Last 100 posts, part 4MAY 10 2005

(Every once in awhile, I summarize what's been going on around these parts. This is that.)

The huge! enormous!! gigantic!!! news is that after many problems, I finally got Tiger installed, thanks to a number of extremely persistent kottke.org readers. Super doubleplusgood thanks goes to Stefan Seiz for not giving up on me and documenting how to fix the problem. I'm still a little concerned that my drive is teetering on the brink of failure, so as many have urged, I'm investing in a Firewire drive soon so that drive failure won't be such a huge pain in the ass. (I'm already backing up the essentials, but it would be nice to have a complete local snapshot.)

Update: Spotlight is already rocking, but Mail.app's permanent placement of the mailboxes pane on the left side is not cool. Anyone know a way around this that doesn't involve modifying .nib files? I've already taken care of the ridiculous icons with Cage Fighter.

Feedback continues to roll in about the new dropdown menu on the front page. Complaints include that it's flickering on Firefox (have a JavaScript solution to the problem but would prefer just fixing the CSS somehow); that it's not a real select menu (I have more control over styling this way...plus some future features won't work with a plain old select menu); a bug in Safari 2.0 where if you try and switch to a previously displayed option, it won't switch (no idea what that's about); and that it just plain sucks (I have no response for that).

Want to get up to speed on the whole global warming thing? Try The Climate of Man, the three part series by Elizabeth Kolbert for the New Yorker: How the earth is changing, The curse of Akkad, What can be done? There's also an online-only interview with her on climate change.

Since I went full-time in late February, the incidence of typos on the site has skyrocketed. This makes me think I'm trying to do too much too fast. Trying to slow down a little bit. Quality, not quantity.

I recently reviewed Steven Johnson's new book, Everything Bad is Good for You. The book is currently sitting at #212 on the Amazon best sellers list and my review is currently sitting on the Amazon page for the book under someone else's name. Which wouldn't be so bad had they actually given me credit for it like he was supposed to.

Many people asked why I didn't include purple numbers in my discussion of fundamental units of the web. It's a fair point, but I guess I excluded them because I was looking specifically for units that stand on their own in the larger web somehow...and paragraphs tend not to have meaning (nor are they assigned meaning) outside of the context of the page/post containing them. That and purple numbers aren't really in widespread use. Grant Barrett wrote in support of words being the fundamental unit of the web, having written this when he launched Double-Tongued Word Wrester last year:

So a few years ago I began searching for smaller elements to extract and found that by picking out an unusual word or a significant number, I could offer yet another entry point to the larger article. It didn't have to be a quote.

Last week I pointed to a WSJ article on the booming online sales of tshirts which mentioned my pals at Connected Ventures. They recently started a new tshirt company called Defunker, for which I did some modeling (you may have seen me in some ads on Boing Boing). This is probably a good time to reveal that this whole blogging full-time thing is really just an elaborate smokescreen for my burgeoning modeling career. Sadly, I haven't gotten any calls since the Defunker photos went live...I guess there's not a lot of demand for sleepy/confused-looking dorks.

I did a segment on Future Tense about my collection of Tiger headlines. A Real Audio recording of the piece is available. Also, thanks to Brad DeLong for satisfing my desire for a really sensational Tiger vs. Longhorn headline.

And that's the last 100 posts.