08.29.99
Jorn Barger is nuts
Last week Jorn Barger, or http://www.robotwisdom.com started slagging on me, out of the blue. From what I can tell through his multi-day rant my unlawful acts were: a coding mistake, use of the TARGET=”_blank” attribute, supporting properly structured markup, and having a ‘weblog’ that was ‘overdesigned’.
Where to start. First off, he lumps Dwelling in with ‘weblogs’. Dwelling is a journal, better called a diary. It’s about me. From what I can tell, Jorn is discussing Weblogs which he defines here: http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$3865 but to my eyes is a daily list of links to new things on the web.
Dwelling is not about the Web. It’s about ME! I happen to be heavily involved with the wired world, but get this straight: Dwelling is a Journal, NOT a weblog.
As for being ‘overdesigned’, I have yet to find one page that makes me give even one iota of weight to his sense of aestetics. His pages have all the design quality of a babboon’s ass. His vision of the electronic world apparently doesn’t include art. I saw the other web pages he critiqued as overdesigned, and saw how some even cowtowed to him. Disgusting really. http://www.egroups.com/groups/weblogs/25.html?
As for coding mistakes, don’t go around his site too much else you’ll hit 3 dead links (to pages within his own site!) in the first 7 minutes like I did. And I hope he can find some way of coping with links that open into new windows. I supposed he must have been traumatized by geocities as a small child. (I can only guess that’s also where he learned design.)
It’s been a long time since someone got under my skin like this. I’m not sure what did it: if it was his ragging on me, his decision to do it in public, or the fact that he never bothered to contact me, or that he has yet to reply to my mail asking him just how he reached the conclusion I was a villian.
If I had any kind of contact with him ahead of time, I might not have taken this so personally, but this was so out of left field. The only reason I found it is because I have access to my logs and found the referer hits coming in.
Well, we’ll see if he responds as the only way he’ll know I posted this is if he notices this page in his referer log.
:E … Breathe in… Breathe out… 🙂
In brighter news, my personal inbox is down to 8 mails, I updated my projects outline, and borrowed a bike from Kam. Now to run down to Fred Meyers to grab some supplies for it. Other than the issue above (which I really ought to ‘let go’), things are going really well: I’m confirmed for teaching this fall’s class at PSU, I got my last credit card paid off and I’m getting things organized or done. Either one is a good thing.