Analog2Digital

Father's Day update -- You can rest easy, I found him. I got a call from him, in fact.

posted by creon @ 8:43:20 AM

I've always hated Father's Day. I probably always will. Although I've come to know people who have nothing but good things to say about their fathers, and are close to them throughout adulthood, I can't shake the feeling that this contrived celebration lets everyone forget what a divorce rate of 50% means. Some of us don't have fathers. Some of us probably never will.

My parents divorced when I was 1 year old, and, from what I've heard, I'm glad they did. But after that, I've only seen my father sporadically, known him through short visits spaced by 3-5 years. I honestly don't know how many times I've seen my father, though I have a crystal-clear image in my mind, one that I can't remember to forget. So this Father's Day, I tried to call him, after 4 years since our last meeting.

I don't have his phone number. And, apparently, it's unlisted. So I tried to call my grandmother and get his number from her; I'd tried on Mother's Day, and it didn't work. I tried again, and it's not their number anymore. This scared me, because I haven't talked to her in as long as I haven't talked to my father this time, I was scared, and now, I don't even know if my grandmother's dead.

So I called my uncle, and I left a message on an anonymous answering machine, hoping it was his, hoping he can call me back. I even tried an online US Search service, but my credit card is overdrawn. Great.

So I still hate Father's Day. It reminds me of all the time I longed for a dad. It frustrates me as I try to make amends. But it makes me take stock, and makes me want to love it some day. So I'm trying.

posted by creon @ 4:47:53 PM

When Mozilla 1.0 came out, C|Net gave it a rather bizarre review, in which they harp on Mozilla's inability to render Internet Explorer-specific web pages. They claim that, since IE is the market leader, pages tailored for IE should be acceptable as Web standard; "That's reality," according to C|Net. That is absolutely insane, dangerous to the very structure of the Web, and biased toward Microsoft's market share and against the health of the industry.

Let's make this perfectly clear. There is one standards body for the Web. It is headed by the man who *invented* the World Wide Web, and its mission is to collect the best ideas of different companies, including Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, and research labs and universities, to foster the most useful, accessible and cohesive hypertext network possible. Microsoft is an enormous corporation, but they are not the owners, inventors or legislators of the Web. The W3C is the only standard that all browsers should follow, and anyone not writing web sites in standard HTML/CSS/XML/JavaScript takes on the reponsibility of alienating part of their audience and hindering the free exchange of free information. I wrote my book in part to show and prove this point, and C|Net is creating a huge disservice by propogating the idea that Microsoft-only extensions to open technologies should be followed merely because of Microsoft's size.

On a sidenote, they also criticized the IRC client "ChatZilla" for not being compatible with AOL Instant Messenger or any other IM services. Of course, they missed the point; IRC is a unique system incomparable with anything resembling a "Buddy List" or AOL's "Chat Rooms". Don't believe me? Check out the Quote Database - distilling disinformation for your comedic pleasure.

posted by creon @ 1:03:31 AM