Tsk tsk
Next week I will be in Seattle for a conference. I'll be arriving a bit early so I can sleep off my jetlag and see a bit of the city. I was trying to book a hotel room through the Travelodge website and finding a suitable location and room is easy enough, but the Travelodge reservation form really doesn't work all that well.
First I was trying to make a reservation with Opera. Filling out the (secure) form was not a problem, only when trying to submit it, the website reported that there had been an otherwise unqualified problem. "Please click back on your browser and fill out the form correctly." Right... only now the submit button wouldn't work anymore. Okay, new window, find room, fill out form, submit... sorry, still a 'problem'. Why bother telling your customers exactly what went wrong with filling out your form? They're probably going to try again, again and again in the hope of getting it right... no?
Maybe it's Opera, I thought. I fired up Internet Explorer and tried again. Hey... look! Instead of offering me a room rate of 207 USD for 3 nights, now it's offering me a rate of 187 USD for 3 nights. Silly thing. Okay... fill out form, submit... ugh, still 'problems' with the form. So I go back again and start tweaking the zipcode and telephone number. We Dutch probably use slightly different ways of noting those than this silly form is expecting. And lo! after only 5 or 6 tries I finally found a way to enter the information in such a way that the form would accept it. I guess the 'problem' had nothing to do with Opera after all, but jeez, guys... if you're getting an overseas reservation, please don't have your system apply the same rules to determine whether the form has been filled out correctly as you would for national (American) reservations.
Anyway... I just made a very easy 20 bucks, so I shouldn't complain too much :-)
May 1, 2003 @ 16:46 » no comments » General
Preferential treatment
Heh... it seems that Travelodge is out to screw users of the Opera browser for at least 20 USD. I've tried booking the same room as before with Netscape 4, Mozilla 1.3, IE6 and Opera 7.03 (identifying itself as Opera and accepting all cookies) and only when you use Opera, you will not get to see the cheapest available rate.
When you select Seattle as location and search for the "Best Available Rate", all browsers will proceed to the next page, where you will be offered a number of Travelodge locations in Seattle. When you click on the "Check Rates" button, it will take you to that location's page and show you a number of different rates for different rooms.
ONLY when using Opera, the second page will show for all locations in red "The requested rate is not available" and you can click a button that says "View Other Rates". These other rates start at 20 dollar above the cheapest rate offered to the other browsers.
But now for the double-check: I set Opera to identify itself as IE6. Surprise! Now Opera gets the cheap rates too! I don't know what Travelodge is doing, and it probably is a stupid bug and not intended behavior, but it sure seems like they're trying to stiff Opera users.
May 1, 2003 @ 17:27 » no comments » General
Wiktionary
William Gibson mentions the really cool Wiktionary site ("a wiki-based Open Content dictionary"; neologisms here) in a very brief interview. Wiktionary appears to offer somewhat more edited content than UrbanDictionary, which I mentioned earlier.
May 2, 2003 @ 15:53 » no comments » General
From Seattle
I had a really cool ticket and I didn't even know it. I booked the ticket online and when I arrived at the airport to check in this morning, there was an enormous queue. But it turned out that I could feed credit card I bought the ticket with to a special touch-screen terminal and check myself in. I bypassed the queue and even got to pick the seat myself. Uneventful flight. I watched Daredevil (hmm... okay I guess, Spiderman was better). I also watched The Matrix, twice... well, I slept through the ending of the first and the beginning of the second run, so technically I only watched it once. Right, some food now!
May 6, 2003 @ 05:43 » 1 comment » General
From David's office
A quick entry from David's office. Cool!
May 8, 2003 @ 02:44 » 3 comments » General
The hotel lobby
So I moved from the Travelodge to the Best Western conference hotel and it has two internet terminals in the lobby. I really need to get a wireless laptop though. Every Starbucks around here offers wireless internet access and why not make the nearest Starbucks your alternative office when you're traveling. Could be worse things.
I noticed something rather disconcerting in the various bookshops I visited so far: they don't carry books by some of my favorite authors. No John Courtenay Grimwood (I had planned on buying his "third arabesk": Felaheen, to read on the road) and neither do they have Michael Marshall Smith. I still have to go see the university bookstore, so who knows...
[update: The UW bookstore had a really decent sci-fi section. Still no MMS, but they did carry Grimwood. I picked up a couple of books from longtime favorites, including Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo, The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul DiFilippo, and The Jazz by Melissa Scott. I really should do a 'favorite cyberpunkish sci-fi authors section'.]
May 8, 2003 @ 21:23 » no comments » General
From the conference room
The last session of the conference is over, now we're on a few minute break before the wrap-up. I'm pretty exhausted, but also really jazzed about everything that happened and everything that we talked about. I'm going to need some sleep first when this is over and then a whole lot of posts to talk about all the ideas that are bubbling around in my head. What I missed was a laptop to dump those ideas straight into the blog when they were happening in the room. The kind of braindump that I mention in the about section. Right, I should probably turn over this keyboard for the wrap-up session now...
May 11, 2003 @ 00:32 » no comments » General
Back in Amsterdam
I got back home yesterday and today I can't seem to get the Beatles' song Back in the USSR out of my head. Blurred timezones afterglow. The plane landed just fine, but I myself crashed when I got home and I slept for 13 hours straight. I hope my melatonin cycle is back to normal by tomorrow. It's strange how being on a plane and being in airports is like being nowhere, not even on a plane or in an airport. Airports and airplanes really are non-places, as Marc Auge writes, and the problem with a non-place is that you can't be fully there. The soul trails the body, never really able to catch up and inhabit it. The passport control people don't seem to see that it's only half of me who goes through, but the mirror in Heathrow's terminal 4 knew.
[update: Actually... I'm going to help the melatonin with another coffee; nothing beats a homebrew espresso.]
May 13, 2003 @ 13:33 » no comments » General
Posting priviliges
Posting from public terminals, I realized that, while small, there was a greater chance that someone would be able to intercept my MovableType username and password. So I made a new account with only posting priviliges for my blog. I'll use that account when on the road and that way, the worst thing that can happen is someone else posting messages to the blog. Changing or deleting posts or the entire blog however is no longer possible.
May 14, 2003 @ 06:25 » no comments » General
Open windows, pt. 1
"Show me what your links are, and I'll tell you what kind of person you are."
Johnny Manhattan
Root Blog
DiGRA
Quicksilver
Blood Gulch Chronicles
Game Writing Online
Gibson, May
Neo's Gospel
May 14, 2003 @ 06:33 » no comments » General
Different
Dutch and American-English weblogs are different, and it's not just the language. Or maybe it's exactly because of the language, or maybe Dutch webloggers have come to a subtly different consensus about what weblogging is and what it should look like. Or maybe I'm not reading the same type of weblogs in Amerenglish as in Dutch. I will have to qualify this difference and I'll need to do some more research.
Speaking of classification: are weblogs a particular type of home page?
May 15, 2003 @ 16:11 » 3 comments » Research
Dutch blog map
Really cool map of Dutch weblogs!
The numbers in the different areas are not the number of weblogs, but the first two numbers of the zipcode. Click on one of those areas to see the weblogs in that area. Looks like they also take Dutch bloggers writing in English...
May 15, 2003 @ 16:26 » 1 comment » Research
Like Weegee
Both Boing Boing and Die Puny Humans link to the Fire..Cuffs and Guts fotolog. The author is a New York City medical photographer and the pictures are not for the squeamish, but I find them totally fascinating. They remind me of the photographs of Weegee, a NYC photographer of the 1930s and 1940s, who drove around NY with a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car, taking pictures, like the one in this post, of accidents, fires, crime victims and odd NY night creatures in general.
May 16, 2003 @ 00:20 » no comments » General
Classification
Owen responds to the question I posed yesterday, whether weblogs are a particular type of homepage, with:
Yes. Except when they're not. Classification is like modelling; useful up to a point.
For me, classification is always a proces, a "tool to think with," not a definitive answer. Classification is also about power: the power to decide on the conditions for inclusion or exclusion. What choices do you make by classifying and what are the unintended effects of those choices? What is the meaning created by calling X a particular type of Y? And maybe more importantly, which particular qualities or meanings of Y go unacknowledged or are suppressed by saying Y is a manifestation of X. And from a more political point of view: who benefits? So yes, I agree that classification in and of itself is only useful to a certain extend. It's the proces, however, that I'm interested in.
Owen further describes the difference between a home page and a weblog as:
A blog tends to be your kitchen table. More personal, more casual. Rolled sleeves, relaxed talk. Coffee cup rings, ashtrays, and tangents. A home page tends to be more kin to the parlor and front step, and is kept tidy as such.
I thought long and hard whether the 'home page' of fragment.nl should be the weblog or a nice and tidy front step. For a long while the weblog sat in the /blog directory and the root index was simply a PHP include of the weblog index. If I wanted, I could switch in a moment and clean up the front step. I guess I grew comfortable with people walking in through the backdoor and sitting right down at the kitchen table.
For all those personal home pages I'm studying, only about a third (rough guess, will do a count later) use a "welcome to my home page" type of front step, unless you'd also count the "welcome; this is me" index pages, in which case it'd be more like half of the home pages. The other home pages dump you straight in the middle of the hobby room, all kinds of interesting things all over the place. (Another metaphor I should consider more indepth later: rooms in a house for the different pages on the website; also compare with more geographically oriented metaphors for turning space into place.)
It's also a question of impression management, which Goffman talks about it in terms of frontstage and backstage. What is the image you have of yourself, what is the image you want to project, what are the social and cultural tools you have or choose for that, and very importantly, what are the technical tools and expertise you can draw on?
May 16, 2003 @ 17:55 » no comments » Research
Translucent Xbox
Interesting. The Dutch section of Xbox.com showcases a translucent Limited Edition of the Xbox. There have been some rumors about a translucent Xbox, but it never materialized before. Also, the US-English main site doesn't seem to mention it. It says the limited edition is on sale now, but the suggested retail price appears to 30 euro more than regular black Xboxes. I'm not sure I like the looks of it, but surely some will. It comes with similarly translucent controllers. The top of the console it still slightly curved though and not flat, so it's still not easy to put other stuff on top of it.
May 19, 2003 @ 11:32 » no comments » Games
Real lookers
So the E3 is over and we're left with a couple of awesome previews and trailers.
My personal favorite is the Halo 2 trailer. The quality of this trailer isn't so great, as it was videotaped from a screening at E3, but the quality of the game and gameplay still is apparent. The Halo fans at bungie.org say that probably later this week an official version of this screening will be made available by Bungie(.com) itself. Good.
The Half-Life 2 trailer is also taped from a screening, but the quality is pretty good. It shows the game in action and showcases a lot of the technology that's in there. It seems that with games like HL2 real-life physics are becoming prerequisites for games and even though still not perfect, the facial movements of CG characters are slowly becoming acceptable. The environments, especially walls and buildings, still look slightly flat and repetitive, although much of the environment seems to react credibly to the user's actions.
Nothing cardboard about the Doom III trailer. It looks positively spooky. The environments seem to have 'body', although that might be mostly due to the lighting and the shadows, and maybe they're not as manipulable as Half-Life's environments, but they certainly look really good. In a generation or two (think leaps between the original Half-Life and HL2: might be another 4 to 8 years) I think video games will have reached a level of realism through technological capability that will allow designers and developers to focus first on game experience and story-line, rather than advancing technology first.
First out the door (June 20th) though, is the new Tomb Raider adventure, Angel of Darkness (trailer here). I'm curious to see if they've been able to refresh the Lara franchise and if this will really be a departure from the original Tomb Raider series looks and gameplay.
Not really related, but still interesting, an article about cheating at Tomshardware.com: Cheating - Multiplayer Gaming's Achilles' heel?
May 19, 2003 @ 12:33 » 2 comments » Games
Latitude longitude
So how do you look up the exact latitude and longitude of a street address (outside of the USA!) on the internet? It seems pretty much impossible and the simplest and most accurate way seems to be to turn on a GPS locator on that particular spot. But that supposes that you have a GPS locator. If someone knows a simple answer, do let me know.
I managed to find the geographical location of my home though. If you live in one of the 17 countries that maps.msn.com provides information for, you can at least search for the exact address and the latitude and longitude will show up in the URL. I haven't found any other online service that will give you a geographical location from address information, but at least now I know I live at N52.3004 degrees latitude, E4.9646 degrees longitude (decimal notation).
You can't seem to link back to the MSN map service, using only latitude/longtitude information, because then it won't show the X-marks-the-spot on the map. For that, it needs the full street address information which is, just like the geographical location, plainly visible in the URL. However, if I plug the latitude and longitude into Mapquest, you get a nice map with a star indicating the location. Interestingly enough, the exact location pinpointed on the map differs by about 50 metres between Mapquest and the MSN map service. Oh well, close enough.
May 21, 2003 @ 13:54 » 3 comments » General
Mozilla done right
I've been playing around with the recent Mozilla Firebird 0.6 release and I really love this browser. Firebird (previously Phoenix) is a lightweight implementation of the Mozilla browser engine. They have taken all the "browser suite" stuff out and focus just on a fast and capable browser that nevertheless does tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. Check out this site to see why you'd want to switch to Firebird.
I've been a staunch Opera supporter and they still have a more polished product overall (well, the 7.03 release anyway). There are some issues with Firebird that will have to be resolved and Opera for instance has a much more refined way of dealing with cookies, but I must confess that I've even imported all my bookmarks into Firebird and I'm going to see for a couple of days how it works out as my main browser... I like it that much.
On the issue of importing bookmarks from Opera: even though Opera will gladly import bookmarks from IE or Mozilla, Opera itself doesn't offer a way to export the bookmarks to a file format that is readable by IE or Firebird. Firebird in turn can't import Opera bookmarks, so you're a bit stuck there. It took a bit of trouble to hunt down a solution, but BookmarkPriest is a fine little Windows utility that will convert bookmarks from and to IE, Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird, and Opera. If you run Linux or OS X, you may be interested in Opera2HTML Perl script, which will make your Opera bookmarks importable.
May 21, 2003 @ 22:26 » 3 comments » Software
Feedster images
An assortment of most images from a day in the blog world.
Feedster images, brilliant idea, wonderful!
May 22, 2003 @ 13:32 » 3 comments » Blogosphere
A late response
As if a week of returning fits of jetlag wasn't enough, it is being served with a chaser of slow burning flu *snirf*. Owen brings up a couple of good points that I've been meaning to respond to, but being clogged up so badly kept me from that, mostly because this post actually involves thinking. So, keeping with the dialogical ebb and flow, I'll start with the last point and sort of work my way back up.
Cultural accents of machinery and globalization. I'm not an engineer and many of the subleties of cultural differences in engineering and design have probably escaped me, but indeed, technology is never neutral and always engendered/embedded in a specific cultural, historical and economical context. In my recollection, 1970s electronics coming from Germany, France, Japan or the USA, had a distinctly different feel to it. I'm not sure there was an equally pronounced Dutchness in technology, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to point out 60s and 70s Dutch kitchens among other examples. Some of the cultural differences lingered long after globalization started, but I agree that globalization causes an increasing homogenization in technology. In another 100 years I'm sure though, that historians will be able to adequately read our current state of mind from (or into) our technologies. As an aside, I always felt that Gibson and Sterling did a great job on bringing out the particular sensibilities of the Victorian age and how that impacted on their technology (and how their technology shaped them) in The Difference Engine.
My own research is not a cross-cultural study per se, but it's interesting to see that when actively focusing on Dutch weblogs, one of the first things that catches my eye is a subtle difference with their more US-centric brethren. The difference is not so much in the technology itself I'd say — although it would be interesting to look at for instance the Dutch weblog tool Pivot and compare it with other weblog tools — but in the unspoken conventions of what makes a good log: what sort of things do you write about, what sort of sites do you link to, what's in your sidebars, and not unimportantly, what do you tell about yourself? One of the things that appears to be conceptualized differently is the "about the author" information. US/English weblogs, at least the ones I'm frequenting, tend to give some information about who author is in real life, whereas many Dutch weblog authors appear to create more of an online personality, rather than tying that selfpresentation to their real life identity. Caveat: I'm only describing a not (yet) quantified observation here.
Going with the flow, rather than the ebb, here and jumping to the point of intentionality of/in (re)presentation. Certainly, some home page or weblog authors are more aware of their online presence than others. Goffman also deals with intentionality in the presentation of self, showing how certain aspects indeed are under the control of the subject, while other aspects escape that control, for example because the subject doesn't realize those aspects might be important, or because there is only so much one can do about one's physical appearance, or because the subject makes a faux pas and lets some information slip out unintentionally. The interesting thing here is the common assumption that online you have a much greater control over your selfpresentation. Still, various everyday aspects of our social reality are encoded in the way we choose to represent ourselves. In a research on family home pages, conducted by a group of students I taught last trimester, it turned out that on the majority of researched home pages the traditional family structure with the father as head of the family, the mother as loving care taker and the children as focus of the family life, was mirrored not only in the content of the home pages, but also in the very structure and layout of those pages. The navigation, for example, invariably listed the father first, then the mother, followed by the children.
My own research is not about classification as an end, but as a tool to think about the everyday processes of social interaction. Intentionality therefor is not in and of itself interesting; what interests me is which aspects of identity are considered worthy of intentional (re)presentation on a home page, and the reasons why they are worthy of active construction. My particular research focus is gender, and why and how home page authors choose to make it (or not make it) an explicit part of their selfpresentation. I'm not just interested in an "on-off" answer here, I want to particularly focus on different social and cultural understandings of masculinity: what do people "do" to present themselves as male, and most of the time a particular kind of male. Gender here is understood not as an innate quality, but as a rather fluid and negotiable set of social, cultural, etc. norms, conventions and stereotypes.
And no, I'm not using "Bacon's table of more or less." I presume you mean Francis Bacon, but I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with this particular theory/concept of Bacon.
Metaphor: If you're interested in that, have a look at George Lakoff & Mark Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By. They talk about how metaphors structure our experience, and how some metaphors are more prevalent than others. Especially spatial and directional metaphors are central to organizing knowledge of the world. The metaphor of the "home," which is already encoded in the term "home page," not only encodes various social connotations of "home", but also implies a particular type of navigable and inhabitable space. Although it probably won't fit in the current research, it would be interesting to see which metaphors are used to construct home pages, and whether they build on different metaphors than spatial/directional ones.
May 27, 2003 @ 17:35 » no comments » Research
Cat and Girl
May 27, 2003 @ 17:51 » no comments » General
Starbucks in the picture
When I was in Seattle, everyone insisted that Starbucks was somehow 'evil,' just like Microsoft, but no-one could explain me why. I had already returned home when Lawrence Lessig posted that he'd heard of two instances where customers of Starbucks were prohibited from taking pictures on the Starbucks premises, because of
Starbuck’s copyright of their entire 'environment' — that everything in the place is protected and cannot be used with Starbuck's express permission.
An investigation by bumperactive.com reveals that the situation is not as grim as it seems, as they quote the Starbucks PR person as saying:
"Starbucks does not have a photo policy for the general public. Our policy is not to allow media to photograph within our stores without prior approval from our media relations marketing team." (Related BoingBoing post, because you can't (yet?) link directly to the post at bumperactive.com)
So the cases Lessig reports were probably caused by an overzealous manager, who hadn't read the company guidelines well. Still, if you often take pictures wherever you go, it's probably a good idea to have a look at the Photographer's Right, a one page flyer succinctly describing your rights as a photographer. All we need now is localized versions.
Which leaves the question of whether posting pictures of you in Starbucks on your weblog makes you "media"? And the question why the Seattlites tell me Starbucks is evil?
[update: An ex-employee of Starbucks explains the origins of the 'no-photography policy' (via BoingBoing of course).
May 28, 2003 @ 10:48 » no comments » General
MMOG subscriptions
An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth. A very interesting resource, putting various massively multi-player online games in a graph, plotting their number of subscriptions. Everquest appears the big leader, with close to 450k subscriptions. I'll have to dig into my stack of game magazines, because I distinctly remember seeing numbers of 600k and even 800k for the number of subscriptions to Everquest.
May 28, 2003 @ 10:55 » no comments » Games
Game on!
The Game On exhibition is opening its doors today in the Netherlands. Great news for us continental game afficionados who never made it across the channel to the Barbican Art Gallery in London.
[update: Hmm... the thumbnail algorithm caused a pretty cool outline effect... interesting.]
May 28, 2003 @ 12:24 » 1 comment » Games
PSX: Playstation 2 plus
Ah, the news of the day certainly must be the announcement of a new "souped up" Playstation 2, dubbed "PSX," as Slashdot puts it. The new PS2 will get a big 120GB harddisk and a DVD+/-RW drive, so that it can double as a digital video recorder. Also added are ethernet, usb2.0 and memory stick support. The case as you can see looks incredibly slick and the DVD drive is slot loading.
So, what do I think? Well, it'll probably take quite a while to get released in Europe and what good is a DVR when the various tv stations cannot even make my fully compatible VPS/PDC equipped VCR record tv programs when it's supposed to be? I mean, digital video recording is nice and all, but as long as you don't get the fabled Tivo experience of automatically recorded tv shows without commercials, it's just an incremental upgrade and not one I'm going to be paying extra for. As for upgrades, it seems that with respect to gaming the PS2 remains unchanged, although integration of ethernet and the possibilities of an integrated harddisk now put it on par with the Xbox. All in all probably a great move by Sony to extend the life of their big money maker, and a good example of the integration of living room media that we will see more and more, but it's not the Playstation 3... yet.
Also check out the IGN coverage and especially the PDF file of the presentation.
May 28, 2003 @ 15:48 » 5 comments » Games
2.64
The 2.64 (minor but recommended) upgrade for MovableType has been released (changelog here). Install went fine, nothing noticeable happened, but I feel safe in the knowledge that some bugs, that hadn't even bitten me, have been eliminated.
May 29, 2003 @ 11:34 » no comments » MovableType
Hidden area of the Matrix site
Atmosphere provides details about how to enter a hidden area of the Matrix website.
• Go to www.matrixmovie.com
• Click on the 'Enter high bandwidth' button
• Click on the yellow dot in the upper right corner of the screen
• Click twice on the square next to the 'Low bandwidth' button
• A new navigation bar appears, click on the latch next to the 'Access panel 3' label
Congratulations, you're in. Now you need to flip 8 switches to make a code that grants you access to the various hidden extras. Here are some combinations:
11011011 3d view nebuchadnezzar
10110110 Bonus clip Stunt coordinator
00011000 Bonus clip Concept Illustrator
10000001 Previous matrix website
11101001 Trinity concept art
11010100 Animatrix Desktop Art
01101111 Hexadecimal menu
Enjoy :-)
May 29, 2003 @ 11:50 » no comments » General
« April 2003 • June 2003 »