Daily Report

26 April, 2000
[3:40 - 5:30 pm]
The Last 'Whassup' Picture Show: This was inevitable. Ten years ago, tragedies quickly turned into office humor. Today they become instant multimedia web events.
        ::: Tales from the Cryptic: Lest we be last in the race to post private messages in public places:
        Anais, bury the gun in the cornfield.
        No, Jim, that part is not edible.
        Well, it's legal in Indonesia.
        ::: But let's talk about us. It looks like we will finish the web design curriculum ahead of schedule. ::: It looks like we will be flying to Berlin for the unveiling of JazzRadio.net in June. ::: It looks like we will be speaking at an AIGA conference in Miami a bit later on in the year. ::: And it's definite that we will attend tomorrow night's Cool Site of the Year Awards ceremony in NYC. You know, just in case we win. (As if.)
        ::: April is the cruellest month. Keeping us humble and right-sized, this building has been without water today, as the system gets flushed for routine Spring maintenance. You don't think about water until you don't have any. Then you think about it. A lot.

[2:30 am]
Quick Clicks 4: CBS has reportedly blown $75 million on the Internet. We can't wrap our heads around that kind of dough, though we wouldn't mind wrapping our fists around some of it. Q. How do you make $1 million on the Internet? A. Start out with $10 million. ::: Fun With a Purpose: 1 May is Phone in Sick Day. ::: This site may remind you of another you know and love. Yet it certainly has its own distinctive touches. We're impressed with the way the designers combine old-school skillz (table cells) with new (CSS absolute positioning), and of course we like the chunky cartoon feeling. ::: IconFactory gets a nice boost on Apple iReview. We're still not sure we get the iReview concept (iMac meets Epinions?) but we're always happy to see our pixel pals expanding their empire.
        ::: True: Our pal Peter Balough writes: "I think the one good thing about what you've called the gold rush mentality surrounding the Internet is that skills that might otherwise be on the same level as building ships in bottles (or assembling plastic tricorders, more aptly) are now able to command actual money from actual companies."
        ::: Misery Loves Phone Companies: Getting over a two-day DSL blackout is like recovering from a cold. The instant you feel better, you're running hatless in the rain, choking on Chesterfields, and partying 'til all hours. We spent at least eight hours yesterday putting out fires instead of getting work done. We note that Scripting News and weblogs.com suffered from similar connection woes on the same days we did. And we feel less alone after perusing Mike Wasylik's personal DSL horror story on Epinions. There are a million stories in the digital city. Some are even worth reading.

25 April, 2000
[7:10 pm]
DSL service was restored at 5:00 pm, but John, the Covad guy, expects it to go down again due to high (18%) magnetic line noise. (20% is considered failure.) We're going to stock up on milk and cookies for these tech folks, since we expect to see them frequently.
        ::: We were explaining liquid web layout to a friend, so we showed her AskMen.com, because the site does a good job of reflowing its pages to fit any visitor's browser window. And that's how we discovered Man of the Week: Steve Jobs. Sure, it's a puff piece. What isn't, these days?
        An Internet pioneer informs us that web users were never supposed to see URLs. (You know, those funny little addreses in the bottom of the browser window.) Jeez, URLs are half the fun. (And writing scripts that hide URLs is the other half.)

[1:22 pm]
Hey, kids! Jump start your Internet business with a reliable, high-speed DSL connection! ... So now we're totally disconnected. Literally. Bell Atlantic just yanked Covad's wiring out of the wall.
        "I don't know what this is," said Ursula, the BA tech, frowning with distaste as she fingered the spaghetti Covad had hung off Bell Atlantic's connection, "but our connection tested clean. This is Covad's problem."
        About the only thing our ISP, DSL provider, and phone company can agree on is that the fault lies with their partners.

We run an Internet business. We pay for high-speed access. For a week we've had blackouts lasting up to four hours, followed by connectivity as brief as fifteen minutes.
        We reported the problem on 19 April. A "trouble ticket" was opened by Covad and our ISP. Though the trouble was never fixed, persons unknown at one of those two companies went ahead and closed the "trouble ticket" anyway, thereby cancelling the record of the trouble. This is like locking the door to a dirty room and pretending you cleaned it.
        So now we have no connection. None. Zip. What we do have is a bunch of disconnected wires, hanging off the wall of a closet. Next step: call our ISP every hour until they get someone from Covad to come out here. Will that person arrive today? Will they actually fix the problem, or will they blame Bell Atlantic again? Who knows? Not us. We are but pawns in a three-way game of chess.
        [Posted via temporary dial-up connection. Which took four hours to dig up and resurrect.]

[4 am]
Yesterday our Mom celebrated her birthday. Or would have, if she had any idea what day it was. Alzheimer's is a terrible way to go out.

::: DSL Hell continues apace. We've been without reliable Internet access for 24 hours. Blackouts last up to eight hours. Access can be as brief as fifteen minutes.

24 April, 2000
[6 pm]
DSL Hell: If by some miracle you're reading this, it means we enjoyed a nanosecond of connectivity during an otherwise unplugged day. And the New Economy marches on.
 
[1:30 pm]
Quick Clicks 3: You wouldn't think designers and viewers could have this much fun with a premise like minty fresh breath. But they do. Bonus: there's a different game and a different color treatment each time you visit. ::: Elegant design at thinkdink.com. Likewise, this personal design portfolio.
        ::: Help Wanted: Netscape is looking for a Gecko Embedding Product Manager. Gecko is the open source engine for the upcoming Netscape 6 web browser. It's also the core of some next-generation web appliances and set-top boxes now in the works. Speaking of which ...
        ::: Buggery: The Netscape 6 display error on our front page has been "fixed" via workaround, while the folks at Mozilla toil to stamp out the actual browser bug (Mozilla bug # 18955, to be exact). The non-hacked page is online in this secret location so the Mozilla folks can test their work against it. All software has bugs; the point is that they get identified and fixed. Thanks to J. David Eisenberg for sussing out the workaround.

And in local news:
        ::: Connectivity problems again this morning.
        ::: Work on the curriculum for web designers continues apace.
        ::: We're approaching our four millionth viewer, helped in no small part by today's boost on the mailing list of MacProNews. (Unless maybe we have one viewer who visits ten thousand times a day.)

23 April, 2000
[2:50 pm]
Quick Clicks II: The JazzRadio placeholder page is up. Site to follow. It's all part of a secret visual dialogue we are carrying on with Matt Haughey, whether he knows it or not. ::: The frames-killing mission from God has been put on the back burner while we finish an emergency project for a client who's sweating bullets.
        ::: Political Correctness Online: In a classic Twilight Zone episode (redundant: they are all classic), Little Billy "wishes people into the cornfield" when he doesn't like what they have to say. We may be paranoid, but we're starting to see evidence of the same thing in the web's independent content scene. Recently a writer shut down his weblog rather than take heat for voicing an unpopular opinion. (We're sure the web authors he wrote about never intended for him to do that.) Then some folks got into an uproar over some SXSW trash talk. There are many other examples. Collect them all!
        On the flip side, it seems like nobody can launch a personal site without heaping praise on five or six of the usual suspects (including us, occasionally, though not as often as Zeldman's insatiable ego would like).
        Folks, it's your web. Do as thou wilt. Design as thou wilt. Say what you mean. Link as you like. Self-censorship through fear of being ostracized from some imaginary inner circle is not what this is about – and is just as dangerous, in its way, as censorship from without.
 
[3:10 am]
Quick Clicks: We're on a frames-killing mission from God. Yes, friends, we've begun yanking down the framesets at A List Apart, so the layout can breathe. We're nowhere near done yet. Always hated those frames. ::: Updated the Belgian section of The Ad Store. ::: Not exactly the Easter Bunny. ::: After judging the finalists in the 5k Awards, we feel shame about the bandwidth we've wasted all these years. (5K winners will be announced May 1st.) ::: Happy Easter from Opus Soup.

22 April, 2000
[10:05 pm]
Post-Peeps: It's been nearly a year since The Peeps died. Bat Head, our Siamese sealpoint, misses his companion. Around Easter each year, the makers of Marshmallow Peeps begin broadcasting a TV commercial touting the virtues of their holiday candy. "Peeps, Peeps, Peeps!" shrills the jingle. With each incantation, Bat Head eyes us mournfully.
        So today we went on a quest for kittens. And located a homeless feline who immediately began nuzzling Joan's hair, and chewing on our leather jacket.
        A happy holiday story? Guess again.
        We were denied the cat, due to the strange rules of this particular animal rescue league. A sad-eyed couple standing nearby confided that they had also been rejected. It was their fifth attempt to get a cat from this agency. The place was swimming in homeless cats and would-be adopters. Animals not given homes will be killed. You have to wonder.

::: Added still more tragically tasteless content to the Ad Graveyard. We once had high hopes that the Graveyard would resurrect magnificent creative ads that should have been published. And it does have a few of those. Mainly, though, it has cheap laughs and uncouth double-entendres, because those are always easier to come up with – and because the brilliant art directors and copywriters we've contacted hold on to their dead ads in hopes of selling them another day.
        Also updated: Les Misc. and the Guest Book.

[2:15 am]
Don't you hate it when all weblogs point to the same site, story, or photo series? We do too. But we can't resist swiping a link from Backup Brain and insisting that you visit skipintro.com now. (Between SkipIntro and e-Normicom.com [noted 19 April], the web's worst stupidities get pleasantly skewered.)
        ::: Life Byte: This being a holiday weekend for many Christians and Jews, our girlfriend Joan gave her mother a call.
        "Oh, Joanie, I can't talk now," Joan's mother said. "I've got to get my cookies out of the oven."