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Monday, December 17, 2001
What a mensch 
| | After I said I'd have voted for Dave if he was running, Ev voted for me. Wow. |
Just for fun
| | Did your computer come with an OS you don't want? Auction it off. The means have just been facilitated by Linux Journal, through OS Resale.com. It's a free site, and LJ doesn't make any money off the transactions. |
3 of 10 don't deserve your business
| | Online shoppers can expect to be confronted with more intrusive and sophisticated "capture" tactics. This Cyveillance study found that more than 30% of the Internet's top 100 sites are using unsolicited technology tactics to expose consumers to content they otherwise would not have elected to view. |
The literature of tragedy
| | I was trying to figure out if it was Frazier Mountain that I saw covered with snow in the distance yesterday (I now believe it was Mt. Piños) when I ran across a link to a Salon piece by Charles Frazier, who wrote Cold Mountain. My cousin Paul gave me that book a year or two ago, and it has haunted me since. The book is the story of a young man named Inman from the time he deserts the Confederate Army until he reaches his home at Cold Mountain in Western North Carolina. It presents a view of the Civil War we never read about in history books. It is uncompromising in its fidelity to the details of life at the time, especially in language. And it is completely unconcerned with the causes of war. Only with its effects on the ground, that phrase we hear so often on CNN. |
| | It is a story with a unique setting and universal meaning. War is the human hell we see now in Afghnistan, and have seen before in Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor, Somalia and the World Trade Center. It is a place where deaths are not "casualties" but pointless events of heartbreaking brutality. |
| | The Salon piece introduces Charles Frazier's diary of a book tour. One fine excerpt: |
| | I am reading a lesser Raymond Chandler novel, "The Lady in the Lake," while the woman jammed knee-to-shoulder against me in the next seat tosses back the third of what will eventually be seven mini-bottles of Bacardi with Coke. A couple of strangers in the seats behind me strike up a conversation in the modern corporate language composed almost entirely of euphemism and puffery, delivered in that barking tone that is supposed to connote confidence, aggression. I can't not listen. The woman identifies herself by company. "We're service providers for the retirement community industry," she says. I try to guess what those words might mean. What work do they actually do? What service do they actually provide? Deliver extra-large Pampers? Haul away the bodies? |
| | By the way, have you discovered TopoZone? Wonderful maps of everywhere in the U.S. (The link goes to Mt. Piños.) |
Higher forms of distraction
| | Drove with the kid up onto the Santa Ynez mountains yesterday. I knew it would be clear because the mountains behind the house looked as close as my own garage, and normally there's at least a little haze. But I had no idea how clear the air would be when we got up there. East Camino Cielo runs along at elevations between 3000 and 4000 feet, which moves the ocean's horizon out past 100 miles. We could see over all the Channel Islands, including Catalina and San Nicolas Island, hidden from view at lower elevations by Santa Cruz Island, which features its own mountain range. I didn't know what we were seeing beyond Santa Cruz Island was San Nicolas until the kid — already reading maps at age five — pointed it out, handing me the binoculars and insisting I have a look. |
| | Before we saw the outline of its two steep-cliffed land forms, I hardly knew Santa Barbara Island even existed. |
| | The view east was just as amazing. We could see all the ridges framing Los Angeles, including the San Gabriels and the Santa Monicas. |
| | No time to say more. Just wanted to urge ya'll to get out and look at the world when the conditions are what pilots call "severe clear." I'd have more links if the National Park Service would serve up Web pages. Something isn't clear there. |
| | [Later: this may explain why the National Park Service is off the Web. Thanks to an alert reader for pointing this out.] |
Whoa ho ho
| | Dave for has nominated me for BOTY: Blogger of The Year. Many other worthies on the list, and off. Some, like RageBoy, are almost new (or, in RB's case, re-new). Too bad Weinberger isn't on there. After going on about he's not really good at this stuff, he took to the form like Mark McGuire to batting practice. Nearly every one of his posts flies out of the park. |
| | Adam's psyched. He voted for himself, avoiding a shut-out (couldn't resist, big guy). I figured if Dave would be modest enough not to nominate himself (he'd get my vote), I'd bring the same restraint to voting for my own pixy ass. So I left that one blank, along with a couple categories I don't know shit about. |
| | Nothing to stop ya'll from picking up the slack, of course. Heh. |
Going, gone, going...
| | While we ponder the WaSP¹s future, we ask designers and site owners to ponder the web¹s. Will it conform to Tim BernersLee¹s vision of an open platform accessible to all? Or will it remain a presentational hack? |
| | For better or worse, the answer is both. The urge to present is as natural to humans as fanning its gorgeous ass is to a peacock. Compared to PowerPoint, over the development of which we have zero influence, the Web is a free art store we can stock or loot as we please. Against the tide of natural urges, good folks like Zeldman are like William F. Buckley describing the original purpose of The National Review: To stand athwart history yelling "stop." I hope they keep it up. |
Marekrolling
| | Marek's blog is becoming an ever-stranger journey into the Heart of Lightness (at the moment he's talking with Freud). Hypernaturally, it branches in all directions. His blogrolling is a blog in itself. His apparent (can't be sure about these things) top domain is RadioPossibility, a conversational point of departure (than no less that than anything else in its domain). He has new book (sort of). A create-a-site free hosting service, which is a fecundity project aimed toward one billion websites by the end of the century. And I don't even know what to make of 100 Recently Updated Sites (are they his?), other than follow all the links to distraction and/or death. |
| | Consider your newspaper. The advertisements are the land. The stories are the Dead Sea, slowly evaporating. Beneath the surface, the advertisements form an unbroken Continental Shelf. Here and there a ridge of PR crops through the shallow surface. Soon salt and sand will blow across a desert. |
| | Who is this? Maybe Marek knows. |
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