I'm giving up trying to control or direct my social life for a while. Everyone has their own pulls, forces, motivations and needs. I'm just going to turn off the engines on this little spaceship and see where the strange forces take me. Maybe then they'll be happy.

Okay, so I did it! The logic took a looot of thinking through, but I've implemented 'new to you' color coding!

Here's how it works:

• The first time you come to the home page since I installed new to you, you get issued a static cookie. Initially, you're fully up to date, and nothing is 'new to you'.
• When new things get posted, they'll show up in the red color on your next visit. Things that are color-coded this way are the message title bars, the 'timeline' bar at the top of the page, and the little 'comment' circles associated with message blocks in the timeline.
• When you visit, look at the 'timeline' to see which messages have new comments since your last visit, and which messages are new since your last visit. you can click on either the message block or the comment circle to have the associated content spring forth.

Here's the slightly tricky part:

• If you visit the site and there's say, 4 new posts, and you follow a link and come back to the site, it would be a bad thing if the system decided that this was another visit, and thus all these things should be marked as read.
• With this in mind, I coded a system where a 'new visit' is made only if the home page view happens more than X minutes after your last home page view. Basically, if you look at the home page every minute, things that were new will keep showing up as new, but when you leave for X minutes and come back, the system will say everything that was posted since the last page view (not counting the current one) are new to you.
• This all sounds horribly complicated, but the point is that you-the-reader shouldn't have to think about it at all, and it should just work like you'd expect.
• 'X' is currently set to be 10 minutes, so as long as you look at the home page once every 10 minutes, Fury will think it's part of the same 'visit'.
• If you want to reset your 'last visit' timer by hand, click on the "New To You" link in the Legend navbar, top right. that will force everything to be marked as read, and will reload the home page.

Make sense? Yes? No? Don't worry about it. If I'm any good as an interaction designer, it should all make sense without my explaining it (except for the 'mark all' easter egg), but I like to keep you posted, and I'd like to hear what you think.

Okay, about half my trauma is eased, and about half remains. Ahh, feeling a little better.

Also, I replaced the flat color circles in the timeline with little crystal drops. Better? Worse? Too foofy?

Oh, and I'm not done with enhancements yet. Top of my list is to enable logins so you can be signed in on multiple machines sharing the same 'new to you' cookie, so it's truly 'new to you' instead of 'new to this browser.'

Also, re the Netscape font problem: eew! I think I know what's causing it, though why it should happen now makes no sense, unless Dreamhost changed the server config inexplicably... Anyhow, it should be working and pretty before I go to sleep.

The bad news is that the same problem seems to have brought down QWER. Fixing that may not be so easy.

It looks like California is finally caving. Starting next week, we'll be assigning numbers to all freeway exits startig with Hwy 101. Apparently federal law has required it for 40 years, and California is the last state to comply. I kind of liked it the old way...

I suppose they think our exit signs
need to be more specific...

Ack.

Late night at Yahoo! tonight, bumming around until Ammy was done with work, so we could go grab some dinner. Anyhow, dinner and a few games of air hockey later, I was driving home at around 10 pm. Driving on 237 east to the 880 junction, traffic suddenly screeched to a halt. the car in front of me was going 30 on the overpass right before the fork to the right to cloverleaf down into the freeway below and suddenly it was stopped, with me about two carlengths behind.

I slam the brake, trying to stop close to his bumper, to minimize the chance of my car losing traction, and to maximize the space for the car behind me. (I think about this kind of thing a lot, ever since I stopped with plenty of room just after the Bay Bridge four years ago and the car behind me slammed into my 3 month old car, resulting in a $13,000 repair bill (for a $16,000 car) and a few thousand in medical bills (for me. The other driver was fine, and the car (uninsured) that he was driving (without a license) wasn't even his).) Anyhow, I'm watching the rear-view for the car behind me, just waiting for the slam that doesn't come, and as I let my guard down I hear a screech-slam! of the car two behind me crashing into the car behind me. Then the car in front of me moves and I see that he didn't stop suddenly so much as he was stopped by the impact when he hit the car in front of him.

So basically, five cars: I'm car three, the middle car. Car one stops, car two hits car one. Car three (me) stops in time. Car five hits car four, and I'm the only one off scott free. Meanwhile car one decides to stop mostly in the lane, instead of getting off the bridge, to survey the damage, oblivious to the chain reaction that did and may still be going on behind cars four and five.

I wouldn't know. I got out of there, with flashes of What Dreams May Come and a Good Samaritan who got caught up in the midst of an ongoing accident going through my head.

The impacts were slow enough that I doubt anyone was seriously hurt, but blar.

Several years ago I saw a book at Barnes & Noble, "Who Wrote the Bible?" and I was compelled to buy it. Sadly, in the years hence I didn't have the same compellation to actually read the book, and it's sat on my bookcase all that time.

I was still intrigued enough by the subject though, that when I stumbled onto a concise analysis of Bible authorship theories in The Straight Dope, I read it.

Ever the king of the short attention span, I found this to be an excellent synopsis of a highly controvertial topic. If you're at all interested in the subject, this will let you learn in an hour what would otherwise take a semester, or at least many nights with a big fat book, to which you can turn if the article sparks more curiosity than it sates.

Note: The link goes to just the first segment of five, dealing with the authorship of the Five Books of Moses. The others address the Histories in the Old Testament, the Prophetic Books in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a chapter on who decided which books should be included and excluded from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Bibles.

Interesting reading. Oh, and in case anyone's terribly offended, the articles present both the religious and the academic viewpoints, without drawing conclusions.

The newest of the 'New Media':

On one side of the media spectrum we have professionally produced shows like the ABC Nightly News with Tom Brocaw. Towards the middle there's 'The Real World', 'Fear Factor' and 'Blind Date.' All the way at the indie end of the pool is The JenniShow. Now, take another 5 paces past Jenni into the uncharted gurrilla media jungle and you'll find The Ben Brown Show, an entirely independently produced, daily, two-minute quicktime talkshow, featuring Ben Brown. Last Tuesday Ben decided that, now that his wife has a new job and he's the only unemployed one, it was time to make good use of his Sony DV camcorder and iMac.

Be sure to go every day, because there aren't any archives and you wouldn't want to miss an installment!

One of my favorite things to do in the UC Berkeley library was to go to the archives of Scientific American and read issues that were sixty or even a hundred years old, seeing the fantastic tales of future technology like single-passenger helicopters that everyone will use for personal transport by 1950, or 'personal telegraphs' in everyone's home in our lifetime.

Along that vein, I present a thoroughly awful article on CNN today: "Antimatter could fuel rockets, heal patients."

It's not that the ideas presented are completely farfetched, it's that they don't give any premise for how it could happen. Sure, we can make a little antimatter, and now pundits are writing about how interstellar travel is 50 years away, while omitting the small problem of how an antimatter interstellar engine would work. It's as if the author suddenly stumbled on to antimatter and said "eureka!"

It reminds me of the South Park episode featuring the Underpants Gnomes, and their plan for world domination:

1. Steal Underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

I'm sure the people working on the problem are a little more serious, but I'm just thinking about the kid digging through internet archives 100 years from now who sees this article and just giggles and turns the e-page.

When I was in elementary and secondary school, I always figured I'd be married by the time I was 21. When I was 21 I figured by 26. Now I'm 28 years old, and I don't have a date (by which I figure I'll be married, that is). Sure I want to find my soulmate. More than anything else maybe, but marriage is no longer one of those benchmarks like getting a masters degree or buying a house, by which I mark the future path of my life.

Yesterday, Emily passed along an article she found on ABC News, talking about "urban tribes" and marriage trends. This story absolutely hits my nail on the head. Clusters of friends make up my life, and give it meaning, to the point where having a spouse isn't a requisite for personal happiness.

I wonder how much the car, the phone, urban overcrowding, and the Internet have to do with this trend? Where your friends used to be those who lived near you, now the umbrella is so much bigger. I actually believe my friends are the result of a dragnet through the SF Bay and Sacramento, instead of people in my dorm hall. Maybe that's why I cherish them so much.

Wow, more readers than usual, but nobody's commenting. Am I being boring? Are you guys busy? Shy? Lurking?