April

It turns out that Google’s Usenet archive is pretty useful for tracking the lifecycles of Internet fads.

August 25, 2004: At Nelson’s request, the data has been updated to July 2004.

In a Usenet post written in July 1981, over ten years before Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web project, K. Richard Magill suggested that combining Ted Nelson’s work in hypertext with “windowing capability, a pointing mouse, and auxiliary 5-key keyset” would make a powerful tool. “Now if only it came packaged in a briefcase-sized personal DEC-10…”

Okay, so five-key keysets never took off, but it’s still an accurate prediction of the modern web-enabled desktop. It’s also the first known reference to the terms “hypertext” and “Ted Nelson” in the Usenet archive. The rest of the short thread is worth reading, too. (On a side note, does anyone know what happened to K. Richard Magill? I wanted to ask him about his prediction, but can’t find any references to him after he sold all his audio gear in 1990.)

The winning performances for last year’s Meow Mix Jingle All The Way To L.A. contest are online, and in an unprotected directory (Windows Media format). These videos are just about as strange as you would think they’d be. Meow meow meow meow!

By the way, today’s my 25th birthday. While my mom was in labor, Julie M. Fidler got some stuff from the Donny & the Osmonds fan club and stayed home sick from school, students rallied in opposition to Henry Kissinger’s planned appointment to Columbia, and Josh Brown enjoyed the most beautiful trip of his life.

And I was born at 12 noon. A pretty quiet day, I guess.

I created this in response to Mat Honan hassling me about not wanting a storTrooper avatar. If you haven’t seen the original, this probably won’t make much sense.

The 1983 Video Game Olympics, held at the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, pitted nineteen players against each other in five events: Frogger, Millipede, Joust, Super Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, Jr. The three finalists went on to compete in the Video Game Invitational, hosted by ’80s car-wreck That’s Incredible. Thanks to the original owner of the Twin Galaxies arcade, the full episode is now online in Quicktime format.

A tape glitch skips over the moment when the winner reaches the high score on Buck Rogers and crosses the finish line, but it’s still well worth watching. Don’t miss John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby’s in-game color commentary of Cosmos, Burgertime, Millipede, Donkey Kong Jr. and Buck Rogers. (“Now comes a swarm of bees and Ben gets stung!”) Thanks to Mathowie for the tip.

Photos from the Fanime 2001 anime convention, where fans dress up as their favorite anime characters. I admire their passion for the genre, but I can’t help but laugh. (Found from a Google Image search for pinchy, looking for images of Mr. Pinchy.)

Phil just came up with a clever variation of Andre’s spambot-defeating e-mail trick. On his old site, Andre dynamically displayed the current date as his contact e-mail address (a la [email protected]), and wrote a procmail script to weed out e-mails sent to addresses older than a week.

Instead, use SSI and environment variables to include the client’s IP address in the e-mail address. So, <!–#echo var=”REMOTE_ADDR” –>@example.com becomes @example.com. Now that you have the spambot’s IP address, do something creative with it.

So, I’ve never really had a personal website. For the last seven years or so, I used the Generic Website as a placeholder for a site that never came. Sure, there were always little nooks and crannies hiding under that blank page, but I figured it was finally time for something a little more substantial.

I can’t promise I’ll keep to these, but here are the rules:

1. No journaling, unless it’s relevant to people who don’t know me. Example: “Today I went down to 7-11 and bought a Slurpee. Strawberry is my favorite flavor!”

2. No tired memes, unless I have something to add. Example: “Take this quiz and find out which Smurf you are! I’m Jokey!”

3. Be original.

Thanks to the close friends who, until this point, have put up with my endless links and web commentary in instant messages and e-mail.