100 Years of Nausea

Grok Headline matches for 100 Years of Nausea

Concerning Naked Lunch: Part 2 - Nausea
and Irony

Concerning Naked Lunch: Part 2 - Nausea
and Irony 06/05/2005 10:54 PM
 This is the second in a series of essays about the book Naked Lunch, designed to introduce the book properly to new readers. Generally, people hear about the life of William Burroughs before they read any of his work. The goal of these essays is to point out the more important aspects of the work, rather than the man. This essay will deal with the use of irony and satire in Burroughs' work, and the way he uses them to highlight the hypocrisy of his time.

Weightless trip yields thrills and
nausea (Reuters)

Weightless trip yields thrills and
nausea (Reuters) 09/15/2004 12:22 AM
Reuters - Fancy an aeroplane trip that takes you nowhere, costs about 1,670 pounds and may make you vomit?

Software That Lasts For Years And Years

Software That Lasts For Years And Years 07/14/2004 06:51 PM
We were just talking about the rise of quick and dirty programs as a way for individuals (not necessarily programmers) to solve specific needs. However, as was mentioned at the time, that would be a different "tier" of software programming, and there would still be a need for programmers to do higher level "big" projects. In the past, we've also discussed the problem of data extinction, where old computer systems and formats die out, leaving content and applications virtually useless on ancient media. This is a big problem for many applications, and Dan Bricklin is now suggesting that people need to start designing "Societal Infrastructure Software" that can last for centuries, not just a few years. The idea is that this type of software shouldn't have to worry about new computers or new formats or new anything... but will be able to just keep on working. In order to build this, though, Bricklin believes it will require embracing open source programming, though not necessarily the way people view open source programming today. It's a fascinating concept, but getting people to think long-term is so difficult these days, that you wonder if such ideas will actually catch on.

Six years!

Six years! 04/09/2004 04:11 PM
Time is flying by so quickly these days, so I didn't notice on March 14th that this weblog is now six years old. Except for the basics (eating, sleeping, remaining alive), I've never stuck with anything for six years straight, so it's hard for me to believe I'm still here doing this. Six years!...

Five Years, That's All We've Got

Five Years, That's All We've Got 12/13/2003 11:02 PM
Much has changed at evolt.org over its five years. Much has not. We are the change we want to see in the world.

10 years

10 years 06/05/2005 11:06 PM
On his site's tenth anniversary, Zeldman thanks you for the memories.

Seven years

Seven years 03/19/2005 02:37 AM

I started kottke.org seven years ago this week. I forget the anniversary until after the fact every year even though I know it's sometime in March (for whatever reason almost everything important in my life has happened in March, at least for the last few years). Seven years is way longer than I would have guessed keeping the site going on a near-daily basis...it's the longest I've ever done anything, even longer than all but a handful of friendships. So happy birthday, old friend, it's been fun. (0sil8 started in March as well...nine years ago.)

Five years

Five years 01/22/2004 02:36 AM
Meg just wrote and pointed out that Pyra was incorporated five years ago today.

4AD - The First 20 Years (brief)

4AD - The First 20 Years (brief) 04/14/2004 06:22 AM
An illustrated history of 4AD Records

fedge.net/~desiderata/4ad20.html
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"three to four years old."

"three to four years old." 08/03/2004 02:42 PM

Four more years

Four more years 12/19/2004 03:55 PM
Bush is reelected President of the United States of America. Four more years of abuse, torture, murder, ignorance and selfishness will follow.

10 Years Ago

10 Years Ago 12/30/2004 04:35 AM

OK - so I didn't mark this exactly with an October 12th anninversary - but it was 10 years ago that Dave Winer first 'blogged' me - rapping out my Marc's 10 Things.

In honor of this auspicious anniversary - I'd like to comment on or update many of these claims on things that the media should be covering on Multimedia and Interactive TV but isn't.

I wrote (in 1994):

Interactive Music Videos

1. Interactive Liner notes are great. Repackaged old music is fine, but MediaBand has started a new category - called Interactive Music Videos - which are original pieces that combine songs, music videos and videogames. It's a new artform that breaks down the barrier between artist, musician and programmer.

I was in the midst of pushing our 'MediaBand' interactive music video ensemble in 1994 - which put out a CD ROM, performed live, had a screenplay and had it'sd own broadband network to interact with folks - in real-time.

So I was seriously into brow beating all my colleagues who simply licensed Bob Dylan or Prince and cranked out shitty ass CD ROMs. To me - that really missed the essence of what was possible combining, music, video and interactivity.

To this day, this new artform is just kind of bubbling beneath the surface - not really making it out. Dance Dance Revolution is the sign of times - now.

BTW a young artist named Moby took some of our MediaBand Director files and added his own artwork and music to it. :-)

Kid's Content

2. Kids today see the twitchy-ness of Nintendo and they see the production values of MTV. Multimedia today is neither. We need to combine the interactivity of Nintendo with the production values of MTV.

This area certainly has matured and grown. We were in the videogame business back in '81-'83, but we never dreamed that gaming would be so 'off the hook' - as it is today.

But Mimi (my daughter) has a great time playing with the Barbie fashion Designer software - and Dora the Explorer rocks. So I'd say this category has fulfilled it's destiny. At least so far.

CD ROMs

3. We didn't call it a floppy disk industry, so how come it's a CD ROM industry? In fact CD ROM [mentality] is holding back the creativity and growth of the entire interactive digital media industry.

Just take out CD ROM and insert 'web'. Same problem exists today. This is why we have CMSs.

I call the solution to this challenge "scalable content". In fact we were using this term way back in '94. Marqui outputs scalable content - BTW.

So CMSs have matured and we don't have to convince folks to de-couple their content from their form anymore. Thank goodness.

Scalable Content

4. Scalable content is an important concept when developing interactive media today. You don't want to design yourself into a corner, letting the technology define the content. Ideally you'd let the content define the technology. Scalability means downsizing through compression, it means user interfaces that work with both single and multiple users, it means getting ready for Interactive TV.

OK - so I just correlated how CD ROMs 'holding back' creativity were similar to what happened with 'the web'. And I said that we called that Scalable Content.

Now let's take my definition of Scalable Content (back then in '94) and extend that to mean 'dynamic user interfaces' - that adjust themselves to who you are, what level of technology you feel comfortable with and what content you've created yourself.

It's amazing to me to read what I said in 1994, and see how these words influenced my thoughts and ideas over the past 10 years and how some of these ideas remain unchanged, while others have morphed and adapted themselves to world today.

The word 'scalability' is just so malleable that you can twist and turn it to mean anything you want it to mean. But is IT clear - that us humans need to be in charge much more of our user experiences - and THAT's a key part of 'activity based computing'.

Audio

5. The classic line is "Audio is the orphan child of multimedia" - why do people still say this? What is behind the hodge-podge of audio - especially on the PC? How come it's taken so long for manufacturers to include audio on their motherboards? In 1984 it was $3 in parts!

MIDI II?

6. What about MIDI? How many people know what that is? Why isn't there an advanced MIDI format in place? The original MIDI frequency standard (32k) is based a 1Mhz crystal readily available in 1982.But what's the problem today? Why hasn't MIDI evolved and grown?

RAM

7. RAM apparently is not following along the path of Moore's Law. The price is still where it was 5 years ago and systems are suffering. Today MPC II is still speced at only 4M - MediaBand needs 8M. Standard business systems should have at least 16M TODAY!

Tee Hee Hee.

You see I'm a musician by training and we put out the first music product for computers that had a piano timeline notational system, qurter note and eigth notes and a piano and real-time interaction. That was 1984.

So 10 years after that - in 1994 - I was bitching about.... well it's now 10 years later and we still don;t have clean audio solved. But we're getting pretty close. Podcastign is evidence of that.

Time stamp - Dec. 2004 - $60 for a 128M MP3 player. Retail price.

MIDI II got usurped by all sorts of things - including OSC - I keynoted at their conference this summer.

Amd I just love to see Shawn Fanning appear in "The Italian Job" and just adore the notion that Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com for $5.6B.

All this is evidence that they'll be plenty more Googles, Netscapes and Eminems.

Set top tests waste of time?

8. The whole industry hopped when John Malone announced he was going to deploy one million set top boxes with MPEG chips in them. Once it became clear that he was practicing FUD, everyone backed off of their predictions, delayed their test trials and are now waiting for the next thing to react to. The tests going on (or planned to start soon) are not based upon the same technology or even marketing premises. What good will these tests do? Will any of these tests actually grow into a real service network.

Interactive Commercials

9. What exactly is an Interactive TV commercial. Lots of people talk about it, but no one does them.

This one is dedicated to Om Mailk. I hope to see him tomorrow night at the Geek Dinner.

I spent allot of the 90's waiting for and explaining why set top boxes suck. They still do. Oh well.

Set top boxes have always been a kind of thorn in my side. In fact I hope to get a Comcast PVR setup in time for the Alias 2 hour season premiere on Jan. 5th. Wanna guess how long it'll take to get?

And the Interactive Ads future - is in John Battelle's able hands. Search meets ads in the valley of the targeted consumer. It's finally here.

Support?

10. Where's the support? As the industry moves towards 900 # support and low priced consumer software, what happens to support? Dealers obviously can't supply it. Is this a new growth market?

Well we're still looking for good Support.

I don't think that will ever change.

OK - so that's it - my 10 year update. I hope you enjoyed it.

Also - how symbolic that Dave's post show's my old Applelink address which went back to 1985. We were the 10th Mac developer. That's why I was D0010.

74 Years Old

74 Years Old 08/05/2004 11:29 PM
"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is denied." Hours later, James Hubbard is injected with lethal chemicals and dies in Atmore, Alabama. Hubbard , convicted of a 1977 murder, was 74 years old, demented, and retarded. File this one under "it's not cruel and unusual if you don't know what's happening to you."

Five years, one day

Five years, one day 01/22/2004 02:19 PM

Yesterday I realized it has been five years since Evan and I founded Pyra, the company that led to Blogger. We used to have a company weblog called pyrAlert! (actually the software we wrote to publish pyrAlert! was what lead to the creation of Blogger). This morning Paulo wrote to point out that pyrAlert! is still online and you can go back into the archives and read what was going on at Pyra in 1999. You may also notice that there are no permalinks on any of the posts, because these posts were made BP, or before permalink! It's funny to see the kind of stuff we used to write about.

Five years!

Five years! 03/19/2003 10:24 PM
The first post to this weblog was made on March 14, 1998, making it five years old last week. I'm trying to recall where all

Three Years Since

Three Years Since 09/12/2004 04:38 PM
I left work on September 10th at 9:00 PM. An hour before, my coworker was getting nervous. She was leaving on a trip to Italy on the 12th and wanted to meet me at 8:30 AM on the 11th to go over what projects of hers I needed to steer in her absence. I rolled my eyes and complained that no one schedules meetings at 8:30 in the morning, and convinced her to postpone the meeting to 10:00 AM.

Three Years On

Three Years On 09/11/2004 09:19 AM
Three Years On A sobering analysis by Juan Cole of the strategic motivation behind 9/11.

Two Years

Two Years 06/17/2005 06:08 PM
... ago today, the Pie wiki was created.  During that period, we had interminable naming discussions, a lengthy process of selecting a standards body, endless discussion on dates, and a last call. One week from today, format-09 is scheduled to be reviewed by the IESG.

Are You Better Off Now Than You Were
Four Years Ago?

Are You Better Off Now Than You Were
Four Years Ago? 09/11/2004 12:25 PM
Stop being economic girly-men .. statistics never lie

buzzflash.com/areyoubetteroff
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"Four more years of hell"

"Four more years of hell" 08/03/2004 10:51 AM

20 years of the Macintosh

20 years of the Macintosh 12/09/2003 08:41 PM
In 1984, Apple released one of the most expensive and effective commercials of all time during the SuperBowl. This commercial introduced the Macintosh, a revolutionary new concept in personal computing, to the world. In January of next year, the Macintosh will celebrate its 20th anniversary, and it is probable Apple will do something spectacular to celebrate this impressive milestone.

evolt.org - Three and a Bit Years On

evolt.org - Three and a Bit Years On 05/23/2002 10:39 PM

Groove, four years later

Groove, four years later 05/04/2004 12:25 PM
I recently met with Groove's Jack Ozzie and Michael Helfrich. Jack is a co-founder and VP, development; Michael is VP, applied technology. The subject, of course, was the forthcoming V3 of Groove, a product I first saw in beta four years ago this spring. We had a wide-ranging discussion; here are some of the key takeaway points. ...

Bob Edwards: 30 Years on NPR

Bob Edwards: 30 Years on NPR 05/01/2004 03:41 AM
A tribute to Bob Edwards from the people who kicked him upstairs .. Bob Edwards: 30 Years on NPR .. Those bastards

npr.org/about/specials/bedwards
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30 years of the internet

30 years of the internet 01/01/2004 01:03 AM
BBC Jan 1 2004 0:16AM ET

Copyright in Eight Years

Copyright in Eight Years 08/05/2004 01:50 AM
So today copyright scholar Joe Liu at Boston College asked a room full of law professors an interesting question. What did we think copyright would look like in 8 years? Here were some of the main categories of predictions (some contradict):...

Columbine, five years later

Columbine, five years later 04/20/2004 08:39 AM
The kids who survived the worst school massacre in U.S. history have graduated, and some of them have even forgiven. But many of their parents have not.

5 Stocks for the Next 10 Years

5 Stocks for the Next 10 Years 07/30/2004 03:17 PM
Bill Nygren shares why he stands behind these solid stocks.

No Accidents in Over 30,000 Years!

No Accidents in Over 30,000 Years! 04/04/2005 06:28 PM
Pro-forma nuclear safety is harder than ever to sell. There's ass-kissing to the sci-fi community (.pdf, download it), the instructional video (warning, boring .wmv, > 12 mins long). But... The design lifetimes of Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant won't protect future generations from groundwater absorbing transuranic waste (Pu239 and like toxins, deadly when ingested for 240,000 years). Do you have this stuff in your back yard today, and how will it get there safely? On top of that, the capacity problem, which looks intractable as long as we keep relicensing plants. If I didn't know better, I assume the only way the government could succeed in getting this done would be to hoodwink us.

MUGs look at 20 years of Mac ads

MUGs look at 20 years of Mac ads 07/28/2004 10:58 AM
Two Mac User Groups (MUGs) have scheduled a presentation called "Twenty Mac Years: The History of the Macintosh Through the Advertisements of Apple" to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Mac...

One guy doing five jobs for nine years

One guy doing five jobs for nine years 04/01/2005 12:25 PM

Driving down here to Richmond, Virginia I was listening to an audio version of Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed, a book about how tough it is for the unskilled laborer in the U.S. and how many of these folks must work two jobs to make ends meet.  Upon arriving here, I found one of my teachers, Rob Roberts, working five jobs simultaneously and having done so for nine years.

In a big metropolitan area the TV station helicopter is a monstrous Bell 407 with four blades and enough horsepower from a single turbine to move the Queen Mary.  The 407 carries a pilot who worries only about flying the aircraft and talking occasionally to Air Traffic Control, a camera operator who points the camera at interesting events on the ground, an engineer who makes sure that the camera and video/audio communications links to the station are working properly, and the "talent", a person with a good wardrobe and make-up whose voice and image skill out into viewers' living rooms.

Richmond is a smaller city and only Channel 12 (NBC) even has a helicopter.  In the afternoons Rob Roberts fires up the HeloAir Jet Ranger and does all four of the jobs that are being done by four separate people in a big city Bell 407.  On days when he is unlucky some neophyte like me gets in and he now has to add a fifth job: flight instructor.

This is one of the things that I like about aviation.  One is very often pleasantly surprised at the supercompetence of the people involved at every level.  The mechanics are craftsmen.  The pilots usually have an impressive range of other skills.  The young ladies at the front desk of Richmond Jet Center are smarter, friendlier, kinder to a wayward Samoyed, and better looking than people working service jobs anywhere else in the city.  How many other fields can we say this about?  The one with which I have the most experience is software engineering.  Despite the higher pay, I would say that the average denizen of the software world is not supercompetent, though often he views himself as such, and the customers are not typically pleasantly surprised.

This will seem quaint 10 years from now

This will seem quaint 10 years from now 07/19/2004 03:06 PM
Wouldn't it be great if you could get the weather from a poorly synthesized computer-generated voice? Well, now you can. Call 1-888-573-8255 and ask Jupiter what the weather is like, or will be like, for nearly any city you want. (via Cool Tools)

My Marvel Years

My Marvel Years 04/29/2004 05:01 AM
My Marvel Years. [via, via]

Big Fat Lies, two years later

Big Fat Lies, two years later 07/15/2004 01:27 PM
Low-carb jumps the shark? More than half of all Americans who've tried low-carb diets have given up, a new survey found. Is this the latest indication that the Atkins fad has peaked? Two years ago this month, Gary Taubes kicked it off with a NYT Magazine cover story arguing that emerging science proved Atkins right and the nurtition establishment wrong. A couple small, short-term studies released shortly thereafter seemed to show he was on to something. But there were problems with the "Big Fat Lie" piece: CNN found that three of the researchers Taubes cited completely disagreed with his main premise. Worse, it turned out Taubes had claimed low-fat diets don't work while ignoring the vast body of peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary, and more of his sources came forward to say things like "I was greatly offended by how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins diet. I think he’s a dangerous man. I’m sorry I ever talked to him." [More Inside]

Ten years of mapping

Ten years of mapping 04/27/2004 06:55 PM

I'm posting this mostly as a reminder to myself to look into this: Tagging photos to GPS data tracks.

Apparently he got this working with a digital rebel like mine, a powerbook, and a $300 GPS unit. I'd love to have a map of the world at the end of my Ten Years project, populated with locations where all 3,650 images were taken.

Ari Fleischer: Still saying nothing
after all these years

Ari Fleischer: Still saying nothing
after all these years 03/14/2005 06:14 PM
The former Bush White House press secretary's memoir is long on praise for his boss and criticism of the "liberal" media, and short on revelations.

Ichiro: four more years

Ichiro: four more years 12/18/2003 03:43 PM
Ichiro agreed to a new four-year deal with the Mariners. Whew!

Yahoo! is ten years old

Yahoo! is ten years old 03/14/2005 04:24 PM

Yahoo! turned ten years old this week which makes me feel like I'm about ready for the retirement home. As part of their celebration, they put up a copy of their home page from 1995. I poked around a little and found a copy from December 1994 from when the site was still hosted at Stanford on a server called akebono. To do it up right, download an early version of Mosaic or Netscape, change your screen resolution to 640x480 with 256 colors, and surf the page that way. Just don't blame me if you get all weepy after seeing the gray background and pulsing N in the corner of the browser.

Note: I have no idea if any of these browsers will even work on OS X or Windows XP...you might need to dust off that 486 running Win95 or a 7100 running System 8.

Firebird At 20 Years

Firebird At 20 Years 09/06/2004 11:00 AM
Slashdot Sep 6 2004 3:14PM GMT
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100 Years of Nausea

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