10/23/99 12:12:02 AM
saw Project Teddy on the siggraph 99 video - since i didn't know the name of the program, it took a while to track it down (once i got motivated). google wasn't good enough w/ the information i had. instead, i had to search through the siggraph99 site. i eventually found a likely project, and google searched for the author...

10/22/99 11:43:17 PM
i got a 150 on this czech iq test. wow, i don't think i've taken an iq test since i was in the 3rd grade. i almost didn't want to, but was morbidly drawn to it (and i'm sure that some of the answers that i got "wrong" are right...). thanks jason!

10/21/99 2:38:45 PM
If you are angry with someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes... then you'll be a mile away from them, and you'll have their shoes.

10/21/99 2:00:41 PM
atlantic article on weblogs that's pretty cool. wished they talked about this at the digital design seminar.

right on dave, about the failure of MSIE. don't let the flames get to you, heheh. i have high hopes for mozilla though. i'm hoping that XUL turns out to relatively easy to use. all i want is to be really is to able to script complex event handling through the dom actually...

10/20/99 9:27:08 PM
interesting ai stuff. the mit ai lab is pretty interesting as well. no mention of any robots with an IQ of 90 there.

10/20/99 9:23:33 PM
Wow, awesome. MIT's God and Computers Lecture Series w/ Donald Knuth are broadcasting online via dr. dobbs journal. that is supercool. yet another interesting thing i have to file away for later reading/listening. (should be studying for tomorrow's midterm right now...)

knuth's website
MIT's God and Computers Lecture Series

10/20/99 9:12:31 PM
I missed this the first time around, but caught this on reruns at tomalak's realm. fascinating q/a with Jeff Hawkins.

10/20/99 8:34:58 PM
who says there's nothing good on the internet? Andy's House of Dangerous Experiments

10/20/99 1:05:18 PM
hah, this is pretty cool. using doom to do system administration. good comments as usual and nerd humor at /. - "It's time to Administrate!!" *pumps shotgun*

too bad there aren't more people doing research on creating virtual environments as representations of complex online tasks. i think it's because most people are much more interested in arguing about ecommerce. Vernor Vinge, 1981. William Gibson, 1984. Neal Stephenson, 1992. It's almost the year 2000 now. same old WIMPy interface. still need CLI to do anything useful.

10/20/99 12:49:18 PM
the PNG homepage @ cdrom.com has a page on PNG-supporting Browsers -- i finally got fed up enough to look for a way to get rid of QuickTime loading up everytime I load a PNG file. Unfortunately, solution they give is to delete the npqtplugin.dll, which will disable QT running the in the browser entirely, it looks like. There has to be a better way. Unfortunately, IE doesn't seem to have an easy menu to change mime types and the registry uses clsids and whatnot. if anyone knows offhand how to change loading PNGs w/ ie, please let me know. until then i'll just look through the m$ site and consider installing a plug-in...

10/20/99 12:24:59 AM
interesting critique of information on the web and doug rushkoff in an old Suck.

10/20/99 12:22:16 AM
today (yesterday by the time this is posted) i went to a talk entitled "The Future of Digital Design." the panelists consisted of: Douglas Rushkoff, John E. Warnock, and Richard Saul Wurman. what ensued was an hour long discussion primarily on commerce and communication. in fact, the only question that was asked by the moderator Ruth Weisberg (dean of usc sofa) wasn't really even answered (effect on design of the web, whether it was positive, and relevance - information management/glut is a big issue on the web, but i guess not to the panelists). not to say the talk was bad. it was very interesting and at times highly entertaining.

some notes: douglas rushkoff (douggie according to mpesce) made some very good points. but my beef is that he probably convinced a lot of otherwise intelligent, but relatively uninformed people that there's nothing good on the web-- this is counterproductive. he also seemed to look at the past through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia (i was on fidonet too, doug), but seems to have let that color what the being online has become-- sure it's no longer our own "secret clubhouse," but that doesn't mean that everything (or most things) have been commercialized. The types of sites, discussions, newsgroups, etc. are still going on, alive and well. These types of communities exist (still) today. no need to wait 20 years as he says. consumerism is not defined by a space, but by a state of mind -- in this way, i think he totally misses the point (he mentions that if you ask any web design house the designers will all be working on ecommerce, etc -- but, if you ask what web designers do on their spare time, he'll get a totally different story). he was probably the most entertaining of the speakers, although he made some big statements which he later backed off on (ecommerce will collapse), and i overlooked a lot of the relevant things going on today (his "summary" view that he gave was convincing and seemed designed simply to advance his own agenda, which of course is natural, but still distasteful. i got the feeling that he should have known better).

i thought that Richard Saul Wurman made a cogent and balanced argument. i liked his point that this coming time was a "world of alsos," meaning there are not necessarily best solutions, but a variety of solutions. his comment on "truths" i think was worded poorly. i don't think he meant to imply that there is no "objective reality" as we know it, but implied the validity of differing worldviews (many, however masquerade as "truth").

John Warnock had some interesting stuff to say as well. He very much disagreed with some of the things Rushkoff said. I think that he saw through some of the bs and concentrated instead on the web as computers (and software) as enabling tools. of all of them, i think he discussed the topic at hand the most, although i was disappointed not to hear more on his (or anyone's) take on how the web was affecting digital design and the issues that were at hand...

10/19/99 11:02:30 PM
news : for the bored.

10/19/99 11:02:07 PM
I went searching for a search of good CSS use a while back and happened upon David Baron's Homepage. i went and found it again today for a friend. Lots of CSS test pages and some DOM stuff as well. While I'm mentioning this site, I should also bring up Ian Hickson's page. also tons of web/CSS stuff.

worth noting is they're both around my age, just way more involved/focused than i am i guess.

10/18/99 7:33:32 PM
fun for the whole family at DadaDodo.

10/17/99 10:53:42 PM
i fixed the code blogger needs to properly bookmark frames and posted it on the blogger forum.

doc = external.menuArguments.top.document; seems to fix this. i'm hoping they'll incorporate this soon.

now back to finding more stuff to do (instead of the tons of homework, cleaning, and other responsibilities that i should be doing).

10/17/99 9:48:43 PM
catching up on some reading and went to evhead. found that its been redesigned since the last time i was there. i got kinda fond of the old design, but the new one has all kinds of neat bells and whistles. also found a link to an interesting PBS page w/ a baby counter.

also doing some reading on the external object in the ie dom to try to find out some more... not finding my books, probably gonna have to go to msdn or newsgroup...