Truly not a real post. I doubt it could even possibly work.
Monthly Archives: October 2003
Clicking for Animals
I’ve been truly remiss about both giving to charities and looking at websites promoting strong charities. I’m not sure how to attribute this, but I’d like to point out a site that, much like its bigger, more well-publicized sister, The Hunger Site, allows a click of the mouse to provide funds toward the organization. It sounds too easy, and it is, in fact, too easy. But it’s a start and the content on this site is quite good for those interested in aiding and assisting our neglected animal cousins: The Animal Rescue Site.
Moving Type
Speaking of movable type (see below), I’m slowly moving to Movable Type instead of Blogger (which has been great — no real complaints) and a new host so that I can more powerfully and less expensively post my arcania to the Web. Please bear with me over the coming weeks until I work out the numerous kinks.
My apologies for advance for not being a good enough designer, technologist, linguist, or Internet protocolist, and all other things.
My apologies to my nervous system as well as, until an hour ago, I thought I had lost 3 years of Deckchairs posts to the Internet wilderness, as I hadn’t backed it all up in over one year. This means, that I would have lost 1 year of posts — but, well, it would feel like 3 years to me.
Web Fonts, oh
Currently, web designers and anyone who uses the web is pretty much restricted to the use of three fine, but very limited, fonts: Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and some variant of Times. What is incredible about this fact is that the web is incredibly rich with typography even though its typographic capacity has been stretched skin-thin. Almost every English-language website uses one or more of these four system fonts, which on the face (pun intended) is pathetic, but if it wasn’t for Microsoft developing Verdana and Georgia, we’d have, well, two! Sure, there is the rarely-used Geneva, and Courier, and Trebuchet and now Lucida Grande from Apple, but it’s still a design tragedy, given: a.) the incredible talent of type designers out there, b.) the phenomenal money poured into online interface design by every major company in the world, and c.) the fact that the web is the most flexible communication medium since movable type.
The paucity of typographic options has led the W3 body to issue one year ago the document called CSS3 module: Web Fonts, which is quite an interesting read, if you like this kind of thing. In a nutshell, and if I understand it correctly, it will allow fonts to be matched with those on local system or downloaded with web pages to accomodate specific designs. Style sheets will take care of it all in the background. My hope is that, whenever CSS3 is implemented (it’s not yet) by browser makers, they make this work beautifully.
A Sight
Holy cow. This is a website that I really, really, really love.
No. Korea
Sometimes it’s important for me to note whether a country with nukes has the capacity to blow us up. It appears, from the news today, that North Korea perhaps has two bombs ready to go. Heartening. Then I went to look at who owned northkorea.com just to make sure that one couldn’t just push a button on their site and send a missle over to Japan. It seems the owner is Reflex Publishing, which appears to be a crappy web development and content company that happened to purchase during the “height,” domains like humor.com, baseball.com, and, well, northkorea.com. Why would someone own northkorean.com? Why would someone check who owns northkorea.com?
A Lot
This site is barely reachable right now because so many are clicking, but take a look at britishpathe.com between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am. It’s a collection of 12 million images that have been produced from every second of film from 3,500 hours of 35 mm movies. In brief: it’s a phenomenal phenomenon of phenomena.
Visual $
This one is making the blog rounds, but I couldn’t help but post it — on one web page the author visually demonstrates how much money $87 billion dollars is and what it looks like. It’s a lot.
A.S.
What can one intelligently say about Mr. Schwarzenegger and his recent win in California? I would argue that absolutely nothing can be said of any substance or consequence. Sure, there will be cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. Sure the pundits will get a story out of it. It’s not incredible in these days that he won, nor is it a precedent.
I wish California lots of luck.
Google Wack
I was interested in reading Kottke’s recent piece on Google and AdSense, which lays out the stupidity of marketers in relation to their tech-savvy clients. For a long time, I’ve thought that Google was wolf in sheep’s clothing, though I use it all the time for all my searches and have done so since it was born.
More recently, the NYT wrote an article in its business section about Google’s placement of counters on select “customers” Google home pages so that they can keep track of how many or what searches take place on a more minute level. Why is the curse of dishonesty so strong for large companies?