POSTS FROM November 2001

How fast do you spank the monkey?

I'm embarassed to say that I'm a Cornell alumni after seeing the new Cornell website. The complete disregard for usability, accesibility, and good design befuddles me, in light of the fact that this is the slightly redesigned version after opinions were solicited on the CU-WEB-L listserv.

Gig is a great book about people and their jobs. It's actually a huge compilation of interviews that gives quite an insight into what really goes on in businesses across the US.
Nobrow is an interesting glance at how marketing dictates popular culture in this country, but certainly not much of a surprise anymore considering the huge mega-corporations we have today.

To drivers in the Bay Area: turn on your headlights. Why is it that drivers here don't bother to turn on their lights during the twilight hour or when it rains? And they wonder why traffic accidents increase by 20% when it rains. In New York it's a state law that you have to turn on your lights if you're using your wipers—which is just plain common sense. Is it not cool to use your lights in the Bay Area? Well, I guess that would explain all the dumb things I see on lights such as the light-blocking black plastic headlight covers (sic), and those asinine Dodge Ram stencils on the brake lights. The lights on your car are meant to shine, people! Not to make your car a mobile planetarium.

So now that I've created this blog, I feel like it serves nothing more than to publicize my personal whims and to validate myself as a web professional. It's not like a personal journal where you record your intimate thoughts, and it's not some kind of PR site either; it fills the space between those two, with entries like, “Today I concluded that Jif crunchy peanut butter is the supreme condiment of all time.”—not exactly a confessional and not overtly superficial. Personal enough to illicit cyber-stalkers, but generic enough to prevent them from cyber-stalking your friends and family. So taking all of this into consideration, I give you my first blog entry:

Does any forward-thinking person really believe that the increased airport security decreases the chances of another terrorist attack? Lets closely evaluate a fundamental axiom of human nature: if somebody really wants to do something, they're going to do it. Who needs to rely on sharp instruments, like the newly banned tweezers and nail clippers, when any fool who studies martial arts can kill with his bare hands? Since their hands are a deadly weapon, would you suggest that we handcuff everyone who gets on the plane? What about the metal handles on rolling carry-ons? I can think of plenty of ways to make it a deadly weapon, so why aren't those banned yet? As long as we're using the rent-a-cops and only doing random bag checks, air travel is not any safer than it was before 9/11.

What really irks me is that the National Homeland Security Agency should have thought this through years ago, but thanks to our wonderful politicos, the NHSA was instated 3 years after it was first introduced. The cacaphony of cracking joints amidst this deluge of knee-jerk reactions is deafening.