R_M Squared

Sunday, October 14, 2001

 
Download a Client

Okay, LiveJournal has a PalmOS client. That's it. I'm sold.

--Robotech_Master 9:43 PM

 
Robotech_Master's LiveJournal

I'm looking at different methods of journal entry now. Blogging is one, and it seems simple enough, and I might just keep doing it...but a friend slipped me an invitation code to get me onto Livejournal, and a bunch of my friends have entries there, so you know, I might just switch. It's easier to switch sooner than later, isn't it?

I may have to put off looking into it for a while, 'til I have more time to spare...but it does seem to have some more support options than blogging does. We'll see.

--Robotech_Master 9:37 PM

 
Ever play the Babelfish telephone game where you translate a phrase into another language and then back to see how it changes? Well, English as She is Spoke is sort of an ancient precursor to that. A Portugese fellow took it upon himself to create an English phrasebook using a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary.

I pity any travellers who attempted to use this phrasebook, don't you?

I think I'm going to go "craunch the marmoset" now...or perhaps "fatten the foot." heh.

--Robotech_Master 8:20 PM

 
End of Homemade Websites (Alertbox Oct. 2001)

This is an interesting little article from useability guru Jakob Nielsen. Though he's talking about turnkey solutions for e-commerce, a lot of what he says might be taken to apply just as easily to blogging. After all, making it possible to blog without knowing much HTML is making this sort of thing easier for a whole lot of people.

--Robotech_Master 7:53 PM

 
Famous last words, about the using Unix thing. I went ahead and did an apt-get dist-upgrade on my Linux box...and I've broken X. Should have left well-enough alone, I guess. I'm good at using Linux, but when it comes down to the more intricate sysadminnish tasks, that's where I fall down a bit.

Looks like I'm stuck in Windows until I can get the local Linux X guru to come out and fix my box. :(

--Robotech_Master 7:12 PM

 
And here I am blogging again. I expect my use of this thing is going to fall into the usual weblog pattern--ten posts in the first couple of days, then five posts in the next week...then one post in the next six months. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I'd just like to note that I'm extremely delighted by how stable Mozilla has gotten in the last few versions. It used to be little more than a curiosity, a monument to a bright idea Netscape had, shortly before Microsoft started bundling and trying to shut 'em down.

It seems like you don't hear much more about Netscape these days, other than that their newest version is going to be a retread of Mozilla, once it finally gets some numbers left of the decimal place. Kind of sad. I still remember my first couple of years here at SMSU, when students were given accounts on this miserable little VM/CMS mainframe for all their Internet use. There were no Windows boxes on campus, just VT100, amber-screen IBM, and WYSE VT100-compatible text terminals. Web browsing? Ha. Unix? Never heard of it. Well, no, that's not entirely correct. There were a Unix box, and some X workstations--but they were specifically for compsci majors, no student use allowed. When do you suppose this was? 1991. 1991. I think we were only about the 3rd or 4th school in the country who still forced their students to use those awful things. (Oddly enough, another one of the schools was the University of Maine, where Gryphon of Undocumented Features fame was schooling--and I helped him get the Rexx IRC client working, as I was using it myself. I later ended up writing some stuff for that universe; odd how these things work out.)

I remember being so amazed and stunned when I came into the lab one day to find most of the terminals replaced by, *gasp*, Windows 95 boxes, running Netscape 1.1--the browser with that giant, breathing "N", before they moved to the much cooler sparkly planet thing. I think I must have spent several hours in the lab that first night, exploring websites I had heretofore only been able to visit using Lynx via telnet. I was in heaven.

Of course, this was back when websites actually had content, not just advertisements (see rant below). :)

Who could have predicted that Microsoft would decide to kill off Netscape's market share by producing a better product and bundling it? (Yes, make no mistake--MSIE 4 & 5 were better than Netscape 4. Or at least, they worked better under Windows. Hardly surprising that Microsoft would know its own OS better than Netscape would...)
Anyway, if quality counts for anything, Mozilla should unseat IE as the best Internet browser. I feel like it deserves to. But who am I kidding? If quality counted for anything in the present-day computing environment, we'd all be using Unix desktops, and liking it. :)

--Robotech_Master 6:24 PM

 
It's been almost an hour since my first post, and I find myself wondering...where is the fame and fortune I've been promised? Where is all the bloggerly adulation? Where is my adoring public?

I suppose I'll give it another hour...

--Robotech_Master 5:43 PM

 

Welcome, One and All!

(And Some Ranting About Internet Advertising)

I figured it was about time I got a blog. After all, all my friends were doing it, or had already done it. The idea appealed to me--a way to make quick entries into a sort of on-line diary or journal, and not have to futz about with HTML editing every page every time I did it. Perhaps this means I will be able to enter some thoughts every day, and keep in the habit of writing things.

I don't know that I really like the term "blog". I know what it's short for--"web log"--but to me it sounds uncomfortably close to the noise one makes when one vomits. "Bloooooog," and the dinner you just ate makes its way into the toilet. But since the system is this convenient, well, I guess they can call it whatever they want. I don't have to use the term myself any more than I want to, after all.

In the "incredible levels of irony" department, I can't say that I'm terribly pleased about having to host the blog on GeoCities, but it's the only site I could find that allows inbound FTP access in this day and age. I really dislike Internet advertising of any kind; I've used Junkbuster for years; now I use the more user-friendly Guidescope to cut down on the Internet advertising to which I am subjected.

It may seem a bit odd, or even contradictory, that I'm using an ad-supported free site at the same time as I'm using (and plugging) a method of avoiding banner ads, but I look at it like this. These sites make their services available for free, to anyone who wishes to connect to them. They don't have any control over how I choose to view them. There isn't a click-through license (though one site has been experimenting with click-through ads) where I have to agree to view the ads in order to view the content. These sites slather ads all over their pages, and make the assumption that viewers will have no choice but to view them. Heck, I recall a NY Times article of a few months back which was notable for the interview it featured with some rather deluded ad agency execs, who seemed to have fooled themselves into believing people liked advertising. Yeah, right. That's why TiVos have commercial-skipping functions.

Even if nobody blocked them, banner ads would not be profitable. They never have been. If they had been profitable, then we wouldn't have seen the sudden explosion of websites shilling for subscribers (most notably Salon Magazine, who can't seem to come out with an issue these days without at least three "subscriber only" features on the front page) and/or donations, and Themestream wouldn't have gone under without paying me the several hundred dollars it owed me. And, of course, this begs the question of whether regular advertising--print, TV, radio--is as effective as people think it is. The advertisers put their ads out there for people to see, but never really know how many people see it. So the ad-men make a guess--which, since their bread and butter is advertising, will naturally be high enough to entice more people into advertising with them. The only reason Internet advertising is any different is that it has an instant feedback mechanism built in--advertisers can discover for themselves that the number of people who click through is abysmally low.

And in so doing, they start to get desperate. Bigger ads, more annoying ads, ads that pop up behind your browser window, ads that pop up and then move until they are behind your browser window...what next? The porn-and-warez site trick of popping up ad windows that pop up more windows until you either disable javascript or kill your browser processes altogether? There's even talk of a so-called "ad-blocker blocker", as if the relatively few consumers who even realize they can block ads pose a great-enough threat to almighty commercialism that even they must be subjected to it.

(Although despite what that article seems to think, this technology is hardly a new idea--Mind's Eye Fiction has had anti-ad-blocking in place for years in part of its website--the part that allows you to read a story for free instead of buying it. I actually approve of its use here, because the advertising section is "opt-in" instead of "opt-out"--you have to choose, consciously, to view the ads in order to read the story.)

Hm. I didn't mean for the first entry in my blog to turn into a rant. But hey, it's a good rant, and I stand behind it. (Hey, weren't blog entries supposed to be short? :)

--Robotech_Master 4:47 PM