While I'm freezing inside my apartment, it's an absolute sauna outside. Outside: HOT HOT HOT. Inside: Brrrrrrrr.... I'm not going to complain because I'd rather it was cold in the apartment than the same temperature as outside.

I was reading Slashdot (for like the third time today) and found an article titled "Banner Ads: Biggest Advertising Mistake Ever". While I didn't read the linked news article, I did read the comments (set threshold to 3) and I particularly liked two comments. The first of which is (excerpted):

The thing about banner ads is that I'll occassionally see one for something I'm interested in or for a company I didn't realize had a web presence, but usually I'll just make a mental note and surf there myself when I'm in the mood to shop...

To which another Slashdot member replied:

What you've described is the classic model of print advertising. Advertising traditionally doesn't work by immediately creating a sale, it works by building a largely subconscious awareness of the brand and product that is being advertised, and associating that awareness with real (it works!) and imagined (it will make you popular, get you laid, and bring joy to your life!) benefits (also mostly subconciously.)

That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing. In other domains, no one judges the success of print ads by the number of people who stop reading the magazine and rush to the phones, they judge success by the overall increase in business. Likewise, no one judges the success of billboards by how many cars veer off the freeway and head towards the advertiser's business, nor TV advertisement by how many people shut off the TV and run to the mall. However, that is exactly what is used to judge the viability of banner ads - it is expected to provide instant business, and advertisers are loathe to pay for online ad campaigns that don't have a next-click success.

Online publishers are partially to blame for this by promising the moon to their advertising customers, and by selling click-through instead of selling brand awareness. This may be fallout from the heady pre-bust days when no one worried about revenue, anyway - having big accounts (which produced no revenue) was seen as more important to attracting investors than the revenue stream was, so publishers would tell ad sales prospects that they wouldn't have to pay (much) unless there was a click through. Now, they are paying the price for that carelessness.

Ah Tung is having his vacuum chair featured at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair held in New York in mid-May. The May 2001 issue of Metropolis magazine has an ICFF preview and has a picture of his chair on page 54! AT is also quoted describing his chair.

"...My favorite thing to put in them is marshmallows..."

AT is famous!

I used Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to build a computer in college. Specifically, XILINX chips. Now those same chips are being using in conjunction with Genetic Algorithms to "evolve" logic design. Genetic Algorithms work by mutating characteristics, in this case of a chip design, and then testing the result for correctness and efficiency. Of course, the better designs, the ones that act correctly and efficiently, survive and are then in turn mutated. Most of the work in this area has been in software where mutations can be tested quickly.

FPGAs are chips whose internal logic can be rewired on the fly. I had to use them in Computer Science classes to create custom ICs. Someone came up with the idea of using a computer to control hardware mutations in FPGAs. Brilliant. Because of this, Adrian Thompson has evolved the design of a chip that distinguishes between two audio tones. What's the big deal? Well, the design was more efficient than those made by humans using known principles. And then there is the fact that five logic cells were completely unconnected to the rest of the circuit and yet when those cells were removed, the chip failed. "Evidently the chip had evolved a way to use the electromagnetic properties of a signal in a nearby cell. But the fact is that Thompson doesn't know how it works."

Chips whose internal logic we don't understand: can we trust them? I can see an entire new field being born to analyze the properties of these Darwinian chip designs. A whole new level of abstraction to describe a collection of NAND gates. via ArsTechnica

I think it was Greggman who brought it up first. About the Daily Me, the concept of personalized news. Portals began on the Internet offering general news, the big ticket headlines that were circulating at the time, the memes that had entered our collective consciousness. But as time went by, and portals evolved, sites like Slashdot popped up offering a more targeted experience. As a programmer, am I more interested in the U.S. spy plane or about the next version of Perl? Maybe both, but I'd probably want to check out the Perl story first. So these newer news "portals" (are they even portals anymore?) cater to niche markets. And everyone loves it. We get just the information we care about. The internet is able to bring together typewriter collectors from around the world for the latest in antique Smith-Corona pricing.

But at what price? I can see an immediate downside to all this personalized news: Where are the common threads that hold us together? What if one person made a President Bush joke and no one got it because everyone only knows about their little corner of the news world?

It doesn't matter who you are — because of television and the newspapers, there are topics that everyone has heard about. These are things that we all have in common.

There's a huge backlash against commonality, against people following the herd. I just watched Josie and the Pussycats...

Josie. Rules. Must. Buy. Soundtrack. At. Target.

Of course, taken to the extreme, it'll result in homogeneity. But, then again, you've got to have shared experiences. Cass R. Sunstein sees a hazard in the rise in personalized news. This specialized news leads to fragmentation and polarization, he argues. I agree to a certain extent. But the Internet is like any other medium and when it finally reaches its equilibrium, I think you'll find generalized news is going to survive. And personalized news is not a new thing. Think Guns & Ammo, Stereophile and Dog Fancy.

The question is: Where is that equilibrium?

Greggman pointed out these pages which chronicle the adventures of Monster. I've always wanted to document my time with Oojamba. Unfortunately, Oojamba and I aren't as adventurous (or as interesting) as Monster. Mostly I sit around and watch TV all day while Oojamba works on web pages. Still, I was able to get a couple shots of Oojamba hard at work before he told me to quit it.

Here Oojamba is on the phone with Covad about a rebate or something...

Oojamba is furiously typing and emitting a high pitched cackle. Is he mad at Covad or is he just in a coding trance? Hehe. He doesn't even notice me taking pictures.

Sometimes, Oojamba stands up, hunkers down and really gets into it. Tappity-tap-tap, this monkey can type!

Oojamba always wants to go out and party, you know, "Work hard, Play hard" and all, but nowadays it seems like "Friends" is on all the time.

It's a conspiracy! I get my bill from Speakeasy today, more than a month after installation and right on the bill it gives me a URL for the rebate that I should get. I go there and of course there is no rebate for me. I call up Speakeasy (on hold for more than half an hour -- you will experience "unacceptable hold times", their words) and they say the time of the rebate has expired, I should have sent in the rebate information as soon as I signed up, two months ago. But I didn't pay Speakeasy yet! How do I get a rebate on money that I haven't paid! Of well... my bad, in the very first e-mail from Speakeasy, after welcoming me, blah blah blah, a couple pages of useless text later, there are two lines:

You are eligible for a Covad rebate.
Visit this page now!

Then there are a couple more pages of useless info. According to the nice lady at Speakeasy, the rebate offer ends March 31. Speakeasy sent my bill on April 3.

I had no chance.

I wouldn't have thought anyone would have attempted to film a story in reverse. Other than Seinfeld.

Memento is about Leonard, who's on a mission to avenge the death of his wife but who can't remember events that occured more than a few minutes ago. What's brilliant about the movie is that in order to follow Leonard on his journey, the story is told in reverse. Since we haven't yet seen the events that transpired in the past, we are very much like Leonard, who has no memory of those events, and is stranded in the present.

I guess I'm a big celebrity!

Looks like someone just did a Yahoo/DMOZ search and dumped the contents.