered as the one he typed tonight."...her blog made me laugh my ass off in tears."Word.
Hot damn! My Blogger stickers arrived today. Thanks Ev and help.
I was a guest at my daughter's Brownie meeting tonight. The entire group was working on some of the criteria to qualify for their technology badge. Being a geek in the eyes of my wife and my two daughters apparently qualifies me to speak about computers and technology in front of a bunch of seven and eight year olds. I've been collecting electronic bits of crap for a long time, so I know a zener diode from a field effect transistor. But it's a completely different scenario explaining to a sporadically attentive jumble of kids that computers once used vacuum tubes (...you mean like how we clean the carpet?), hard drives used to be the size of small refrigerators (...didn't the computer get cold from being in the fridge?), and that yes indeed, we really did have to "dial" a telephone. The best comment after I explained that some of the first electronic computers were the size of a gymnasium was: "... I bet it was fun jumping on the big keyboard to type stuff into the computer!" I guess it would make perfect sense to an eight year old, someone who has never been exposed to a computer that didn't sit on top or underneath a desk, that the input device would be built to the same scale as the room-sized computer. Most of these girls had never seen a vinyl record album or a reel to reel tape, let alone something as archaically obscure as a vacuum tube or a circuit board full of hand-woven core memory. It was satisfying to see how much of the relatively old stuff I brought was completely new to them. In particular, the Mac Portable was a big hit, probably because mine has a trackball the size of a hamster. One reassuring note was that several girls recognized a 5.25" floppy disk. On second thought, I probably should take that as sobering evidence of the current state of the equipment being used it their school libraries and computer labs. At the end of day, I got to show off a pile of my old junk, and everyone learned a little bit of something. Me too. I love this kind of stuff.
