I resigned my position as a columnist for Digital Web Magazine today.
I resigned my position as a columnist for Digital Web Magazine today.
For several months my column has been more or less dormant, not unlike this Web site. I have been trying to understand why.
~ Maybe it’s my life and the happy complications of business school.
~ Maybe it’s my job, at which I have been more hands-on than contemplative in recent months, forcing me to learn the nuances of CSS rather than ruminate about the ramifications of using it.
~ Maybe it’s the rather stale nature of Web site design in general. The most recent topic I tried writing was, “Why is the push for standards the only hot
topic in the design community?” I also have a column in my head (likely written elsewhere by now) wondering, “Why do we talk about weblogs so much?” That one is so big it’s hardly worth writing.
The Web design industry has matured. The two largest issues facing online purveyors today are clarifying code for future iterations and making money to keep the future bright. Neither of these issues requires much more discussion than already exists.
My creative juices have flowed into schoolwork and my other keyboard of lateâI lead the class rock band at school. Working on chords instead of clauses has been refreshing.
Frankly, there’s not much incentive for me to think about Web publishing on a macro level at the present time. I have three roles in life:
- Create quality output for my employer
- Create quality output for my study group and professors
- Create a happy home
I’d post links to favored items here, true-weblog-style, but that’s not a creative or satisfying endeavor (let us mention here that every blog I read checks out the New York Times and kottke.org, just like me, thereby lowering the exploratory threshold several notches).
I can do better than that. I’m not interested in doing worse.
“Being different is good. And no intelligent man will ever hold it against you.”
—from Nowhere in Africa
“It’s very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth. Well, I don’t think any real damage has been done here. Because I don’t really know what the truth is. No one ever will, I suppose. Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we’re just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to return a guilty man to the community. No one can really know. But we have a reasonable doubt, and this is a safeguard which has enormous value to our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it’s SURE. We nine can’t understand how you three are still so sure. Maybe you can tell us.”
—Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men
For the Charley enthusiast, a batch of new images is now available.
I have my mother’s sneeze.
I have my mother’s sneeze.
It’s a big, satisfying sort of sneeze, high-pitched and assertive, a face-twisting “ehh-echhu!” that usually hits in pairs, not threes.
My nose-blowing is my father’s, a hearty, head-clearing honk that can turn heads. I usually leave a crowded room to blow my nose without disturbing anyone.
The runny nose causing the sneezing and nose-blowing today is neither Mom’s nor Dad’s but the product of my ENT, who tinkered extensively with the inner workings of my schnoz today and reduced me to a mucusy, sneezy mass.
I’m going to go and lay down for a while.
I generally tire of the entries on my site 10 days or so after they’re posted. More recent entries entertain me, both the linked content and whatever it is I’ve written in conjunction to them (or the expository mini-essays I write).
I read this page today and didn’t like what I saw. It wasn’t fun; it wasn’t entertaining; it wasn’t what I normally expect of myself. The entries that were here have been shuttled prematurely to the archives, preserved for posterity but no longer prominent and awaiting digestion.
The past few months I have had a lot to share but not a lot to say, which I discovered recently and have felt even more since. This site may benefit from a links area, like all the kids are doing these days, but that would leave me with very little to write at all.
A wet or messy dog shakes its entire body down, from head to tail, to rid its exterior of whatever is polluting it. Right now I need something like that for my sentence composition.
Pardon me while I clear my head. I’ll be back before the winter’s out.
Sometimes your past work ages better than expected.
Speaking of which, I have to get the 2002s on this site to 2003. Soon.
Make your own hot headlines with the CNN fake news generator. (This may be an old page but it’s new to me, and the cnn.com wrapper is up to date, too. Not bad.)
From World New York and Caterina.net: difrasismo, “the linking of two nouns to create a new idea” in the Nahuatl language.
Like “web log.”
Boxes and Arrows: Printing the Web. “Computers are good for storing information, but generally bad for using it. Research shows that difficulty in reading from a computer screen stems from poor resolution: compared to paper, monitors—even of the highest quality—offer only low-resolution reading.”