1. You’re supposed to be unnerved, saddened, or upset by reading of someone’s suicide. But that’s other people telling you how to feel, rather as may happen after your mother dies. I was nonetheless somewhat perplexed and indeed unnerved to read of the suicide of an IRC participant unknown to me. But his homepage, which you can find in the aforelinked entry, has quite simply freaked me out. Who posts a Wojnarowicz-calibre cartoon on their own site before killing himself? ¶ Update (2003.09.06): Matt May  ¶ 29
2. The Decline of the Dictionary. Quit bitching about descriptivism; it’s the basis.  ¶ 27i
3. Macintosh (separatist) workstation. Why do designers forget that we have other materials we work with, like piles and piles of printed matter? Where does that go?  ¶ 27ii
4. Winer and Pilgrim, “a new talk show focusing on arcane technical debates, obscure blog politics, and other pressing issues of the day.... The hour-long program will air Friday nights at 10:00 p.m. on the Fox News Channel, ‘a day and timeslot we discovered is the best time to reach the most geeks at home,’ says Ailes.” ¶ “How dorky is an application used by three people that hits one of my sites 10K times a day? Sometimes I wish the kids would just grow up. Or if that’s not possible, at least leave home. Or if that’s not possible, die.” You first, Dave.  ¶ 27iii
5. Wrecked Exotics. Great concept, initially fascinating (I scoured the Bentleys – now you see why every car has to meet safety standards). Then I recalled my youngin’ days in engineer school, where I was interested in auto safety. I had a collection of – how does one put this? – used seatbelts. Eventually it became too grisly. Remember, in many of these exotic cars, someone’s life changed, or indeed ended.  ¶ 27iv
6. Put down that dwarf! Blind-guy boxing is it. (“Fresno’s rock station.”)  ¶ 26i
7. Can you get this page to print properly? Invariably not. You should see my traumas in printing out HTML proofs. Any writer or designer lives an uneasy degree of denial about paper.  ¶ 26i
8. Giving up the ghost. Austin seemed like a real city when I was there. Even the rednecks in pickups nodded and said hi. Must have been my hat.  ¶ 26i
9. Арт. Лебедев: Moscow Metro 70th anniversary; Mabbila phone; VK chocolate (dig the drawers at bottom).  ¶ 26i
10. Matrix re-enactments (soon, pre-enactments of Revolutions): 1, 2. “Js don’t all look the same. They just try to.” ¶ You could always watch it in Russian, or just buy the phone.  ¶ 26ii
11. Windows XP Rough Edition. And there I was just agreeing with Bowman that XP uses screen real estate better than X. The difference is: I can read everything under X. Incidentally, a Windows laptop (Fujitsu tablet Windows laptop?) is increasingly necessary, along with VirtualPC.  ¶ 26iii
12. iTunes: “As a Mac user, I shouldn’t have to mingle with the general Internet. It’s so... tacky.”  ¶ 26iv
13. BigMuscleCrips:
    • Wheelchair:
      1. Being German, even he wears leather pants
      2. XGymnst
      3. MusclLvr (“I am in a wheelchair and don’t work out but I am very attracted to muscular men” – which would make you unusual how, exactly?)
    • Blind: Jarheadmuscle (personal fave)
    • Deaf:
      1. chestshug
      2. DeafTim2 ([clears throat])  ¶ 18i
14. How not to depict the very feature you are promoting:

    I guess they tried to fix it.

    

    Tried. ¶ 16i

15. “Eco on Google”: “I asked... Umberto Eco how the characters in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum... would have used [Google] to construct their conspiracy theories. ‘If in 1984 there was Google I would have written a different novel. Yours, Umberto Eco.’ ” ¶ 16ii
16. More Google no-shows (which you could skip):
    • A result that should simply have linked me to http://www.issn.org:8080/English/pub/ instead used http://www.google.ca/ url?q=http://www.issn.org:8080/ English/pub/ &sa=l&ai= Ad0w8_KTP_A5xIsMskMvrxnZAieLaC- Z2C06i0bRABApTAAthDEQABwMEAA
    • And another search yielded the monstrosity http://www.google.ca/ url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://rtnl.org.uk/ words/ 20030620-fahrner_image_replacement.shtml &e=747 ¶ 16iii
17. Ian Roberts: Less uninteresting (q.v.)?

    Roberts’s boyfriend Andrew moved overseas for 10 months.... “But after two months of getting used to being without him, that’s the first time in like 12 years that I’d been single, like physically single, you know what I mean? ...I had a ball. I can’t believe it.... I have been so living in a box that I’ve been scared to step out of: The relationship thing. So since he’s been back, yes, we have had some problems....”

    “I’m actually in the process of being a sperm donor for a lesbian couple, and thats been happening now for about 12 months,” he says.... “They made it painfully obvious that legislation prohibits them from helping someone, a gay man, donate sperm. It’s the only time in my life I can honestly say I have felt discriminated against.”

    Well, of course you fucking haven’t. You’re skyscraper-tall and built like a brick shithouse and you played footy professionally for ten years. Who the fuck’s gonna get in your face? ¶ 15i

18. ISO paper sizes. ¶ 15ii
19. Get yourself known by unfucking corporate Web sites. I don’t see anybody at the corporations unfucking them. ¶ 15iia

    There seems to be a bit of a movement at the moment of Web designers creating accessible and standards complaint versions of well known Websites.... I think a really proactive approach would be for budding Web designers with time on their hands to create versions of well-known Websites that address issues like usability, accessibility and Web standards, and then pitch them to the site owners

    If I worked in a big company and a freelance Web designer came to me and told me what was wrong with my site I’d probably either ignore it or take note and then get my £2,000-a-day London agency to rebuild it. However, if the same person came to me with a fully working prototype of the site that looked great and fixed all the issues I’m damned sure I’d take note.

20. OMG! WAI f2f @ T.O.! ¶ 15iii
21. “The perfect boyfriend”? A phrase like “hit man and bisexual lover of fellow informant” is really all you need to get you going, don’t you think?

    He was a two-bit hoodlum at the centre of extraordinary times. From being a bisexual hit man in the ultramacho world of outlaw bikers, to arm-twisting the authorities to pay for his liposuction after he became a police informant, nothing was typical about Aimé Simard. ¶ 15iv

22. Automatic link insertion gone awry:

    The Secret Service (news – web sites) used “profoundly bad judgment” in seeking to question a Los Angeles Times cartoonist over a political cartoon depicting a man pointing a gun at President Bush (news – web sites).... Rep. Christopher Cox (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said.... In the cartoon, the man pointing the gun at a caricature of the president has “politics” written across his back, and there’s a sign on the street scene in the back reading “Iraq (news – web sites).”

    So where did the locution “news – web sites” appear on the sign? Above or below the word Iraq?

    (Links faked; see reproduction of the expired original. Why in the world should articles expire?) ¶ 15v

23. Jayzus! Tijssellism is going to work for Joichitism! ¶ 13vii
24. You can manipulate icon sizes and positions and backgrounds in X to create entire canvases in windows. It’s quite common in nicely-designed installers. iCab’s is the nicest. ¶ 13vi
25. PerversionTracker Design Awards 2003. LittleMinx: “a guess: you SO write perversiontracker.” I wish.  ¶ 13v
26. McStebbins, the Irish Paperboy. Always loved chiaroscuro red-and-black photos and illustrations. I pity the protans.  ¶ 13iv
27. Linguist’s geek code. (Skip)

    LGC(-) F Pc+ Pn+ M Sx H- O++ Lg--< L()D()>
Data: Mo-Sign
C- Im-- I()U() S

    Onanistic and hermetic in the extreme.  ¶ 13iii

28. Ian Lloyd: “I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had I simply knocked on the bedroom window without peering through it first. I’m sure it would have made him jump”  ¶ 13ii
29. Google calculator. Doesn’t do currency conversions yet. Does, however, understand teaspoons.  ¶ 13i
30. NagaraBrowser puts Web sites on your desktop, if you can read 日本語 (via Tijsselism).  ¶ 03i
31. Three-year-old page prompts new MetaFilter entry that busts WCAG 2.0. Blingk-blingk?  ¶ 03ii
32. J.G. Ballard’s ill-balanced fantasy monolith reflects the sunshine buffered by bluster and cloud.  ¶ 03iii
33. In interior design, Europe has little to fear from the Icelanders, though the page design is tasteful.  ¶ 03iv
34. DVD MIAs.  ¶ 03v
35. A Nice Cup of Tea Espresso and a Sit Down.  ¶ 03vi
36. “Adventures in the Alpha Room.” (I don’t actually hate Dan.)  ¶ 03vii
37. Corin.  ¶ 03viii
38. Iwan Thomas, not, in fact, naked.  ¶ 03ix
39. I argue with my esteemed colleague over MDF versus real wood. Perhaps I should be looking at my own trade first. Gunnar Swanson:

    Although U.S. newspapers were letterpress-printed in our lifetimes, it’s now exotic enough that I have letterpress cards that serve the purpose of your engraved ones. Maybe one day soon people will say “Look! Real laser printing.”  ¶ 01

All dates in August 2003.

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