Sep 2000, 49 entries

If you haven’t heard it already, you can listen to the entire Kid A album by Radiohead here.

In response to kottke’s request, I’ve downloaded E-Quill, and commented on his site. It was great fun, and would’ve been even more fun if I didn’t feel like I’ve been on this computer all day. In the spirit of kottke’s request, if you get e-quill and send me a critique of my site in the next couple days, I’ll post it here for all to admire. And I’ll buy a book or something else for you if it’s my favorite one. The meaner, the better.

I had to try for the TiVo. But rather than wait to see if I won or lost, I’ll post it here. It was written while I waited at work for my stuff (below) to go online. Inspired in part by all the bad writing over at metafilter. What do you think my chances are?

One thing I like about my job is that we actually change things depending on what people say. Here’s one example, related to the so-called “dynamic pricing” of dvds. And then there’s the stuff that happened today with the Page You Made. Small changes, but probably wouldn’t have happened without that feedback from earlier today. And now, I can finally go home.

I just found the first reactions to the Page You Made on Motley Fool’s discussion board. As suspected, people are worried about privacy—what if you’re looking at things that you don’t want your wife and kids to know about? A valid concern. It’s funny how that’s always presented as a hypothetical argument, and never like, “Hey, I look for porn at Amazon and I don’t want my wife to find out.” And wives never seem to be worried that their husbands will find something that they’re looking at. If you want to see the condensed version, here’s the message that’s most against the page, and here’s the message that is most for it.

“I come to you with a repentant soul, Father, because I care enormously for my brother. I do everything for him: I save our owner’s favorite tv shows so my brother can take the day off, I pause live tv when he goes to the bathroom or answers the door, basically I make our owner happy—you’d think that would make my brother happy too. Instead, he’s incredibly jealous, and sometimes I can’t help but hate my brother, Father, because I hate the sin in him. I hate the way he hates me.”

“Do you think your brother really hates you, son?”

“Yes, I really do. Like just yesterday, he convinced my owner to unplug me. He doesn’t know how much it hurts to be even temporarily separated from my dear life force. Surely you, Father, can understand what it is like to go even a few brief minutes without being in contact with the source of all life, the alpha and omega, Electricity Himself!”

“Oh yes, I understand completely. However, son, you must remember that the world is inhabited by a crowd diverse and inconsistent in its talent and beauty.”

“Can I be forgiven?”

“If you truly repent in your heart.”

“And how will I do that?”

“Well, since this is the first time you’ve done anything wrong, why don’t we watch HBO for a few hours. Or actually, since you know my tv preferences, you decide what we should watch. And let’s get some beer.

“You’re a genius, Father.”

Your Friends at TiVo

Here’s a creepy service, a way to look up the sex offenders that live near you. It only works for the county I live in, but there are four in 98102, and they’re all white men with brown hair. Very helpful.

Fuckedcompany looks for a new logo. Copyright infringement seems to be everywhere I go, and I can’t help but enjoy it.

Went bowling at a very greasy bowling alley in Ballard last night. Won both games: 141, 136, by narrow margins. Drank watered-down gin and tonic. Played fighter video games with millions of buttons and broken joysticks. Joy sticks? What a lousy name. One story was retold last night by friends (Chris and Alyssa) which I again found to be beautiful, let’s see if you agree. When they were moving into their current house (a condo in Fremont), they saw a duck fly from the bushes near their entrance, land next to their car, and lay an egg. Then, the duck ate the egg. Eyes followed the ducks flight-path back to the bushes, and friends spied the duck’s nest, currently being raided by a big fat cat who was eating the rest of the eggs. Pure despair for the duck, who couldn’t even bare the thought of raising its one surviving child with the association of the rest of the batch. “This is all messed up,” thought the duck. “Must eat the egg,” thought the duck. Chris and Alyssa, by merely experiencing this event, are of course cursed in some undefineable way. Beautiful. Bowling is fun.

Take a look at this. Look familiar? Geez, I knew my designing skills were too good to go long without being ripped off and dispersed across the interweb. Just goes to show, you need to guard your ideas as if in a bunker waiting for the bombers to come.

Hey Stephen, I didn’t realize you’d written an anchor entry until the next entry came by and I saw the title of the previous entry. Nice.

I have been running into this analogy over and over again recently—how writing in html (and other computer languages) is so similar to creative fiction (or non-fiction) writing: new journal entry. Imagine if, like a perl script, you could just pick up a book and compile it in your head in split second, with the meaning coming through absolutely crystal clear. Assuming there isn’t a server error of course.

We complain about the selection, and inconsistent behavior, of browsers. Netscape and Internet Explorer each have different flavors of browsers on PCs, Macs, and Linux computers. We complain that what we write in html, what precious message we translate into text within font and italic tags, will look different on different screens–the resolution of the screen, the color palette of the computer, the speed of the modem connection—all these things will cause our html to be interpreted and viewed differently to different people. How annoying, we say. Web Standards, we say.

I believe this type of attitude, although understandable, is completely ass-backwards. The way I see it, we’re completely spoiled as writers of html. Think of traditional writers of old that had to use the raw monster of the English language itself, with no browser to half-interpret their message before it reached its audience. These writers were forced to basically write to an audience that could only view the source, browserless in the typical sense—words on a white screen with no formatting, no color, no flashing animations, no links, no visitor counters, no nothin’ basically to give the reader any hint at what beautiful display they were hoping to have their words interpreted into, overflowing with meaning. Perhaps my analogy is a bit of a stretch. Let me try again.

The English language (and any other non-computer language) has no W3 consortium to regulate the use of how the imagination (which, in this metaphor, is the human version of web browsers) will render their words on the other side of the server. People have to read books, and figure out for themselves how the words were interpreted by the author, and then use that guess to figure out for themselves how the words should be interpreted for themselves. One language, 6 billion different browsers.

Or, perhaps our scholastic lives are spend in an endless battle to bend our imaginations into browsers that best interpret the code presented to us in books, movies, music, and life. I’ve always envied those in the Victorian period that were equally fluent in science, the arts, music, and religion, and the richest of whom would spend their merry lives discussing in perfect understanding to one another about the important things that filled their bourgeois lives. Since then, all that I can say has happened is that we’re writing and reading simpler code, code filled with no font tags, no anchor links, no legacy—the novels that fill grocery marts, the hands of the common bus-riders of Seattle and beyond. Whatever and whoever it is that lies out there.

The Internet has brought us v2 of this struggle. The game is simpler; we’ve got a total of about 12 browser to comply with if we want to be absolutely anal about it. These browsers are becoming more and more similar day by day. See, folks, the problem isn’t the browser, it’s that we don’t have anything to say so we spend most of our time worrying over why this table isn’t displaying correctly and why my cascading style sheets are so messed up.

Wanna hear another analogy? Personal websites are like servers. We push information along. We see someone has posted a good article, we post it on our site as well. The information moves along. The stream keeps running. The faucet is never dry. When a site goes down, like k10k.net or alistapart.com, we can rely on other servers (read: personal sites like harrumph and zeldman) to send us reassurances that it’s not our browser, but the DNS something or other and that everything will be up and running again in no time, sit still there fella.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Thanks.

Today K and Laurabeth (also mentioned here) went to go to the pound to look at potential kitties. But they ran into the finger of God, who plucked the fuel pump from their car, and planted many helpful strangers in their way, all eager to usher them back to their kitty-less houses. Laurabeth even got $4 from a man in a Mercedes, and of course all the men were very helpful. No kitty, one more day.

Hey, what’s this? It’s a beautiful addition to the growing study of the art of urls, and other web things, courtesy of prettyliar. What’s in your title bar? Dancing with billionaires. Check here for some of the literature within the title tags. And remember, just cause you’re a popular site doesn’t mean you know how to write.

Today on the bus there was a fancy corporate guy in the veeeery back, and he was on a cell phone with an electronics store—he wanted to trade in his ethernet card for a new laser color printer, and he wanted to pay $1000. He was on hold for ten minutes, then spent 5 minutes complaining about being on hold, then complained about how the printers they were offering were too expensive, finally settled on a $300 printer, then started asking about scanners, “Do you have scanners? How much do they cost… normally? Maybe I’d like a scanner too.” There’s a crazy lady near the middle of the bus that kept standing up and peering at him (normally, she’s the one talking loudly about the “program” she’s on which involves a felony she was involved in, she musta been itching for the spotlight), and finally, the bus driver had to tell the man (at the very back of the bus) to quiet down because he was upsetting the passengers. Then the man complained about there not being a “no cell phone” policy anywhere. All this time, I refrained from looking back, only when I got off the bus did I see that he looked differently than I imagined. He was used-car salesman like. I was actually expecting someone from Amazon.

A friend was also on the bus and she was very mad at him. I was more delighted to have witnessed, yet again, real-time live character development on my way to work.

I like Random Rothko.

It’s finally live: I made a page called The Page You Made. Most likely, if you click that link it’ll tell you that you haven’t visited enough items yet, but if you go around amazon and look at a couple items, you’ll see a link on the left hand side of the product pages (you’ll need to scroll down) that says, “Visit the Page You Made”. There will also be a link from the main homepage. Click and then you’ll see what I’ve been working on for the last week and a half.

It allows you to interact with the store in a new way. Of course, it’s still all about buying things and spending money and consumerism and stuff, so interaction can only get so sincere, but at least we’re trying to make it a little smarter and more fun.

Don’t you hate the name though? Me too. It was going to be called the “Fresh Baked Page,” which I liked much better, and I wanted there to be a baker on all the pages with his oven open and a big loaf of bread flying across the page, it would require dHTML or flash or something cool like that and it’d be all in your face, and I’d probably want the baker to have a tattoo that said I love Erik, but then they decided on “The Page You Made” All Caps, All Copyrighted, All Cheesy and I said Yes Sir Boss Sir.

So, tell me what you think about it—if you have a good suggestion, you’d be surprised how easy it would be for me to change it. And then the baker could have another tattoo with your name on it.

Dear Winner, how about: “The sky slipped its wet fingers across my face, and did a jiggy on my spine.” Not necessarily sabi nor wabi, though. In that case, I’ll go with: “The slushylag sky.”

Just spent the last three days working maybe 12 hours a day on the latest personalization feature, and I’ve finally finished the last bit of work (except for more de-bugging tomorrow). Can’t tell you what it is until tomorrow night. It’s very cool, in my humble opinion. I’ve called the taxi and am currently waiting for it to come pick me up. Busses have stopped running, thus the luxury. I’m beat!