Denoser is a Perl script that filters out the noses from emoticons. And you thought Ben Trott’s Silly::Die module was useless…

In the spirit of Leslie Harpold’s recent Verisign debacle and David Gallagher’s successful campaign to get his name back, I’m starting a Googlebombing campaign of my own.

Help me defeat Scott Baio and get my name back! Burn, Chachi, burn! (Baio! Baio! Baio!)

I love it when people find the three-year-old blank checkbook you’ve thrown away, and start writing checks in your name. Fortunately my account has long since changed, so they didn’t get a dime, but it’s still unnerving to see someone else signing your full name.

Note to potential thieves:

I don’t sign my middle initial, and I don’t write like a girl.

Note to self:

Shred unused checks from now on.

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.

Continue reading “Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet” →

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.)