Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer
At Bice, an upscale Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, the kind of place where men in suits can order $90 truffle pasta platters to impress other men in suits during their business lunches, in the men’s room, above the urinal:
WE AIM TO PLEASE
YOUR AIM WILL HELP
And apparently it’s hip now, too. How fucked up is your social life when you have to smoke crack to be “cool?”
Witold Riedel‘s weblog source code begins with a large ASCII rendering of his head.
Pyra is looking for designers/Blogger fans to redesign Blogger.com, essentially for free. Comp with caution.
SVN’s forum has an excellent debate on the pros and cons of “free” design opportunities. I’m in the anti-comp-design camp these days, but the debate is complex and intriguing.
I’m considering auto-deleting emails from certain country codes as a simple way to avoid spam.
No offense to the nations mentioned, but more than half the junk mail I receive is from Brazil and Denmark thanks to lax security by foreign sysadmins. I don’t know anyone in either country; why not filter them out? Seems far more straightforward than installing some half-brained spam software that may junk my real correspondence.
Which begs another question: do the spammers really think I’m going to “llame, por favor!” when the x-sender is .dk?
Andrew Baio has recompiled his list of available dictionary words in top-level domains. Some real gems in there, even in the .com list. Who wouldn’t want to claim scrota.com as their own? (Scrota.net and .org are there, too, for shoring up resources. Act now.)
The Dialect Survey, now in progress, is not only a fascinating read, it’s fun to take.
60. What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road?
a) berm
b) parking
c) tree lawn
d) terrace
e) curb strip
f) beltway
g) verge
h) I have no word for this
I recommend taking the survey or, at the very least, exploring some of the linguistic maps.
~ Leonid meteor shower visible in North America November 19. If it weren’t a Tuesday, I’d drag my family to my elementary school again.
~ The Guardian gave Pete Townshend a forum to review Kurt Cobain’s “Journals” and rebut Cobain’s “Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend” line. And did he ever. “These are the scribblings of a once beautiful, angry, petulant, spoiled, drug-addled middle-class white boy from a divorced family who just happened, with the help of two of his slightly more stable peers, to make an album hailed as one of the best rock records ever.”
~ Speaking of petulance, Mad Magazine turns 50 this fall. The Sunday New York Times ran an article compiling some of Mad’s greatest letters to the editors. “I have been reading Mad for several years now. Mainly, the first issue I ever bought. I just couldn’t see wasting a quarter on another.”
Launching Monday is the Web site of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. I find that conceptually fascinating: “promoting IA.” As vital as it is, IA certainly deserves any possible efforts to increase public knowledge and understanding.
The top level of the organization is jam-packed with name-brand IAs and an ambitious list of projects appears on its initiatives page. This is a site worth bookmarking.
I am curious to see how the organization develops, and whether it becomes public-relations oriented, like the EFF, or more communal, like the WWWAC. Stay tuned.
Update, November 5: There’s a vitriolic but compelling debate about the long-term usefulness of this organization on Metafilter.
Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.