April 5, 2005
Happy blogday to me.
Five years and just over 1,800 posts ago, I began to jot down bits and snippets in a weblog. This weblog, in fact. Reflecting on this anniversary, I’ve come to the stark realization that one hell of a lot of text (based on opinion, fact, self-reflectance, or what have you…) has been tapped out through these fingertips. Has my focus changed? Not really. What was being served on the daily menu way back when? Here are a few choice cuts from my very first month of vintage bloggery. On domain names…
Tuesday, April 18, 2000 — “In the self serving, random mention department, I noticed while parsing my referrer log (just try using that line at a party…) that my domain name of the week is ‘pretty frickin awesome’ according to GeekLife. Gosh, I’m feeling so parsed now, I think I’m blushing.”
On user interface…
Thursday, April 20, 2000 — “Jakob Nielsen gets another 1,700 words of fame on adobe.com under the somewhat oxymoronic subhead ‘Web curmudgeon, voice of the user’. Hopefully it’s not just me, but I really prefer to have someone other than a ‘curmudgeon’ representing my usability fears and online anxieties, thank you very much.”
On browsers…
Thursday, April 20, 2000 — “With the recent rash of revamped browsers making their debut, an article at Webmonkey entitled Bittersweet Releases offers a bit of used car lot commentary on the current trend of buffing up the browser chrome, hoping that no once notices that the engines are missing.”
On Macintosh…
Monday, April 17, 2000 — “Computerworld reports that millions of obsolete PCs enter the waste stream each year. I am convinced that this is the real reason that the calculated market share of Windows-based PCs is so huge. I’ll agree that the raw number of Windows boxes is significantly larger than that of the Macintosh installed based, but the numbers are inflated because Macs stay in use longer and are not obsoleted en masse like their inferior counterparts are. Is my bias showing yet?”
On Microsoft…
Monday, April 24, 2000 — “Microsoft’s buns are smack dab in the middle of the furnace this week, and everybody and their dog wants a turn at cranking up the thermostat. Does anyone believe that something like divesting Office is actually going to happen? As much as I love to see them sweat profusely from every pore, my gut says that they’ll get off with not much more than a nasty burp in their valuation.”
On Newton…
Wednesday, April 19, 2000 — “InfoNewt, my news bucket of choice covering left-for-dead digital assistants, mentioned that work has resumed on hacking together a WaveLan driver for the Newton. Hiroshi Noguchi of Driver Labo has already reverse engineered code for previously unsupported ethernet cards, and now he’s taking on the same wireless hardware that’s used in Apple’s networkadelic AirPort. Technically, if this thing works, I’ll be able to serve web pages off my Newton wirelessly from anywhere in the office. How cool is that?”
On typography…
Tuesday, April 18, 2000 — “A gorgeous new type site typophile.com has just been launched that will please even the most persnickety fontheads. Lovingly built with a bucketload of Flash by Jared Benson, and chock full of delicious instructional goodness prepared by the one and only Jonathan Hoefler, typophile.com is aiming to be a vast resource of all things technical, æsthetic, motivational, discussable, and kernable relating to type design and type designers. Yum.”
Shall we review? After five years of near-daily blathering, contextualizing, ranting and linking, the current state of equivalent affairs reads like this… The domain name of the week is still very much around. Jacob Nielsen (and his site) still get under my skin. Browsers have developed into a slightly less annoying day-to-day adventure. Macintosh, love. Newton, love. Typophile, love. And if nothing else, Microsoft has been a constant stitch in my side — excelling in its ability to both entertain and aggravate the hell out of me. Five more years of entertainment and aggravation anyone? Why not?
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