Farewell, Packard Bell. You shall not be missed.

• NEC slashes Packard Bell unit [ZDNet]
  ... the unit will withdraw from the U.S. retail PC market entirely, although it will explore options for selling consumer-oriented PCs over the Internet.

I remember well the dread I felt every time a student brought me one of those cheap, ugly gray Windows 3.1 boxes to fix. [shudder]

Here's an idea - let's not use ISA cards, just stick all the PC's functions on the motherboard! It's cheaper, and this way, if ONE thing goes bad, the whole computer's screwed! Bah.

I was darn surprised when NEC bought them in the first place. I was generally impressed with NEC up to that point.

Cheap bad junk go bye-bye. Yay capitalism!

In the Internet spirit of truncation-of-words = efficiency = good, I'd like to propose yet another new way to refer to weblogs/blogs/logs...

Ogs. Noun and verb, like blog.

This is an og. I og, you og, he/she/it ogs. We are oggers.

Which, serendipitously enough, sounds like augurs, noun, meaning prophets. Heh. Um.

Please remember, if it catches on, that I was 95% kidding.

Epinions followup: Ogger Jason Kottke notes:

If you edit an Epinion, the ratings assigned to that Epinion by other members are erased.

I dug around a little more in the FAQ and found the reference:

• Why did I lose my rating when I edited my epinion? [Epinions]
  We do not preserve ratings for edited epinions since your changes may alter the epinion's usefulness to other users. The epinion ratings restarts over based on the new epinion.

So that at least is done right. Cool, and thanks, Jason.

My primary gripe remains, though. Coming someday, maybe: my secondary gripe with epinions.

I'm probably not alone in wondering what my point is about epinions...why pay so much attention to them if I think the model is so flawed? I guess it's that I do like the idea of rewarding people who provide good content, but am frustrated that there seem to be big holes in the implementation.

The rebuttal to that is, of course, that accurately providing a generalized model for review aggregation and ratings would be awfully, awfully complex, and that only by these oversimplifications could it have been put up in the first place. A partially working system is better than no system.

So I come back to the mantra 'building the web is an iterative process'. ( My original site was not as good as [ the next version ) was not as good as { this version ] will not be as good as the next version }. Fine, then...what I'm doing is encouraging epinions.com to iterate. Wisely, unlike Alta Vista. :)

Hey, there's no country that corresponds to .og as a Top-Level Domain. (The closest is Oman at .om.) Could we declare an Og Nation? nowthis.og? Or, failing that, nowthis.blog?

Again: kidding.

Horked from Bring the Rock: an old (new to me!) They Might Be Giants interview:

• They Might Be Giants might be rock's wittiest institution [Metro Pulse]
  John F: "I think the biggest test of our friendship is just how much idle time we are forced to spend with one another. It's enough to drive most people crazy. Actually, we're often stuck in a Ford Econoline van for four or five hours of a day just sitting next to each other.
  
  "As John once said, you can come to resent the way somebody else breathes if you're with them too much."

And hey! Some free TMBG tracks are here, including "Older" off the new mp3-only album, Long Tall Weekend:

• They Might Be Giants [Emusic]
  Along with their next (old fashioned) CD release, They Might Be Giants are currently completing a children's album and a series of performance segments for ABC's Nightline Primetime to be broadcast this summer.

"Back?" What is this "back" you speak of? I haven't said I'm back... (Dan, cautious soul, simply noted my continued breathing...)

Seriously, it's nice to be missed, and I wasn't even away for that long. :) Thanks to all the well-wishers.

UN-fortunately, my workload is still looking uhh-GLY for the remainder of '99. (Yes, yes: 'awwww, poor baby'.) But! I will try to show my face here at least once a week, hopefully more. So, I guess you could say I'm 'back'...sorta.

Very little Pokemon-related stuff has so far intruded itself on my awareness, and for that I am thankful. That said, South Park had a very funny skewering of it (sorry, of 'Chinpokomon') this week. Catch the Saturday midnight-ish showing if you can. :)

Next week's South Park topic: homeschooling. Hmm.

In the 1800s, og also meant cake.

http://www.southpark.com/ doesn't go where you might think. Ah, the Grand Parade of Colliding Namespaces!

Banner week at the comic shop:

• Astro City concludes Steeljack's long, excellent villain-trying-to-do-the-right-thing storyline,
• Preacher (not for kids, not for the easily offended!) is entering the home stretch with the reunion of Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy, and
• Cerebus, Starman and Promethea showed up too. So much quality!

So much catching up to do! I'll have to save some for later, or else this entry will double in size.

I'm off to Iowa for a friend's wedding (Hi Amy, Hi Bill!). I will reappear here sometime next week.