The company I work for (Borders Group, Inc.) recently acquired a 20% stake in a small British company called Paperchase. My U.K. readers are probably aware of the really cool stuff that the U.K. Paperchase stores carry. One of my most recent projects was to build a web site that allows us to sell a limited number of the Paperchase items here in the U.S. from our Borders.com web site (Paperchase does not yet have an e-commerce site). One of the coolest things we're selling is this unique aluminum business card holder for $4.00.
Alright. This is the last I'm going to say on this subject before I'm tempted to remove all the reciprocal links from my site. Every week I receive numerous requests from fellow webloggers asking me to point to their site. On many occasions, I added their sites to my reading list after reading only a couple of days' worth of stuff. Some of these links grew stale and I stopped reading their sites. Recently, I made the decision to remove some of these weblog links from my site because I wasn't reading them anymore. Certain persons, who will go unnamed, took it as a personal attack and started saying not-very-nice things about me on their sites. In my defense, I've been very clear about why I've made the decisions about what I'm doing with CamWorld, and on many occasions have even asked my readers about the direction they'd like to see CamWorld go in. An example of this was when I was offered a substantial sum of money to place advertisements on CamWorld. After polling my readers and the weblog community, I decided to turn down the advertising money because I was reminded that CamWorld is a personal site, and should reflect my personal tastes, opinions, hobbies, likes, and dislikes. This goes for the sites I link to as well. If your site isn't compelling enough to hold my attention, I likely will stop linking to it or visit once and never come back. Why people think that once I link to their site, I am required to continue to link to it, is beyond me. From a personal point of view, I'm tired of these people. I'm tired of the continuous stream of submissions that point to very badly designed weblogs, and I'm tired of the idiots who simply don't "get it." CamWorld is about me, not you.
I know I've linked to Joe Lavin's site before, but it's worth another link. Plenty of humor to be found here.
Do you have a gripe?
Sorry about the lack of updates. The holiday weekend really slowed me down. And I'm a week behind in email, so if I haven't responded to something you wrote, please accept my apologies.
Movies I saw this past weekend: Legend of Sleepy Hollow (surprisingly bad for a Tim Burton movie), Dogma (not as good as I expected, given the caliber of Kevin Smith's earlier work), and Princess Mononoke (definitely worth the $7.00 admission -- simply an amazing movie and an amazing experience). I even bought the soundtracks (both the original and the re-mix which was made for the American version) for Princess Mononoke.
Regarding the 11/28 entry on Unobserved Utterances, I'm puzzled as to why he's saying the things he is. Is it because his weblog was removed from my reading list? Please see my 11/17 entry for an explanation. Regardless, I think some people invariably take some things far too personally. Grow up people...if you want me to become a regular reader of your weblog, you're going to have to try just a little bit harder to appeal to my tastes. Calling me names and acting the way you are simply doesn't get you very far in my book. Maybe an apology is in order.
It's Turkey Day (Thanksgiving) here in America. Yet another holiday that's been commercialized all to Hell. Well, at least I don't have to go to work.
I'm working on several projects on the side. One of them promises to be really cool/useful. All involved agree. Another project is going to be a commercial weblog/newslog. Look for it early next year.
I am simply amazed at how many high-quality (in both design and content) weblogs have sprung up these past few months. I've made quite a few edits to my list.
Here's a great forum thread on HDTV widescreen TVs. My opinion: wait another year for the prices to drop. HDTV is coming - early adopters will always pay a premium.
From 1995: Humanizing Cyberspace: Privacy, Freedom of Speech, and the Information Highway.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The author of this piece makes the comment that an astonishing number of the show's residents come from New Jersey. If I recall correctly, the toll-free phone number used to not be toll-free, except for in a few states, like New Jersey.
Heh, let's see a bunch of PCs do that without crashing.
Wow, I'm glad to see incidents like this being treated seriously.
Look ma, I'm finally popular. [Sniff]
Oh wow. Oh wow. Stuff like this makes me get excited about LEGOs again.
Displaying Photographs on the Web, by Victor Lombardi.
I really like the clean, elegant, minimal design of MetaJohn - a new weblog.
exp.com makes a valiant attempt at competing with epinions.com, but upon first look I have no idea where to click first. The front page is a perfect model of information overload. If an experienced web surfer like me gets confused with a site like this, you can only imagine how flustered the typical user will get. Too many links wth no correlating content is a bad thing.
Reflections of a Modem Junkie is one of the oldest tech-oriented personal web sites on the web. Lots of great stuff to read here. No surprise here that this was submitted to CamWorld by someone using the Opera browser.
OrbitalWorks.com is another nicely-designed weblog, but it hasn't yet earned a place on my list as it consists of mostly links I've seen elsewhere recently. Which leads me to think about why some weblogs insist on pilfering most of their links from other weblogs. I'm keeping an eye on OrbitalWorks.com, because I think it can become better over time.
Taking a few more days off. Updates will resume soon.
I saw "American Beauty" and "Messenger - The Story of Joan of Arc" today. The first was simply amazing. Kevin Spacey is an amazing actor. The second was long and convoluted, not as good as I expected.
The reviews at IMDB are sometimes amusing. For example, a viewer had this to say about "Death and the Maiden" starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. "That bald Alien bitch is only good at one thing, and that's as a reproductive source of extra terrestrial's."
The WELL's online writing contest deadline is tomorrow. Hurry up and get your submissions in. You don't have to be a writer to enter. You can submit/nominate someone's else's work.
Jason Kottke pointed me to the SXSW 2000 Competition.
Tonight's travel code is: E1.
Some of my more recent site design can be found at the Borders.com Gift Center.
New eBay stuff section. See left-hand side.
Derek Powazek is selling Fray t-shirts and stuff. Which reminds me again of the getting CamWorld t-shirts done. Hmmm....
Where Google came from. [Slide show]
TurlyMing looks like a great new weblog. BTW, I'm going to be trimming my weblog list at the left, and adding some of the newer/better weblogs that have come of late. Please don't take any offense if yours gets removed. I cannot read them all and the ones that I've stopped reading regularly will be removed. My goal is to make the left reflect my personal reading list more, and less as a comprehensive list of existing weblogs, which is what it started as.
Students cause riot. Students get expelled. End of story. Except for when said students (who happen to be black) go whining to Rev. Jesse Jackson that they've been unfairly treated. Regardless of race, any student who causes a riot deserves to be expelled. What exactly is Jackson protesting?
$5 | $10 | $20 | $50 | $100
Meta: I get enough weird email now, that I actually have a Eudora folder called "Nutcases".
I think this was a pretty fair trade. [Thanks John C.]
Note to self: Stop being so bitter and cynical. [Happy Cam is on a vacation.]
Pat's Do-It-Yourself Loudspeakers.
Mr. Barrett talks to a taxi driver in NYC.
Don't worry. Bifurcated Rivets will be back. Lindsay said he's been having hardware problems.
The new toy in Toy Story 2. [Mature humour.]
Must Read: "When the merger of AT&T and MediaOne is complete, AT&T and its affiliates will oversee a broadband cable network that will cover some 80% of the residential broadband market. That network will be part of the Internet, but it will not be architected according to the principle of end-to-end. Instead, the network will give AT&T and its affiliates the power to discriminate in the service it will provide, by limiting users to the ISP of AT&T's choice. It will be the owner of the network, not the user, or the innovator, that gets to decide how the network gets used." More on this very important subject. [Found at Hack-the-Planet]
Robert X. Cringely offers up a page-by-page summary of the DoJ's Findings of Fact.
Caught. Pants down. Again.
Tips for seeing the Late Show With David Letterman.
Borders Books and Music Online Employment Application. [This is a parody and is not affiliated in any way with Borders Group, Inc. or Borders Online -- who happens to be my employer.]
What I Learned From TV: 100 million acts of sexual intercourse happen every day. This results in 910,000 pregnancies of which 400,000 babies are born. Each day!
CamWorld is proudly 100% free of "Mahir the Turkish stud" links.
Macromedia is working on some sort of super Content Management tool called Whirlwind. It will be interesting to see how good it is, as every large site has such different needs.
The official Dolby Surround Sound speaker placement (with diagrams).
Ack! Gag me with a spoon! Steven Champeon pointed out that it's pretty lame for Microsoft to use the American flag image so freely for such a vile piece of propaganda. Last I checked, Microsoft was an international company.
I've got a couple of "20% off all purchases at any Borders or Waldenbooks store" postcard coupons that I'd like to give away. They can only be used November 21 and November 22, and can't be used for online purchases. The first two people to email me with their name and mailing address will receive one of these postcards. Christmas is coming...
Anyone owning more than a couple of domains gets mis-directed email all the time. Me: about 5-10 mis-directed emails a week. Some of it is very bizarre; love letters, personal communication, and even spam. Maybe I'll share it some day.
The prediction of most IT departments is that they plan to spend most of January dealing with the impending Y2K bug. I'm betting that most of the year 2000 will be spent dealing with the other Y2K bug.
I saw this a few weeks back and didn't link to it. It's making the rounds again. Too bad U.S advertising can't be this clever. [Brilliant!]
Pet psychics? [via Backup Brain]
1-877-258-5808. Is anyone compiling the questions/answers online?
I feel completely burned out and I don't know why.
Does anyone else have a problem with the new MacOS Open/Save dialog interface being completely sucky? I love using Default Folder to quickly navigate multiple folders and volumes, and the new Open/Save interface has a really crappy implementation of this same functionality, and at the same time renders Default Folder useless. Ugh.
I saw "The Insider" and "The House on Haunted Hill" this weekend. The first was superb and second totally sucked. I don't have enough energy right now to write more about them. Maybe I'm coming down with something.
Related Meta: Why do all the movie web sites now use extensive Flash? They also do browser detects that spit back "Sorry, you don't have the Flash plug-in, so fuck off" pages even though I do have a Flash plug-in installed, albeit an old one.
I find it interesting that on several mailing lists I'm subscribed to, people are already talking about Microsoft in the past tense. "Microsoft was a great company" and "It was great while it lasted."
Well said, Rogers.
It is a great day!
Rafe is hosting a copy of the Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game.
It's not looking too good for Microsoft. [Yay.]
"Dude, you bought a chick car!". [found at This is News] For the record, I drive a 1995 Jetta.
camworld.org and camworld.net now point to this web site. [Depending on your ISP, propagation will take another 24 hours]
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: Search for a trademark. [Useful!]
Bruce Tognazzini talks about the advent of a truly personal computer network where access to private files is available from anywhere on the globe. He gets pretty deep into the concept of security vs. privacy and what can be done to make global networks more secure.
The morons were probably trying to scam the Mafia or something.
Intresting chat transcript about the Danny Glover taxicab incident.
So, I'm watching the new game show "Greed" in FOX. It's a complete rip-off of the other prime-time game show, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" except the questions are incredibly easy.
Amazon.com has switched their servers to Apache. [via Apacheweek]
Decoding those encrypted porn spam URLs. [found at Dog on Radio]
This article at Salon should be called "How the Marketing Schmucks and the Morons in Management Screwed Up Altavista." If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Dan Bricklin: Trademarks and Domain Names.
Unix on a Commodore 64. What's next? Unix on a PDA? [Don't read this the wrong way, I'd love to see Unix or Linux on PDA. Imagine the posibilities!]
Unix/Linux on a PDA (thanks go to Josh Baugher for the links):
The Chris Elliott Video/Audio Archives. [Comic genius is never understood.]
The Rare Glitch Project.
David Isenberg, author of the awesome "Rise of the Stupid Network" offers a great rebuttal to Emily White's incredibly misguided Seattle Weekly "Techno-Tyrants" article about visionary George Gilder.
State of Oregon vs. Randal Scwartz (computer security case). [Interesting!]
Personal computing gets easier and easier with the new keyboard from Microsoft. [via Strange Brew]
Welcome InfoWorld readers.
The EgypyAir tragedy hits closer to home than I expected. One of my co-worker's grandparents were onboard. [I'm sorry, but I will not disclose any names.]
The Mackinac Bridge which connects the upper and lower peninsualas of Michigan opened 42 years ago today.
Great NYT editorial on Microsoft's lobbying abuses. This reminds me of a book I read after leaving college. Transnational Media Corporations: Global Messages & Free Market Competition is a great look at how large corporate conglomerates are changing the way business is done and laws are passed. [BTW, this was written by a college professor of mine.]
Fast Company: Great interview with Paco Underhill. Underhill is the author of a new book called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, that looks at consumer shopping patterns, both online and off. [More: Borders.com interviews Paco Underhill.]
For my Michigan readers, Don Norman will be speaking November 10 at MOCHI in Ann Arbor on the campus of University of Michigan (Hale Auditorium, Business Administration Building - School of Business, 7:00 PM). MOCHI is the Southeastern Michigan and Northern Ohio chapter of ACM SIGCHI. See you there.
Your phone records are being sold. I'm glad to see FCC chairman William Kennard get angry about this. He's not as good an FCC chairman as Reed Hundt was, but he's doing a pretty good job in protecting our consumer rights and privacy. [via Factovision]
Sweet! This is exactly the kind of thing I like to hear about -- phone companies getting caught with their pants down.
On a related note: Some of you may remember me complaining [loudly] about the new Minimum Usage Fee the long distance (LD) carriers are now instituting. I didn't like the fact that I had to pay them $3 a month regardless of whether I made any long distance calls, so I called my friendly (ha!) AT&T customer service representative and bitched up a storm. After working my way up to the top tier of thier customer service hierarchy, trying to get my account credited with $3, I was finally told in a firm manner that there was no way they were going to credit me the charge. The evil AT&T representative claimed that it cost them a minimum $10/month just to keep a customer's record in their database, regardless of how many calls are made. I then proceeded to call Ameritech to cancel my long distance service. Last week, AT&T called asking me why I switched LD carriers. I made it clear to them that I dropped my LD service (didn't switch) because I was unhappy about the new Minumum Usage Fee and hung up. So, now I use my cell phone for long distance calls. [Ugh: If I didn't need a land-line for Internet access, I wouldn't even have a phone.]
Oh yeah, Happy Birthday Mom! Card's in the mail.
