Minh’s Notes

I keep a folder of bookmarks filled with pages I intend to mention at some point on this blog, because they’re just so funny or otherwise worthwhile to read. But the last time I ever drew from the “Blog About…” folder was over a year ago; since then, its growth has closely paralleled that of the National Debt. The 182 bookmarks stand as a rustic testament to my penchant for procrastination, and that’s just the ones I didn’t lose when switching to the Mac. Though many of those links are now dead, no longer interesting, or covered copiously elsewhere, I’m still going to post the interesting ones.

Well, maybe later. Instead, I thought it’d be fun to share a few of my oldest “good read” bookmarks. Here are some of the webpages I added to the “Humor” folder back in high school, sorted by date bookmarked. Seriously: it’s not every year you find this kind of brilliance on Digg or Reddit:

• Steve, Don't Eat It! – 1991 Urkel-Os (bookmarked June 23^rd, 2005)
• Under Construction (June 22^nd, 2005) – guilty
• The Onion 2056 (June 22^nd, 2005)
• Big Fat Institute for Advanced Interactive Experiences (April 11^th, 2005) – based in Cincinnati
• The Credit Card Prank (April 1^st, 2005)
• PodBrix (February 27^th, 2005) – Legos, except not
• Taste for the Web (February 8^th, 2005) – a parody of Paul Graham
• Postal Experiments (January 21^st, 2005)
• “Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head.” (September 22^nd, 2004) – in 112 languages
• BlueScreen Screen Saver (August 28^th, 2004) – free from Microsoft
• win98.c (February 14^th, 2004)
• Case Western Reserve University, circa 2000 1900 (September 2^nd, 2003 1903) – background
• Laws of Japanese Animation (September 27^th, 2002)

Entry №2071, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 2:38 AM | Edit | Permalink
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Time to slim down my “need to blog about but can’t find the time for” folder. Since there’s currently a whopping 171 bookmarks in it, I’ll start with some of the stuff since October:

• Finally, there’s a solution to the troubling trend of small logos: Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
• Wired Magazine details the pains Apple went through to make the iPhone happen, and the lasting effect it had on the phone industry.
• For the last three years, one man, Alexander Clauss, has pretty much single-handedly competed against Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple. Although his Web browser, iCab, looked horrendous for the longest time and never gained even the market share that Opera had, it until this month supported decade-old Macs and modern Web standards at the same time. In case you’re wondering: yes, my computer has a copy installed.
• Those fortune cookies you get from any of the hundreds of Chinese buffets in Cincinnati? They’re Japanese.
• My first quarter out here at Stanford, I joined a few hundred freshmen descending on downtown San Francisco for the school’s annual Scavenger Hunt, essentially a denial of service attack on the city’s mass transit infrastructure. Caltrain, the regional commuter railroad, was resilient enough to stuff everyone onboard successfully (albeit unconfortably), but once we got downtown, the Muni bus system was a different story altogether. Apparently Muni’s semi-subway system isn’t any better.
• Today’s big corporations would be ashamed of what their Web presence amounted to back in 1996. My favorite is Nickelodeon’s site, where a pre–Web 2.0 vlogger is stuck in the back seat of the family car “with only her goldfish, Rover.” Yeah.

Thanks to John Gruber and Steve Baldwin.

Entry №1166, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:15 PM | Edit | Permalink
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• Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place. Japan’s (unconvincing) answer to the TARDIS. [1]
• California. Microsoft’s (unconvincing) answer to Apple packaging.
• Videos of people using assistive technology. Unbelievable. [2]
• Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man. Believable.
• Administrators Draft Guidelines For Responsible, Safe Hacking. It was inevitable, but I find it amazing that such a cool MIT tradition has lasted so long without much in the way of written rules. (Note that hacking means something completely different – and potentially more hazardous – at MIT.)
• Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster. Speaking of the inevitable…
• Is the glass half empty or half full? As always, a Wikipedian took the time to enumerate the ways you can answer the question. The relativist’s take: Depends how you read the meniscus.

Entry №1157, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 4:00 PM | Edit | Permalink
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