When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · January
· · · · 12 (3 entries)
Slippertje gemaakt? (Antislipschool) · What happened was, I was sitting up late and saw a new bot hitting the site; first of all, the bot said it came from TranSGeniK, a French Techo/Ambient music site which has some OK tracks to listen to (have I just fallen victim to referer spam, I wonder) but then I see that the bot’s being run out of ovh.nl, which near as I can tell is a bunch of Dutch auto enthusiasts who have lunch and practice anti-skid driving techniques (you can get “slipcertification” it seems). And they need to run a French bot at ongoing. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Hunter’s Martian Eyes · In Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams (a beautiful and wise book) he laments the passage of the special relationship between the hunter and the landscape; A hunter—a real hunts-to-live hunter, not a plaid-clad suburbanite gun nut—has to as a matter of life or death study his surroundings with great care. I quote: “But the meticulous inspection of the land that is the mark of a good hunter becomes most evident when he uses a pair of good field glasses. Long after the most inquiring nonnative has has grown weary of glassing the land for some clue to the movement of animals, a hunter is still scouring its edges and interstices. He may take an hour to glass 360° of the apparently silent tundra, one section at a time.” In that spirit, go visit the very good Quicktime VR panorama of the Martian Surface, set the scene into a slow, slow drift (it’s easy with a trackpad), cultivate that hunter’s eye, and spend a half-hour looking at the horizon, and the sand, and the stones.
TPSM-10: Happy Programmers · Programmers are the foot soldiers in the technology wars: the closer you get to the big-money decisions in the corner office, the less people actually care about code and coders: get the business priorities right, the thinking goes, and then worry about making the technology happen. I actually have some sympathy with that thinking. But there are a lot of programmers and they make a lot of everyday decisions: do these add up enough to make them important influencers of technology success? ...
