Watching my Apache log files for this web site, I was struck by something very interesting. I used to notice in my log files, the occasional request by a ‘robot’ or ‘spider’ – some automated program that downloads web content on behalf of their owner.

Today, I’m noticing the occasional request by a real browser. Almost all of the requests to my web site are by automated programs, which download my content either for publishing on some aggregator or other, or from something like Amphetadesk that serves the same purpose on the desktop.

So it seems that, finally, we have been relived of the drudgery of reading websites by programs that do it for us, even as Douglas Adams foresaw in “Long Dark Teatime of the Soul”, and in his talk at ApacheCon London 2000.

After recommending, for nearly 4 years, that people read “As We May Think”, by Dr Vannevar Bush, I somewhat sheepishly admit that I had never read it myself.

I rectified this yesterday, and WOW. You have *got* to read this. It does a number of interesting things for me.

One, it shows me the astonishing foresight that some people have about technology, and trends, and where things are headed. This guy, in the closing days of WWII, foresaw the World Wide Web in a way that some people *still* don’t get.

The other thing is that we have absolutely no concept of what is going to happen with technology, because we express things in our current terms. Dr. Bush had amazing ideas of what would happen, but could not express them because he was trapped in the metaphor of his day. Thus, his “Memex” device contained reams and reams of microfiche, which are accessed by photoelectric devices that scan them in, visually, and then mechanically move them around to find the related (“linked”) ones.

This, in turn, makes me marvel at where we will be in 50 years, and how we will look back on the remarks made in this poor benighted decade, when we thought we were at the peak of technological advance. After all, every age thinks of themselves as the moderns. The folks in the early 1800s viewed themselves as supremely enligtened, risen from the ignorance and prejudice of the past, and technologically advanced to the point where no further advance was likely.

In the final remarks of Dr. Bush’s paper, he speculates that, maybe some day, it would be possible to not have to resort to a physical intermediate layer at all – that data could be taken directly from a stored form to a stored form, without having to manipulate a keyboard, or a physical printed version, at all. Then he almost dismisses this as pure fantasy. And just a few decades later, we have trouble imagining data as anything *but* electronic.

If you haven’t read this paper, it is well worth the time to do so, whether or not you are involved in technology in any way.

Having been reminded that Coffee Times Coffee House is a free QX.net wireless hotspot, I’ve come here to hang out for the rest of the afternoon, in the hopes of getting some stuff written. Hopefully there will be fewer distractions here than there would be elsewhere.

Ken has a brief mention about all the gadgets and tools that he carts around. I was reminded of an incident at ApacheCon, during the closing shindig. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but someone asked Ken “Do you have a screwdriver?” To which Ken answered indignantly, “Do I have a screwdriver? What the hell kind of question is that?”

In the last few months, I’ve had to start lugging a bag around to carry all my technology. Palm Tungsten e. Magellan SporTrak Pro GPSr. Screwdrivers. Pocket watch. And now, a mini-cassette recorder, since I’m tired of losing story ideas because it’s not convenient to stop and write at the moment.

And of course my wallet, checkbook and phone.

And my SwissCard. And my micro flashlight and compass. And a knife.

Geez, I’m turning into Ken!

It’s a wonder I can ever get onto an airplane.

I am looking at getting a Roomba on the general theory that it will vacuum more often than I will.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, turns out that there are weirdos out there that actually hack on the Roomba to make it do strange and wonderful different things.

People are funnier than anybody.

I’m using Safari on my iMac to access a java client on a Linux machine which runs Citrix on a Windows machine on which I’m running Internet Explorer to connect to a web-based app running on another Windows machine. On the way, I’m going through my Linux firewall/router, and a Cisco firewall on the other end. I don’t even know what all is between here and there.

I wonder if packets have an OS preference. I can just picture the packets sitting around arguing about what OS treats them best.

I’m using my new iMac.

I plugged it in, turned it on, and it Just Worked. It found my wireless network, and connected. At the time, I was worring about where I could set it, so that I could run cables. Apparently I didn’t need to be concerned about that.

I still have a few confusions, but I expect I’ll figure them out.

Why do I have an iMac? Well, I’m doing a training in May for Big Nerd Ranch and the training machines will be Macs. So they sent me one to practice with, and so that all of my class material will be *sure* to work on Macs. I don’t anticipate any problems, but it sure was nice of them.

I really don’t have anywhere to put it, but since it does wireless, that makes it a little easier to find a place. At the moment it is on the dining room table, which is less than ideal, but works for now.

The Palm Tungsten calendar “agenda” view has a display option to show background image. Unfortunately, the “background image” is light blue. That’s the only option. I wanted a background image.

So, after poking around a little, I found T3AgendaBG that lets you change the image, and a website that lets you create backgrounds from your own images. So, now I have a background image of St Benedict’s, near Ferdinand, IN. The picture is somewhere in my pictures from my geocaching trip.

The trick is making the image pale enough that you can still read the text on top of it, but not so pale that it is invisible.

I recently started doing my banking online. You’d think, since I’ve been wired longer than almost any of my friends or family, that I’d be the first to do online banking. Well, I’ve done enough bank security assessments to feel more than a little trepidation at the prospect.

So, anyways, I’m doing my banking online. And were these online banking interfaces written by monkeys? Managing accounts, payees, and pending bills, is an amazingly complex process. If I don’t have a payee already in my list, why don’t you add it automatically, like every banking software on the planet? Or at least provide a link so that I can add one, rather than making me go through 4 menus to get there.

And here’s the one that I really like. When add a “business payee” it asks for the account number. What account number you might ask? Mine, or theirs? Well, that’s not clear. But if you go into the list where you can select a business payee from all the business payees that other customers have created, it appears that many of them thought it meant their account number. ’nuff said.

But, of course, the annoyances don’t end there. There’s no register view (ie, the list of payments that I’ve made that haven’t cleard yet) which means that I’m actually *more* prone to overdrawing than I was before, not less. This was one of the major motivators of doing this, so this is the one that annoys me the most.

The fact that everything is Java servlets and runs the speed of molasses uphill in the winter only serves to intensify my annoyance.

However, from talking with other folks, it seems clear that *most* online banking solutions are no better. *sigh*.

I suppose this might seem blindingly obvious, but …

In the early days of the web, the convention was that if there was a bit of text that was interesting, you’d link that text to another page that gave further details. This way, a document could remain brief, but still contain a wealth of material.

Soon, an annoying practice started up. Instead of merely linking the phrase, they’d insert into their paragraph the phrase “Click Here for more information. This was aggravating, because if you just wanted to read the synopsis, you’d be interrupted every 6 words by the phrase “Click Here”. This was particularly irritating if you weren’t using a graphical browser, and so you were not clicking at all. Grr.

Well, it appears that the “Click Here” people have won. While there are a few very geek websites that still practice the Old Way, the vast majority of websites tell you to “Click Here”, as though you don’t actually know how to use a browser.

Another irritating trend started up about the time that businesses started getting web sites. Whereas before that time, the purpose of a web site was to link to other web sites, when businesses started their web sites, they started to spread the wisdom that offsite links were BAD, because they took your audience elsewhere. Or, worse yet, that you should open these links in a new window or warn your audience that links to other sites were not endorsed, and probably not worthwhile visiting.

These days, it seems that most websites are closed systems. They have links to other pages within their own website, but you can’t get here from there.

Interestingly, it’s the websites that *do* link elsewhere that are the busiest. Google, Slashdot, and Yahoo are good examples of this, but, of course, there are others. These are the sites that you keep going back to, precisely because they link to other sites.

Anyways, I’m sure that this isn’t news to anybody, but it was an interesting observation to me. And that’s what reall matters.