The only thing that really frustrates me is that some people have no imagination or design skills whatsoever, so they completely rip off somebody else's work. There are simply far too many similarities between Scott Bartlow's web site and CamWorld. He even had the balls to steal my graphics. HTML code is one thing, but you cross the line when you rip off graphics.
He didn't even have the sense enough to test the design he ripped off in Netscape. Apparently his HTML editor screwed up my code and it renders weird.
Just in case Scott discovers the error of his ways, here's a screenshot of his site.
I need a favor from my readers: Please do not email or call Scott Bartlow. I feel that he has learned his lesson, and he has apologized and taken the site down. I'm concerned that some of my more fanatic readers have over-reacted and misunderstood why I alerted my readers to Scott's mistake. My intent was only to point out that what Scott had done was wrong, and used him as an example. The important thing is that Scott learned that "borrowing" an entire site design and graphical layout was wrong. Thanks.
Here in NYC, Y2K festivities are gearing up in a major way. Cops and transit police are very apparent in the subways. The homeless were kicked out of Times Square, so they're riding the subways. For two days now, all of the trashcans in the subways have been covered with trash bags and duct-taped shut. I believe this is to deter the Y2K nutjobs from using them as convenient bomb receptacles. In Grand Central Terminal, there is a steady stream of foriegn tourists with giant backpacks and camping gear taking the shuttle to Time Square, in hopes of securing a good location before the big mob hits later tonight.
Most of the NYC locals I know are making it very clear that they are trying to get as far away from the city as possible because of tonight's festivities. My brother and I are planning on going to a party in New Jersey. Far enough away, I think, to avoid the crowds.
I'm told that CamWorld was mentioned "as a place designers hang out online" in the February 2000 print issue of HOW magazine, a popular designer's magazine. I'm still trying to locate a newstand that's carrying this new issue, which hit subscriber's mailboxes earlier this week.
The CamWorld Reader Get-Together last night was a roaring success. All in all, twelve people showed up, not including my brother and I. I have pictures but I left my camera software and patch cable back in Michigan, so I'll put them online when I get back next week.
Thanks go out to: Lane Becker (and Courtney Scott and her brother Ben), David Wertheimer, Elan Freydenson, Peter Merholz, Judith Zissia, Anil Dash, Ron Vogel, Grant Barrett (no relation), Red DeLeon, and Joshua Eli Schachter for making it such a success. It was fun meeting everyone.
Duct tape!
Now in New York City. It's cold here too.
I see my old friend Tom Mangan is doing the 7 Questions thing again. He just interviewed Jason Kottke.
Tom did a 7 Questions with me way back in September 1998.
Don't forget the CamWorld Reader Get-Together tonight at 5:00 P.M. in NYC. If you've RSVP'd, I'll see you there.
Jenni of the infamous JenniCam web site has a moving journal entry about Christmas, Christians, and American family life.
I heard on the news that some more people were arrested at the American border for trying to smuggle in bomb-making equipment. This is like the second or third incident in a week. I won't be surprised if some nutjob blows himself up taking a bunch of people with them. I also hear that gun sales are at a record high. Maybe it's time for the American government to close the borders. At least until this Y2K hysteria has passed.
Microsoft is going to try and "spin off" and rename the MSN portal and separate it from the Microsoft brand. I wonder if this is an attempt to try and get away from the negative connotations that come to mind with the word "Microsoft." Or it could be a sign that the DOJ lawsuit is going to have more impact on Microsoft's identities than originally thought.
I haven't investigated the potential of myspider.com, but it sure does look interesting.
I can think of plenty of sites that provide services without first registering. Is it possible the NY Times is playing into the Internet paranoia that regularlty sweeps the media circuit every few months?
"I want to Work for Maxim, Dammit!" is an intriguing article about a young man who applies for his dream job. Be sure to read the follow-up articles [links in the left column] and find out if he gets the job.
I received a couple of excellent responses regarding my frozen doors/locks problem. Unfortuntely, I'm beginning to think it's a problem that has more to with with the electronic locks my car has. I know the cold temperature is causing the problem, but I think that most of the solutions offered aren't going to work, as the locks are powered electronically, including the locking mechanism. This is leading me to the conclusion never to buy another Volkswagen [I have a 1995 Jetta III].
Solutions:
Update: I was able to get the driver's side door open once, and sprayed a healthy dose of WD-40 [what I refer to as liquid duct tape] into the locking mechanism, and opened and closed the door a couple dozen times to work it in. Problem solved. Or so I thought. The last time I closed the door, it refused to open again. Very frustrating. Damn stubborn car.
How can you not read a story such as this one?
What? What's that I hear? Car doors don't freeze shut in San Francisco?
Check out #23 on this list of Technical Service Bulletins for my car. Unfortunately, this means that it's still my problem and not the manufacturer's.
Ralphie wants only one thing for Christmas: a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Lightning-Loader Range Model Air Rifle with a Shockproof High Adventure Combination Trail Compass and Sundial set right in the stock. "You'll shoot your eye out!"
TNT is showing this movie back-to-back for 24 hours starting at 8 P.M. Christmas Eve.
www.leglamp.com
Has anyone else noticed that the telephone companies are becoming the worst offenders [see Dan's comment on MCI] of unsolicited telemarketing phone calls? The other day, I received three calls in a row from three different phone companies, all of them trying to sell me a cell phone. Every time, I tell them I already have a cell phone, and these morons still insist on trying to sell me one.
I really hate winters in Michigan. The temperature fluctuation can be extreme. I forgot to wear my winter coat to work this morning and when I left work this evening, the locks on my car were frozen shut. After twenty minutes of trying not to break the key off in the lock and avoiding frostbite, I was able to get the passenger door open. So now, my car is parked outside my apartment, with the doors unlocked (I don't dare lock them again). The driver's side lock is still frozen solid. Can anyone recommend a good lock-thawing technique? I've tried those little tubes of stuff you're supposed to squirt into the lock, but they never work.
Seth Godin (of Yahoo) has an article in the current issue of Fast Company entitled "In the Face of Change, the Competent Are Helpless." He talks at length about how "competence is the enemy of change" and argues that competence and the attitudes it creates can actually be a bad thing for some new media companies. An interesting perspective.
I find it quite amazing that three different people have RSVP'd for both the NYC and the San Francisco CamWorld Get-Togethers. New media people travel a lot.
I don't often completely endorse a television sit-com, but I want to point out that Stark Raving Mad has got to be one of the funniest, best-written shows I've seen in quite a few years -- especially when compared to the drivel being churned out by most of the networks these days. I mean, what idiot keeps renewing the Veronica's Closet contract? Ugh.
I wonder how much the camworld.* domains are worth to these folks?
I'm not going to make any comments about Time's choice for Person of the Year, except that they really blew it. I can think of plenty of more-worthy people than Jeff Bezos. It just goes to show you how the brainwashed the media in this country is.
A couple of interesting news articles from Dave Farber's Interesting People mailings:
Alright, you can go ahead and wear this stuff if you really want to.
Steve Wozniak on Microsoft and the NY Times internal politics. [Found at Scripting News.]
The times, dates, and places for the CamWorld Reader Get-Togethers have been finalized.
Who's sexier than Po?
As a true design geek, I'm in love with packaging. If there were ever a store that sold nothing but different kinds of boxes, envelopes, and foamcore, I'd be there at least once a month. As it is, we now have the web, and a fine mail-order catalog company called Uline.
Of course, no true designer could not also have a love affair with paper, specifically the stuff put out by French Paper. Here's a company who not only has high-quality products, but also has the class to hire Charles Spencer Anderson, one of the finest design studios in the country. French's paper catalogs are examples of awesome design. (Maybe it's my browser, but I can't seem to get the French Paper site to work tonight. It's doing some weird looping HTTP request with a .jsp page.)
The votes are in: Readers love the Christmas-light-in-a-box GIF animation. It's not how good clip art is or isn't, it's what you do with that counts.
Anyone who has heard the old Nails song "88 Lines About 44 Women" will love this Brunching Shuttlecocks parody, "88 Lines About 42 Presidents."
Awesome. RatBastard has redesigned, and is now in a format that encourages me to visit more often.
I can't help but to think that our society is self-destructing after I read about incidents like this.
Go read Dan Lyke's rant about the new Texas Instrument's digital projection system now making appearances in some movie theaters. Then go read Roger Ebert's review. It makes sense that movies like "Toy Story 2" and "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace," which are wholly or largely digital, would look better with a digital projection system. Fascinating stuff.
26 characters isn't enough? The whole idea behind the DNS setup is to make web site addresses memorable. I don't think another 45 characters is going to help the already unmanagable glut of dot-com advertising and web hype.
Somebody with way, way, way, way too much time on his hands. [Found at Cardhouse.]
The ever observant Dan Bricklin spotted some cell phone towers disguised as trees!
The redesign is now live. There's still lots of holes as I convert some of the really old sections of CamWorld and the archives to the new design.
Hey, the redesign is shaping up. I've completed an updated template that is looking pretty good. I took alot of your comments into consideration about reading text on the grid background. I also had lots of people comment on the tabs I was using and pointed me towards a recent article by Jakob Nielsen about the mis-use of tabular navigation in web site interface design. Whether or not you agree with Nielsen, he makes some good points.
What's funny was I received several comments from people refering to older versions of the index.html file that I had left on my server as backups. They found them by changing the number after "index" to a lower number. One reader even sent me feedback about index6.html even before I had finalized the design. I can picture him at home, hitting reload in his browser every 5 minutes to see my changes and tweaks, as I cleaned up rendering problems with the new layout. It's interesting how people's curiosity works. Maybe I just need a different file naming scheme. Heh.
Oh yeah, I haven't tested this at all in IE 4.x or IE 5.0, so if it's rendering weird, I'll have to tweak the HTML even more. Yes, I code for Netscape first, IE second.
Not to worry, if the colorschemes are giving you the heebie-jeebies, I'm working on some schemes that work better for cross-platform viewing, but aren't limited to the web-safe palette.
This is pretty cool. There's a company called Design Within Reach that does nothing but sell furniture for designers. We're talking loads of style here, folks.
I received so much interest in a NYC CamWorld Reader get-together, I've decided to also hold one in San Francisco the following week. Please use the form on this page to RSVP if you'd like to attend. This is a pretty new concept for me, but I'm always looking to meet people in person who I know online.
All of your comments about the new proposed design are really helping. I'm working on a solution that takes most of your comments into consideration. I think you'll all like the final outcome. Look for it soon.
I apologize for the lack of posts and original content recently. I've been swamped, both at work and at home.
Hey, I'm working on a new design for CamWorld. I want to get as much feedback on this new dynamically-rendering template as possible before I port the rest of the site to it. Please let me know if you have problems or experience any weird browser behaviors. Some of the graphics aren't finalized yet, like the cool little box in the logo. That's just a placeholder for something else.
As limiting as Apache's SSI commands are, I'm able to do a surprising amount of dynamic rendering.
From bendypig.com comes an interesting little essay about the Millennium.
I picked up a book this weekend at Borders. It's Fleeting Memories: Cognition of Brief Visual Stimuli by Veronika Coltheart, from MIT Press. I havent read it yet, but it looks simply fascinating, and may help me better understand the psychology behind interface design and metaphorical representation. There's also Shockwave-based visual cognition experiments at this supporting site, but I can't get them to load, even after I went and installed the most recent player.
Boycott Amazon. This call goes out as an attempt to bring attention to the ridiculousness of the "1-click shopping" patent Amazon was recently awarded. Because I work for a major Amazon.com competitor, all I can say is, "There have been meetings."
Parody: Internet For Assholes.
Somebody leaked the salaries of NYC's Agency.com employees. Oops!
Silicon Alley Daily also has the scoop on the Agency.com IPO and also mentions sweatshop conditions and high turnover. Hmmm.
The only sentence worth reading in this article: "One of the biggest seller of all in this millennium craze, millennium condoms by Durex. They've seen a dramatic increase in sales for the New Year." The typo is theirs.
NYC-Bound: I plan on being in the greater NYC area from December 27 to January 3. Because I don't want to spend more than one day following my brother around the city from job to job while he works, I expect to have some extra time to kill that week. I'm thinking about organizing a small CamWorld reader get-together for my NYC-area readers. If you're one of these people, please let me know if this would be something you'd be willing to do.
Tonight is our corporate Christmas party. Methinks it's going to be a dud, and I'll end up somewhere else.
Salon weighs in on the dot-com TV advertising push.
Smoke this!
Am I the only one who for two days now, has been getting an error message when trying to check Hotmail? I did a bit of testing and the error "The document contained no data" only surfaces when I'm using Netscape on a Mac and I have cookies set so no username/password entry is required. Netscape on my Win95 PC is able to get to Hotmail just fine. How long before Hotmail stops working in Netscape all-together?
Long-time CamWorld readers will remember how pitiful my softball team performed over the summer (we ended up losing every game). My bowling team is doing much better. Last week, we were in second place but totally blew it, so we'll likely drop to 4th or 5th. We don't care, though, because we just ordered matching bowling shirts from bowlingshirt.com (an example of how not to design an e-commerce site). We rock.
I'd like to rant and rave some more about how much I love Aimee Bender's work. So fresh! What's even cooler, though, is she emailed me a nice "thank you" note after I wrote a glowing review of her 1998 book, "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt."
One of the best articles on customer loyalty I've read in a long time. Jason Chervokas, you're my hero.
Request: A very good friend of mine asked me to help him find a high-quality headhunter who does new media placement. Please send me your headhunter horror stories, as well as your positive recommendations. I'll compile them into a page to appear on CamWorld sometime in the near future.
I have plenty of reasons not to be, but for some reason, I'm in a good mood today.
Yay! Lane finally has Monstro.com up and running. Expect good things.
Loads of web-based tools for doing spam and other Internet research.
Thought of the Day: "Go away, little boy."
Portrait of a Repressed Killer.
Epicentric.com, a portal startup in San Francisco, is working on a truly customizable portal -- based on a user profile. Here's some screenshots.
John Stevenson, who wrote a bunch of early eye-opening papers about Internet culture, has a personal web site/weblog at tranquileye.com.
Riffage.com is a site that attempts to rate many of the thousands of MP3s floating around the web. They also have a My Riffage section that lets you compile and share your own playlists. I bring this up because I was cleaning my apartment tonight and found a CD full of MP3s I picked up at one of the Bay Area get-togethers they sponsored during my last trip to San Francisco.
I've always been a fan of Amazon.com and what they've accomplished, but their new Holiday TV commercials totally suck. You'd think they could have dumped a couple million into creating a real TV ad campaign instead of the cheesy crap they're now airing. I'm speaking, of course, about the lame "choir" commercials where Amazon employees are singing in what sounds like an empty warehouse.
Expect sporadic connectivity to lots of weblogs tomorrow, or at least the ones that use Pair.com as their hosting provider (quite a few of us). Pair Networks is moving their entire operations center to a new facility. This move will affect CamWorld, so don't expect any updates tomorrow. You can track Pair's progress tomorrow at this URL: pair-is-moving.com.
Here's a great overview of BBDO/Canada's advertising for Chapters.ca, Pepsi-Cola, Daimler-Chrysler, and more.
Modem Junkie: Thoughts at the End of a Century.
Is a large portion of the Internet down today? I haven't been able to get to parts of Yahoo all day. Nor can I get to mtv.com or washingtonpost.com.
Monkey Bagel: Geek Fantasia and Suck Factor.
I want to know why searching for "wearing a monkey suit" on Altavista returnd a link to the main page of Mastercard.com. Is Altavista now randomly inserting links to companies who pay them, regardless of whether there is a relevant match to your query?
How to Turn OFF HTML or RTF in Various E-mail Software Programs.
CamWorld: Defining the Design and Production Process
You know you want to enter to win a trip to see the set of FOX's Ally McBeal TV show. (Site design by yours truly.) Reload any page to get another "Random McBealism."
Excellent. Sun is doing a Macintosh port of the popular StarOffice suite.
The alpha version of the Opera browser for the Mac should be ready by Christmas.
