Saturday, June 12, 2004

Second audio weblog post, in which I talk about dead presidents and their funerals and how many Dead Presidents we have to spend on them. Here's a place to comment on the post. 

Ole Eichorn: "Have you ever wondered about all the unused keys on your keyboard?" 

Adam Curry: "After a few minutes I forgot that he wasn't talking to me. But just like a radio host, he is talking to me." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Raymond kept all 150,000 of his open source tulip bulbs through April 2002, his last month on the VA Linux board." 

Susan Kitchens needs some help exporting her Manila site. 

On this day two years ago, I pointed to Brian Buck, a member of the mid-90s Frontier community who was fighting bone cancer and writing about it on his weblog. Seeing the link reminded me that it had been too long since I checked in. I just did, bad news. He's got a big tumor, is back in chemo, and according to Brian, it's not looking good. He's a young man, and was always very generous in the community, a kind spirit. Makes all the other michegas seem so small and unimportant. 

Interesting argument about the white-on-orange XML buttons. Reminds me of a story. In 1995 or 1996 or so, before the dotcom boom, I was driving from SF to Calistoga, via US 101. In San Rafael, I passed the Marin Civic Center, which had a big electronic billboard facing the highway, one where the message can vary depending on what's going on. That day the sign simply said http://www.marin.org/. I bet just one in a thousand of the drivers knew what that weird word meant. But I knew and I laughed out loud because it was such a cool use of technology, and a harbinger of things to come. Today it wouldn't even make an impression because URLs are so commonplace, in fact, you'd probably be surprised if they didn't tell you how to find them on the Web. Now I'm not going to tell you I know for a fact that the white-on-orange thingies are going to be as ubiquitous as Web URLs in the physical world, but maybe they will be, and it doesn't hurt anyone to see a little thing they don't understand, happens every day, all over the world, and somehow we survive.  

As an illustration, I bet only 1 in 10 Scripting News readers understand the paragraph above, or the picture below. How do they cope with the confusion? They probably just skip it and get on with their lives.