I wanted to give a big thanks to the three people who responded to my plea a couple weeks ago for a tape of the West Wing season premiere, especially one anonymous reader from New York who mailed his copy out to me! Thank you!

Now don't I feel like an ass. My TiVo didn't record it this week either, because it wasn't listed either in TiVo's memory or in the TV Guide. Very, very frustrating.

So: As a thank you to Mr NY who sent me his tape, I'm sending back two Cameo cameras along with his tape. I'd like to do the same for anyone who happened to record last night's ep and is willing to let me borrow it. I'll pay postage. Anyone in the bay area record West Wing last night? Anyone anywhere? Taunt me.

I feel like such a schmoe... Hey, at least it gets Cameo cameras out there!

Heck, I'd planned on taking at least a month to learn pi to 100 decimal places, learning a couple digits each day, but it turned out to be easier than I thought. Rather than hurdle headlong into a project that literally has no end, I think I'll stop now, and maybe learn another hundred in a month or two...

Ho, hum. Let's see, working on simultaneous redesigns of the AOLiza page and the Cameo site. The funky horizontal layout of AOLiza doesn't scale well now that there are over 40 convos online. I have it all planned out, but I'm still coding the global, cross-site navigation to make everything nice and ultra-modular. Once that's done there are a lot more features I'll be able to put in to the weblog, including a search function for entries, and a bunch of other stuff.

When, you ask? Well, I'm guessing the reworked AOLiza will go up by midnight tonight, and Cameo by this weekend. I should really stop giving cameo estimates, shouldn't I? Peter has chided me for letting redesigns inhibit content publishing, and he's absolutely right. Hey, at least I'm writing in here!

It bugs the hell out of me that Mac OS 9 assumes that I'm asleep at midnight. It must, because it always chooses midnight to try to index my hard drives. Despite the fact that every night I hit cancel within seconds of it trying to tie up my computer, it doesn't learn that maybe 4am or 6am would be a better time. So much for computers that learn and adapt to their users...

At long last, I've put up 12 new AOLiza conversations tonight. There are two absolutely fabulous pieces in there. Hopefully within the next day or so you'll be able to tell which they are by the voting score.

Not that I expect anyone to care (but you never know!) I'm posting my daily pi memorization log to keep track of my progress to pointlessness.

There's so much on the presentation and peer-pressure in the AmIHOTorNOT experience that I decided to run a little test. A little while ago Victor Johnson conducted an experiment to find the 'ideal' caucasian face. I took the resulting face and added it to AmIHOTorNOT. Let's take a look and see how much the cynical mediu of amIHOTorNOT afects the outcome.

For the sake of the experiment, please don't vote on this pic, as you're already biased one way or another. I'll post back in a day or two what her score is. Thanks!

In my idle time (heh, right) I'm trying to memorize pi to 100 decimal places, because frankly I don't think I'm geeky enough. (although I'm not using his mnemonics. I'm making my own thankyouverymuch)

I'm trying to learn between 1 and 5 new digits a day. Right now I'm at 3.1415926535. Don't worry. I won't keep you posted until I manage all 100.

Now that Palm has moved into it's own apartment (and furnished it quite nicely), 3com is trying to create the next big thing, Audry.

It looks cool, has a good price, but it doesn't seem to know whether it's for the family that doesn't have a computer yet, or one that needs another terminal. It's definitely a network appliance, with email, datebook, and web functionality and little else. It wouldn't make a good kid's computer because you'd be doing a disservice to limit a kid to reading the web and sending email. My biggest complaint though is that it isn't wireless. It's nicely portable and would (scary as this thought is) make a good TV companion, in place of getting a webTV, but with a telephone cord sticking out the side? I just don't think so. 3com are wireless mavens though, so it shouldn't be long before they have a homeConnect card to plug into a 802.11 wireless LAN.

At $499 it's not bad for what it is, though some things will have to change. The largest UI element, the big knob below the screen, lets you 'change channels' between cobranded sponsor sites, but apparently not your own. If you're advanced enough to actually have other sites you like to frequent, they "let you designate up to 3 Favorite websites." Ooh... Three whole sites? How ever will I choose them?

It's a start, likle the Newton was a start, but it's not the breakaway product. that's another 18 months down the line. Less, if organic polymer displays come to market sooner, allowing for smaller, lighter 'compliances' with lower energy requirements (Mmm... Transmeta...)

I know I want for Christmas next year.

Interactive Week is reporting that Deja.com is up for sale. The story says Deja wants to sell its Usenet archives and collaborative recommendation buying guide seperately.

This is more monumental than just another dotcom not meeting expectations. In the beginning (1979), before the web ever existed, usenix (usenet) was created as a sort of internet bulletin board. It experienced slow, yet exponential, growth for the first 10 years, but eventually exploded into gigabytes of new content a day.

• 1979 3 sites, 2 articles a day
• 1980 15 sites, 10 articles a day
• 1981 150 sites, 20 articles a day
• 1982 400 sites, 50 articles a day
• 1983 600 sites, 120
• 1984 900 sites, 225
• 1985 1,300 sites, 375 articles per day, 1+Megabyte per/day
• 1986 2,500 sites, 500, 2 MB+
• 1987 5,000 sites, 1000, 2.5 MB+
• 1988 11,000 sites, 1800, 4 MB+
• ...
• 1993 66,000 sites, 26,000, 65 MB+

People would use specific newsreading applications to access the newsgroups and they were entirely seperate from the web and from email. Over time, newsgroup reading and posting capability was added to mail clients (except Pine, which had NNTP capabilities much earlier on), and later there were posting gateways brought to the web, so people could use web-based remailers to post to newsgroups.

Somewhere around 1994 Altavista came along, one of the first comprehensive search engines, with the distinctive advantage that you could search both the web and usenet postings. Before this it was exceedingly difficult to find specific information in usenet because you would have to perform time-consuming local searches on individual newsgroups, and even then there were already over 20,000 newsgroups out there. Bringing search to usenet drastically changed its utility drastically. Before search, a newsgroup was a serial you would have to read every day in order to keep up, but afterwards it became a research tool. Where before you would post a question to a newsgroup and wait for a reply from an expert, now you would search for someone who already asked the question.

Later, full usenet gateways sprang up. In addition to incorporation into back-office tools for individual companies or institutions, a small handful of free major services started around 1996, one of which was dejanews. It's probably the last one to survive.

Wow, I was going to write a short post, but it turned into a big history lesson (and research session for me). I don't have time to write what would have to be at least 8 pages to do it justice, but the gist is that I believe that Deja's failure is the turning point for usenet. It will always have niche uses and devoted communities, but it's clear to me that knowledge transfer on the net will depend on web publishing tools. Be it by UBB, blogger, homestead, slashdot, epinions, evite, egroups, ebay, or good-old FTP, distributed information will go through the web and, sadly, usenet will atrophy...

If anyone has recent usenet usage stats, I'd love to see. I'm very interested to know if it's peaked in recent years, or if traffic is still climbing.

Agaon, sorry for the roughness of this 'report'. I just wanted to get it out and I was just a few keystrokes away from deciding to chuck the whole thing inthe intersts of "if you can't do it right.."

On the brighter side, research brought up a few interesting reads including The Virtual Community, The Development of the International Computer Network (1995), and the Usenet Access Guide. It's a really strange feeling to be nostalgic over usenet. I was still getting over being nostalgic over VAX BBSes, fidonet, ANSI and Hermes BBSes, pre-internet AOL (back when it was worthy of nostalgia), and ICB...

I wonder how long it'll be before we're nostalgic about the web.