January 2002

10 things Google has found to be true

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Charlie Brown - Intelligence: Extremely High
Despite our suspicion that Linus is actually the intellectual center of the Peanuts universe, we acknowledge Brown’s ability to distill great emotion into few words (e.g. “augh”) and his apparent interest in only the metaphorical implications of football (futility).

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I heard this morning that neither Tyson’s pre-fight rampage or yet another pending rape charge will have any effect on the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s decision to reinstate Psycho-Miko’s boxing license. Instead the commission will review more substantial issues, like the number of zeros on their checks.

<rant>
I have to say that I am completely unimpressed with AT&T Wireless‘ service in the Los Angeles area. I have experienced more dropped and missed phone calls than I ever did with SprintPCS. The calls that do manage to connect often suffer from horrible audio - inbound and / or outbound. They supposedly have a ton of features: find the nearest movies, directions to restaurants, etc. But you can’t use the “extra” features if you can’t frickin’ call anyplace, y’know? The thing that really is bugging me is that I’m not 100% sure it’s AT&T’s fault. It might be my phone. I have a trendy little electric-blue Nokia 8260. I love that it’s the tiniest phone in the world, but I’m often suspicious of its quality. The user interface is nowhere near as lovely as it was on my Samsung. The power button is on the top for who-knows-what-reason. The phone book search is not intuitive. It’s even a pain to simply switch from audible to silent alert. And, perhaps most annoying of all, the AT&T voice mail system is el-ay-em-ee. SprintPCS’ service was smart enough to know if I was calling from my own phone! That meant that I didn’t have to enter my soopah-secret PIN to get my messages; the system already knew it was me. And another thing: If I don’t listen to the entire voice mail, AT&T considers that message to have been “skipped” … so I have to listen to it again when I invariably have to redial my voice mail because I’ve been disconnected. And how’s *this* for annoying? Most of the time the service is so bad that the voice mail system can’t hear when I hit “7″ to delete a message until after I’ve listened to the entire thing.

I’m going to cancel my AT&T service and return to SprintPCS. Luckily I still have my phone and my phone number with them.
</rant>

“The important thing is to never stop questioning.” That quote is often attributed to Einstein. I cannot confirm that he ever actually said this. But I doubt I would hear many arguments if I suggested he was one of the greatest thinkers in history.

Is “questioning” really all that important? I guess it depends on how you interpret “important”. At some point in my life I decided to take that path. “Questioning” … “knowing” … is very important to me.

It’s even more important to me than “happiness”. At caterina.net right now there are some questions about … well … questioning. Caterina says:

I also read a study once of a conjectural connection between intelligence, depression and a “sense of reality”: they tested people who identified themselves as “happy, content” and people who identified themselves as “unhappy, depressed” and gave them a test to assess their knowledge of history and current events. The “happy” people had no idea what went on or what was going on, whereas the “unhappy” people did. Whether they knew these things because they were depressed type people or were depressed because they knew these things is hard to guess.

I know from experience that there is a very definite correlation between how aware I am of current events and how happy I am. I don’t even need to use the example of my extreme “awareness” during the weeks immediately following September 11 to illustrate my point. A much simpler analysis can be made by using the weeks surrounding the whole “Cuban-raft-boy-Elian” episode.

I remember that the events of this boy’s life so overwhelmed the media that I simply stopped listening. I went from being able to tell you which specific bills were before Congress and the names of all of the Cabinet members to barely knowing what the day of the week was. I went from listening to NPR for two or three hours each day and reading the newspaper to listening to nothing but my CD player and reading only mind-numbingly boring tomes on database access.

If you’re waiting for some flash of brilliance here, you’re not going to get it. I apologize, but I’m just thinking out loud now. It’s amazing, sometimes, how reading someone else’s blog will spark a whirlwind of confusion and contemplation in my mind.

In the end I am - and always will be - someone who believes that it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And in the end I think … well … the love you take … is equal to the love …

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Are these fonts too small? Anyone?

I’ve been fooling with the themes here at the dg.net web-technology outpost. It’s all wacky css and javascript fun! If you have cookies disabled (You paranoid silly person!) you might not be getting the whole shebang when you view my site(s). Oh well. Clicking on the “themes” links over there in the sidebar should allow you to change the entire look of this site. Which do you like? Which do you hate? Do you even care? Well. So. Okay then. Just trying to make you happy. That’s what I do here. I’m all about being user-friendly.

I think that the best linking weblog on line right now is Follow Me Here. Every time I visit I find a half-dozen or so excellent articles. Eliot must be a voracious reader, and his comments are insightful and thought-provoking. If you have never been to his site, go right now. Here are a few of his more recent links that I found particularly interesting:

· A few months ago - just after Sept. 11 - I wrote a little rant about parallel universes and how I deal with the concept of infinity. I never claimed that it was an original idea, or my own. But I like it. It seems like this theory, which dates back to at least 1957, has sparked some renewed interest. The Economist has a very enlightening and much more scientific explanation of a theory of infinite universes than the one I provided. If you’re as fascinated by the concept of infinity and its implications as I am, you’ll appreciate the Economist’s essay.

· The London-based eZine Spiked published an article on “the Singleton Society” last week. I’ll give you an excerpt here, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

… the age-old tension between the aspiration for self-realisation and commitment is difficult to resolve. In the past this tension could be contained through the widespread influence of the ideology of romantic love - which celebrated the value of self-realisation through an intimate encounter with another person. The synthesis of autonomy and commitment helped diffuse conflicts of interests, at least for a brief period of time.
But the ideology of romantic love could only effectively contain conflicts of interests because women were expected to renounce their desire for autonomy in favour of maintaining the relationship. Since the 1970s, this one-sided arrangement has come unstuck. At a time when women seek to develop themselves no less than men, love ceases to provide the focus for an ideology that can sustain durable commitment.

· The Crackpot Index claims to be, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.” It’s very funny, more so if you often find yourself trying to debunk those with seriously high levels of bunk.

Special Super Bonus Extra Song - via visualdistortion.net
(It was Take on Me by a-ha.)

Several people have asked me how to add random text strings to a web page, so I thought I’d write a little tutorial. All you need is a text editor and a web site. If you publish your own blog, I’m sure you’ll be able to do this. If you follow these simple instructions, you should be able to add the same feature to your web site.

I am by no means an expert on the subject, and there may be better ways to do this, but it has worked for me. If you have suggestions or improvements, please let me know.
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When I want to register a domain name, I go to Dotster.com. It might cost a few dollars more - and I’m talkin’ like, $2 more - than some of the bargain basement registrars, but you cannot beat their customer service, administration, and control panel options. I’ve used them for years and highly recommend their company. I mention them today because I just discovered that they have a thing going now called the Dotster Sunday Mystery Special. Every Sunday they have a new little schtick. Today it’s a deal on .info domain names. Check ‘em out.

I found a great feature at the New Scientist on alcohol:

Everything you ever wanted to know about the stuff but were too drunk to ask.

The Simon & Schuster web page for Ernest Hemingway is interesting, if commercial. There is an option to join a ‘fiction’ mailing list, and plenty of links to purchasing the author’s books. I’m linking it mainly because it has a very user-friendly design.

Update: At some point they completely changed the site and now it is horrible.

The Ernest.hemingway.com website is a very nicely-designed tribute page. I can’t find any “official” relationship to the author, but there are some good biographical bits here and it’s certainly a good place to visit if you’re interested in the author’s personal life.