Under strick instructions from Jason Kottke I went and checked out Matt Groening’s Top Ten Simpsons Episodes. I don’t agree with a couple of them – Frank Grimes was appalling – but there are some classic moments here. “We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us!”.
What kind of advice is this: Mystery Meat Navigation: An Introduction. People are always asking me, “What’s the best site on the Web?” My response is “There is no best site because the best site is the one that as soon as someone clicks a link to go there, money is automatically sucked out of their wallet.”?
Well I am afraid Barbelith operates on a non-corporate principle, as I think do most of the very best sites on the net (at least the ones that I visit). So I am therefore more than happy to be (in the words of the man who I quote above) a web site that sucks.
British Telecom finally did something useful with the web. I know it is a shock, but it’s true! No longer will I be paying 50p a shot for directory enquiries when I can go to www.bt.com/phonenetuk.
Yesterday a new G4 arrived in TimeOut.com’s offices. I am in awe. Lust lust lust lust.
The point of weblogs is to talk about other weblogs – actually no, that is completely not the point. Still – never mind, eh? Metajohn thinks I am nice. Drat Fink has said in response to yesterdays ravings (and I quote): “i hate it when im confronted with intelligent thoughts on other blogs, then im forced to actually use my brain, which only reminds me that i hadnt been using it prior to that point”.
The domain name www.year2000.com has been put up for auction on eBay. I think bids closed at around $10,000,000 [Full Story]. Why do I suspect barbelith.com will never be worth a penny? Huh? Answer me that!
I am adding stuff to The Bomb as we speak. It might be in your best interests to go and have a look!
I am back at work, and thrilling it is too… I am really taken with the way that metajohn has incorporated the date information into his blog. I may be forced to steal valuable sexy ideas from him.
INTERNET TIME PART TWO:
So the response to my first conception of Internet time wasn’t particularly overwhelming. People seemed (how should I put this) … confused … by its purpose and/or functionality. Looking over it again they are probably correct.
So I have a new and better idea. Imagine this – you wish to organise a meeting with someone at 1pm your time. You decide on e-mail. You click on the new e-mail button, write what you want, and when it comes time to put in the time of the meeting you click on the clock icon on your toolbar. This icon triggers a “realtime” plugin which would bring up an image of a clock which you could click on, thereby selecting a time. This then writes a small piece of code into your e-mail which you would see as 1pm.
However this code at the OTHER end would be read by the plugin and automatically translated into the equivalent in their time-zone – thus your meeting partner would view it as 3pm (for example).
This plugin could then be added to any number of packages, automatically translating a particular timecode into what time it should be in the place where it was read. (Packages like word processors and web browsers are obvious examples – you can do something on the web like it with applets or javascript, but they go no further).
If you added to the functionality of the plugin by having it check the time against some form of authority (such as GMT) and automatically setting the computer’s internal clock accordingly, you could have a really handy nice little device that would completely invisibly generate a standard for Internet Time.
And to make it more entertaining, you could have any number of additional translation timescales in place – you could specify you wanted to see times sent to you in Swatch Internet Time (automatically translated with Swatch’s permission) or any number of wacked out systems. Think of it – on your home computer you could choose to work completely in StarDates (with the permission of Paramount of course). And if you wanted to extend it to dates, you could operate in a completely different calendar (although that might get a little too confusing). And it wouldn’t matter at all, because to the people who you communicated with would all think you were making all these appointments in whatever system they preferred as well!
Is there anyone out there interested in developing such a mini-app? I even have a snappy name for it: THERMIDOR, after the month of the French Revolutionary calendar in which I was born.
More ravings tomorrow.
Mr Blair, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, has given his approval to the creation of GeT Greenwich Electronic Time. The site for this is incredibly boring, and I can’t help feeling rather misses the point. I mean of course it is handy to have a standard to measure time on the net, but Swatch‘s system seems to me to have more going for it (although it isn’t particularly intuitive). It seems to me that one of the functions of Internet time must be to make it very easy for people to agree to meet online without having to take into account regional time differences. Therefore the system must be intuitive enough for people to be able to understand, while different enough from the standard layout of time to not be confused with it. It’s important that people can say lets meet at XXXX and understand where that is in relation to their own time even when their own times are very different.
So here is a preliminary statement regarding BIT – Barbelith Internet Time. My suggestion is to keep with the 24 hour clock (because people have to be able to work out its relation to their own time when things like daylight saving and stuff kick in in the real world), keep it running from Greenwich (why the hell not, everything has done for years anyway) and only abstract its presentation. Something like 3113 for 1:13 pm GMT, minutes first, hours second. I know it seems ridiculous, but it should make time translation really easy while not allowing it to be confused with local time. Six figure numbers would have the seconds at the front – hence 003021 would mean 9.30pm exactly GMT. Someone who currently uses Eastern Standard Time would be able to say to someone two hours ahead of them to meet at 003018BIT which would be half past one EST and half past three for the other guy.
Has anyone got any other ideas?
Powazek has politely pointed out that he has written two new pieces for sf stories. I am an idiot. While we are at it, why don’t you tell the fray where you were at midnight…
I wanted to get a new relaunched barbelith up today, but the site is so far away from being completed, that I just can’t. Which is a pity. Happy new Millennium people. Use it well.
Last night in a nutshell:
Today’s barbelith celebrates etoys decision not to press its utterly ridiculous law suit. Bear in mind though that the precedent probably still stands.
Oops. I accidentally wrote an epinion on Mystery Men.