Month: July 2003

So my mom and my kid sister got chosen to be a Nielsen Netratings family. (How? They’re not quite sure.) Of course I told Elizabeth that she had to visit my site lots, and some of the sites I like, too. 😉 Here’s part of what I wrote her, in terms of recommendations:

Most of my favorite sites are listed on *my* site under “linking goodness”. I think you’d really enjoy Kat’s. She writes funny weird stuff, about words she likes and wanting to be a pirate and stuff like that.

The photos at A life uncommon are very well done. 8bit joystick (Jacob) rants a lot about video games and copyright. stavros, wonder chicken (he was rude to you once on metafilter a long time ago, but apologized) has funny, sometimes slightly obscene, writing about life as an english teacher in s. korea; big white guy is sort of similar, but not entirely (more pictures!), and in hong kong. talking points memo is fabulous political writing & reporting. caveat lector and anita rowland are daily reads for me; both all over the place in subject matter, but great “voice”.

of course, most of those sites are pretty geeky – lots of web stuff – but if you’re at all interested in how the web works, they’re worth checking out. I’d especially recommend zeldman, dive into mark (and for some just amazing writing, his addiction catagory is well worth it), burning bird, tim bray, and joe clark. (joe is the *man* when it comes to accessibility on the web, and darn funny to boot.)

oh, and you might turn up some pictures of Morgan at Kermit’s blog (on my list as “K”). 😉

if I didn’t mention someone in my blogroll, it’s not that I don’t love you. 🙂 I just didn’t want to totally overwhelm my sister.

so everybody wave hi to my sister, and to the Nielsen folks too. (yes, dammit, I’m gaming the system.)

I thought I had also linked to Joe’s article searched for as “all the guys”, but it looks like I just double-linked to a pierce of Dorothea’s that seemed on a tangential topic. now I can’t find it. gah. stupid internet.

but man, typeing on those those teeny tiny cell phone keys drives me nuts. (C, on the other hand, is going to end up with japanese-schoolgirl-like texting skillz.) I dream about the Palm Tungsten C, or even better, a laptop or tablet. sigh.

i am testing posting via cell.

– arrange for cats, mail, house-watching we’ve got it covered.
– plan route, stops along the way working on it
– memory stick(s)! on its way got it!
– power inverter (car to normal outlet) on its way got it!
– cooler(s)
– sandals for C.
– phone charger? the lovely people at Shilo Inn are mailing up the one we (oops!) left in PDX. got it!
– clean house
– where is the cheapest booze? too hard to figure out. just gonna bring some NW beer.

So C. & I had plans to go to Portland…among other things, I wanted to go to the Bead & Gem Faire, because I’m trying to get back into the jewelry thing, and those sorts of events always inspire me. (There’s a similar event this weekend in Tacoma, but I prolly won’t go…a little burnt out, and I have lots of things to do here.)

C had his own plans, so we split up and I went to the convention center, with just my little bag but no notebook or camera (not even a pen, much to my later chagrin, and rather against character). The Oregon Convention Center is a darn big place: an enormous circle, sort of. I took a wrong turn, not knowing where this bead thing was at — bad information architecture! — and saw a sign for a “Webvisions” conference. “hmmm.” Wandered past. “oooo, that looks cool.” Scoped it out – “wow, Mark Newhouse? Jeffery Veen?” Chatted a bit with the gals out front, hemmed and hawed about buying a ticket, then ended up going off to the bead fair.

Which was cool, although they’re all pretty much alike: rows and rows of tables laid out with beads and rocks and jewelry. Picked up a few things that might make some nice pieces. Then, of course, wandered back to the Webvisions room.

Wow…I’ve never been to one of these sorts of conferences, and it was an amazing experience. Mark’s presentation on standards was quite well done — clever concept, although he was a little stiff. And Jeffery’s was exceptional…got me all fired up to do all sorts of things for work, plus a few things here, too. (Going to start looking for students to interview at work.) Funny as hell…I need to reread his book.

Met the director of Free Geek, which was way cool. Need to connect deTray at UWT with him for sure. Entirely blown away by their whole setup.

And then…or rather — right off, first thing I saw when I walked into the conference room was Matt Haughey‘s profile. Whoa. In my little world, that’s like seeing a movie star. 😉 So I hung out afterwards and introduced myself, feeling ultra-ultra-dorky. But he (and pb, who I didn’t recognize, because I hadn’t ever seen his picture, I don’t think) was very nice, and funny too (asked if they were trading beads for pelts/land at the bead fair). Said he thought he remembered my MeFi username (epersonae, of course). He’s taller than I expected; Paul is shorter than I would’ve expected. (I’m beginning to wonder if I assume that everyone is close to my height if I haven’t met them in person. Veen was freaking astoundingly tall.)

So…yay. I’m going to talk to my boss about going next year, too, so I can actually be at to the whole damn thing. Oh, and bring my notebook, pen, and camera.

“if you look for the truth outside yourself, it gets farther and farther away.”

I’m actually going away for a vacation — not right now, but soon. Earlier this year, I managed to take two whole weeks of vacation, but I hardly left the house. 🙂 (not that that’s a bad thing.)

But over the weekend we were invited to come to C’s friend’s wife’s family’s annual get-together on Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin. And I’ve never been to Wisconsin, nor to any of the other states between here and there. So, yay.

I’m thinking about taking a detour to Madison to visit Dorothea; haven’t entirely made up my mind (she’s cool either way), and it may even depend on how the journey goes. In any case, I’m anticipating having a great trip, seeing new things, relaxing, and taking lots of pictures.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything anyone else hasn’t already said, but I wanted to gather it here for my own benefit after the last month or so of browser news….

Internet Explorer
Frozen. The Windows version will not be updated beyond the current 6.0; allegedly the next major version will be part of the operating system. There will not be another Mac version (currently at 5.0), except as part of an MSN subscription. (Monopoly? What monopoly? Lawsuit? What lawsuit?)

Netscape
Dead; AOL closed shop this week. Version 4, now six years old, is still being given security updates; apparently the same will be true of the most recent (7.1) version as well, but there will not be another version. (This after AOL got piles of cash as a “settlement” in one of the anti-trust lawsuits, and MS agreed to “let” them use IE as the default AOL browser for free for the next seven years. I like Zeldman’s latest take on that.)

Mozilla
Alive. The open-source behemoth will, apparently, keep rolling. They’ve been booted from AOL, but with a tidy little donation, and will be set up as entirely their own non-profit org with cash from Sun, IBM, etc. (The whole quasi-anti-MS posse.) Current version is 1.4; the general-user version, now called Firebird, is at 0.6.

Opera
Alive. No recent changes in direction for this browser from a small company in Norway. Most recent version is 7.0. Last I heard, Opera was making strong inroads into the embedded devices market: cell phones and the like.

Safari
Quite alive, thank you very much. Current version (1) is the default browser for OSX.

What does it mean?
My short answer: nothing good in the Windows space, more neutral in the Mac space.

The overwhelming majority of Web users are on IE 5, 5.5, or 6, which were the default browsers for Windows 98 (5 or 5.5), 2000 (6), and XP (6). most people upgrade slowly, whether that’s operating systems or browsers: they don’t know why they should, don’t want to learn something new, don’t want to spend more money. upgrading a browser suffers from the additional hurdle of involving downloading software, which on a dialup connection can be deadly slow.

IE 5.5 & IE 6 have issues. Security issues, for one thing, though that’s really out of my personal expertise. On the Web design front, they have numerous CSS bugs and support problems. Luckily, those tend to be fairly well known, so there are lots of hacks and workarounds. But hacks and workarounds always slow things down, both the design process (a design that I could get to work near perfectly in Moz 1.4 and Opera 7 has an intractible flaw in IE 6) and in the downloading experience (more hacks means more code, even if it’s vastly less than the old browser detection & table-layout stuff).

And there are always deadly combo bugs. (Don’t get me started.)

More generally, it means that one company owns the Web-surfing experience for the overwhelming majority of users. One can imagine a number of consequences of this fact; I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The only bright spot I can see is Apple’s committment to Safari, which is based on the open source K-meleon (sp?); countering that are the legions of Mac IE 5.0 users.

what to do?
Perhaps what the Mozilla folks should organize next is a CD-burning distribution project; distributed distribution, as it were. If you have a broadband connection, and care about this sort of thing (either fighting the monopoly or fighting for Web standards), burn some disks of the latest Moz/Firebird release and give them to your friends on dial-up.

Also, is there a super-simple user’s guide for Moz/FB?

On the other hand, I’m thinking about paying for a copy of Opera (at home), instead of just having the ad-supported version. Put my money where my mouth is.

since for some reason (arg!) my server is down, I’m recording things here. (I should probably look into a more stable — tho probably more expensive (ow) — host.)

* Wikis & weblogs
* Wikilog
* Bill Moyers interview with Jon Stewart (like anita, it’s one of the few things I miss about having television. that, and cooking shows.)