Farhad Manjoo remembers the unrecognizable Internet of 1996:

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are – "Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online – you can visit the New York Times or Time – and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name – the World Wide Web – and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do – after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on. [...]

Repeat after me: the Web is not the Internet, dammit!

I know Usenet¹ is a backwater nowadays, but there was no shortage of extremely lively and entertaining user-generated content and community activity to be found in newsgroups in the early- and mid-1990s. Even better (in those days of priced-by-the-minute internet access), it was pretty straightforward to jump online, batch download updates to your favourite newsgroups, then go offline to read new posts and compose replies before going back online for a couple of minutes to upload your newsgroup posts and responses.

Apart from ignoring Usenet, I think Manjoo mistakes a lack of medium-to-large-scale media sites for a lack of interesting online activity. Quite apart from the volume of text-based activity going on over email and Usenet and even gopherspace, there were likes of the (Cardiff) Internet Movie Database² and web hosts like Geocities³, all providing online spaces for users to publish and organise content.

There's no question that there's a lot more content online nowadays, much of it (courtesy of widespread takeup of broadband) in multimedia formats that would have overwhelmed our puny 28Kbps modems back in 1996, but there was no shortage of worthwhile content online in the mid-1990s. By 1996 the days when one person could keep up with Usenet were already long gone.

[Via currybetdotnet]

1. Or should I say, 'netnews', for the benefit of those who want to be picky about the terminology. ↩
2. Which was itself an offshoot of a list that started life in a newsgroup. ↩
3. Which Manjoo mentions, but primarily as a forerunner of Facebook! ↩

Baby Slippers. Oh my…

[Via web-goddess]

Matt Jones has put up a terrific slideshow he presented, entitled The Demon-Haunted World, or the past and future of practical city magic.

Take Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, Dave Hill's The street as platform, Tower Bridge twittering and the equation media = rhino poop and you have a piece that's well worth a read.

[Via kottke.org]

Sad news from The Omni Group:

"As a small company with limited resources, we have had to make some difficult decisions about where to focus our attention as our business continues to grow," said Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group. "By making these applications — which are not currently under active development — available as free downloads, we hope that more people are able to enjoy using them without the barrier of cost."
(Emphasis added)

One of the applications being turned into freeware is OminWeb, which is pretty much the best web browser available for MacOS X: feature-packed, stable and very pleasant to use. With my customary impeccable sense of timing, I returned to using OmniWeb as my day-to-day browser (having spent some time playing around with Safari 3) about a fortnight ago.

Oh well, I hope there's more to Safari 4 than eye candy.

[Via ranchero.com]

Who'd have thought that a TV advert could be considered misleading…

A car insurer admitted today it refuses to cover musicians despite featuring Iggy Pop in its adverts.

The veteran rocker is the star of swiftcover's Get a life. Get swiftcovered campaign. But although the 61-year-old American is best known for singing hits such as Lust for Life, it has emerged that the online insurance firm has been turning down people who work in the music and entertainment industry for car insurance, citing higher levels of risk and potential claims costs as its reasons.

Needless to say, swiftcover.com have a perfectly reasonable explanation:

Tina Shortle, marketing director of swiftcover.com, said Iggy Pop had been chosen as the face of its advertising because he loves life, not because he is a musician. He is an actor demonstrating the benefits of swiftcover.com.

[Via The Morning News]

A letter from CERN: Dear Higgs Boson…

(See here for source of post title.)

[Via Seed Magazine]

Welcome to Geekamania:

Overwhelmed by the Web 2.0 social-networking revolution? Intimidated by all that newfangled whiz-bang technology? Convinced the government is tracking your every keystroke? Too busy to give a damn about any of it, but still have a vague sense you might be missing something good?
You've come to the right place.

Welcome to Geekamania, your full-service, Web 2.0 personality enhancer™. For a small monthly fee, we do the social networking for you, so you can feel remotely relevant and even slightly connected to the sexy youth culture of today, without lifting a finger, remembering a single login, or buying some of those ridiculous $200 jeans. It couldn't be simpler! [...]

[Via Suddenly San Franciscan]

Ireland's worst driver has been apprehended (sort of)…

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.
However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown. [...]

[Via The Magistrate's Blog]

Clive James has some of his old television criticism from his days at The Observer up at his web site. I followed his work every Sunday back in the day, then bought the various collections of his columns, but it's been years since I read his take on television at the turn of the 1980s.

Here he is on The Big Time, an early version of the 'member of the public gets a crash course in a new profession' show that was so popular a few years ago, before TV producers realised that the format works even better if you put a 'celebrity' in the role of the anxious learner:

The latest episode featured Sue Peacock, a housewife who wanted to be a Nationwide presenter. She was trained up to have a shot at being a Nationwide presenter for a day. To everybody's astonishment except the viewers', she did quite well, rendering the Nationwide regulars awe-stricken at how quickly she had mastered the fundamentals of their supposedly arcane craft.

But it was obvious from the start that Sue simply had what it took, whatever that is. Most people very correctly find that being on television is a madly artificial experience. A few people find it as natural as breathing. Whatever airs these few might tend to give themselves, the fact remains that they have merely been blessed with a knack that ought to be common, but for some reason is quite rare. The best television presenters are those who regard their own ability to keep their heads while talking to camera as rather less than a sufficient qualification for immortality.

Of the people Sue was given the opportunity to meet, Robin Day and Sir Ian Trethowan were the most substantial, principally because they are both something rather more than just talking heads. As a natural corollary, they are also both devoid of an artificial manner. But everyone else, from the narrator on downwards, was all charged up with cheap drama. 'One of the hottest seats on television … hard, demanding, ruthless … come and meet Frank Bough.'

Catching the mood, Sue kept saying I just don't know whether I'll be able to do it. This was exactly what the professionals wanted to hear her say. The more she went on about her nerves, the more they could indulge themselves in a lot of calmly purposeful moving about.

Finally it was the big night and Sue, having complained dutifully about her nerves right up to the last minute, ripped through her part of the show without a fluff. All concerned showered her with praise, but only Bob Wellings had the nerve to say that she was frighteningly good – i.e., that the job isn't really all that hard. Or to put it another way, being a personality isn't a job. Staying calm, reading out the words and asking the elementary questions is merely where you start from.

"Being a personality isn't a job." It's difficult to imagine a TV critic writing that nowadays.

About DIGITAL COMICS: nice.

[Via Excuses and Half Truths]

Julian Barnes on George Orwell, National Treasure:

One small moment of literary history at which many Orwellians would like to have been present was an encounter in Bertorelli's restaurant in London between Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick and Orwell's widow, Sonia. Crick dared to doubt the utter truthfulness of one of Orwell's most celebrated pieces of reportage, Shooting an Elephant. Sonia, to the delight of other clients, according to Crick, screamed at him across the table, "Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!" The widow, you feel, was screaming for England. Because what England wants to believe about Orwell is that, having seen through the dogma and false words of political ideologies, he refuted the notion that facts are relative, flexible, or purpose-serving; further, he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.

[Via 3quarksdaily]

I think Martin Belam is right: Poole – HAL 9000 is surely the geekiest page in all of Wikipedia.¹

Poole – HAL 9000 is a fictional chess game in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the astronaut Frank Poole is seen playing chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer [...] The director Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, so unlike many chess scenes shown in other films, the position and analysis actually makes sense. [Discussion of starting position and on-screen moves follows...]

[Via currybetdotnet]

1. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ↩

Coming soon to Dubai: the Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower…

LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) unveiled the design of the Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Dubai, the first project of a series of branded towers, a new concept by PNYG:COMPANY, a company focused on branding. [...]

According to the architects, the design of the 59 storey luxury tower is abstracted from the geometric laws of snowflakes and Formula 1 aerodynamics, in order to obtain an effficient/minimal structure, maximum views and optimal light and air distribution. [...]

Three observations:

1. Catchy name.
2. Abstracted from the geometric laws of snowflakes and Formula 1 aerodynamics, eh? I just hope they're taking the Pepsi Gravitational Field into account.
3. In the next plot along: the Damon Hill Memorial Bungalow.

[Via Smashing Telly, via Qwghlm]

Lois Lane just won't be told.

[Via Oliver Willis]

I've been catching up on season 1 of 30 Rock in preparation for season 2's debut on Channel 5 USA later this week.

I can pinpoint the precise moment when I fell in love with this show: last night, at shortly before midnight, watching episode 3. Specifically, the scene when Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy channelled Hannibal Lecter at a particularly tense moment in a poker game.

Barking mad, and by some margin the funniest scene I've seen so far this year. I'm sold…

The US National Weather Service warned of unusual weather conditions last Friday:

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY

1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

…POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND … OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS … RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME RESIDENTS … AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY … FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

[Via Planetary Society Blog]

This week's selection:

• Michael Bosanko's light graffiti
• Seagull over snow
• Fading light
• Fractures
• Snowing in London
• Stop and stair
• Smoke signals
• Oliver, Daily: 4 February 2009
• Tiger shark
• The Old Silo Against the Elements

[Michael Bosanko's light graffiti via Word Magazine]

The Watermarks Project projects onto several buildings in Bristol the position of the high-water mark in the event that the Greenland ice cap melts.

About the only improvement I would suggest would be that the high-water mark line should advance up the sides of the buildings gradually, mimicking the rise of the flood waters and making it less likely that passers-by will mentally filter out that static white line.

[Via Seed]

There's good customer service, and then there's Daniel Fleisch:

Many authors would claim to be committed to their readers, but academic Daniel Fleisch has gone that extra mile and then some. The scientific writer, it has emerged, flew more than 900km on Christmas Day to hand deliver his book to a customer who had posted a negative review on Amazon complaining that he'd been sold a flawed copy. [...]

The phrase Technical Debt encapsulates a concept anyone who ever wrote a program much more complicated than 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"; 20 GOTO 10 will recognise:

You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy – you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place.

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. [...]

[Via rc3.org]