Chasing My Own Tale
From the bookmarks:
<http://www.uwm.edu/~chruska/recursive/moser.html>
This has always been one of my favorite writings, ever since I read it in Whole Earth Review about a decade ago. Hmm, maybe skin ought to give me a login on his weblog <http://www.gaff.cc/> in order to provide him with great stuff like this. 🙂 Skin?
Feb 16 Wed (09 AM)
Eudora 4.3 is out now, but I’m holding off at least 2 weeks before I download any updates. 4.3 was released yesterday and it turns out there’s a bug in it. E-mail is such an important part of my daily activities (reading it, not necessarily responding to it.) that I won’t do anything that might disrupt it.
Yesterday I received the Student Evaluations from the Fall term class I taught on Web Graphics. It seems like the students really liked it, and gave me pretty high marks. That must have been the reason why <http://www.pdx.edu> kept me around for another term. I only hope that this term’s class goes half as well as the previous term.
On Sunday Amy and I attended my Grandma’s funeral. I’m not sure I want to talk about it just yet, but I wanted to note it in my journal. It’s been more difficult on the inside than is evident on the outside.
Feb 15 Tue (11 AM)
Is it just me or does it seem like Donald Norman and Jacob Neilsen are slowly merging into one body?
I was turned onto Norman in 1995 after reading ‘The Design of Everyday Things’, and Neilsen’s work in 1996/97 when I started reading his <http://www.useit.com> web site.
They’ve since started a consulting house together <http://www.nngroup.com> and are working on some sort of online university.
These guys are obviously candidates for some sort of brain/body merging technique…
Next time I’m at Powell’s I want to pick up this new book that I say at Barnes&Noble’s, called UnderStAnding, aka Understanding USA. I flipped through it at first, but didn’t spend much time on it, though it stuck in my head.
Then I found this article <http://www.fastcompany.com/online/32/benchmark.html> and I’m more intrigued with it now.
The Zip drive on my new G3 died, so I’ve had to take it in to get replaced. It’s obviously still under warranty and it looks like the Zip drive is the only problem, so with any luck I might have it back by Saturday. Till then, I’m Mac-less, though I still have access to most of my e-mail and lots of the stuff I’ve been working on.
Hopefully, Amy will let me use her Mac, with my old Zip drive to upload some files for my class tonight.
<http://www.amazon.com> is in the process of redesigning their front page. They’ve dropped the whole tabs interface. It will be interesting to see if the ‘tab craze’ that has gripped web design for the past few months will start to die off.
We might be installing Apache at work, migrating from Netscape Enterprise Server. This would be great news for one of my other projects. Hello XSSIs… 🙂
Jan 31 Mon (09 AM)
Last night I believe was a re-run episode of the X-Files where the creator’s other series, “Millennium” was wrapped up.
Frank Black was neither frank, nor black. Discuss.
I had stopped watching the show because our reception for the local Fox broadcast was so bad. At times it looked like Amy and I were doing calisthenics, rather than simply tryng to improve the reception as to make out what was lurking in Chris Carter’s dark sets.
However, I was surprised at how quickly the single episode wrapped up the Millennium story line. I figured it would take at least a couple of shows.
However, I think Mulder actually died when he was trapped in the cellar with the zombies. That would be the way to get rid of him…
Jan 28 Fri (12 PM)
I’m slowly catching up with stuff. I’ve got these little bundles of files, folders, e-mails and papers that I’m constantly digging through. My home e-mail is down to 25 mails in my inbox (some of them quite old, but getting there), then there’s the inbox at work, currently at 13 mails. Then I have my ‘files pile’, stacks of icons on the left side of my screen at home and at work. This has documents to read, to write and to file away properly. On Wednesday I made some progress on that front at home. It’s down to 5 or 6 icons. At work I’m holding steady at 6.
Then there’s the paper piles. The actual physical manifestation of Things I Have To Do. That’s the part I’m least proud of. Christmas and Birthday cards to respond to, plus Tax information, pay stubs, receipts, warranties, magazines. This is the goal: Clean out all the piles before they overwhelm you.
But when I do, I hate it when the slightest, smallest thing gets put into my mail, in my icon stack or my paper stack. So I’m left trying to keep just enough in there that when something gets added it doesn’t depress me, but taking care of enough things that the pile is small enough that I think I can handle it.
Jan 25 Tue (11 PM)
So Amy and I broke down and decided to order cable TV. We’re both very interested in getting BlazerVision, the Trailblazers home games channel.
So this morning I call AT&T Cable services (nee <http://www.tci.com> ) and ask to sign up for the expanded basic server (includes the Discovery Channel). They ask for name, credit card number and…
“Address?”
I give her my address, wait a bit and hear,
“Pardon me sir, but we already have that location as having a subscription and activation.”
…
So it turns out that for three years, clear TV reception has been but a 32″ coaxial cable connection away. This is only the second time I’ve ever had cable access in the place I’ve lived. This will be the true test of my self-restraint, because I know just how easily I slip into that TV stupor.
Wish me luck!
Jan 25 Tue (12 AM)
I had been looking at it for quite a while (well, since it was introduced in early January) but tonight, I finally decided to do some creative surgery on Apple’s web site and their plans for the new MacOS interface.
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Jan 24 Mon (07 PM)
Recently Amy and I have made a number of trips to the bookstores locally and I’ve been picking up a few great pieces. Saturday night I finally got a hold of a Flash book that more than just re-hased documentation. Flash 4 Magic follows in a long line of ‘Magic’ books and I’m so far very happy with this one, though I have yet to really push my way through it.
<http://www1.fatbrain.com/>
As a matter of fact, I’m just about to finish reading Steve Levy’s ‘Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution’ which is my mythology, a look back at the people who really developed the roots of the culture that I find my career immersed in today. I read this for the first time in about 1990, and recently saw it on the shelves at <http://www.powells.com> and had to pick it up. I highly recommend it for any one who really wants to know where the computer industry came from in the first place.
<http://www1.fatbrain.com/>