Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
This Indian fellow is driving along when a truck full of rebar stops in front of him. Iron bars pierce his windshield and … his neck. His head is nearly severed, the spinal column alone keeps it attached to his body. He stays conscious, realizes no one is coming to help him, and ties his own head back on with a piece of cloth, then drives 30 kilometers to get help. Beyond surreal.
Arm is healing pretty well — no surgery or pins required. Starting to do small things with the hand; now tying my own shoes at least. Can’t change a diaper quite yet. Can lift a wallet and remove money just fine.
After a week and a half of trying to get ahold of the woman who hit me (kept getting phone ringing into empty space, or a teenager who would say “I’ll get her” and then put the phone on the table and wander away, leaving me hanging for five minutes), finally talked to her. She opened with “But you hit me!” (referring to the fact that I hit her right rear flank). Oh my god. Me: “That’s a matter of a half second’s timing, and was only because I swerved to avoid being hit head-on! Has nothing to do with who had right of way, who turned left into oncoming traffic.” She softens. “My life sucks. I’ve barely left the house since our accident. I’m afraid. The clutch went out. I have a seven-year-old boy. I’ve been looking for work for six months but nobody is hiring. I still live with my mother.” and so on. It’s pretty clear she’s got nothing, which is why she was uninsured to begin with. I’ve decided not to go after anything. She’s agreed to try and help pay for damage to bicycle, maybe some of my medical co-pays.
Well, okay. Me, I’m ready to heal up and get back on the horse. Just want it to be over, move on. Walking to BART now, the commute takes ~45 min total, twice the time it took to ride. People wonder whether I feel cursed, this happening so close to Matthew’s death. Nope, not at all — I’ve been riding for many years without incident. I ride hard, but do believe I ride pretty safe, and that this was a freak incident. I’ll be wearing an orange safety vest from now on, though.
The new era of weblog comment spam is upon us.
Google determines rank in search results depending on # of incoming links from other sites. Posting a comment w/URL on someone’s else’s site causes Google to “like” the commenter’s site more. So essentially someone is hijacking my comments system (and probably lots of other blogs’ comments systems) to abuse Google’s algorithms.
Back when Alta Vista was the King of Search, META keyword stuffing was the primary mechanism of search rank abuse. Google had seemed to put an end to that, but where there’s a will… Clever. Though stupid that they would drop both fake comments on a single post out of nearly a thousand, three months apart. Also, it’s hard to imagine these not looking suspicious to any blog owner.
Update, 10/15/03: As it turns out, this has become the single-most spammed-upon entry at all of birdhouse. If you are reading this without having had to wade through tons of spam, it’s because I’ve deleted tons of them manually, and (later) because excellent tools such as MT-Blacklist have made dealing with rising blog spam much more manageable.
Had a great visit from an Apple rep yesterday, came to help us solve some persistent Final Cut Pro lab issues. When he booted his laptop, saw this great wallpaper — an x-ray of the very TiBook he was using. He sent me a copy. Higher-def version for posterity here. Something about this seems vaguely naughty, like it must have felt in the 1800s to catch a glimpse of a woman’s calf or something.
Salon: A new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004. Meanwhile, “highways would receive $34.1 billion in fiscal year 2004, which is $2.5 billion more than this year.”
Never mind the political fallout of U.S. oil dependency on the Middle East, or the fact that the average mileage per gallon for new cars and trucks in the U.S. is at its lowest level in 20 years.
We worked very hard to find a house within biking distance to work. The bike path that gets me 80% of the way there has turned out to be more of a blessing than I had imagined (when I’m not getting atomized on the remaining 20%). Being able to ride or walk to work through the city amongst green grass, away from threat of cars, is an experience I wish every American — and every congressperson — could have for just one week. Instead we encourage the problem and discourage the solution.
Three of our grad students are in Iraq for a while, reporting on post-invasion conditions. I set up a Movable Type blog for them, where they’re posting words and images daily.
A few people have asked how I feel about the death of Netscape, so thought I’d peck out (still one-handed) a browser evolution brain dump.
Netscape wasn’t the first browser I ever used — Max and I first turned on to the Web at ZiffNet via Cello, and later Spyglass Mosaic. Looking back, it’s almost impossible to imagine an interweb with no corporate presence, no ads, no porn, no spam, and no Internet Explorer. But that was the early web Netscape was born into — flat grey, plain text, blue links, and a few images. And yet, between around 1994 and 1996, Netscape became synonymous with the web itself.
Over the next few years web technology exploded and it was all developers could do to hang on. Netscape brought us background colors and tiles, tables, animated GIFs, frames, layers, and tons of other innovations now considered so fundamental we take them for granted. Netscape even brought us the almighty blink tag (if the word “blink” there isn’t blinking, consider yourself lucky). It seems almost ho-hum in retrospect, but it really was an exciting time. The sky was the limit, the ground was moving fast, the self-publishing door was wide open, and people were coining and abusing phrases like “the internet changes everything.”
For those reminiscing along with me here, bake your noodle on the memory that browsers were not always free. Navigator (and later, Communicator) cost around $30, only being forced to go free on later to respond to IE being free (keep in mind that Microsoft had other revenue streams, Netscape did not). How strange is it that Office still costs money while Explorer doesn’t?
What’s actually surprising is that Netscape held on as long as it did. Navigator has been losing share for a very long time, and Mozilla gets all the non-IE attention anyway. When AOL acquired Netscape, it seemed there might be enough non-IE momentum in the gigantic AOL userbase to re-ignite the browser wars, but that too fizzled when AOL decided to use IE at its core after all.
Let’s face it — Netscape may have innovated dozens of web technologies, but Navigator did not remain the best browser, and many of Netscape’s innovations were rejected by the W3C (e.g. OBJECT was accepted over EMBED, and Netscape’s weird, proprietary LAYER approach was rejected in favor of the much cleaner DIV/CSS model). In fact, Netscape 4.x’s CSS support was so half-baked that it single-handedly delayed broad CSS deployment at probably thousands of organizations for years. I personally excised it from dozens of J -School Macs rather than wrestle with CSS workarounds to accommodate its frustrating brokenness. Netscape 6 looked promising, but was ultimately a dud.
Anyway. The news itself isn’t that exciting — Netscape is already pretty much irrelevant, and has almost become synonymous in developers’ minds with “legacy browser.” Watching Apple choose the little-known KHTML over Mozilla for Safari was emblematic of Netscape’s current lack of relevance (not to mention performance). What’s interesting is that the rise and fall of a great company and such a successful innovator can occur in such a short period of time. That a single product can so fundamentally alter the way we interact with information, and that the creator of that product can be slaughtered in an anticompetitive marketplace with virtual impunity in the course of a few years.
But Mozilla lives on, with a user base that seems to be growing rather than shrinking. If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that Mozilla devs won’t have to compete for attention from Netscape. And while companies like Netscape, who are bound by the profit motive, may fail in the marketplace, open source projects are immune from the wiles of capitalism in its most raw form (though open source has other weaknesses, such as misdirection and ill communication).
Thanks for the good times, Netscape. I’ll never forget the original pulsing purple ‘N’ in Netscape 1.0.
It’s a small thing, but it took me by surprise — I’ve run a web server of some flavor from home for the past five years. Now that the box is in a colo, the router lights at home stay solid most of the time — no activity. I wasn’t even aware of it, but I had subconsciously learned to see those lights in my peripheral vision, to be subtly aware of the stream of visitors — the network of unknown friends blinking into and out of the office. Strange, but it feels a little bit lonely tonight in here.
In the month 9 gallery, Miles learns to crawl, cruise, and then walk. We move into a new house and Miles digs it. Going to the zoo, trip to Arcata, stealing keys, messing with cables, and cuteness coming out our ears. This is a big gallery — 32 photos in two sets.
And now the mimicry has begun – he wants to do everything we do. If Amy cleans something up, he takes a hunk of cloth and wipes things at random. If I drive a toy car up his arm, he returns the favor. And Amy and Paula swear that when Paula said Hi to Miles yesteday, he said Hi right back.
Moved our web and mail server into the colo facility at Cliq tonight — birdhouse now hanging off a lightly shared T1. Enough moving around – it’s been a bumpy few weeks. Should be nestled in for the foreseeable future now.
