having never gotten into work so early before, i've discovered that surfing is kind of pointless. everyone else is too busy sleeping to actually update this early. 09:12 am

today is our first day babysitting my nephew. i'm not looking forward to the "awake" times. 08:57 am

ugh. now i remember why i tryed (and succeeded) to forget this ie specific "feature". page transitions. at least i know how the fade thingy is done. sigh. i have a lot of catching up to do. thanks fraser. 08:08 am

since i started using ie today, i've noticed that there's a lot of new fangled thingies that i never see and therefore had no idea i should probably be learning them. some things i knew about and purposefully ignored, like the ultra-important colored scroll bar, but after visiting blogjam, i'm curious about what other effects i'm oblivious to. btw, how do you do that fade thing? 05:01 pm

there's nothing more frustrating than a programmer who won't learn html and has to ask me how to do something every 15 minutes. maybe jason thinks it's beneath him. sigh. 03:12 pm

who are these people anyway?

"People tend to think that [virtual worlds] alter how people perceive one another. That gender and race and handicaps cease to matter. It is a noble vision, sure... In truth [they] reveal the self in rather disturbing ways. We all construct 'faces' and masks to deal with others. Usually in [real life] interpersonal relationships, the masks can slip, they evolve and react, and they have body language and cues. [In a virtual world], on the Net, whatever--they cannot. And people see specifically this: what you choose to represent yourself as, and that is more revealing of your true nature than gender, race, age, or anything else... it's not a matter of how we hide, it's a matter of how we are revealing ourselves. "

01:42 pm

the gaming section of ralph koster's site contains lots of good stuff. his essay, a story about a tree describes what i've been feeling about the people i play diablo with. it also describes other "virtual" connections pretty accurately. via nadav. 01:34 pm

more and more i'm feeling forced into using ie5. now the google toolbar is luring me in. via nadav. 01:26 pm

somehow i managed to miss the1000journalproject. via xblog. 01:12 pm

uh oh. it's the beginning of the end. now even A List Apart is removing their ns4 workarounds. i don't want to change browsers dammit! 12:05 pm

just in case you needed a refresher, zeldman revisits the whole css font size thingy. 01:02 pm

builder.com has put up some sample Contracts for freelancers. via building the web. 11:40 am

david was nice enough to send more addictive time wasting gems. Bejeweled. 05:45 pm

since i'm looking at them and will probably want to find this again later. WAI Guidelines talk about allowing users to stop motion. i wonder if compliance will get rid of obnoxious banner ads.

"People with photosensitive epilepsy can have seizures triggered by flickering or flashing in the 4 to 59 flashes per second (Hertz) range with a peak sensitivity at 20 flashes per second."

steve's written an article on Modifying Styles with javascript. it's probably quite good, knowing steve, but i'm much too lazy to read it right now. especially since i still can't get ns6 working on my win2k box. if anyone has figured out a way to get it to work, please let me know. 02:48 pm

a couple of things from acia. Lessons Learned from the Dot.Com Crash: A Passenger's Story and salaries and benefits for information architects. 01:16 pm

damn you taylor, i mean eric. damn you! 05:03 pm

i think i'm depressed. i don't have the energy for anything. no energy to update the weblog. no energy to re-assemble my bookmarks since happynetbox deleted them all. no energy to keep up-to-date on web design related research and learning. no energy to read other weblogs. it bothers me because i'm not sure where it's originating from. concerns over lack of money? concerns over lack of work? home buying/selling stress? winter doldrums? dot-com death doldrums? loneliness? maybe it's just burnout. hard to believe, but in two weeks this weblog will be 2 years old. hard to believe, but i've been working the web for 5 years. i have a feeling it's time for a re-evaluation of life. i hate being depressed. 03:00 pm

oh yeah, since there's such a backlog, if you submitted a weblog ages ago and it's not up yet and for some reason it's really important that it gets listed, email me. 12:52 pm

thank you neale. i've spent the entire morning validating weblogs. yes, there is a huge backlog still, so if anyone wants to validate a 100 or so weblogs, please, let me know. anyway, all the links that caught my eye were getting me more and more depressed. the same things that always get me depressed, popularity contests, articles which are the equivalent of popularity contests because the authors always hold up examples of the "popular" weblogs, etc. while looking at aaron's weblog theory page, i came across neale's weblogs [good god y'all] article. it's what i would have written if i cared enough anymore to write that sort of thing. 12:36 pm

torturous, but it forced me to waste 1/2 an hour trying to solve it. theseus and the minotaur. 06:33 pm

i also didn't know that palm was insane enough to expect people to pay for an os upgrade. thankfully, 3.3 is free. 05:46 pm

i had no idea that Palm desktop 4.0 was out or even that os 3.5 existed. 05:12 pm

POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy. personally, i think the genochoice web site is the better fiction. 04:43 pm

another site to add to the free font list. True Type Resource 03:58 pm

PoPoRon and bitemymonkey. amusement brought to you by lance since it's too much effort to find my own content. 03:43 pm

matt has put together a tutorial on how to manage your site with Blogger, PHP, and XML. 10:44 am

while there's not a lot of content yet, apple has put together an internet developer site. could be a useful resource. thanks dylan. 11:26 am

in the process of making our house showable, we had to clean the doggie door from the bedroom into the garage. however, cleaning the door meant removing the likeness of jesus that had grown from the dirt on the door. i'm still not sure it was a good idea, i mean, we could have charged admission to the thousands of pilgrims. 04:14 pm

sometimes i wonder whether intuition actually exists or whether it's all dumb luck. yesterday, my dad called us with two houses that we should look at. i looked at the listing and called my dad back saying we had to go look at it that afternoon. the listing agent happened to be there when we went by, he mentioned that he was countering an offer that afternoon, we made a fast decision, wrote up an offer and by 7pm we had a new house. 04:01 pm

since they won't be offering truetype font downloads after mid-jan, tucows is letting you download all their fonts. all 2200 of them. 03:46 pm

considering the lack of content around here, you may want to head over to somewhere else like Plastic. 12:49 pm

i always wondered if it was true that mobile phones interfere with the flight systems on planes. apparently, they do. 12:21 pm

the lack of posts is due to manic attempts to get our house ready for sale. and equally hectic, searching for a house to buy. meanwhile, everything else is being neglected. 11:20 am

Am I Immortal? Find Out Now... is a weblog devoted to testing alex chiu's immortality rings. one of the oddest topics i've seen lately. via michal. 11:18 am

i think IT is getting out of hand. there's now a website devoted to finding the answers. theITquestion.com - What is 'IT'? i guess the tech world needed something to be excited about. 02:33 pm

in the spirit of asking for money for services, lance has gotten greedy. just think of everything that lance has done for you over the years... 01:29 pm

guesses on what IT is. 01:24 pm

Invasion of the Usability Experts. i read this quote taken from one of jakob's alertboxes last year, "Web content is intellectually bankrupt and almost never designed to comply with the way users behave online" and couldn't help but wonder how many content sites are still using the multi-page split article format, merely because jakob said back in 1994 that users don't scroll. 06:02 pm

i was just thinking today that i really should do this url mapping thingy and was wondering where i'd found the article on it. of course, i probably posted it before and forgot which means that unless i do it soon i'll forget where it is again. i don't think that sentence made any sense. 04:26 pm

i had no idea that there was an official U.S. time. via media nugget. 04:08 pm

hmm. no one knows what IT is, but investors expect that within five years the inventor, dean kamen, will be worth more than bill gates. whatever this product is, it's supposed to "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide." too bad we won't know what it is until 2002. 04:03 pm

because of south park, one line of the dreidel song occasionally pops into my head and plays itself on infinite loop. i have always wondered what the rest of the words were. 03:52 pm

seen on elan's random quote:

"Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance."
     - Jon Franklin

MIT-IDEO Wearables project. via webword. 03:36 pm

A digital living room throne. scary. via webword. 03:16 pm

Interview with jeffrey veen about his new book. 03:10 pm

The Completely Uncensored Unbelievably True Ren & Stimpy Story! back in 91 (?) i went with my friend jon when he interviewed Chris Reccardi about his work on ren and stimpy. i'd forgotten about that until now. via lilly. 08:01 pm

Personalized action figures, as in, send them a picture and you'll get an action figure with your face. scary. via andrea, who started a weblog without telling me. 07:09 pm

more on micropayments. A Penny for Your Thoughts? - Charging a little on the Internet is even harder than charging a lot. by Nathan Myhrvold. this one is from way back in early 97. maybe people should have listened to it then. via derek. 06:51 pm

i had no idea that the price of stamps went up yesterday. thanks to jason, all these bills sitting on my desk waiting to be mailed won't be returned for lack of postage. 06:40 pm

ea is releasing a new game called majestic in a couple of months. if it's anything like all the articles and press claims, it'll be a really interesting game. i'm certainly intrigued. 06:31 pm

mini 7 is now available as a truetype font with lots of different versions. via zeldman. 06:27 pm

it seems that lots of people redesigned in the last month or so. sigh. i feel so out of touch. matt mentioned jazz late last month, and reminded me that we went to the blue note last week and saw jane monheit. she's an incredible singer who's being compared to diana krall. 06:26 pm

He's Dead, Jim. 05:14 pm

peter talks about paying for content and thankfully links to ev's pricing matters essay. (another thing i missed.) ev points out a common habit where people point to one failure and completely dismiss a concept because of a single instance. peter also links to clay shirky's the case against micropayments. an article that i find myself whole-heartedly agreeing with. 04:27 pm

another thing i missed while on vacation. lance launched The Dead Letter Office. mine's in there, but i don't think i want to link to it. 04:02 pm

in other catching up news, dylan sent me this wired article on the diablo2 hack, of which i was completely oblivious having been unable to play for the last 3 weeks. of course, the first thing i noticed was that the long awaited 1.04 patch was released the day we left. figures. according to this cnet article, they're going to resurrect all the characters. 06:10 pm

sometimes the web gives me the creeps. bryan emails me about getting his weblog listed (he'd found a bug... er, i mean a feature) and mentions that our design styles are similar. so i go to check out his site and see his dog. not only do we have similar design styles, we also have similar taste in dogs. australian cattle dogs. weird. 05:32 pm

the other trouble with returning from a long vacation is catching up with everything that happened whilst you were gone. adam launched organizine. he gives a good description of it too.

ev made a plea for donations to the blogger server fund and received quite a bit of publicity and, of course, a lot of flak. if you are one of those people who doesn't feel good about contributing, you can always buy merchandise. and yes, i did donate and i even donated more than $5, so there.

along the same theme, ben has promised a beta for happynetbox, which, like many have suggested to pyra, will be a pay-per-month service. 05:02 pm

gotta love the web. while looking at the Rocky site, i discovered that richard o'brien had done a "sequel" entitled shock treatment. so of course, having rocky on the brain, i had to order the 25th anniversary edition dvd of rocky and the shock treatment video. 04:40 pm

the really bad thing about getting back from vacation, is the sense of the real world settling heavily back on your shoulders. too many things to worry about and do. things that i've managed to put completely out of my mind for the last two weeks. so, before my memories are totally obliterated by real life, i need to write down some of what we did.

new year's eve was bad, we had fun, but the people who put it on should be shot. they opened the doors 45 min. late. we waited outside (snow. very cold.) in the will call line for another hour after that because they only had one credit card machine and they hadn't run the cards yet. the count down started while we were standing in the coat check line without a drink. by the time we got upstairs, the last of the four bands was playing. we had missed the first three. the open bar ran out of alcohol at around 2am. they turned the lights on at 3am and turned the music off at 3:30am. even tho they were supposed to be open til 4. then, to top it all off, the coat check racks all fell down and there was a free-for-all mob scene where people scrambled around trying to find their coats. luckily, none of ours were stolen, although someone was thinking about leaving with my tahari jacket. ugh. don't ever go to something put on by groovejet.

wednesday, we saw miss saigon. it was good, but not as exceptional as people claimed. later we saw the rocky horrow show. it was a lot of fun, although more so for those of us who'd seen the movie than kirsty and karin who hadn't. the trouble i had was the feeling of watching and listening to a poor remake. i've got associations in my mind of how the characters should be and how the songs should sound and how the timewarp is done. the live show just didn't live up to them. joan jett just couldn't replace little nell as columbia. it didn't work for me. tom hewitt did an admiral job of stepping into tim curry's shoes, but still, it couldn't compare. 04:21 pm