The conclusion of Adam week: Filler Friday: A Team Effort
12/29/2000 11:30:02 AM | +
You have to figure now that I've got Netscape 3 and Lynx support launch probably isn't that far off.
12/28/2000 09:35:10 PM | +
Über day four: Fart.jpg - new and improved.
12/28/2000 10:11:06 AM | +
The Standards Process: Money Talks, Bullshit Walks -
"The problem with XML standards is that they're all created by intellectuals who are typically holier-than-thou, and completely out of touch with the general developer population. They create complex specifications that are obviously the product of academia and are not geared toward conservation of time, money, or brain power."
12/27/2000 07:25:12 PM | +
Day three: The Problem With Videogames
12/27/2000 12:11:56 PM | +
Day two: Pajama Pants
12/26/2000 10:45:50 AM | +
Adam week at Über begins with a whimper, not a bang.
12/25/2000 02:25:33 AM | +
Next week is adammathes week at Über. No, seriously, I'm going to write. Like, every day. Quantity over quality. 12/24/2000 11:38:40 PM | +
webware is CNet's new (or at least new to me) directory of web applications.
12/24/2000 11:37:27 PM | +
Filler Friday: Adam Is On Vacation -
"We deserve the vacation. To punish Adam, this piece will be deliberately bad."
12/22/2000 03:40:24 PM | +
ZDNet: News: Netdocs: Microsoft's .Net poster child?
"According to sources, Netdocs is a single, integrated application that will include a full suite of functions, including e-mail, personal information management, document-authoring tools, digital-media management, and instant messaging. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) will make Netdocs available only as a hosted service over the Internet, not as a shrink-wrapped application or software that's preloaded on the PC.
Netdocs will feature a new user interface that looks nothing like Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer. Instead, Netdocs will deliver an integrated workspace based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), where all of its application modules are available simultaneously. This interface is based on .Net technology that Microsoft, in the past, has referred as 'Universal Canvas.'"
Sounds a bit like Groove. To me, the most interesting aspect to this is that even Microsoft is realizing that traditional desktop applications like Office aren't effectively solving the problems that information workers have today. Which makes sense, since Office and the like were designed in and for, and I'm being serious here, a completely different computing era. Document creation and management in the interconnected world of the web isn't the same as document creation and management for the laser-printer 80's and 90's. I'd argue that what you want your Personal Information Management tool to do is probably vastly different as well. Personal Information Management isn't just about keeping your phone numbers and appointments, it's about dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available now, and making the important things easily accessible.
As for providing serious software as a serivce, I'm still skeptical as to whether or not people will accept it.
12/22/2000 03:29:28 PM | +
I'm a slacker. But yes, finally, it's that special time again, time for:
The Quarter in Review
I usually try to say something funny here, but fuck it. I'm on vacation.
CS145 - Introduction to Databases
EE182 - Computer Hardware Organization and Design
- Software, I do software. Not hardware. Software.
- Before this class, I thought of my computer as a happy, magical box that I programmed on. After this class, I think of my computer as a very, very complicated angry box that I do not want to fuck with. Ever.
- At some point, as I was coding a MIPS simulator in assembly language with SPIM, my MIPS simulator, I began to worry about my sanity.
- I should never be allowed to design processors.
- It's astounding the sorts of advancements the hardware engineers have made in the past 50 years. It's particuarly astounding in comparison to the advancements of software engineers.
- I don't do hardware. Software only. No hardware. Hardware makes no sense to me. That's why I do software.
Latin 1 - Introduction to Latin
- Why the hell am I taking Latin?
- No, seriously, how the hell did I end up in an intro Latin class filled with History and Classics majors?
- Actually, it's awesome.
Wow, this Quarter in Review really sucks. This quarter really sucked. I think I took another class too. Oh, whatever. I'm on vacation.
12/21/2000 12:17:22 AM | +
Forthcoming on trenchant.org, your favorite site for poor design sense, useless links, and mind numbingly boring lists -
- blueblog's most famous (and only) regular feature - the quarter in review, where i needlessly rag on classes, make inside jokes that no one but me and the people in the class could possibly get, and generally bore the "audience"
- discussion of why running batch scp jobs from perl scripts is like, hard, and stuff
- a new fun-filled wacky mad-capped adventure-packed texty text
Currently on trenchant.org, your favorite site for poor design sense, useless links, mind numbingly boring lists, and redundancy -
- nothing, i'm traveling back to chicago for winter break
Also, I was totally lying about the texty text.
12/14/2000 01:05:48 AM | +
Finals are all done, so now it's time to tackle the items on my to do list for winter break:
- launch organizine
- watch the 6 tape set of every Thundercats episode Craig purchased in some stupid auction
- Read Heinlein's Friday to see if Dark Angel really is just a ripoff
- launch organizine
- read Gene Wolfe's Exodus from the Long Sun
- take lots of baths
- launch organizine
- launch organizine
- play Shenmue
- launch organizine
- register for sxsw
- start my last summer "job" "search"
- shave my beard off
- launch organizine
12/13/2000 02:14:00 PM | +
OC - Mystery Videogame Theater 3000 - Episode #24: Best 50 FANTASIA
"The therapeutic value of playing Japanese 90's era pornerific attempts at borrowed gameplay combined with in-arcade, quarter-munching female objectification CANNOT be overstated. No way, No how."
12/12/2000 10:42:51 PM | +
Blah blah metadata organizine will support blah blah blah, you don't care anyway.
My finals made me weep today.
12/11/2000 06:45:11 PM | +
God, I love the Internet.
12/10/2000 02:01:04 AM | +
More on TV Funhouse -
A Kids Show ... for Adults Only -
"Yes, TV Funhouse's brand of humor is base and juvenile. There is no arguing that it isn't. In the end, though, it is hilarious."
‘TV Funhouse,’ a wacky, tacky pad -
"Adding to the absurdity is the fact that the animals — with their above-the-fray detachment, their blithe disregard for this or any TV show — are the only participants to hang on to their dignity. Their puppet counterparts become the butt of the humor.“Look at that guy,” says Smigel as he points at the screen: A pecking, strutting rooster pays no mind to its ranting puppet co-star. “It’s like the animals are bad actors. But you can’t blame them for being bad actors. They have their own priorities.”
Also, holy crap, I'm not sure when this happened, but moreover seems a lot more useful now.
12/9/2000 03:34:55 PM | +
FYI - when your "editor" says, "don't worry, I'll take care of the graphic," by "take care of" he actually means make something horrible, then put your name on it. Anyway, Finals Study Guide at Über, which, to be honest, looked substantially better when I had it hastily drawn out notebook paper.
12/8/2000 12:16:42 PM | +
I have two finals on Monday. Yay! I love finals! Yay!
12/7/2000 08:40:51 PM | +
New York Times - Ease Up, Top Colleges Tell Stressed Applicants -
My brother is in the midst of this as of now, and I don't envy him. I don't have many fond memories of my college application process. Kids arriving at college at the brink of burnout is one thing, it's the ones who continue their insanely singleminded faux existence of resume padding activities to get into the "right" grad school or med school that really scare me.
"At gatherings around the country, admissions officers are bemoaning the slick packaging of applicants and discussing ways they might encourage high school students to be truer to themselves rather than aspire to some model they think will get them into the Ivy League.
...
But the colleges say they can do little beyond talking to guidance counselors, students and parents about their concerns and hope that people take them to heart. The paper from Harvard, the institution to which others look to set a tone, calls for students to take a timeout literally and figuratively, for a year, a summer or just an evening, not to add to their credentials but 'to develop into a complete human being.'"
The top colleges can do a lot to change things. Well, that's not necessarily true, but at least they can do a lot to change the sort of people they admit. I would hope that after reading thousands upon thousands of applications, admissions officers could begin to tell the difference between qualified applicants who are being genuine in their applications, and the pampered, prep-school kiddies whose applications were filled out by highly paid "college consultants."
But right now, the structure of most "top" schools' applications encourages the sort of resume padding and falseness that these colleges are bemoaning. Smaller colleges usually have applications that have more substantial and varied writing components. While it may be easy to pad a bunch of boxes about your dippy high-school activities and write a single spinless "personal essay," it's a lot more difficult to write a number of short pieces in answer to more direct questions falsely. (The Stanford application is considered by many to be much more "difficult" to fill out for this reason - a lot of my friends in high school gave up on finishing it.)
And what about interviews? Why don't top colleges use interviews to figure out which applicants are just resume-padding, overpriviliged, assholes? The problem is most Ivy-League schools' interviews are conducted by alumni and given almost zero consideration in the admissions process for most students.
College is just a big racket anyway.
12/7/2000 04:25:34 PM | +
TV Funhouse is comic genius. Probably the funniest show on television right now.
12/6/2000 11:03:39 PM | +
When you first start chewing a piece of gum, it's a little tiny bit hard to chew. Then after a few seconds of chomping on it in your mouth, it softens up a bit, and you can chew more easily. And the sugary bubblegum flavor is very strong as it mixes in with your salivia.
And so you can continue to chew, and at this point the gum is the perfect consistency to start blowing bubbles, so you do,
Then, ever so slightly, flavor begins to weaken, just a tad, but the gum definitely still has flavor, so you keep chewing away.
As you're still chewing away at the slightly weakened gum, it begins to get harder to chew. And harder, so you have to put a bit more into your chewing, and by this time, the flavor is just gone.
And now, the flavor is gone, just chewing the gum is such a chore it's beginning to hurt your jaw, and all you can think about is trying to find some place to spit it out, but you can't just spit it out anywhere because you're not some bloody savage, but there aren't any garbage cans around, so you're walking, and chewing this tasteless, tough, gum desperate for an opportunity to spit it out.
And then, finally, you find a suitable trash receptacle and spit it out, wondering why ever wanted to chew gum in the first place.
The point is, you should learn to spit out your gum just at that point when it starts to lose flavor.
12/5/2000 11:46:23 PM | +
Smashing Pumpkins Takes 'Last Gasp' -
It seems like the band's that were really "important" to me and my generation in my formative years, the early 90's, are all dead. Which is kind of sad.
And makes me feel really old.
I guess the only positive aspect is that at least in 20 years my peers won't be paying exorbitant prices for Soundgarden or Pumpkins tickets, as moronic critics claim that while their 16th album was really bad, this new one is really good. There won't be Rolling Stones syndrome.
Well, actually, there will be for Pearl Jam. The same tasteless morons who paid too much to see those talentless turds in the 90's will pay even more in 10 years in a vain attempt to relive those days. God, I hate Pearl Jam.
12/5/2000 02:29:22 AM | +
we interrupt this weblog to bring you this snippit of a chat transcript, completely without context:
AdamMathes: i am a genius 12/3/2000 01:10:05 AM | +
Über is really bad today.
I blame myself.
Which I think is pretty valid, since I wrote it. Often I blame myself for things which I have no control over, but this one was well within my control.
I found electronicwhore while looking through the Über referrer logs yesterday. Which I though was funny because last night I went over to Narnia, where my friends made staff and I didn't, for dinner, and when asked what I've been doing, I explained that I was busily working on my latest business venture, which is like Kozmo except that it's narcotics delivered by hookers, and the url was going to be like edrugsandwhores.com.
Well, it's more entertaining dinner conversation than talking about a web based content management and publishing system, ok?
Ok, so, actually, it's not that funny, and doesn't really have all that much to do with electronicwhore.com.
I blame myself.
12/1/2000 12:12:36 PM | +
"But increasingly, and some might say hypocritically, admissions officers at the most selective colleges say they worry that the process has become such a high-stress exercise in résumé padding that students are arriving at their campuses on the brink of burnout."
Bandleader Billy Corgan wept at the conclusion of the marathon event, which marked the demise of yet another influential band from the early 1990s heyday of guitar-driven grunge rock. Fellow alternative rock bands Nirvana and Soundgarden are now defunct, while holdovers like Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails sell a fraction of the albums they used to."
kid roboto: Huzzah!
kid roboto: You are a GOD.
copyright 1999-2000 adam mathes