‘Tis Friday the 13th, and like Jason Voorhees, I’m feelin’ a little psycho (but not a constant murderous rage). This psychotic episode will have to be quick as I’m at work and it’s been pure zaniness here lately.
When the latest issue of Communications of the ACM arrived in my mailbox, I put it on my I’m-gonna-read-this-before-the-next-issue-arrives stack of magazines. I now realize that I should’ve read it immediately instead of ploppin’ it on top of the current issue of Dr Dobb’s in said stack. A few articles in that issue of Communications of the ACM touched on the possibilities of what the web’s next killer app would be. The articles were mostly filled with theories and hypothetical situations. However, I know what I don’t want the web to be…the world’s largest diary. In the past week, mon chums Barry and Pat have updated their websites. Having your own personal website can be a great source of creative output. However, it’s come to my attention that everyone and their mother has a blog, nowadays. Take a look at Barry and Pat‘s sites…blogs! Take a look at the site of the woman who I no little about but Pat’s apparently seeing her…blog. And her entry for June 10th is identical to mine! I started to record my life events and thoughts on my website a couple of years ago. It was purely an extension of the .plans (welcome to the Unix world folks…no blogs here) we used to keep in university on rural.lssu.edu…a rock solid Solaris server that we used in courses like Systems Programming and Operating Systems as a test-bed for assignments. Our .plans were used to keep others in the class informed of what we were doing on the server at the time, displaying our wit and the odd rant about the insane difficulty of any given assignment, blah blah blah… I just ported that idea over to my website. Besides, people like id Software‘s John Carmack and Nullsoft‘s Justin Frankel kept .plans on the web and those guys made programmers look like ewkl people. But now with the blog revolution taking over, I don’t think I want to be a part of rest of the pack. Perhaps, the web’s next big thing is locked away in the back of my brain, waiting for the perfect time to alert the editors of Communications of the ACM to come to Kitchener to seek me out. Then again, perhaps there’s nothing locked away at all.
In the meantime, take a look at this mess of controls on a dialog that’s the result of lot of prototyping; deadline July 1, 2003 😉
