While I was reading this , I read a sentence that got me thinking about why the web is both strange and sensible at the same time.

While Mike Johnston (whose is the proprietor of The Online Photographer ) was proposing a simple exercise to improve ones’ photographic skills (and which I should try to follow, one day), he wrote this,:

“If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one…”

I think, based only on his writings, that Mike is probably an honest, neither overly conceited nor overly modest, guy who knows quite a bit about his subject (much more so than the average: he had, afterall, been employed in the past as a photography journalist by specialty print magazines) and is very good and entertaining in his writings about said subject. That 30,000 people a day should read his site is a testament to two things. One is that, as we all know, by far the majority of that hugely vast amount of content on the web isn’t really of much interest to anybody else. Even discounting the dumb, evil, or designed-to-disgust content, most of it just isn’t anything special. So good, honest, thoughtful writings by someone who knows something about his subject is bound to, eventually, attract people who appreciate it.

Second is that there are so many people surfing and reading the web that even if this good content is really not gripping enough for most web surfers, the minority who are attracted are still an amazingly sizable chunk of people.

I think I’m making this sound more profound than it is or maybe it’s more profound than I can describe without sounding like a pompous twit (I’m not Mike Johnston, after all). But it does continually amaze me that good people with good skills who may have lost their niche in the analog world find a new one that looks completely different but which enables their skills to be out in the skills-marketplace, so to speak, and attracts the people who are looking for those skills. Even, in this case, if it’s just good writing about photography.

Had a funny net-day in Abbotsford today. I was at a couple meetings at University of Fraser Valley and I couldn’t get normal websites such as gmail, basecamp, or facebook. Not even plain old google. But I could get VPL’s super-weird user-unfriendly remote email connection where you have to go through a firewall with port 950, authenticate there with a generic login, leave that window open while you then go to an outlook-webclient page using a weird, hard-to-remember URL. It was astonishing. That weird email routine is usually hard to get inside the network of academic institutions; yet, today at UFV, I could get in using my laptop with a borrowed wireless authentication as well as using a library workstation and a guest-authentication.

I mean. That’s just not normal. I’m sure they must have been having some kind of dns/bandwidth/I-don’t-know kind of problem to prevent google and gmail but to have that stuff *not* get through when weird email firewall stuff does get through is very strange.

I was sitting in the coffee shop this aft; I should say “hiding” in the coffee shop because the wireless where I work wasn’t agreeing with Suse liveCD in my laptop (the wifi at the library is superbogus crappy: you have to scroll down below the fold of a page of straight text and the authenticate through a form that sometimes works), and then I had to try *two* coffeshops to get a properly working connection and I was totally grumbling and posted a snarky comment to my twitter when I suddenly thought of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc . So now I’m thinking: is free/cheap  public wifi that’s available pretty much anywhere something that, in  Louis CK’s words: “the world’s owes us?”

I mean, here in the downtown, there’s  almost free, good wifi pretty-much within reach of wherever we might be. That’s actually pretty good. So, even if it doesn’t work once in a while, maybe I should stop griping. I don’t know.

Interesting little post over at David Lee King’s blog about ten gadgets that are dead or dying (and will be impossible to find soon). One is the wrist-watch. Hmmm. I know that my phone will tell me the time. So will my Palm. In fact I’ve been carrying a device of some sort that will tell me the time for at least 17 years. But still, last time I spent the day without my watch, I kept noticing. So much so that that was the topic of my FB post for the day.

I’ve been wondering why it is that the current rage for “useful” bicycles, which in itself is a marvelously Good Thing, is centred around bikes which, while being made of new materials, are shaped like very old bicycles. Hundred-year-old bicycles, in fact. When it’s been well-known (at least among cycle engineers) that the most efficient shapes for two-wheels-in-line transport are somewhat different. 

The unpopularity of recumbents is somewhat understandable, if unfair. They don’t “look right” and they can be harder to ride at first. And when people buy bikes after riding them around the bike-store’s block for ten minutes, that makes recumbents a really hard sell, I suspect. 

But small-wheeled upright bikes don’t suffer from this problem. They ride like a “normal” bike and you can tell that as soon as you start to turn the pedals. It’s also reasonbaly well-known by bike engineers that a little bit of suspension at both of those small wheels makes for the most efficient bike of them all. (I know I’m biased. I’ve got an old Moulton.) Still, I don’t really know the answer to my question: why don’t the regular (and nicely outfitted, I might add) Dahons, have suspension? I’m puzzled buy this.

And I’m also puzzled that there aren’t more companies marketing a wider range of bike shapes (small wheels, spar frames, etc.) to capture the audience of new utility cyclists?

I have to admit: even though the Mother of all Funk Chords has been all over the web (posted in places as disparate as Slashdot and Virtual Dave…Real Blog), I still think it’s the coolest thing I ‘ve seen in ages.

It’s all done by this guy.

Here’s something to listen to!

 

It’s what the Digital Cobbler was all about 7 years ago! The CBC has finally caught up to us 🙂

 

[thanks to Paul Woods for the tip].

This site started a long time ago with a long article that formed the basis of the previous site. I’ve finally converted it to a set of WordPress pages on this site here.