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2000.09.17 : 2000.09.23
Saturday, September 23, 2000
Yow. It seems that Dave already had a target on his
"livers
eaten by eagles" quote referred to yesterday.
He's so foresightful. I should have known.
Yo. The food court at our
hotel has a disorienting feature: active signs.
There are several fast food places: Italian, sandwiches, burgers, ice
cream. Each has a sign above it that looks like a typical plastic back-lit
sign advertising its brief menu. Right. I'm poking about, looking at food.
Then something odd happens. That sign that had a picture of lasagna on
it (at least I think it did) is now showing pizza.
Turns out that they are actually rear-projection video displays. Over
the course of a few minutes, they show the name and logo of their cuisine,
their menu, and a picture - one at a time - of each of the six things they
serve (with subtle animations of various parts of the sign).
Rather cool, actually, after you get over the fact that they keep changing
even though it doesn't look like they should.
Pretty soon, these things won't be merely active - they'll be interactive.
They will ask the many devices you have or wear who you are, and adjust
what they display to pander most successfully to the gaggle of people who
happen to gathered around them at any given time.
They'll know what you ate there last time. How long you looked at the
pizza display even though you finally picked lasagna. They might ask the
rest of the Web where you live or what your profession is and, based on
that, make a guess about your income, your tastes, what might appeal most
to you and how much you'd be willing to pay for it. They might throw in
a free Diet Coke (which your grocery store told them you buy every week)
if you get the more expensive veal scaloppini.
Dot-commies will find themselves huddles around signs featuring pricey
techno-goodies. Greenies will be offered environmentally-friendly stuff.
Kids will find themselves in a world of toys and candy.
The world is about to get very strange.
Yo. Heard on some TV ad last night, while I was fiddling with
my weblog and not paying much attention: "I am a human cannonball, not
a doctor." I have no idea what they were talking about, but it is curious
how deeply the obviously-referenced
meme is embedded in our collective consciousness. Even Helen got it.
Friday, September 22, 2000
Yo. There's an odd symmetry in the universe. The covers
of men's magazines have women on them, of course. (It would be pretty surprising
to find, say, Al Gore on the cover of Playboy, don't you think? Laminated
Al. Fund-raising, bible-thumping Al.)
The curious thing is that the covers of women's magazines also have
women on them. Almost universally. Helen thinks it's not true, that
sports and business magazines are the real men's magazines, and they typically
have men on their covers. I think it is true and reflects our culture's
fascination with (and often insistence upon) female beauty. Or else it's
because women are just more attractive than men.
Yo. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're
number two for take-off, but we've been asked by the tower to hold here
while they repaint the lines on all of the runways. The good news is that
it's a warm, sunny day, and I'm sure the paint will dry pretty fast. So
sit back, relax, and welcome to the friendly skies."
Yo. The flight attendant was serving breakfast. "Watch your elbows,"
she said. After struggling for several seconds, I finally asked her if
Helen and I could watch each other's elbows, as we were probably not as
limber as some of the other passengers.
Yak. I was talking with somebody-or-other at last
week's conference about slow
glass. This was a cool material in an
old science fiction story that worked just like regular glass, but
transmitted light inside of it much, much slower than regular glass. It
could take hours or days for light to travel through a pane of it. You
could hang a slab of it up in a room, then come back later and see "though"
it what had happened in that room a while ago.
I suggested that the world was going to have such stuff in it pretty
soon, though a bit differently that the science fiction story had envisioned.
Instead of slabs of some material hanging about, there will be zillions
of sensors - visual, audio, and everything else. And they will all be on
the Net. Like Webcams
now, but these
will go to eleven. In a few years, these things will be tiny. And cheap.
And all over the place. In fact, they will be so tiny and so cheap that
people will just leave them littered about. Think about M&Ms with cameras,
microphones and IP addresses.
These little goodies, or whatever is listening to them just upstream
in the Net, will store their datastreams, at least for a while, in case
anyone wants to know what they said. So, you will be able to ask a collection
of these things to show you what happened by the bench in the park at 10
AM today. And you will watch it, and hear it, exactly as it happened.
Slow glass. Coming soon in silicon.
Plurp. The part of the DisneyWorldhotel
we're staying in this time is called the Love
Bug, after which both the architecture and interior design are patterned.
Terminally cute. On the way here, Helen calculated that this is our eighth
time at D-World. That's one time more than the five year old kid on the
airport tram with us. We are so competitive.
Yow. Dave
and Ian both linked to Plurp. In
Ian's
case, several times, and Plurp has the great honor of being one of
the few male authored blogs to make his margin list. Dave noted that I
had mislinked to his log a bunch of times and put
up a page specifically to redirect folks appropriately (as if anyone
else has even seen Plurp!). That's very Dave. And I, woefully embarrassed
by my sloppiness, have tried to fix all of those errant links.
Plurp. Most of the time, there are word running around in my
head. An internal conversation with someone, in which I run both sides.
A list of things to do. A silly jingle. (This afternoon, it was It's
a Small, Small World, a particularly insidious meme! I'll bet your
little voice is singing it right now. See?) Sometimes it seems positively
hard to silence the voices, to quiet the songs, and simply to experience
the world in a non-verbal way. I suspect that this state of mind is one
goal of religions like Zen Buddhism.
My insight for the day is that a weblog is kinda like using a thought-to-text
translation device whose output gets posted to the Web. Most of the time,
I can't believe how dull that little voice is. The notion that anyone would
want to listen to it (or in your case, read it) who wasn't stuck in the
same head as it - well, that's just mystifying.
Thursday, September 21, 2000
Plop. So much for e-commerce! The folks at uniform.org
can't seem to figure out if they can ship that
black shirt in time for my
upcoming conference presentation, so I'm giving up on them. Heck -
the person who answers the phone seems always to say "Oh, the owner isn't
here and I don't know about that." How do they make any money? (Maybe they
really
are an org.)
Looks like we'll go shopping at one of those old-style analog stores
for a black shirt with a regular collar, then I'll wear it backwards under
my lab coat for effect at the talk. Along with the red sunglasses, it should
be good for a laugh.
Plurp. I seem dangerously close to having everything ready to
actually post Plurp. Scary!
Yow. An issue of the venerable HWA.hax0r.news,
with a particularly juicy quote.
"stoners make the best cryptologists,
I know because i've written some kick ass shit and the next day, no way
could I figure out wtf I did man I have stuff from like the 80's that to
this day, I still have no idea what it is and whole teams at the NSA have
worked on it for me stoners man, thats how to do real strong crypto...DES?
no! LSD? yes!"
- Stu Shimoruma (off the record at
a wild party in Denver)
One wonders if this is the Tsutomu
Shimomura of hacker-tracker
fame, reported by some person in no state to either spell or know the
meaning of "off the record." We may never know.
Rant. I hate computers, but oh come on! Netscape
DeComposer is several neurons shy of brain dead!
So there I was, all read to post the initial Plurp site, all glorious
six pages of it. This meant doing the following.
-
Throw my hands up at Netscape DeComposer, which doesn't seem to know how
to publish more than one file at a time, create directories on your FTP
site, erase files from your FTP site, etc., etc. At least, not as far as
I can see.
-
OK. Give up on DeComposer as a publisher. Ian
says "Get WS_FTP."
Yes, yet another program to download.
-
What's
my password? Oh yeah.
-
That didn't work. But of course not! I'm doing this from the office and
I don't have a socksified stack, so I can't FTP through the firewall. "Socksify
your stack," says Morton.
Is he nuts? Stir all those bits just to FTP a few files? Not a chance.
-
No problem. Dave
has an analog line in his office, so I dial in through that (at a blazing
21k bits/sec - feel the power), in a configuration that allows FTP. Nope.
WS_FTP still doesn't work. It just disconnects me. Not clear why.
-
Try FTP from a DOS box. Nope, same thing.
-
Try publishing one file from DeComposer, which worked before. Weirdly,
it works again. "It's your time-outs," says Ian, who has dedicated far
too many brain cells to this stuff. But he's right, and fiddling with WS_FTP
settings works! Zoop those files up there, point my browser at www.stevewhite.org
and there's the new front page. Cool?
Not a chance! All of the graphics links are broken. I read the HTML on
the site, and it's fine. It works perfectly on my local system. What could
be going on?
Ian bets me a dollar that it's DeComposer being stupid, and not translating
the blanks in my filenames correctly. "Impossible," I think. "Nobody would
write such a dumb product." But I don't take the bet.
Of course, he's right.
Now I've renamed all my graphics files, changed all of the corresponding
links, and I'm ready to try again. Are
we having fun yet?
Yow. O
frabjous day! Plurp
is finally up. Can you feel the empathetic palpitations of the aether?
I can. For the moment, at least, I need not fear that the eagles
will eat my liver. (Yeah, that last link is obscure. Click on it and
search for "livers". I could try to convince Dave
to put a target on that entry, but he'd probably ignore me.)
Happily, I lost my bet.
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Yow. Thanks to Dave
for the clever idea of having an easy way to get permanent URLs for various
Plurp entries, in spite of the fact that the "current" week changes all
the time. (Hint: Click on the lovely clay colored box that begins a week's
entry, or the spicy mustard colored box that begins each day's entry.)
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Rant. Well, OK, so WYSIWYG HTML editors have their problems.
The draft of Plurp that I'm working on is now inhabited by demons. I can't,
for instance, insert a table inside of the current 1x2 table and get anything
that's functional. I've fiddled so much that I have no idea what's in the
HTML any more. I'll have to start over with a clean slate. (What a wonderfully
anachronistic, analog phrase!) I hate computers.
Rant. Creating all these graphics is a pain. I spent hours optimizing
download times. You reader-type people better appreciate it, gosh darn
it!
Plurp. A draft of Plurp exists, in all of its 800x600-compatible
glory, including hopefully-final graphics, directory structures and so
on. Now several days of getting all the links right and it might actually
Be Ready. Betcha this entry goes into the archive before the whole thing
is posted, though. :-)
Monday, September 18, 2000
Rant. It's so nice to drive my Miata
again! That poor, sad Ford Whatever that we had in Silicon Valley last
week was like an old hound dog. It would get up and move when you kicked
it, but it would whine when it did. Step on the gas and it said "Do I have
to?" before kicking into overdrive (which it did whenever you asked for
any acceleration at all, sigh) and slowly climbing up to speed. The Miata,
on the other hand, is more like drive-by-neuron. "Faster" you think, and
it does. "There" you think, and it sidesteps deftly. And that poor Ford
was like driving a mattress. Boing, boing, boing - you can't even
tell what the road is doing.
Anyhow. Good to be back.
Yak. Word is out that I'm thinking of blogging myself. "It's
very ... white," says Ian, looking
dubiously at my screen, "and I didn't figure you for the graphical type."
I love being radically unpredictable like that. "You're using a WYSIWYG
HTML editor?" asks Dave,
disbelief in his voice. "I once compared them with C editors that only
let you compose the output of a program." "What a great idea!" I
reply, "We could get rid of all that pesky intermediate software. Can we
get a patent
on that?"
Rant. This Web stuff may not be the cat's meow. The store
that had the band-collar shirts has some underling answering the phones.
She can't promise delivery in less than 7-10 business days (read "forever").
I tell her I need that shirt, in Florida, on Tuesday of next week. She
tells me that only The Manager can deal with that request. The Manager,
it seems, is not in until Wednesday, presumably having lots of much more
important things to do than manage this particular company. We'll see.
I don't order off of the Web. Not for anything except books from Amazon
anyhow. I used to, but I had too many experiences in which the store didn't
have the item their Web site said they did, or their delivery time was
after the heat death of the universe, or whatever. I had stores charge
my credit card instantly, then notify me by snailmail that they didn't
have the item. When I called to get my money back, I was told that it would
take N days to credit my card. Interesting business model, but no thanks.
These days, I do product research on the Web, then call a human who can
tell me if they have stuff, if they can really deliver before the next
ice age, and stuff like that.
Plurp. Multi-column Plurp, now with TABLE tags. Thinking about
directory structure. Wrestling with graphics; graphics winning.
Plop. Mrs. Clinton Works Hard on Her Spontaneity intones
the New York Times today. Regardless
of the possible truth therein, I can only think that the Times has fallen
into the sarchasm.
Yak. Helen is watching the Olympics,
of course. Men's gymnastics is tonight. Watching these guys do septuple
flips while vaulting, she says "That's not normal." One would have
to agree.
Plop. "Normal" for me is a pretty low bar these days. Physically,
I mean. (Those of you who are sniggering about the generality of that statement
will have to wait for another time for a larger exposition on the subject.)
Last Saturday, Randy
and I threw the frisbee around for about an hour. Hardly even worked up
a sweat. Now my right shoulder is sore. What shape is it that's maximally
out of shape?
Sunday, September 17, 2000
Plop. Silicon
Valley. It's not just for geeks any more. In fact, it's hard to even
find
geeks here any more. Too many damn dot-commies.
Plurp. Another technical triumph! A first draft of the Plurp
weblog has passed Helen's graphics design approval. This might even be
real some day. (Breath holding not recommended. Not responsible for articles
left in your sentences.)
Plurp. Will this be the first weblog that had archives even in
its first issue? Will it ever have a first issue?
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