Thursday, May 30, 2002

I caved in tonight and purchased a Microsoft optical trackball for my home computer.  I've been using a trackball at work for the past few months and have kept it despite the strange looks I get from my coworkers when they come over to my computer and want to drive. 2:58:08 AM     I was trying all of my search techniques today trying to find documentation on programs or interfaces to the history kept by your browser as you surf the internet.  I suddenly had the idea that it would be interesting to analyze my own surfing habits to discover which sites I had checked during the last day, week, or month.  I thought it would be easy to write up a script that took the history files and converted them into XML or some other manipulable format.  Then I could design different interfaces to the data to display histograms or connection graphs on the internet. What I found on the net were a lot of history visualization projects that were written as plugins for Mosaic in 1995 or 1996 and never been updated since then or ported over to the latest browsers.  So we are left with the same simple lists of previously visited sites we had 8 years ago.  Why was it so difficult for those projects to succeed and would they do any better today? I've tried some of the visual browsers and my reaction to them has been lukewarm.  Seeing the connections of links from a site soon becomes useless because the tree grows so fast.  Follow any of the links to a reasonably dense news source and it takes the visual browser minutes to download and display the new tree of links.  I'm more interested in the site than waiting a minute to see a graph of where I've been, by the time the graph is complete I'm surfing onto another link. Nonetheless I'm still convinced that the browser history could be used more effectively.  My idea now is to use it to make my community of practice or interest visible to others in a similar way to Jon Udell has been making the list of his RSS subscriptions visible.  Visibility leads to more community building.  It's a way for me to show you what I'm interested in and what was too uninteresting to merit a mention here. 2:53:14 AM     I saw Episode 2: Attack of the Clones last weekend and I have to agree with everything I've seen written on it, from the pans in the major dailys to the defenders of fandom I declare my belief in all of you.  The most interesting recent piece is from LA Times arguing that 'seculsion has left George out' (via Ghost in the Machine) On the one hand the acting and script were ridiculously cliched.  On the other hand the effects were stunning.  The backgrounds spectacular.  And the story still mattered to me because I grew up on Star Wars, it was the first major cultural event I can remember.  I saw the original movie more times than I can remember and I went to the sequel with my neighbors, a pseudo-family outing I still recall.  So I will wait patiently with the other fen for the conclusion of the saga in three years. 2:30:00 AM     The insanity of a market bubble continues to amaze me.  Witness this story on companies similar to Enron in their shady business dealings. 2:22:51 AM     Boy things are getting pretty bleak in the tech world if you believe what this Financial Times article says. Down in the Valley  I know things have been tough at work.  I'm thankful to have kept a technical job through the recent downturn.  The Star Tribune adds that the tech market in Minnesota doesn't look much better than in Silicon Valley. 2:21:25 AM     Random checking of weblogs.com led to If which led to a NYT article "The Wonders of Genetics Breed a New Art" and then Google quickly gave me the link to the actual exhibit site. The interactions between science and art are fascinating but I'm even further outside of the contemporary artistic community than I am outside of the technology community.  Because I rely on the internet to reveal communities to my gaze technology communities naturally come to the top and other communities disappear to the bottom.  Then again the sites may be on the web but I haven't found the gatekeeper links in the blogging community that will reveal the community to me. 1:38:57 AM     InfoWorld: IBM recruits students for grid computing effort. [Hack the Planet] This makes me wish I were back in college studying computer science. 1:06:20 AM     My recent investigations into online learning systems as part of a project at work has made me interested in distance learning and how it can be successful.  I found this article on DL via Stephen's OL daily. It talks about building a sense of community in an online learning environment. 12:29:16 AM     Douglas Rushkoff is making an interesing point about the politics of revolutions versus renaissances.  I'm thinking about a less aspirational, less narrative model for political and social change than the counterculture's more typically communist posture. Instead of looking forward to a day when justice will be won, we declare ourselves to be living in a just world right now - and that we are simply fighting for MORE justice. My problem with 'movements' has always been the narrative style of their intended unfolding. They yearn forward towards salvation in the manner of utopians or fundamentalists. And then people do all sorts of nasty things in the name of that deferred future moment. People are actually taken OUT of their immediate experience as they put their heads down and do battle. 12:25:15 AM     People do the weirdest things to make money.  Here's a story from the Guardian Limited about a young man who stole rare books from libraries in Europe to sell at auction. 12:22:20 AM

© Copyright 2002 Todd Suomela. Last update: 6/5/2002; 1:55:58 AM.