alex chiang: web 6.0

A friend sent me a link to these earrings, and thought that Jenny might enjoy them:

My reply email is guaranteed to be funny for one person on this planet: me.

Nice. I appreciated the pun. Jenny didn’t get it at first, but after a 90 minute PowerPoint deck on internet history, starting with ARPAnet, touching on bangpaths, brief consideration of gopher (and associated WAIS technologies, such as archie and veronica), then fast-forwarding to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and of course, a deep dive into the technological, philosophical, and ethical underpinnings of SGML, I was finally able to convey the inherent humor in those earrings. Of course, she too, was disappointed that HTML was such a cheap hack compared to SGML, but after a quick extemporaneous minilecture on disruptive technologies and the genius behind “perfect is the enemy of good enough”, with liberal examples from the hard drive and microprocessor industries, we were back on track. Afterwords, at the roundtable discussion, we both agreed that the advent of CSS and separating content from presentation was a nice shoutout towards the purity of vision originally put forth by Berners-Lee. Just for completeness’ sake, I concluded the deck with a survey of technology on the horizon, such as Web 2.0, the semantic web, and intertwingularity in general.

I think she really enjoyed it.

But seriously, there is a lot of context that two people need to share before jokes are even possible. Without it, the best you can do is wonder if the other person is about to bash you on the head with a rock and eat your babies.

Today’s piece of Digg-fodder is “Six ways to make a good email signature”.

ORLY?

The very first tip is:

1. Keep it short. Seven lines is good. Mine happens to be 8, because I also include a row of “=” to separate it from my text.

Wow, way to hand out completely incorrect advice by the second sentence! At the risk of sounding mean, the author probably grew up thinking that “lol a/s/l?” was standard nomenclature for saying “hello”.

RFC 1855 has been around since 1995, but merely codifies a long series of convention that has existed since ARPAnet. If that’s too confusing to read, try Gopi Sundaram’s email signatures page.

The only two things you need to know are:

1. Four lines or less, 80 columns max (the McQ limit)
2. use sig-dashes (single dash, single dash, space, newline) to separate the signature from the body

Everything else is superfluous.

For what it’s worth, these days, I don’t even bother with a .signature anymore (but when I did, it was surely McQ-compliant).

This concludes your grouchy unix-guy rant for the day.

Jenny and I went and looked at all the churches in Strasbourg so that you don’t have to. Yes, they’re beautiful, but after a while, you just get worn out.

I found the markets in Europe to be delightful and delicious. Above are some delicious sausages that we saw in an outdoor market in France. There were outdoor markets in almost every city we visited, and for the most part, they weren’t very touristy; that is, they were by and for locals. Note to self — I ought to visit the farmer’s markets around here more often.

Below are some hard boiled eggs sold in a regular supermarket in Switzerland. Apparently, they dye them bright orange/yellow to indicate that you should take them on a picnic. I didn’t buy any to eat, although in retrospect, I definitely should have.

“saddest and most moving piece of rock in the world”, Lucerne, Switzerland.

From the wikipedia article on Lucerne:

Bertel Thorvaldsen’s famous carving of a dying lion (the Lion Monument, or Löwendenkmal) is found in a small park just off Lowenplatz. The carving commemorates the hundreds of Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution, when the mob stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

More information can be found at everything2.

carnation, Staubbach Falls, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland

We spent a few days in Lauterbrunnen, which is in the Jungfrau region, close to Interlaken. The place was beautiful — we think. Unfortunately for us, it was cloudy most of the time, and there was even a freak snowstorm that dumped 3 inches, and closed the roads in and out, due to rockfall and breaking trees. Yikes.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley has a ton of waterfalls — 72 of them, if you believe the locals, and all quite beautiful.

One day, we went hiking, and decided to follow an unmarked trail. We came upon a building with the word “Feldschützen” on it, next to an open field that looked like it might provide access to some other trails. So we walked up to the edge of the field, ready to cross it, but it was roped off.

Luckily, we weren’t in the mood to break any rules that day, because as we turned around and started to leave, a very concerned man came running out of the Feldschützen building, and yelled, “Hello! Hello! What are you dong? Where are you going?”

“We’re just about to leave.”

“Ok good. Don’t go into the field. Very dangerous!”

[looking in the windows for the first time, remarking to Jenny] “Hm, look, they all have rifles in there.”

[Jenny's response] “Let’s not walk across any firing ranges today, ok?”

[me] “I guess that explains those weird thunder-like sounds we kept on hearing.”

In retrospect, I will help you translate the German word printed on that building. “Feld” means “field” and “schützen” means “shooting the stupid Americans who walk into our line of fire”.

snail, Saanen, Switzerland

So one of the debates I kept having with myself during the trip was whether the rental car was worth it, or if we should have done what most normal people would have done and ridden the trains instead. The reason we originally decided on the car was a combination of enhanced freedom and lower (upfront) cost.

When we looked at Eurail passes, it would have been something like $900 for two people over the age of 26 for the countries we were thinking of visiting. The rental car was only $569, so it seemed like a no-brainer at the time. Turns out that we spent $243 on gas and another $166 on tolls (yes, the tolls in France are ridiculously expensive), so in the end ($977 total car expenditure), it was a financial wash.

Still, it was nice to have the extra freedom. Case in point, as we were driving from Nice, France to Interlaken, we happened to drive through the tiny ski towns of Saanen and Gstaad, which were beautifully idyllic and pastoral, and ended up staying a few nights, just enjoying the scenery and being away from the hustle and bustle of Nice. That never would have happened had we been on a train.

In the end, a car isn’t a bad idea for two (or more) people (just don’t drive in France). For the single traveller though, the train is an obvious no-brainer.

The other thing we did while in Nice was to pop over to Cannes during the 60th anniversary of the famous film festival. We only wanted to stay for a little while to experience the zeitgeist, and so we weren’t planning on camping out near hotel entrances just for celebrity watching, but we got “lucky” (at least in one sense of the term) when we happened to see a bunch of paparazzi wielding bazooka sized cameras chasing after a blonde lady.

Of course, I had to join in the fun and followed them (although I stayed way to the back of the pack), and ended up snapping a shot of Ivana Trump and her horrible looking balloon lips. Ew.

Naturally, I had no idea whose picture I was taking, so when the flurry of activity was over, I just asked one of the “real” photogs, and he turned out to be pretty cool. So indirectly, I figured out a decent strategy if one was truly interested in seeing celebs at Cannes, without having to look at screening schedules, etc. Just hang out with the pro paparazzi, chat them up and make friends with them, and when they run after someone, just tag along for the ride.

It’s the fast track to pretending like you know what’s going on without knowing a thing.

Looking down on the Plage la Mala beach, near Monaco.

We spent an afternoon lazing around on this beautiful beach in Cap d’Ail, which is in France, just one train stop before reaching Monaco.

The beach itself, much like the town it’s near, is quite tiny, but luckily there was almost no one there when we went. Probably due to the somewhat dreary and overcast day, but we managed to have fun nonetheless. And if you’re planning a trip here, it turns out there is a relatively cheap youth hostel in this town, so you can really be just a few minutes walk away.

Also, for those of you who wondering whether the reality of topless beaches matches the hype, the answer is yes. Too bad Americans are such prudes.