The most pleasant memories I have about the time that I was a freelance web developer are the memories of me doing absolutely nothing. Not just for an hour or two, but for days and days or even weeks in a row. I like doing nothing. I think idling is a good thing, it’s pretty scary to see what negative connotations the word nothing has, just look at those synonyms! If there’s anything I miss about freelancing it’s not the liberty, the money, the responsibility or the pride (and certainly not the angst for lack of work or the insane hours you make when you’re busy), it’s Nothing that I miss.
As we gain knowledge over the years about the things we design, the design get better and better. When you look at the first web sites and compare them to the things we create today you can say that we made some improvements. This rule, that design gets better over the years, does not apply to remote controls for DVD players.
There are a few things I want to do with a remote control for a DVD player: skip unskippable trailers, go to the menu, and play the damn movie, finally. You’d think that three buttons would be sufficient. Mine has 33.
I’m working on some lengthy posts about nonsense and they take much more time than I expected – nonsense can be quiet complex! So in the meantime here’s some random nonsense for your well being. We all know On Kawara – well, you do now – who documented everything he did and everywhere he went. Evan Drolet Cook documents the places where he hasn’t been. He might go there one day, but as ever, we don’t know what the future looks like. We’re curious though, so we’re guessing; we’ve always been guessing, and luckily we’ve mostly been wrong. But we’re not just wrong about the future, sometimes it’s hard to get the facts right about our recent history. Back then every man had a moustache. I predict we will all have one in the future.
Yes, I do love nonsense but some things are just too absurd, they get in my way. In these rare cases action needs to be taken. You’d think that evolution would get rid of things that just don’t work but apparently evolution really doesn’t exist in god fearing Italy: for as long as I can remember the packaging of all pasta has been flawed.
Legal disclaimers, long, hard to read documents in which lawyers say, with too many words, something like Ich Habe Es Nicht Gewußt
, have no legal status in The Netherlands. In the United States they do, I guess, even though they are meaningless: most disclaimers contain a sentence which states that “we are allowed to change this disclaimer at any time”, which means that tomorrow it can say the exact opposite of what it says today.
A while ago I read a paper (why do they call a PDF a paper? Ghehehe) about cookies, behavioral targeting and privacy. For those of you who don’t understand what the paper is about: it’s about clever online advertisements and the privacy issues surrounding them – not funny at all and the paper is very useful, not something I should be writing about on this blog. But. In this paper I read this sentence that somehow confused me: The success of behavioral targeting is apparent. Advertisers, publishers and consumers are benefiting
. I do understand that advertisers and publishers are benefiting from a successful advertising method, but consumers? I really don’t understand how they benefit in any way from any advertisement, actually.
There are over ten thousand lakes – bigger than ten acres (that’s 40,000 m², for people who don’t understand medieval units) – in Minnesota, a state in the United States of America, and they all have a name, an incredible fact by itself. Nicole Meyer found out that if these ponds have a logo they have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly
. She decided to publish one new logo for one Minnesota lake every day. Until now she made one hundred logos which means she just has to make another 9,900 to finish. The project will be done in little over twenty seven years.
Lasers are the shit. All sharks have lasers, I’m sure you didn’t know that. Some of you might know that most women incorporate lasers but to most of you men it must come as a surprise. My loyal readers should know that the little creatures on this site are capable of shooting not just two but four lasers on command. But unfortunately most humans (well men anyways) don’t natively support lasers. Until today.
Today the evil geniuses Kilian Valkhof and Paul Chaplin, launched the Laser Eyes webservice which lets you add lasers to pictures you upload. Only robots who were sent from the future can create something like that! For this reason you will need a future proof browser (Firefox will do, Chrome will do but is very slow on Mac). I think this is the most incredible thing you will ever see. As far as I can tell the internet is finished.
More and more I hear requests for so called easter eggs, hidden, funny features on websites. We used to redirect Minimalissimo to maximalissimo.com whenever you typed the Konami code. I changed this feature: it now turns the minimal layout to a maximalissimo one. It uses the incredible code you can find on the website MOTHER EFFING TEXT-SHADOW when you click the ‘all the way’ button. This site was created by Paul Irish, a true easter egg apostle.
During his talk on the Fronteers 2010 conference Paul Irish asked for more lasers whenever people press the letter ‘L’. I always thought this site would be just perfect for this feature. Try it. (For best results you should use a modern browser like Safari, Opera, Firefox or IE9. There is a weird Chrome bug on Windows which renders only half of the creature, that’s not how it’s supposed to be).
Know more sites with easter eggs? Let me know.
You would expect that 400 years after somebody rediscovered that the earth is not the center of the universe everybody would just accept that as a fact and move on. No, not everybody. On Saturday November 6th 2010 the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism: Galileo Was Wrong will be held in a small town somewhere in the USA. These people earn their money with writing scientific books about this matter! That is just amazing, literally. I’m jealous, I wish I could make a living just by publishing huge piles of nonsense. Unfortunately I don’t have the money to attend this conference, without a doubt it would be the best and most entertaining waste of time ever.
