fox@fury
broken System - Redux
Sunday, Apr 01, 2001
So the drive wouldn't come up after booting from a system CD, so I'm off to the student store to buy a copy of Norton Utilities (wouldn't it be nice if you only had to pay for it if it worked? I'll be pretty pissed if I have to pay $60 for disk recovery software that doesn't work...).

Oh yeah, and I wish this were just an April fools.

The Southwest Story
Saturday, Mar 31, 2001
Okay, it's after Thursday night now, so I can tell this story:

I was flying home to Berkeley from Burbank on Tuesday and overheard the person sitting in front of me (window seat) talking to the older man on the aisle and the woman in the center. It seems that the guy was flying up to Portland, solely so he could catch a plane on Thursday night going from Portland, through San Jose, and back to Burbank. Specifically, he needed to be on the plane in San Jose before people boarded because his girlfriend was taking that flight to visit him in Burbank, and he planned on serenading her (guitar and voice) on the plane as she boarded, and asking her to marry him! I haven't seen The Wedding Singer, but apparently this is where the idea came from.

The people in front of me spent the rest of the flight having the most interesting, mature conversation about marriage, a man who's been married for 20 years, a woman who's been married for two, and this man who's about to propose (apparently for the second time. I don't know what happened to the first fiancee).

All in all it was more interesting than my book. My favorite part was when the older man asked him what he thought she'd say. The guy (okay, so the cast of characters in this story seems to be 'the guy', 'the woman' and 'the older man') anyhow, the guy says that he and his girlfriend decide everything, where to go out to eat, what movie to rent, all that, by playing gin rummy, and winner's way goes. He's pretty confident that her response to his proposal will be 'Get the deck.'

Later I asked him if he'd considered stacking the deck, but he said if he wins he wins, and if he loses he probably wins anyhow. Personally, I'm curious whether the girlfriend would say yes if she won, or if she'd play to lose.

Anyhow, cute story and I wanted to share it with you. I didn't want to say earlier because a few different experiences lately have shown how remarkably well info can travel from this weblog to a reader and on to someone else who the entry directly applies to, and I didn't want to wreck his surprise. I just hope the flight wasn't oversold and the girlfriend wasn't enticed to take a later flight with a $200 coupon!

Also, later that evening I had dinner with Rick and Ammy, showing up a little late, and apparently missing just an interesting conversation they overheard between two older women about the evolution and comparative nature of Christianity and Judaism. After the women finsihed their meal Rick confessed how much he enjoied thier conversation. He even gave one of them his email address, so maybe they could all continue the conversation!

Daylight Savings tonight
Saturday, Mar 31, 2001
Hey folks in the US, don't forget to set your clocks forward tonight. Daylight Savings is upon us!
Check out Metacookie!
Friday, Mar 30, 2001
Okay, so I've given a few oblique references to metacookie, my latest project to distract me from finishing cameo I mean randompixel.

Now metacookie is firmly in its first round of testing, and so I'll tell you what it's all about. After all, I want your help!

Metacookie is basically a tool to help people who read several sites that update on an irregular basis (weblogs, news sites, internal business sites, whatever). The way it works for the user is like this: Whenever you see a site that uses metacookie (you can tell because their main page will have a little metacookie 'badge' somewhere on it), that site is automatically added to your list of sites at metacookie. It also makes note of the latest 'edition' of the site you've read. Now you can go to metacookie and it will show you a list of all the metacookie-enabled sites you read and, most importantly, it will show you which ones have new content since the last time you were there.

You can think of it like the folders in your email client, where you can see which ones have unread messages. Basically, when the site publisher makes an update, they follow a bookmark to metacookie and it updates its records.

What this means to the typical reader is, once more sites are metacookie-enabled (just 10 for the beta test, but likely several hundred within the next month or so), you can make your browsing experience much more efficient, and you can just keep a metacookie 'remote' window open on your desktop, letting you know when things change, instead of site-surfing all day, hitting reload 'till the button wears out.

So, after all that, I need to add that the current beta is just about bare functionality. There's no design or even information architecture applied yet. I'll be practicing what I preach in designing this site and will be preforming a contextual inquiry, creating a few personas, a task analysis matrix, competitive analysis, and all the rest, to create a highly usable, unencumbered, yet elegant solution. and of course I'll try to get it out as quickly as possible.

For now, go to Metacookie and check out some of the other beta-testing sites. email me with comments, bugs, or suggestions, and I'll keep you in the loop!

As always, thanks for your help.

Blogger Block
Thursday, Mar 29, 2001
Blogging is weird. If you stop for a day or two, it almost feels intimidating to start again. Not to worry though, I do have a slew of interesting tales to tell, but I'm getting really close to getting the Metacookie beta out the door to the testers, so I'm devoting energy there at the moment. I have a bunch of stuff to blog tomorrow though!

Also, my heart goes out to all the 'Blogger' bloggers out there, and to Ev, as evan is battling the Blogger Database tooth and nail. May justice and SQL-wrangling prevail Evan!

marchFUCKED
Wednesday, Mar 28, 2001
So that sucking sound you're hearing is the brain trust taking off (well, being laid-off) from marchFIRST, leaving a vacuum of empty cubicles and tattered office supplies in its wake.

I already have two friend who have been let go in recent months, Ernie and Ken, and now it looks like East and West coast operations will completely shut down, possibly within the week, which means Karen will be joining the enforced exodus as well. The irony is (now I have to pause and think every time I use the word.. um, yep. It is irony in this case) Anyhow, the irony is that those who stayed on to the end will likely only get 2 weeks of severance pay, while those laid off earlier get 2 months. My friend Ernie, who left around March 8th, gets paid through May 8th, while Karen may only get paychecks through April 15th, despite having worked nearly a month more. C'est la vie.

Anyhow, this will likely mark the final scene in the ongoing USWeb saga. Five years ago I started working for a company called Ikonic Interactive on a contract assignment for a year. Shortly after I left to go work at CKS Partners, Ikonic was bought by USWeb and absorbed. A year later, USWeb and CKS merge to form reinvent USWeb/CKS. Shortly after that I took off, as management was getting boneheaded and two of my favorite people had gone off to start their own new company, Eleven Inc. Then came the Whitman & Hart merger (side note, for a long time I got Whitman & Hart confused with Wolfram & Hart, the fictitious super-evil law firm on Angel), and the renaming to marchFIRST (or m1 for short).

Anyhow, one of the rumors is that this is nothing so much as a messy divorce, or more accurately, uxoricide, as the bi-coastal operations that were USWeb/CKS will be killed, while the inland ops will quite possibly reform as Whitman & Hart.

Anyhow, you know you're in trouble when your stock has fallen from $80 a share to 13 cents, and Nasdaq halts trading until the company can give them further data on their viability as a company.

Further bulletins will follow, I'm sure...

Cool Southwest Story - Embargoed
Wednesday, Mar 28, 2001
I have a cool story to recount from my flight back up to Berkeley yesterday, but I have to embargo the tale until late tomorrow, because of a time-sensitive issue and the extremely remote chance toat information travels too quickly and too accurately.
Breaking 'The Rules'
Tuesday, Mar 27, 2001
Back when I used to work for CKS Partners (later USWeb/CKS and marchFIRST), I used to have a coworker we called Sondra-dot-com. Notable for being a fair hand with javascript, she was also an intense believer in The Rules, the bizarro-feminist manifesto on how to get a man and keep him.

How bizarro? Well, go to Sondra's site and play 'the rules' home game. (note: the site is down for renovation, so you can't see it. Suffice to say it's a version of javascripted 'date-roulette' where good things give you positive points and bad things give you negative, only the bad things far outweigh the good, meaning anyone who plays the game will invariably lose in a romantic Kobiyashi Maru that is probably the most realistic portion of the entire site).

Anyhow, I bring this up because of a story I read in SFGate this morning, mentioning that the author of "The Rules" and "The Rules of Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work" has filed for divorce.

Looks like nobody has the real answers, or if they do, the real answers aren't entertaining enough to make it to the Washington Post's bestseller list...

No time for AOL
Monday, Mar 26, 2001
So a couple years ago Swatch came up with the idea of 'Internet Time' where everyone in the world is in the same time zone, measured by metric 'beats' (a thousand a day). It didn't take off in a lot of places though, notably, the CNN and Apple home pages used to post the current internet time, but neither do anymore.

Meanwhile, AOL UK is trying what's been labeled by many within the company as a PR stunt, asking their employees not to bring watches to work, and cover all clocks, on phones, walls, and computer screens, to determine whether it creates a more relaxed work environment.

It turns out that the employees are more stressed than usual, concerned about being late for phone calls, appointments, and meetings with people in organizations that aren't time-hobbled.

Me, I'd take it in the spirit it was intended, go in to work when it feels like I should be there, and leave when it felt like I shouldn't be there. The whole program was apparently created by the marketing department at AOL UK, so I wouldn't feel any compulsion that I 'should feel' any certain way about the program. After all, a feeling of temporal indebtedness (this term could mean several differnt things and I should explain what I mean, but I'm both lazy and late, and the ambiguity seems to fit the story) would make any honest analysis of the stressing or destressing completely meaningless.

I wonder if AOL management would feel more or less stressed if their employees were happier, but only worked 5 hour days (or nights)?

Anyhow, I'm still in Los Angeles, where watches are second only to cars, and computers are much farther down the list, after cellphones but before palm pilots. But I'll be back tomorrow...

Isn't it ironic?
Saturday, Mar 24, 2001
So I was thinking today... What's the dictionary term for irony? Reality Bites and Websters define irony as when the expressed meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning.

Of course, you've probably heard people bitch (or you've bitched yourself) that the Alanis Morissette song "Isn't it Ironic?" gets it completely wrong, because none of the incidents detailed in the song (dying and wining the lotto the next day, meeting the man of your dreams and then seeing his beautiful wife, etc.) are actually examples of irony, but are instead examples of misfortune, bad timing, or just dumb luck.

So I was thinking, since the song is titled "Isn't it Ironic" and implies irony, yet actually delivers the opposite, i.e. literal anecdotes, doesn't that make the title "Isn't it Ironic?" in and of itself a perfect example of irony?

I guess that either makes Alanis a victim of irony or, in the off chance that it's what she intended from the start, it makes her God.

  
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Hi, I'm Kevin Fox.
I've been blogging at Fury.com since 1998.
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