Sometimes there are days when everything happens at once. Today was let’s-change-everything-computer-wise-on-Andrew-day-and-see-what-happens.
11:00 AM. I started loading my new G4 with lots of RAM and hard drive space with my applications. So far so good.
12:30 PM. I find talk in one of the bulletin boards that Safari has been upgraded from Beta to Gold (which is long for Go?). I’ve been waiting and hoping for this and it’s true.
12:40 PM. The new Safari browser that I just downloaded takes me to the Apple website homepage, which shows that the company just released its G5 computer, making my brand new G4 fundamentally obsolete. Plus, I wasted money, time, and energy on this old computer, which runs spectacularly, by the way.
1:30 PM. I can’t easily restart the new G4 because it doesn’t have a nice, little Power On/Off button in the middle of the keyboard. I’m pretty sure that the sleek new G5 has a keyboard bellybutton.
11:15 PM. After continuing to load my apps on the G4, I feel a need to post something on Deckchairs — a need borne by desire. And Blogger Pro looks different, strange even. It has an entirely new interface and I’m not sure if I’m just looking at it oddly in Safari, I’m on some kind of new G4 medication, or Apple has done a new number on me.

This is a really well-written and edited site chock full of real interviews with “creative people in a technical world.” Today’s piece is about Mr. Zeldman, who will promote again and again to whoever will listen (that means the 3 of you). But it’s a nice, if underproduced, site.

In case you ever wondered what your exact coordinates are on this planet Earth, you might want to look at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Map Server.
The ACME Mapper is way cooler, showing you a satellite photograph of your location — there’s little image detail so you won’t see yourself waving but it’s still quite astounding.

Finally, I pulled together a few hours to prettify a few of my sites, including this one, with customized favicons. If you’re viewing this site in Netscape, Safari, Chimera, or Mozilla, you should see at the left of the address bar a teeny weeny, 16×16 pixel icon of a deckchair. And at MANOVERBOARD.com, you should see a little red man pointing over a board. Boy, those 256 pixels sure do make me giddy with the novelty of reinvention. I think I now know (a little) what artists who draw mountains on single grains of rice must feel like.

About four years ago, a friend told me that I really need to watch this site, whose tagline is “vertias odit moras”, and is really an academically-oriented review of and pointer to news, culture, and criticism on the Web. I went back to the site today, after sadly ignoring it for four years and while its appearance is almost exactly the same, the content is unbelievably good.
Here are some highlights: Susan Sontag calls for English or an international lingua franca, in the TLS. Only 47 items are currently missing from the Baghdad Museum, out of 8000 originally, in the Washington Post. A feature by Elizabeth Drew, in the New York Review of Books, about Bush Neocons. I’m truly flabbergasted at the linking, culling, curating, and editing talent of ALDaily.

In many ways, this was to be expected: MS gives over its browser-ware to Apple and its new Safari. Does this mean that alternative browsers like Mozilla, Opera, and even Netscape have an opportunity here to rule the Mac world? Yes, but it means absolutely very little at this point in time. Apple is aggressively stationed to create its own superior utilities and other software and the reality is that few large companies, other than Adobe and Macromedia, care.

There are too many Blairs, imho. In this article, Salon.com News | N.Y. Times finds more bogus Blair reports, it’s evident that the headline writer was either on early vacation or up for early promotion.

I’m reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s brand new book from New Riders press called Designing With Web Standards and it’s quite eye-opening. I do definitely believe that the way that most people (including myself) have been building websites will be obsolete in about 1 to 2 years time. I’ve realized this for a while and that CSS and XML and DOM is the future of Web computing, but it’s powerful to see Zeldman make the case coherently with an eye toward the history and mis-management of browser development. (Browsers are how we see the Web, in all its beauty and bluster.) The crusade to build more standards-based websites is a natural evolution that has coincied with every media from books to television and I welcome it with clenched teeth.

As car manufacturers like Honda and Cadillac place increasingly larger and larger corporate logos/ornaments on their cards, there is a small but growing trend of car Logo Removal. I find it kind of fascinating and I’ve only really seen it in Bed-Stuy, of course. Some of the larger SUVs, in particular (and no, well, these are not cars), will have tricked out, customized front grills and very clean, logo-less skins. Most of these vehicles are painted black. These look very, very wicked, for some reason and my reasoning is as follows:
1. The car is anonymous in the way that the Secret Service employs for its automotive machines. The car looks like a conspiracy on wheels.
2. The car looks less recreational and all about business while at the same time, it defies big business identity, corporate culture, and visual recognition. It’s small-time, mob capitalism which we are not supposed to know enough about.
3. The car is cared for personally and in a real sense, the car is re-owned or re-captured from industry itself. This ironically makes the car appear sinister and romantic, cold and palpable, smart and aloof.

Sometimes I’ll read a book to my daughter which will show a large, usually uppercase, letter next to a picture or ideogram, such as an apple or a cat. So, an “B” will be next to a bird and an “Z” will be next to a “zebra.” Nothing interesting. But when one “reads” the book, one says “B is for bird, C is for cat, D is for dog, E is for Elephant” and so on. Why is the letter “for” something? How did it originate that a letter is “for” a word? Shouldn’t it be “Bird starts with B, Cat starts with C, Dog starts with D, Elephant starts with E” — or is this just non-alliterative and unfriendly. I think a lot of our language works this way, whether it’s childhood-related or not; a series of words stick and they are used to make sense of the world regardless of their internal logic. I just wish I was more conscious of this in daily, speaking life.