Month: November 2000

I did a little more shopping around, and this is much better free desktop planetarium than the Cosmic Thing: Heavens-Above. Endless [free] content unrolls before your eyes. Here’s the view from my back yard.

stating the obvious has an entertaining piece about uber-geek Jamie Zawinski. I remember thinking how annoying he was when I first saw his Netscape internal web page that blared out “my cubicle is cooler than yours.” I work with people like this every day.

Truly one of the great applets of all time: J-Track

3D for keeping track of satellites.

Speaking of astronomical applets, AJ’s Cosmic

Thing will tell you what’s in the sky at any given time.

Usability on parade in FEED: Listen to the usability rock stars talk about how the famous Palm Beach ballot was flawed.

And if you want the anti-rockstar view on usability, listen to Frog Design designer Valerie Casey declare “usability is dead.” Or you can order your own What would Jakob do? mouse pad.

New Scientist magazine has a good article in its November 11th issue, Surf like a Bushman, about biological foraging theory and the hunt for information. Searching for food and searching for information are strikingly similar. I can relate; I feel the primal rush of a successful hunt after tracking something down on the web. The word browse derives from eating.

The December issue of The Atlantic Monthly is just terrific. I’ll buy a magazine if it has one interesting paragraph in it, and this issue has two big meaty articles worth savoring in detail: a report on wine critic Robert Parker Jr. and an article on people who deliberately amputate healthy limbs by Carl Elliot. Weird but compelling.

I love Books on Tape. I used to be embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve given up. Now the only question is whether to say, in idle conversation, that I “read” such and such a book, or to say that I listened to it, but hey that’s just as good. I have a half hour commute, and listening to good books has become one of the high points of my day. Recently “reads”: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain and I, Claudius by Robert Graves.

Charts from Hell. Someone has gone to the trouble of collecting gruesome stock price charts of dot-com failures. It’s voyeuristic but riveting to click through them. You can practically hear the sound of a lot of money being lost.

The Joe Cartoon Co. has been around for a while, and if the humor is pretty adolescent, the artwork and animation are inspired. Check out The Boss, a recent Flash animation at the site. The voice characterization on the brown-nosing gerbil is just brilliant.

Fun blog: dack.com.