10/9/99 4:16:16 AM
i've pinned down what i've been reminded of by our group's matrix design - it's sort of like (except for not as well done as) the lotr site.

10/9/99 3:49:42 AM
Mozilla would so rock if if had these features. In related news, Time wrote this useless article about mozilla, which is bs.

10/8/99 2:32:12 PM
while on the subject of vision, time has a cover story on lasik eye surgery.

10/8/99 2:05:38 PM
who needs bookmarks when you have a blog?
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/nn/web-pubs/htmlbook96/index.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/sirosh/research/cortex.html

10/8/99 12:52:01 PM
the following seems to be a relevant comment in terms of artistic pretention and the avant-garde (and the art world in general)

I revel in the hypocrisy that Wired flaunts as it sucks up to the wannabe anarcho syndicalist digerati who were made rich by using technology created by and for the government while it chants its libertarian abolish government-and-we-can-all-live-in-a-Neal Stephenson-novel mantra.

from 5.05 rants

10/7/99 7:10:59 PM
changed my style sheet to use pt sizes instead of ems. hopefully doesn't cause any problems. hmm. also interesting that the default border color of the img is that of the body link colors and can't be styled (unless you are using a CSS border) in ie.

10/7/99 6:40:08 PM

10/7/99 6:14:53 PM
I guess I'm hypothetically stupid. ;-)

10/7/99 6:12:22 PM
The Mirage Institute II vs Irational.org

10/7/99 6:00:24 PM
chill w/ some fbs

10/7/99 5:54:49 PM
I'm linked in Jason Kottke's 10/7/99. must have found me from my skulking on his server logs or something. ;-P

i've been spending a lot of time on slashdot lately. by that, i mean, more than the usual half an hour or so... Among the interesting discussions things happening over there are stuff of web interest like the use of trademarks in META tags - in this case, trademarked names vs individuals, Pez and Jane's Intelligence Review soliciting opinions from /. readers and then scrapping their original article on cyberterrorism and making a new one from the comments(!). shows not only how the far the open source phenoma has gone, but also another example of just how powerful the net can be when used for "the forces of good"(tm).

And that's just the web stuff. I was up until 2am last night reading the discussion on the hoopla surrounding princeton prof and baby euthanization. Read the discussion with a moderation threshhold of 2, but went back and found a lot of really good posts with only a moderation of 1 (~400 of those). All in all though, still better than USENET. A lot of the stuff is pretty relevant to a Philosophy class I'm taking right now.

My Philosophy TA said that in his estimation, Peter Singer (the Princeton prof) is little better than a barbarian. I'm assuming that's referring to the apparent cruelty and harshness of Singer's views (on the issues of infantcide). It is however the logical conclusion to his utilitarian view of ethics (not that deontologism is any better), making him impeccably "civilized" and rational. Is there a difference between civilized and barbaric? Well, I think it's good that Singer is out there putting out his theories, especially in light that he has perhaps begun to realize how foolish they are when the human factor is taken into account. It's also good that people are protesting, and definitely raises some questions on the nature of consciousness and ethics.

As usual, the ensuing discussions are much more interesting than the original article. ;-) Now it's time for me to get back to doing work.

10/6/99 1:08:59 PM
Make google your default search engine. Plus google is just plain fun. try some searches on: evil borg","evil man","evil company","evil empire","evil place", "more evil than satan". Also, try "best opearting system".

10/6/99 12:20:27 AM
In FA410 class Monday, the Professor made this talk about how the web is now commercial, etc. etc. and in the old days of the web people surfed to go to artistic sites and they people don't do that now, it's all about getting stuff done, e-commerce, etc.

I have to take exception to that because, while some of the that is true, besides the world of academia, which I would say was the primary constituency of the web at the time, there was a large percentage of "digeratti"-- avant garde artists some, hanger ons or people with too much time others. In any population that's pretty small. As the web has grown in popularity, the percentages have evened out a bit. That's not to say there aren't any more "art" sites around or even that less people view them. In fact, many more do, merely by the magnitude larger numbers (of people) involved. The sites may be "harder to find" in the sense that there is a large number of sites out there, but face it--how hard was it to find back then--near impossible to get access to the web, less indexing and search capabilities, and the prerequisite of needing to be in the "in crowd" to be associated with a lot of this stuff. Maybe the last point could be replaced with something more relevant...

In any case, web art, design, culture is alive and well, thank you very much. And not very hard to get to. Singular visions and communities abound. Weblogs are all over the place (and all link to each other and all over the place). The artistic and intellectual environment for discourse is richer than it ever was in the good old days. And this is what the web is about today.

10/4/99 12:50:58 AM
Just when I thought this was the best thing i found all night, then i found this page by the same guy. yes, i'm still procrastinating on that paper...

10/3/99 11:24:25 PM
I'm convinced that the main problem with the matrix design we are using is the background image. Or, specifically, the interaction of the background and our types of images. However, that background was sort of the reason we chose the design. I'm perfectly willing to go for a more standard "design school" look.

my personal aesthetics preferences, in no particular order: white/minimal, boxes of color, bordered boxes, smaller verdana, lower cases, layered boxes

while i'm talking about random stuff. Check out Squant, the 4th primary color. I remember Negativland from the U2 song they did... i think i have it somewhere on my hard drive. oh, and the reason for my large number of postings: i'm putting off writing a draft of a philosophy paper right now.

10/3/99 11:08:54 PM
I've been reviewing sites recently in NS3. It's interesting how some designs degrade better than others.

On a tangent, I was impressed by Wineshoppers tables shenanigans emulating a layered look (their about page is also a good illustration of this). I suppose eatonweb could be constructed that way, instead of with DIVs, although that probably would have destroyed the design intent even though it would look the same...