it's a very odd sensation being here alone on the most anticipated new year's eve of my lifetime. not that it wasn't by choice, but i didn't realize how odd it would feel. being alone with my thoughts is forcing me to reflect on the past year and if you keep reading you'll have to suffer it.

i started this year by staying at a job i hated because i thought the holy grail of the net slave, stock options, was really important. i learned my lesson there. it did, however, give me the opportunity to surf the web 6 or 8 hours a day. i found jason's osil8 which led me to peter and then to cam. cam had just written anatomy of a weblog. this combined with the inspiration of lance's redefining possible article caused me to build a site, start a journal, and begin keeping a weblog. at the time i thought none of those things were a big deal.

the site is still no big deal, but it's most definitely mine now, whereas it was my husband's before. and i wouldn't give it back for the world.

the journal was a little too expressive and caused my departure from the job i hated, luckily right after the magical stock had vested. at which time i learned that i could have made more contracting.

the weblog has shaped my life. it's allowed me to explore my creative side, my writing. it's introduced me to a wide range of friends (most of whom i've never met, but you knew that), and provided me with an outlet which has kept me sane. i've watched a community grow, and fall apart, and re-combine in a different way. hopefully, my contribution has been mostly positive in those respects.

this is the point where i would start listing all those people who've meant something to me this year, but i would hate to leave someone out. i think most of you know who you are, but if not, look at it this way: if you've sent me an email this year, and i've replied, then you're probably on my list. 09:38 pm

it's 9pm here in california, and i just listened to the ball drop in times square. i think netscape4.7 has a y2k bug, it's not letting me type properly. i have to hit a key 3 or 4 times before it registers. so now i'm using ie which works fine. wierd. 09:13 pm

both dan and john have written end of year reflections. 08:33 pm

i can always tell when i've been too busy at work, i go somewhere familiar and get shocked by the change. the familiar this time was genehack. not only has he gotten his own domain name but the design has also changed to very soothing shades of green. and, of course, i haven't read any blogs in several days so there was lots to catch up on. 08:26 pm

this article does a great job of explaining why .com success can't be measured in page views, but doesn't really say how that success will be measured. except for vague mentions of profiling. via tomalak. 06:36 pm

does this mean that i can sue for all those times i ordered something that didn't get shipped immediately?? 06:26 pm

i finally got around to adding all those blogs that were cued up in the list. so if you've been waiting, it should now be there. also, when they changed servers on me, they removed my cgi access so now i can't run any scripts, which means if you want a blog added, you'll have to email me directly. 06:14 pm

movie mistakes. 06:12 pm

it's fixed, but they forgot to mention that my ftp info had changed so i couldn't update the site. i love it when isp's do shit without mentioning it to you. 11:39 am

so i come in this morning and i've got about fifteen emails in my inbox (thank you everyone who sent one). ooh, i say, this is exciting. then i read them all. every single one is a bug report telling me my weblog or portal is coming up text. so i panic start troubleshooting and discover that the ssi's are no longer being parsed. i then call my isp and finally someone walking by picks up the phone. of course he can't help me, but he'll get it to someone who can. about ten minutes later the ssi's are getting parsed, but it's still coming up as text instead of html. i then get a phone call saying they've fixed it, and i have to laboriously explain that it's still not working. but it's working in ie, they say. last night when they moved it over to the new server no one told them i was using ssi's. of course, this guy doesn't know enough about apache to be able to figure out why it's ok in ie but not netscape. so now i'm waiting for someone to fix that. 11:24 am

this article on registration led me to enonymous which seems like a really good idea, but i'm dubious about the execution. 05:25 pm

the latest RCFoC looks at the past and the future of technology. it also mentions the new mediafusion patent which will send data over the magnetic fields generated by power lines. 04:13 pm

hmmm. it appears that convergence is finally happening, at least on the tv front. it's very hard to imagine, but the number of viewers says it's working. 03:53 pm

What High-Tech Worker Shortage? basically the same thing people have been saying for the last year, but still an interesting read. 03:47 pm

i am, however, discovering the beauties of alcohol to get me through these torturous social weekends. it's much easier to handle crowds of strange people when you're drunk. my quote of the weekend "those computers and the internet are going to destroy the world, they're taking over and everyone's going to regret it". 10:19 am

<whinge>if anyone knows of a way to get out of traveling to see parents/in-laws for christmas, i would love to hear it. i am so sick of this yearly ritual. i'd just like to stay home for once. my three hour trip to oregon turned into a 17 hour ordeal which i never want to repeat again. thanksgiving was just as bad, a 3 hour drive to sacramento became a 6 hour drive in stop and go traffic. the only excuse i can come up with is inviting everyone to my house, but then i'd have to cook...</whinge> 10:14 am

tim's user interface guidelines, a very useful reminder of what we should be doing. thanks peter. 04:18 pm

i finally saw the matrix last night, and while i regret the loss of sleep, i think it was well worth staying up late for. i hate it when i see movies months or years later and realize i should have gone to see it in the theatre. 03:21 pm

the moon definitely looked brighter last night, but i couldn't tell any difference in size. gee, what a surprise. 02:25 pm

jeffery veen's solution to browsers all sucking. it would be nice, but i'm too cynical to believe that it'll happen. via tomalak. 02:19 pm

a hilarious review of the '70's star wars holiday special. 01:35 pm

one .eu domain name for the whole of europe? it might just work. but can it ever compete with .com? 02:14 pm

don't forget that the full moon tonight will be bigger and brighter than usual. only practised astronomers will be able to detect the difference, however. i take that as a personal challenge. 02:11 pm

i've been seriously lax about posting new blogs to the portal. i'm going to try to wade through them all before i leave for oregon thursday. speaking of oregon, i'm beginning to think putting blue streaks in my hair before going up there was a mistake. now i'm going to have to deal with all the shocked looks and questions from the in-laws. i guess i'll just have to pack only black clothes. eager to incite trouble? who me? 01:58 pm

ah, the joy of meetings. meeting from 9-12:30, meeting from 2:15-3:00, meeting from 3-3:30, meeting from 3:30-whenever. i sit at my desk and don't know what to do other than wait for the next meeting. sigh. i hope it lets up soon. 01:29 pm

i had a brief conversation with my boss about where i fit into the company as it currently is and where i'll fit into it in the future. it was really easy back when there were only 6 of us. i just did everything that no one else could do. now i have to make a decision. do i focus on design and planning or do i focus on coding? i know that i couldn't deal with implementing someone else's designs, so i guess coding is going to be falling on the wayside. where that leaves me position wise is a big question tho. 07:13 pm

i've been in meetings all day 7 straight hours of meetings. i'm burned out again. and my boss was kind enough to remind me that my deadline is only 3 weeks away. the deadline that is very dependent upon the decisions made in all these meetings. sigh. 07:10 pm

john has a very interesting interview with don norman. finally someone who is not afraid to say that usability is secondary. 07:08 pm

the result of my having too little coffee and not enough intelligence. 11:46 am

oh no! desmond llewelyn better known as Q died in a car crash yesterday. i'm sad now. thanks scott. 07:34 pm

i've been in meetings all day. which is my pathetic way of saying excuse the lack of links and the lack of originality. 07:05 pm

a really interesting article about competent people. competent people according to the author are very resistent to change, whereas incompetent people are constantly moving on to a new interesting thing. it certainly describes the silicon valley startup world. thanks cam. 07:03 pm

brad's christmas tribute and probably the only holiday link i will put up. bah humbug. 11:16 pm

The Geeks Next Door??? thanks john. 06:04 pm

why would you want to do this? 05:43 pm

unimobile seems like a good idea. trouble is, i can't get a connection, it uses windows text colors but not background colors so i can't read the text, and it really looks f***ed up on my laptop which is set to 72dpi. maybe next version... via tbtf. 02:44 pm

i'm really liking blogger as a tool. i'm still adjusting to the "your not in emacs" notion, but the convenience of not doing the copy and paste thing is pretty high. also, it doesn't matter which machine i'm surfing on, i can click on the bookmarlet and add it to my blog. 12:33 pm

last night i started reading Hardball for Women. i got about half way through it, but i can already say that this should be required reading for any woman working in the business world. here's what i've learned. 12:07 pm

if it wasn't for the $3500 price tag, i'd want one of these Dyson autonomous vacuum cleaners. found in wired. 07:08 pm

i'm curious about how other companies handle comp time. every other company i've been at has always given comp time (extra vacation days) for serious overtime worked. is this unusual?

SimplyModern.com has some cool products that are "right-brain style with left-brain sensibility". 06:35 pm

ken over at factovision is ranting about the slew of popularity contests that have sprung up in the last few months. he's right it does set up an element of competition that never used to be there. i hadn't really thought about how much that effected the bloggin' community. hmmm. 04:16 pm

is silicon valley slowly killing itself? 03:50 pm

JustBalls.com is one of those things where you stop and say "how did they think of that?" Then you wonder *why* did they think of that? 02:07 pm

i really like the new blogger interface. there's a certain elegance and ease of use that makes me itch to utilize what they've done. i'm using the blogger generated file as a server-side include, so it doesn't affect the rest of the page. unfortunately, this causes problems with the archive index, since the index points to the include file. at worst i have to copy a template and add a link each month, which is much less than i'm doing right now. 10:35 pm

i'm going to be trying out blogger as an alternative tool. mostly for ease of updates and archiving. we'll see how it goes. 10:29 pm