Posted on by lhl

also on peterme, peter talks about the interface culture panel and also mentions scott mccloud (author of the awesome understanding comics). the latter made me think back to the animation, comics and film: narrative on the web panel at sxsw that taylor moderated, and which unfortunately sucked all kinds of ass. a very rich topic that had tons of potential instead became a stupid clipshow. wtf? in fact, i don’t even think there was a single discussion on the panel about narrative on the web. nothing about how interaction plays a part, or the shift from low to high bandwidth, or about the uniqueness of the computer-based screen medium, about experimentations with narrative, the combination of audio and visual data, how hypertext and dynamic data changes and effects how narrative needs to be considered, nada.

now, on the other hand, i thoroughly enjoyed the interface culture panel, as matt predicted, it was (for me at least, i overheard some people hating it) the best panel of the conference. tons of issues discussed, the most interesting being about creating webs of trust (an interest of mine for the past half-year or so). an issue for me was trust of the trust broker. it occurred to me that unfortunately, for most sites, you aren’t given the algorithms or exact composition of your web of trust. sort of also related to the profile that’s built about you by a company like amazon, which may or may not even be accurate. two thoughts occurred to me: when i doctor gives me any kind of exam or care, the medical data is mine, why then, for profiles that are accumulated on me that can be even more personal, is that information owned by the company? and 2) if i were to accumulate all this data and were able to keep it with me, how would i store it? ideally, i’d like to see some sort of transparency, ie at least if they collect all this data, i should be able to see it. perhaps, it might be possible for a personal profile to be formed that would reside at a trusted source. this is leading back, perhaps to a /. post that i mentioned earlier…

Posted on by lhl

hmm, i recently set up a search for my site w/ atomz.com. it seems to work pretty well. the only problems for me is figuring out somewhere to put it. i have it on my archive page right now, but it doesn’t look right anywhere i tried to place it on my front page. here’s the actual search box that i style. i’m not sure if looks right up on top (this link only works w/ ie4+).

right now i’m considering either putting it up there and letting it be hidden, or just making it a dhtml popup from the top bar. i really want to keep the simplicity of the design. it’s getting a bit crowded as is.

Posted on by lhl

<rant>who is anyone to tell me what i can or can’t do on the web? i don’t think that ben made a good point at all when he basically said: if you aren’t publishing in my format (as opposed to any other) then you shouldn’t be doing anything in the at all. those were prett much his exact words at the sxsw roundtable discussion and i will tell you that rarely have i ever been so disgusted.

so, maybe his comments were good for some, but what he advocated was no better than what he decried. (oh yeah, this is the kind of self referential stuff that steve was complaining about, also at the same sxsw panel).</rant>

now that i got that out of my system, some more thoughts: it has occurred to me that while some people are longing for these big monolithic projects that used to be all the rage, what they are wishing for really isn’t what the medium of the web is most conducive to. when artists, creative people, started getting on the web, by and large they were coming from a screen medium – cd-rom projects. as time goes on, the web has acquired it’s own voice, which includes big experimental stuff like erik loyer’s marrow monkey, long tracts in word or the fray, but also communally moderated forums like slashdot, and other network-based (the natural mode of the web) models (amazon.com, epinions.com, etc.). weblogs seem to fall in between those two areas, having the important aspects of content (personal voice), and also functioning as a means of collaborative filtering.

now may also be a good time to mention some of my reservations of weblogging as a phenomenom, especially in the sort of celebrity / weird cliquishness it seems to engender. i can’t quite put words on it right now, and i really do think that any sort of self publishing on the web, whether it be the now passé homepage, journals/weblogs (it has a new name now, but people have been doing it since the web was put up)

, but i’m sure that something will come up eventually. anyway, my brain is still fried and i have a crapload of work to do, so off i go.

Posted on by lhl

the inderma looks neat. web browsing through mozilla, 100mb ethernet, hdtv output, game support, and mp3/vob support to boot. hopefully these guys will be able to market it correctly. (and if in addition it did tivo stuff / dvd playback, it could kick major ass)

Posted on by lhl

how sweet it … wasn’t. spent about 4 hours walking around, looking for ppl, and chillin w/ some friends. things started to pick up around 2am, where i met a bunch of old faces. dissapointed w/ how much wandering was happening vs.musical enjoyment, but i was able to catch: junior sanchez, dj hype, dj dan, doc marten, derek carter, sniper, and a bit of mark farina (plus hearing thee-o scratch was awesome).

Posted on by lhl

ok, i lied, i still am slacking. i did overcome my laziness and actually post a little version of a photo of the tornado weather. i color corrected it to get it a bit closer to how it looked, but trust me when i say it was amazing. texas is a weird place. austin is particularly weird. it’s a city w/ less of a downtown than la and is oddly suburban. when i came down to texas i was expecting it to be a lot more … deserty, but instead it really reminds me of being back in the northeast.


Posted on by lhl

hmm, looks like blogger is back online. i stopped by rc3, it mentioned a funny w2k / ie 5.0 bug – if you install it, you are fscked and can’t login. also while blogger was down, i took a go through of the demo/tour they offer. sounds like they have some good features they’re working on. wonder how hard spell checking would be w/o going down the road of microsoft (activex control for the office spellcheck engine would probably be the easiest way, but that’s evil).

looks like their gonna be burning the iridium satellites. lots of talk about it on /. – wish i heard some of the analysis before i bought iridium stock.

i’m looking seriously into getting a stowaway keyboard for my visor/palm. need to figure out which to get it for though (it’s out right now for the palm, but not for the visor until april. i’m carrying around my visor right now even though it’s bigger, primarily for the extra memory it has). it’s been months since i last stopped by the pda sites, so i’m making my rounds right now instead of doing work: visorcentral, the gadgeteer, pdadash, and palmstation. looks like there are some neat modules coming out for the visor soon.

i’m learning some interesting things about the visor’s cradle connectors…

i’d post some photos right now, but honestly, i’m just too lazy to ftp the stuff (need to bounce through one of my other servers because of funky port blocking by the fgsquared firewall. it’s really neat being on a multimonitor workstation though.

ok, now i’m gonna finish my nth reread of dune and program for the rest of the day (i mean it this time!)