Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Something’s Coming…

Thursday, August 7th, 2003

Some­thing is indeed com­ing, and com­ing soon; unfor­tu­nately, good news often comes at a price, and the price in my case has been lim­ited time to do any­thing other than work, eat and sleep (and lit­tle of the last two), which includes man­ag­ing SuperfluousBanter.

Post­ing has been rather infre­quent of late (as noted by read­ers like Adam Polselli), and it’s due to a few projects which have been tak­ing up quite a bit of my time over the last few weeks (most of them war­rant the time spent…).

I will be writ­ing more in the week(s) to come (expect lim­ited post­ing until some of these projects have been com­pleted) but here’s a quick run-down of what to expect:

• A CSS Project to be included in the sec­ond edi­tion of Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets: Sep­a­rat­ing Con­tent from Pre­sen­ta­tion, cur­rently being revised by its orig­i­nal authors, and soon to be pub­lished by Apress;
• Web­graph will be launch­ing a new site for the Mic­co­su­kee Tribe of Indi­ans (all XHTML and CSS of course, with some extra acces­si­bil­ity thrown in for kicks);
• Hope­fully an announce­ment of some new projects which are in the clos­ing stages of dis­cus­sions with clients.

Every­thing is quite excit­ing at the moment, which is a nice change of pace. I’m also work­ing on ideas for a few arti­cles that I will attempt to have pub­lished (ALA, Dig­i­tal Web, etc.) — I’ll pub­lish them here if I have to (ahh, the joys of inde­pen­dent publishing).

Changes con­tinue to be made to Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter, some notice­able, oth­ers hid­den behind the scenes — I’ll write up a list of changes and any inter­est­ing tid­bits once some of these other projects are under­way. One you will see soon is a tran­si­tion from JavaScript to CSS for the style switcher rollovers in the side­bar, as well as fur­ther use of the FIR tech­nique (or its recently dis­cov­ered alter­na­tives through­out the site (for more on FIR, read Dave Shea’s new arti­cle for Dig­i­tal Web Mag­a­zine, In Defense of Fahrner Image Replace­ment).

Finally, in addi­tion to The Old Tech­nol­ogy Give­away, I’ll be post­ing another lit­tle con­test early next week (pos­si­bly over the week­end) with some more use­ful prizes, and a lit­tle less-esoteric theme.

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AOL Collectors Edition (or, “The Old Technology Giveaway”)

Tuesday, August 5th, 2003

While sort­ing through some old piles of paper­work, SyQuest car­tridges, and flop­pies, I came across a curi­ous item: An orig­i­nal AOL 2.5 for Mac­in­tosh Installer Disk, still shrink-wrapped!

So I started won­der­ing “what other mint-condition exam­ples of use­less tech­nol­ogy are hid­den in the col­lec­tions of techies like me?” Since I can’t very well go rum­mag­ing through your houses, under your desks, etc., the only way for me to know is for you, my cher­ished reader, to sub­mit links to pho­tos of your ancient tech­no­log­i­cal curios in the com­ments of this post.

“What’s in it for me?” you ask? Well, I thought of that too, so as incen­tive, I’m offer­ing up another piece of com­put­ing his­tory to the indi­vid­ual whose sub­mis­sion tick­les my fancy the most (this is, of course, purely sub­jec­tive, but it’s my give­away, so deal with it) — the top two “win­ners” (term used loosely) will receive (ship­ping paid by me, and the first place sub­mis­sion gets first choice of the prizes) either an orig­i­nal Quadra 950 Moth­er­board w/68040 Proces­sor! (pics: one, two) or a shrink-wrapped 3M 590MB Rewritable Opti­cal Disk! (pics: one, two). Hey, we are talk­ing old tech­nol­ogy here…

This “con­test” will run for an almost indef­i­nite amount of time, but no later than Novem­ber 30th (so you can get your prize in time for X-mas — if you cel­e­brate another, ear­lier hol­i­day, good for you, but the Novem­ber 30th dead­line will stay put).

Also, if you link to this con­test (“The Old Tech­nol­ogy Give­away”) from your site, it will cer­tainly make for a much more inter­est­ing exper­i­ment (and I’ll get lots of traf­fic too… ;-) — feel free to use my mini-banner in your sidebar.

Happy dig­ging!

UPDATE: To para­phrase the wal­rus, the time has come — the con­test is now closed to new entries, and judg­ing is under­way (sounds seri­ous, don’t it?). The win­ners will be posted within days…

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