Thursday, May 27, 2004

Redraw your own conclusions

Brian Dear has some very interesting graphs that show downward trending for some name brand Web sites, and ... well, you'll see.

The Godot Manifesto?

After reading Giles Turnbull's post-Cluetrain piece, The Long Conversation, in the Guardian, I'm thinking that the Net has become better than ever at shipping clues, but that Dorothy Parker is still right: You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think. (That's a nasty way of putting it, but a great excuse to quote Parker.) [Note: I just learned she said "horticulture." This is one of those times I wish the strike tag worked here, but alas... woops! no... look: horticulture.. thank you Susan] Among The Clueful Giles (actually, the CT authors) lists a couple of airlines, the Dean campaign (and, with qualifications, Kerry's and Bush's), Google, MeetUp and weblogs. On the whole things are better than they were in '99, but I gotta say, not that much.

Maybe I'm just having a pessimistic day.

[Later...] Also a correction (which I thought went in here already, but apparently didn't) to Giles' otherwise fine piece: Cluetrain didn't start when Chris Locke and I started talking. It started when Chris brought two conversations together: the one he was having with David Weinberger and the one he was having with me. If there was a departure point for the train, that was it.

Screen flat

At home I use two screens: the one on the laptop, and a larger adjacent monitor. For the last 1.5 years the other screen has been a ViewSonic UltraBrite A90f*. Last night it went dark, started making loud clicking sounds, and played havoc with the laptop too. This morning it was no better. So I called the customer support line listed in the manual, and got a sexy voice warning me that I need to be "over eighteen" to proceed.

There's no point. It's dead. I'm not sure I want to spend the $600+ required for a really good LCD monitor, so I might go one more round with a VDT. I also like the absence of a single native resolution with VDTs, so there's no blurring at all resolutions other than the native one.

I kinda wish I'd picked one up at the computer fair, where every VDT, including 21" Sonys, was around $100. Replacing the ViewSonic with an identical one is $250 at CompUSA, but I don't think I'll trust another one of these things.

So, recommendations?

[Later...] Just got pointed to this. Whoa.