Avaunt!

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?
-- E. C. Bentley

Wednesday, March 8, 2000
Two years ago: Mourning

Two years ago, I was so bummed! Even though we only dated for seven weeks, I did like Jason. He did the right thing by breaking it off, though, since he really wasn't interested in me in a romantic way, and wasn't a very suitable partner for me. I remember how swollen and red my eyes were, from crying. I was really pleased by what Andy Hooper said about me in that entry.

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Lynette of Medley was talking about cherry tomatoes. She seemed to think they were a new, genetically modified variant. I said, "cherry tomatoes are really closer to the original wild tomato than most regular tomatoes. But most foods we eat would count as genetically modified, if you consider controlled breeding and selection as doing mods. We save the seeds of the plants that taste good, bear well, and resist disease. We breed the animals that are easy to keep around, instead of the ones that spook easily, attack each other, or don't grow well."

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Chip said to me (and jokes that I should start shaking in my boots when he says this), "I had a thought in the shower this morning." He felt like we aren't making good progress on the new production process (bad! this sounds like I'm not working hard enough), and maybe if we set a goal for using this process in a specific way (besides doing the entire site in this format) we (meaning me) would get farther. His two ideas -- work on the HTML email thing, or do a version of the site for handheld devices. I was much more in favor of the handheld version, since I'm morally opposed to HTML email still.

So we installed the palm emulator software on my machine, and I created an account at Avantgo. The emulator made me giggle. It's much bigger than lifesize, for some reason, and takes up a good chunk of the screen. I started studying the developer's guide at Avantgo, to see what parts of our site would be useful to view on a Palm.

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We had the weblogger's IRC chat tonight. I do enjoy it! I usually find some new weblogs to sample. The growth in this area is phenomenal. It's akin to online journals in 1996 and 1997, when the Open pages webring went from thirty or so, to hundreds. (I'm number 143 in that ring.) Some weblog writers are stewing about a decrease in average quality as the number grows. It's true that tools that make it easy to start a weblog (or journal) lead to larger numbers of abandoned pages.