Yesterday, toward the end of the fest, Jaeger announced that the shared content database thingee was ready for use. As such, neither bouncing nor I wasted much time producing implementations of it on our pages. A cool concept, me thinks. We'll see what happens with it. :)

My advise to readers of this web page: Each time you visit, no matter who you are, type something into the box. Just one little line. Doesn't have to be anything profound. A random thought. Any thought will do. Yes, even you. It's more fun for everyone. :)

(Unless, of course, you're still viewing through the spaghetti interface, in which case you have no idea what I'm even talking about. A perfectly reasonable possibility, given that it is still considered the real "production" version of this web page.)

Brain is feeling just slightly zoned out this morning. Tired might be the word, but I woke up at 0730 without any prompting from any of the electronic wonder devices which I surround myself with at all times. I suppose this "tripped out" feeling isn't exactly dampened by this Perfect Circle music. Heavy, hard, yet somewhat psychedelic. Maynard's got that touch. There's also something that's just inexplicably cool about the feeling of being totally wasted, but knowing that you don't have to do anything or be anywhere all day. Sleep is most certainly an option. :)

The ugly hacks I employed to get that shared chat thingee working had me wondering. (And whatever happens, we're NOT calling it a chatterbox! Because around here, when it comes to web design ideas, we don't rip off anything. No siree. We rip off EVERYTHING!) Is it even worth trying to be elegant?

I mean, here I sit, spending months and months, delay after delay, trying to get Version 2.0 done the "right" way, and what do I have to show for it? A big pile of shit, mostly. And then, yesterday afternoon, I say "to hell with it", and throw together a quick, dirty hack to kludge the chatterbo... err.. the thing into place. And it works. The code sucks. It's an abomination to look at or think about, but it works. And now I'm wondering if I had just done everything with such careless abandon, maybe I'd have more of a working page?

One ugly hack at a time. That's how the Internet was built, right? I mean, look at the IPv4 addressing system. Did the designers bother to think about how many boxes the world would want to hook up? Of course not. They just figured it would be them and their dozen other pals in academia, and maybe the military, so why use more than 32 measly bits to uniquely identify each system connected to the network? Low and behold, the world pounces upon it, uses it for purposes it was never designed to fulfill, and we have our Internet. Hairy, ugly, stretched beyond its means. But it pretty much works.

So I dunno. Maybe web pages that "work" have to follow the same path. Just throw something vaguely useful out there, even if its innards make you wince, add to it, refine it, build kludges on top of kludges, and if you're lucky, you just might end up with something cool. Hmmm.

Well, people, I'm zonin. Gotta love holidays. Free your mind. Peace.