Ask Symantec: NAV won't install

Grrl.com - Bonnie Blog

Rejection letters are never fun to get in the mail. As a writer, you either have to get used to people saying they're not interested in your numerous queries and book proposals, or you need to find another profession where people hug you all day long.

Cool stuff. I had to dig a little to find B. Burton's blog, which is a fun read. I like her line about "a job where people hug you all day long." I do tech support for an English department, and although they are grateful to see me on occasion, as soon as I fix their problems I just can't feel the love any more. I think that being a celebrity is sort of like being hugged all day long, but most of them drink themselves to death or engage in other acts of self-destruction, as do lottery winners. Are there any poor but happy people in Amerika?



I was sort of bummed to discover today that Al Roker had a weblog. But Bonnie Burton's blog balances that out, restoring equilibrium to the blogging world. (and Al's doesn't totally suck, btw).

Top CIA official warns next terror attack unavoidable

Without providing any details, Pavitt acknowledged his agency's intelligence-gathering capabilities had been tremendously boosted since September 11 and now exceed those it had during the Cold War.

"Today, the year 2002, I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA," he said, adding that the agency was now training more than 10 times as many operatives than just five or six years ago.

SIGNUM: DETRITUS

The Post-it Note’s tactile simplicity is misleading in another way as well. While it often stands in counterpoint to the digital office, a throwback to the days of paper clips, staplers, and typewriters, the Post-it Note is actually postmodernism writ on a square of yellow paper. Unlike its predecessor, the memo, which functions as a self-contained message, the Post-it Note is an analog forebear to hypertext; it acknowledges in its very construction that what’s most important is context – and that context is where you make it, achievable with glue as much as any organic cohesion of ideas.

SIGNUM: DETRITUS

Eventually, however, Fry experienced another moment of inspiration when preparing a report for his boss: to call attention to an important reference, Fry drew an arrow on one of the bookmarks and affixed it to the report. When his boss returned the report with his own comment written on the bookmark, Fry realized his invention might appeal to more than just fastidious hymnal users.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Reawakening the creative mind "Some scientists believe that the essence of creativity is not a state of mind but an activity," he told BBC News Online.

Committee votes to set weight standards for textbooks

Citing concerns about children who lug heavy backpacks in schools, an Assembly committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would set maximum weight standards for textbooks.

Maybe this will encourage ebooks.

Salon.com Technology | Inside the Xbox

Takahashi realizes that his book may annoy Microsoft corporate types.

"Any of the insidery stuff they just really didn't want to get out," he said. "The fact that the initial code name was Project Midway -- they don't want the Japanese people to know that because it will hurt their feelings." The Battle of Midway in 1942 was the turning point of the Pacific War. Before the November 2001 launch of the Xbox, all of the players in the console hardware market -- Sony, Nintendo and Sega -- were Japanese firms.

Hmmm...



I know I said at one point that I was going to start writing more commentary in this blog, but I guess I'm full of crap.

Long Distance May Face a Very Short Future

For years, long-distance calls were more expensive than local calls because providers such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint Corp. had to pay fees to local phone companies to have their long-distance calls begin and end on local networks. Over time, the Federal Communications Commission has reduced those fees from several cents each to only half a penny apiece, Pulver said.



"A lot of cost is from originating and terminating a call, not how far it goes," he said. The marginal cost of carrying a call farther on a company's phone network amounts to "some fraction of a penny per call."

The end of long distance. I basically only call my family in Utah, and we get a 4.5 cent/minute rate through a phone card. We probably spend five bucks a month on LD. Eventually I hope we get rid of our land line and go to cell phones.

LinkPimp

Muetze's Palm-Pages: The Must-Have-Software.

Creative VoIP Blaster: User Reviews SUMMARY:

Guys, after a night of problems and terrible but friendly tech support I got my blaster to work with a router (both a Linksys and a Netgear) along with the LAN. I'm somewhat computer savy and when I read in the manual (after I bought two of these) that it would not work I really wondered because I've never seen something that won't work around a router. The biggest problem is that it talks back to your computer through not just one but several random ports. It will work with a router/LAN but it takes a little time and the procedure varies from user to user. Here's a general idea of what you have to do:

Google Search: voip blaster The VoIP Blaster cannot support Lan / Internet connection sharing /

router / behind firewall. To solve this problem you must use the 3rd

party software.

Download from here http:\\www.fobbit.net

Google Search: I have Confirmed that VOIP Blasters:

. work ok when connected to internet isp via modem

. do not work through linksys cable/dsl routers, even with dmz set



These babies are going back...



Here's the last comment from Creative labs:



CREATIVELABS VOIP BLASTER TECH SUPPORT THREAD:



Installation: VoIP Blaster





Support ID: 52941

Request Type: Installation: VoIP Blaster

Product: VoIP Blaster

Current Status: Pending





Support Request Message Thread:





Response from Customer: 9/28/01 1:07:39 PM





Hi Jason,

Thanks for getting back to me. Just one more quick

question. How does the voip blaster work over the

internet? The internet is based on routers and as far

as I know, there is no way for me to communicate with

anyone on the internet without a router somewhere in

between.





Response from Creative: 9/27/01 8:28:08 PM





The VOIP is not supported with any kind of router, hardware or

software. The software is not designed to work with them, and

unfortunately, there's no way around that. I apologize for any

inconvenience.



Jason

Creative Labs Technical Support

Blagg

L545 Index L545 is one of the core curriculum for the SLIS Master of Information Science degree. This course will introduce the basic concepts underlying systems analysis and design, focusing on contextual inquiry/design and data modeling, and the application of those analysis techniques in the analysis and design of organizational information systems. We will work on the processes that project teams should follow to understand their users work and then to build the software to enhance that work practice. The important philosophy introduced in this course focuses on the concept of user-centered design.

Institutional Theory Bibliography

NETWORK INSTITUTIONAL THEORY NETWORK INSTITUTIONAL THEORY:

IP: Bruce Sterling closing CFP Speech

"The supposed explosion of digital creativity

on a million websites and a thousand channels... Well,

come 2002, it boils down to 95% market share by a single

ruthless feudal empire! And you wonder where your

excitement's gone? A thing like Linux... that isn't a

competitive free-market innovation, that thing is like a

slave revolt.



But it gets weirder. The public interest in public-

domain intellectual property freezes dead with the humble

birth of a cartoon mouse on a tabletop in Kansas City. The

Mouse is flash-frozen in legal ice. He's unrotting. He's

undying. He's cryogenically preserved.... In ancient

Rome, folks thought it was pretty decadent when the

Emperor Caligula made his horse into a Senator. But in

the modern US Senate, there's a Senator who's a cartoon

mouse!"

 

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Evaluating websites

Objective: Later in the semester you will be designing a website as part of a
collaborative project.  In order to develop criteria and methods for
evaluating websites, we'll visit several locations and discuss how useful and reliable they are.

Go to
http://php.louisville.edu/a-s/english/chat/ and log into the open forum chat
room.  You can use any user name you feel comfortable with.  We will
use the chat space primarily to share information, especially URLs for websites.

Open a new, different browser window. (usually you can type control-n from
within netscape or internet explorer).  Divide into groups of three and
visit the following websites, one at a time.  Take notes in a word
processor, email note, or web page about each site.  Although we will be
building a list of questions and criteria for evaluating websites in class, we
don't need to start entirely from scratch.  Here are a few questions to get
you started.

• Who is the audience for this site?


• What is its purpose?


• Is this site trying to persuade you of anything?


• What are the underlying themes, values, or ideas expressed by this
  website?


• How is this site different from a booklet or pamphlet?  How is it the
  same?


• How easy or difficult is it to use?  Explain.

You should be adding to this list with your own questions. At the end of class you will email me your list of evalutation questions with the name of each group member attached. Mark Crane

Sample sites

•  


• http://www.louisville.edu/provost/undergrad/elp/


• 
  http://www.geneva.com/


• http://www.scorecard.org


• 
  http://www.beefnutrition.org/


• 
  http://www.dhmo.org/Criteria
  
  
  
  Bonus round:

Select one member of your group to come to the front of the class and share
one of their favorite websites.  They should tell us why it is their
favorite, why they use the site, and briefly discuss usability.

Evaluation Grid (work in progress)

"Ideally, usability tests for documents occur in a setting
that simulates the actual situation, with people who will actually use the
document" (Lannon 336)

Rhetorical	Functional	Usability	Yet to be named
audience purpose claims authority	complete current working links load time	locate understand use information	Visual Ethical Stickiness Underpinnings

 

Sources I used to build this assignment::

• 
  http://www.louisville.edu/infoliteracy/evaluate.htm (U. of Louisville
  infoliteracy pages)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/webcritique.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• http://www.useit.com (Jakob Nielsen)


• Lannon, John. Technical Communication. 8th ed.

Super Bonus Round:

If we have time at the end of class, we'll play around with http://www.blogger.com , a collaborative publishing tool.

 

 

Software for the People - Knowledge Management Research Center Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist who studies how people use IT. In her job as a principal research scientist with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies, she helps design software that people actually want to use because it takes into account the way they work and communicate. She finds that technologies such as instant messaging and e-mail are popular precisely because they facilitate relationships among people who aren't connected by a line on the corporate org chart. Technology, Nardi believes, should above all be "useful."

CNN.com - Net blamed for marital breakups - April 15, 2002

Net blamed for marital breakups


LONDON, England --The Internet is becoming a frequent cause of the collapse of relationships, a leading marriage guidance organisation has warned.
One in 10 of the 90,000 couples who seek the help of UK-based Relate now cite the Internet as a problem, with obsessive use of the medium blamed as well as its ability as a communication tool.
Both men and women complain of becoming Internet "widows" as their partners spend hours at the computer downloading software or looking at pornography.
Sex chatlines and sites such as friendsreunited.co.uk, which can rekindle old school passions, pose further threats to relationships.
Relate's chief executive Angela Sibson told The Times newspaper on Monday: "Our counsellors report that, more and more, the Internet is a relationship breaker."

Community Voices How did you come to be active in the computers and writing community?
What's the most important aspect of the computers and writing community for you, and why is it so important?
What scholarly project in computers and writing has been most influential for you, and why has it been so influential?
What worries you about the computers and writing community, and why does it worry you?
What's the best lesson you've learned from the computers and writing community, and why is it the best?
Why do you choose to be active in the computers and writing community?

Metafilter | Comments on 16376

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

posted by kirkaracha at 11:50 PM PST on April 15

Written in response to the discover of a supercolony of ants in Europe.

Business pros flock to Weblogs Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, says he has been inundated with e-mail since launching a Weblog in 1999, sparking online discussions that have helped change his approach to journalism.

“My readers know more than I do, and that’s a liberating notion, not a scary one,” he says. “Every journalist ought to realize it’s true. No matter what you cover, your readers know more collectively than you do. If we can capture that, we all come out ahead.”

Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (Alertbox April 2002) Differences between Children and Adult Users
Our usability findings for kids often differed from those we typically find when testing adult users. Some of the more striking differences were:
Animation and sound effects were positive design elements for children; they often created a good first impression that encouraged users to stay with a site.
Children were willing to "mine-sweep," scrubbing the screen with the mouse either to find clickable areas or simply to enjoy the sound effects that different screen elements played.
Geographic navigation metaphors worked: Kids liked the pictures of rooms, villages, 3D maps, or other simulated environments that served as an overview and entry point to various site or subsite features.
Children rarely scrolled pages and mainly interacted with information that was visible above the fold. (We also observed this behavior among adult Web users in 1994, but our more recent studies show that adults now tend to scroll Web pages.)
Half of our young users were willing to read instructions; indeed, they often preferred to read a paragraph or so of instructions before starting a new game. In contrast, most adult users hate instructions and try to use websites without having to read about what they are supposed to do.

Yahoo! News - Hi-Tech School Bullies Working Round the Clock "The crucial difference from traditional bullying is that in the past kids who are being bullied could go home and find a safe haven," NCH associate director John Carr told Reuters.

"But if they're bullied on their mobile (phone) or on the internet, then it's ever-present," he added.

Carr said that schools were generally good in preventing bullying, but NCH wanted to make sure they were reacting to this new angle.

"This is a new and insidious development," said Carr. "It can ruin lives and lead to suicide."

When games stop being fun - Tech News - CNET.com Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn't being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game "EverQuest," and that was all that mattered at the time.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things My friend Geoff Cohen turned me on to a book called "Cat's Paws and Catapaults," which examines the historical failure of mechanical designs based on nature -- for example, the ornithopter. There are rare exceptions, like Velcro, but for the most part, nature's designs suggest mechanical dead-ends when applied to human engineering.

It seems that this is not the case in networking. Eric Bonabeau's Ant Colony Optimization research (which I've written about here on several occassions) has been used to solve real-life networking problems and to approach optimal solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem inherent in Southwest Airlines' routing. The Santa Fe Institute has also used cellular automata research to solve complex traffic and urban-planning problems

Salon.com Technology | Microsoft's mythical man-years

The trouble is, the whole concept of measuring software productivity in "man-years" or "man-months" is profoundly discredited -- and not by some radical new theory of software development, but in what is probably the single most seminal work on software management: Frederick P. Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month," first published in 1975, when Bill Gates was a stripling and personal computing a dream.

FOXNews.com

Adding the 307 and 1,138 figures equals the alleged 1,445 alcohol-related deaths annually among college students.

But Hingson relies on a key, but unsupported assumption. It does not automatically follow that college students constitute 31 percent of alcohol deaths simply because 31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are college students.

Minerva Record View 1 Author:Finders, Margaret.
Title:Just girls : hidden literacies and life in junior high / Margaret J. Finders.
Publisher:New York : Teachers College Press, c1997.

vita Books

Finders, M. and Hynds, S. (Under Contract). Literacy Lessons: Teaching and Learning with Middle Schoolers. Columbus, OH: Merrill, Prentice Hall.

Finders, M. (1997). Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York: Teachers College Press.

Articles

Finders, M. (2000). “Gotta Be Worse": Negotiating the Pleasure and the Popular. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 44, 146-149.

Beach, R. and Finders, M. (1999). Students as Ethnographers: An Alternative Approach to Research. English Journal 89, 82-90.

Finders, M. & Rose, S. (1999). "If I Were the Teacher": Situated Performances as Pedagogical Tools for Teacher Preparation. English Education 31, 205-222.

Finders, M. (1998/99). Raging Hormones: Stories of Adolescence and Implications for Teacher Education. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 42, 252-263.

Finders, M. (1996). Just Girls: Literacy and Allegiance in Junior High. Written Communication, 13, 93-129.

Finders, M. (1996). Queens and Teen Zines: Early Adolescent Females Reading Their Way toward Adulthood. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 27, 71-89

Research Statement
Margaret J. Finders


My research focuses on three aspects of teaching and learning: 1) social contexts of literacy learning, 2) gender studies, and 3) teacher education. My research agenda includes on-going projects and new work to contribute to understandings about language, literacy, and social life, specifically regarding gender and adolescence. I am interested in exploring the social contexts of literacy learning, examining closely how literate behaviors are entangled in larger political, social, and cultural issues. Drawing on critical literacy theorists, I argue that teachers and students negotiate their identities through multiple, competing discourse communities. I make the case that who they are, their identities, are closely connected to the language they use. In light of this, my focus on pre-service education specifically examines the ways in which sociocultural and equity issues play out in pedagogical and assessment practices in teacher education programs.

Entry into adolescence marks a critical juncture in social and cognitive development because of greater emphasis on academics, an increase in expectations for social experiences outside the home, and an intensification of differential gender roles; yet the dynamics of literacy learning in early adolescence remain severely under-researched. My book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High, published by Teachers College Press, explores the real worlds of seventh grade girls both in and

Sony MZ-N1: OpenMG Jukebox

From your OpenMG Jukebox playlist, you are allowed 3 simultaneous downloads (or "check-outs") of a song at one time. Once all 3 check-outs have been used up, the song will still exist on your harddrive, and you will still be able to play it on your computer's jukebox. However you won't be able to download it to another MD until one of the checked-out copies is checked back in. Checking-in a track will delete the song from the MD and increment the number of your available check-outs in the jukebox by one. Note that there is no way to upload a track recorded on an MD up to the harddrive at high speed (and the "check-in" process doesn't involve any actual audio upload). This is an unfortunate limitation for those that were hoping to be able to transfer their live recordings and interviews onto their harddrive to use with other applications. Perhaps in the future...? The speed of the PC-to-MD transfer ("check-out") depends on the selected MD recording mode - 2-4x for SP (292kbps ATRAC), 16x for LP2 (132kbps ATRAC3), and 32x for LP4 (66kbps ATRAC3).

Serial rights management sucks.

testing archives

Cyber-Serfdom

But with the cost of this technology rapidly decreasing, it will spread faster than you think. And so will the social stresses associated with it. Apropos of such a future, I heard a lot of new phrases this week: "device creep," "Machines don't serve us, we serve them," and "My identity is now less important than the data that is stored about me." Have a nice day.

Cyber-Serfdom The key to winning in business today is adapt or die, get wired or get killed, work 24 hours a day from everywhere or be left behind. Finally, during the question time, Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony America, stood up and said: "Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off."

TAP: Web Feature: Going Post-al?. by Brendan Nyhan. April 5, 2002.

In this changing world, the norms and practices of the lumbering print media leave it increasingly vulnerable to nimble online critics. Over the last two weeks, for example, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman has blasted the right in columns on David Brock's book and Social Security. But Krugman-bashers like Sullivan have unlimited space and time to tear him apart for days between his twice-weekly 700 to 800 word columns. It's no contest, and it's even worse for news reporters who have no means for responding to critics at all.

The newest example of the war between the online and establishment media comes from Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt, who is "widely considered the most slavish recipient" of leaks from Ken Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel, according to an article by Marshall on Salon.com [Salon Premium subscription required]. Following her March 20 story with Neely Tucker on Robert Ray's final independent counsel report, MWO blasted Schmidt as "Steno[grapher] Sue Schmidt" and told readers to e-mail her, presumably to express their discontent with her reporting.

Topica Email List Directory Sorry, I don't mean to lose it, but I've had it up to here with the

whole "well, if you believe *markets are conversations*, why don't you

let us talk freely." There is a big difference between "markets are

conversations" and every fucking idiot and his dog expressing their

opinion. Don't get me wrong -- I love it when people start their own

websites. Great! Go express yourself! Guess what? If you touch a

nerve, you'll get readers. But the simple fact is that most of these

discussion board shitheads couldn't pull readers to their own site if

their life depended on it.



Not to revert to the whole complex adaptive systems theory all over

again, but voices of prominence rising to super-node status in the

network is simply how this shit works. No one said all of the nodes

would be of equal status.

I'm going to post all of my really bitter, dark, negative stuff on the secret blog. I'd tell you where it is, but it's only open to people sneaky enough to find it.

I was going to blog a link to the new holographic dvd storage medium, but what's the point? I won't be able to afford it for about five years. In the meantime it will be discussed by hundreds of online instapundits (not that there's anything wrong with that) and eventually the technology will, hopefully, trickle down to the lower-middle class. And then you are going to see scads of pirating and recording the likes of which make napster and morpheus seem like rubber band guns in a nuclear arms race. We're talking 20 full-length movies per disc. Yum.



This begs the uncomfortable question, however, of "isn't there more to life and identity than your mp3 and video collection?"



Very few people attempt to define themselves outside of their consumer purchases or their employment. We don't even know how to have that conversation anymore, online or off.

Proposed copyright law raises controversy / COPYRIGHT'S NEXT CHAPTER / Latest legislation tries to control the technology itself

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002, introduced by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would give the entertainment and technology industries up to 18 months to agree to a technological standard that would halt the spread of unauthorized copying of digital video and audio.

The bill would require this on any "digital media device" -- any hardware or software that reproduces, converts, retrieves or accesses copyrighted works in digital form. Penalties for altering the standard would be $200 to $2,500 per violation.

Calendar Live - Press Play to Access the Future Brett Ratner, director of the "Rush Hour" movies, concurs. "I'm thinking about the DVD as I'm making a movie. Things I'm going to put on it. Picking takes for the movie and for the DVD. I even remixed the sound for 'Rush Hour 2' for the DVD, because we have different kinds of sound equipment in the theater and at home. It was a way to enhance that experience."

Calendar Live - Press Play to Access the Future

As audiences became acclimated to music videos' jump-cutting and nonlinear storytelling techniques, they were able to absorb information more rapidly and in different ways, allowing filmmakers to short-cut exposition and action without necessarily sacrificing clarity.

Cyber-Serfdom My favorite, though, was that we now live in an age of what a Microsoft researcher, Linda Stone, called continuous partial attention. I love that phrase. It means that while you are answering your e-mail and talking to your kid, your cell phone rings and you have a conversation. You are now involved in a continuous flow of interactions in which you can only partially concentrate on each.

MetaTalk | Comments on 2061 No! This is exactly wrong. The web is not a tool to replace face-to-face communication between people who are in the same room. It's certainly not supposed to facilitate audience members ignoring the person they paid to hear speak so they can send them messages.

The web still doesn't have effective tools for writing, but the reading tools are pretty good, and they should give people enough experience that they'll be good listeners in person.

Why couldn't Dan just raise his hand?

The conversation continues... Last month, my company held our 25th anniversary PC Forum, the annual meeting of the computer and online market. As you might expect, while the speakers were holding forth onstage, audience members were second-guessing them from the floor.

Only this time, the attendees engaged in some high-tech heckling, using their PCs hooked up to the conference's wireless local-area network (Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity), and from there to the Internet.

The implications are broad.

No, it won't make private meetings public. But it will make for more two-way communication at public meetings. Listeners can simultaneously query the speaker and communicate among themselves instead of everyone remaining silent while one person at a time speaks.

The Risks Digest Volume 22: Issue 2

(Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive?

Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using

a pencil took years of practice. Is that what we want? A control that takes

years of practice?)

That is to say, I am not a fan of the student centered class as it is often

outlined. I have had too many experiences and good teachers that have

pointed me in directions and made things that I thought dull, very

interesting and important. If we only stayed with those thing we knew and

were interested in, life would be dull indeed (not to mention very limited).

We are after all rhetoricians. The trick is not to let students decide the

way, but to get them to think they are deciding the way. Rhetoric can be a

really interesting thing to learn (even if students don't know what it is

when they begin the course).

Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did

Creating an alt. news group If a new group is to be justified, its topic must already be under discussion somewhere in existing Usenet groups. The question is: under what circumstances is a new group warranted?

1. If the topic is consistently dominating discussion in a more general group (e.g. 80% of discussion in alt.books.horror is about one author). Forming a new group because of this reason is called "splitting". If you want to form a newsgroup by splitting from an existing group, you should discuss the idea of a new group in the existing group before coming to alt.config with a proposal. People have to agree that there is a logical way to split the discussion. The old and new group would both be need to be viable after the split.

gladwell dot com / books

We sometimes think of Sesame Street as purely the result of the creative genius of people like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. But the truth is that it is carefully and painstaking engineered, down to the smallest details. There's a wonderful story, in fact, about the particular scientific reason for the creation of Big Bird. It's very funny. But I won't spoil it for you.

Antidote to the Liberal Monotone: Blogging

There are, of course, blogs of all persuasions on the Net, but the stars of the genre tend to tilt right of center. This is understandable, given the leftward swing of the mainstream press. The Web is an outlet for ideologically homeless opinion-mongers, and the smart ones are using it. Their audience? Readers and viewers who are hungry for alternative points of view.

Yahoo! News - Living on Internet Time, in Another Age

This is the crucial difference between the Edison site and newer museums that many children are familiar with. Older museums tend to be places where you can see and learn, but not touch. The newer ones tend to be entertaining interactive spectaculars that say, "Touch me, please," but at their most superficial are not easy to distinguish from Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlors. Aside from a few push-button displays, including kinescopes of Annie Oakley and a boxing match, the Edison site is definitely in the former camp.

Why Microsoft President Quit

"Believe me, things that the press is hearing about today as new initiatives were fully planned out as contingency actions years ago. Nothing happens on the spur of the moment here.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and elusive Academy Awards broadcast.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/25/2002

One example of the suspicion attending my evident passion for maternity came from a colleague in my discipline, who wondered aloud, upon learning that I had four children, "Is she part of a cult?"

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/25/2002

I am convinced that if your heart is in the work, either you will find your audience or your audience will find you. And if your heart isn't in it, find something else to do. Above all, we need to bring passion to our investigations, so that the highest scholarly standards can be informed not only by intellectual rigor but also by love.

The Nando Times: Poor sleep habits linked to moodiness, other problems

A new poll on sleep habits suggests that millions of Americans are in a bad mood, short-tempered and prone to overeat because they are tired.

The National Sleep Foundation Poll, released Tuesday, finds that people say they're much or somewhat more likely to make mistakes, get impatient or aggravated when waiting, or get upset with their children or others when they haven't gotten enough sleep the night before.

One fourth said they were more likely to eat more than usual on days when they didn't get enough sleep, with slightly more women than men reporting this was common.

"The poll establishes a direct association between how Americans are sleeping and their overall behavior, mood and performance," said Richard Gelula, the foundation's executive director. It shows 'you are how you sleep.' And it indicates that some of the problems that we face as a society, from road rage to obesity, may be linked to lack of sleep or poor sleep."

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog

Another cherished belief that this explodes -- weblogs are useful. The secret to the success of both SOAP and XML-RPC is the weblog. Mail lists stop when someone posts a flame or a challenge from left field. Weblogs keep on truckin. For example, James Snell of IBM sneers at Sun for not joining the interop process. This makes me cringe. IBM didn't join the process (nor did the people he applauds) for many years after it started. But the work can continue. It's just one blog. He can say whatever he wants, believe whatever he wants, and the work continues.

The test of any technology is the extreme case. For a car, it is surviving the Paris-Dakar Rally. For a hair dryer, it is baking Don King's hair into a ziggurat. And for TiVo, the digital video-recording device, it is capturing the wily and elusive Academy Awards broadcast.

In the past year, TiVo has been widely adopted in Hollywood, where it is beloved for its ability to store up to sixty hours of programming; to create a profile of its subscribers based on what they watch and then record shows it believes they will like; and to blitz through commercials at sixty times normal speed. In mid-March, TiVo sent its customers an e-mail urging them to build their Oscar nights around TiVo, but reminding them to "pad" their recordings by at least thirty minutes: "That way, in case the ceremony runs long (ahem!), you're covered."

David Park, an agent at United Talent Agency, went one step further. He said, "I set TiVo to record the Oscars"—slated to run from 5:30 to 8:30 P.M., Pacific Time—"and the hour-long Barbara Walters special that followed it. I knew I had four hours—plenty of time. My girlfriend and I came home after a lovely dinner and chilled on the couch, eating tiramisu and fast-forwarding through the boring parts, the technical awards. We saw Halle Berry freaking out, saw Julia Roberts freaking out, and then, right before she announced Best Actor—it cut off! I said, 'This totally sucks!' " The

nothing, and lots of it

There seems to be a trend lately that describes a history of weblogs beginning from a very different place than I expected. I've seen a few occasions where Andrew Sullivan is credited with bringing weblogs to the masses, most importantly after September 11.

This revision of history doesn't totally surprise me, as I've heard comparisons of the web's history (and weblog history, indirectly) drawn to early television. In the first few years of television, the people creating shows knew the technology inside and out, worked the cameras, lighting, and sound while simultaneously writing, producing, and acting in their shows. The same can be said for many web pioneers. They had to not only code pages by hand, they often ran their own web servers, created their own graphics, and wrote everything themselves. Eventually, TV took off when the professionals showed up. The radio personalities and vaudeville comedians brought their heightened creativity to the medium and it finally gained a wide audience.

The Internet is Missing

Gender & ICT - Design Suchman and Jordan (1989) have argued that incorporation of the everyday work practices of the users of the technology is imperative in order to design appropriate technologies. In particular, the design of technologies that are sensitive to women's knowledge and concerns and work practices is necessary.

IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau If you can instantly edit, you don't need URLs?
Right. You start out by writing your own set of documentary pages on your local disk. Then you would click your insertion point in the browser. Like in every good application, if you wanted to put the insertion point, you'd click once. If you wanted to make something work or to follow a link, you clicked twice. There was no distinction between editing mode and browser mode. We lost all that along the way. What we see now is mostly inflated rubbish.
So you lost that because you decided to release it to the public?
We lost it because we couldn't port it easily from NeXTStep. Writing an editor is much harder than writing a passive browser. The guy who brings out a passive browser spreads it faster, but it's not necessarily better for the user.

For want of an editor, the web was lost...

IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau I proposed a range of possible projects for myself, one of which was Hypertext, and another of which was analyzing physics data using object-oriented systems and NeXTStep.
But why were you so hot on Hypertext?
I felt that we needed to be able to do more than just produce something and then output it on paper; we needed to be able to navigate within it. There had been this project called CERNDOC, which was a system completely based on VM, CMS, and the IBM. It was sort of a hierarchical system in which you could search for documentation, get a document out, and then maybe print it. But I felt that the whole thing should have been hypertext-based, or that we should at least look into what could be done with it. I thought that we could maybe even do things on the network, but I had not thought of the Internet.

NetHistory v2.0: An exhaustive list of Internet history resources Welcome to Nethistory, the most comprehensive directory of links (160 and counting) to information about the history of the Internet, World Wide Web, Usenet, as well as related concepts such as email, browsers, online games and BBSs.

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification

Winer and his team don't email one another any more, and they claim radical productivity gains as a result of the switch to instant outlining:
We've been using this tool since November, internally at UserLand. We shipped Radio 8 with it. When we switched over our workgroup productivity soared. All of a sudden people could narrate their work. Watch Jake as he reports his progress on the next project he does. We've gotten very formal about how we use it. I can't imagine an engineering project without this tool.
If you read their outlines, which you can do because this experiment is being done in full daylight (if you're not a Radio user, you might try these renderings rather than the raw OPML files), you'll get a sense of the conventions that are evolving in this new space. Here are some of them:
Blog-like journaling is the basic style.
The top level of each item is date-stamped, and preferably includes a short description.
Older entries are archived (an easy manual operation in the outliner).

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification

Here is another entry for Ryon, the sub-diety.

Here is a test story.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 03/29/2002

Academicians, Ms. Mentor notes, are not always the most courageous fighters for principle. And so, instead of the bright young postcolonialist who'd been brought to campus and royally feted, the department hired a rather foggy personage whose expertise was Old English philology. And since hardly any students would willingly sign up for that, the department quickly made Old English philology a requirement for all majors. Students fled, and the ranks of general studies and communications majors swelled to bursting. But Professor Cheese was appeased and pleased.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Institutional Analysis for Design

(1) Design is a social process, with a variety of players and
issues, and the design process is becoming more complicated as more
considerations are brought to bear on designers' choices.

(2) Computer use is a social process, and the process of computer
use is becoming more complicated as security problems proliferate
and users form themselves into advanced communities.

(3) Computers mediate social relationships, and Web-based tools are
capturing and supporting those relationships in more detailed ways.

Getting to the Root of All E-Mail (washingtonpost.com)

And tucked away in a less-traveled back corner of one of the server rooms, behind the door of a black tower that looks no different than any of the others, is the principal reason for all the precautions: the A root server.

Most people envision the Internet as a global network that resides on no single physical system or network of systems. While that picture is roughly correct, key pieces of the Internet's technological backbone are concentrated in a handful of physical locations around the world.

The Domain Name System (DNS) makes the Web easy to navigate by translating long Internet protocol (IP) numbers into memorable Web and e-mail addresses. It relies on a hierarchy of physical root servers to inform computers connected to the Internet where they need to look to find specific locations online.

At the top of that hierarchy is the A root server, which every 12 hours generates a "zone" file, which in turn tells a dozen other root servers spread around the world what Internet domains exist and where they can be found.

Google Technology

Pigeons naturally operate in dense populations, as anyone holding a pack of peanuts in an urban plaza is aware. This compactability enables Google to pack enormous numbers of processors into small spaces, with rack after rack stacked up in our data coops. While this is optimal from the standpoint of space conservation and pigeon contentment, it does create issues during molting season, when large fans must be brought in to blow feathers out of the data coop. Removal of other pigeon byproducts was a greater challenge, until Page and Brin developed groundbreaking technology for converting poop to pixels, the tiny dots that make up a monitor's display. The clean white background of Google's home page is powered by this renewable process

Harper's Magazine: A Gaza Diary, p. 12 of 14

Arafat loyalists in the camp, such as Faqawi, concede that Hamas is ascendant. If Oslo had led, as many had hoped, to a two-state solution, and thereby given Palestinians some glimmer of a better life, it is a fair bet that Hamas would be a marginal force in Gaza. But Israel's occupation and Arafat's mismanagement have made it only a matter of time before the militants come to power. They already rule the street. If Sharon unleashes Israel's might, as he did in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority will be his first victim.