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I found two new journals I've really been enjoying. One is Footnotes, written by Secra Terry, now living in California. She has lived a full and interesting life, and seems really happy now, finally. The other is called i wasn't built to get up at this time, and it's written by a 14 year old boy in England named Tim (not Tim Hunter, for you Books of Magic fan). Actually, he sounds like a cross between Tim Hunter and Adrian Mole. So go, enjoy. Don't forget to come back! Thanks to Katie of digital ink for introducing me to Tim and for sending me some e-mails so I know someone reads this thing. Yes, that is a pathetic attempt to get some e-mail.

I'm leaving in a little bit to get my lovely highlights put in the front of my hair. I'm pretty excited about that, but I wanted to get my entry in before, because I have to work this afternoon and then I have class tonight.

I plan on doing a Real World summary/review (I taped it and everything!) but it might not happen until tomorrow because of my schedule today.

Last night I was thinking about Things That Annoy Me, the Web edition.

1. When advertisers try and refer to URLs as a joke in their ads, and they get the syntax wrong. The first striking example is the car commercial that rips off that "Some Number of Lines about 16 Girls" song by Jim Carroll that says "Backslash dot com all day long". Nowhere, in any URL, is there a backslash. So that bugs me. Then I saw a Hershey print ad that tried to have two names carved into a heart on a tree, except the names were like "http://www.mary" loves "http://www.fred" or whatever. Regardless, it was no web address. Who are these advertisers trying to appeal to? People who know anything about the web are probably annoyed or maybe slightly amused. People who don't know anything about the web probably wouldn't get it.



2. People who confuse URLs and e-mail addresses. "You can e-mail me at www.something.com" or "My website is someone@something.com". I hear this more than you would probably think.



3. Commercials that use upload and download to try and sound hip, as in "The coffee has finished downloading". Ha ha, not. The one exception to this rule are the commercials for Comedy Central that say you will laugh so hard "you will download in your pants". Now THAT'S funny.



4. Really ugly web pages. If you are building a web page, you are obviously already on the web. How hard is it to take a look around and see what other people are doing, and try and copy it at least? I'm talking about the stereotypical GeoCities page (and don't get me started on GeoCities) that has a gray background, 20 different colors of type, a MIDI file that plays "My Heart Will Go On" and blinking text. You think I'm kidding. They're still out there. I don't expect everyone to be a wonderful web designer. I'm certainly not. But if you don't know, just use a white background and black text, preferably in a legible font and size. And get off GeoCities, please. If you must be on GeoCities, at least do that thing to get rid of the popup. Thanks. For an example of people who should know better, check out my school's Career Services page. This is an Information Science school, for Pete's sake.



5. Kind of a corollary to the above...animated .gifs. For those of you who don't know, these are images (something.gif) that can have moving parts - it's an easy way to have movement on your page without using Shockwave or something that requires the user to have a plugin. However, it is really rare that these add anything to the page except making it longer to download. I even found an example in honor of my friend Stimp. I've been looking for a good use of an animated .gif and haven't found one yet. Let me know if you do, and I might change my mind.

The end. Feel free to disagree with me, but these things have been bugging me for a while.

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