{ 2000.12.23 } I wanted to do all kinds of nifty things with png (funky loss-less graphics format that's replacing gif) but browser support is abysmal. The W3C png page links to places to test your own browser (scroll down). Quick summary: Your png viewing is broken unless you have MSIE5/Mac or a late Mozilla build. Bugger.
{ } Wow, c-ya.com specialise in Relationship Closure cards (now there's a great euphemism), but sadly their 'site is down. Still got the Google cache of c-ya though. I wonder if I can think of anything that isn't somewhere on the www? Apart from up-to-date, accurate information I mean. Obviously.
{ } More e-cards for breaking up. Some wonderfully harsh messages.
{ 12.22 } Did you know that KPMG has a theme song [cheers Flat James]? I'm not taking the piss, this is the real thing. Fucking hell though, how did they come up with those lyrics? "K - P - M - G, We're as strong as can be".
{ } Hey remember months ago, when I mentioned my mate Andrew McCargow has appeared on some packaging and in so doing short-circuited the system, criss-crossed the wires of the consumer hierarchy? Yeah? Well, I finally got the photo developed.
{ } As long as you're going to pay people to do stupid things [via the wetlog], I suppose you may as well put pictures and full video of the event on screen. But I'm not sure which is wronger: getting girls to rodeo naked, or poking people hanging on a highbar with a cattleprod. And it's not like you're guaranteed cash, it's a competition. And people beg to do dares, because they need the cash for education, or holidays or something. Fucking hell.
{ } Good grief. Send free electronic greetings cards to your ex.
{ 12.21 } Roll up, roll up for your fresh Upsideclown.
I left my advent calendar on the windowsill. The sun came out. Now a piece of chocolate that used to look like Santa is seeping from Homer Simpson's left eye.
Jamie isn't exactly in the festive spirit: fuck xmas.
Talking of which... Upsideclown will be running as normal over the festive season, which means you can pick up fresh clown both on Christmas and New Year's Day. Bloody hell, aren't we working hard?
{ 12.20 } The Shoreditch Workers' Club brings together the New Media Proletariat of affluent East London to network and drink. Concerningly, I think I might be outside the catchment area. Nice pseudo communist design, but really. "dot.Comrades" indeed.
{ } Ted Nelson summarises the aims of Project Xanadu, and where it goes from here, in a recent (late 1999) article Xanalogical Media: Needed Now More Than Ever. A point raised is the important of linking to content rather than documents and how to do this; interestingly it's something the W3C are tackling with xml linking. It seems that TBL's vision of the semantic web brings us closer to Xanadu.
{ } Information Management: A Proposal, March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for what would become the www.
{ } The Electronic Labyrinth is a guide to hypertext technology, written in hypertext. Each section is short, digestible, and crosslinked.
{ } Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and initiated Project Xanadu [Xanadu homepage], a hypertext system with version control and transpublishing that the www is nothing like. I can't believe I've not mentioned Xanadu on this homepage before, but now is not the time.
Ted Nelson came to hypertext through his own world view; Xanadu is a product of a certain way of seeing the universe rather than an application to fulfil a requirements document (although I won't deny that Tim Berners-Lee has vision, the World Wide Web is a solution to a problem which is iteratively solving the problem better with each revision). Nelson is an interesting character from this perspective, especially as my own world view resonates strongly with the network/interconnectedness metaphor.
dmoz has further Ted Nelson links.
{ 12.19 } Hey, if you were a server and you'd been hit 7598 times in 23 hours by a single machine and you were trying to serve a dynamically generated page with every hit, well you'd have been running pretty slow recently too. But Interconnected should be up to full speed again now.
{ } Ooh, yes, very useful. Filtering Mail FAQ [via prolific].
{ 12.18 } There are so many ways to choose colours, for packaging or websites or whatever. The Red Queen Color Theory covers a few [via eatonweb].
Previous to designing (this revision of) this 'site, I'd been locked into the idea of colour "chords" (as I called them) or triads for a long time; it was quite constraining, but I couldn't think of any other ways to choose. Simply put, it's two similar colours and a constrasting one which "work" together. Once I had the idea in my head I couldn't shift it. When it came to redesigning this page, everyone was using blue, orange and grey and I wanted to move away from that. I started with obnoxious colours, brown and red mainly, and worked from there. It's much more of a challenge to take horrible colours and make something that looks okay. I think it kinda worked (many people really hate the scheme, but that's a good thing. I don't want to please everyone), but I've still not managed to completely escape the triad concept.
{ } A link from a few days ago broke over the weekend -- but there's a mirror of the Apache, php4 and MySQL packages for Mac OS X. The installation of these is covered pretty well on a thread on the MacNN forums. (btw, these packages work a treat too.)
{ } Monday is a new week and a new Upsideclown.
We all feel low sometimes. That's why God gave us two arms - to hold each other up. My father told me that. It was, I found, a most inspiring lesson.
Oh, no. He is no longer with us. Going down, by the way? Excellent.
Today Dan is descending to The Loa Depths.
