Often the web seems devoid of emotions. Except for some occasional humor, sarcasm and the odd marriage proposal, it’s rare that anything breaks out of this shallow emotional subset.

And then something does. The Life of Jos Claerbout is one of those sites. In 1999, Jos was working at WebTV when he died suddenly at the age of 25. This site is a memorial tribute written by his parents.

Jos died in the midst of the dot com gold rush and many people whose lives he touched remembered him on the web, these are some of those sites:

• Jos Claerbout
• Jos Claerbout (1974-1999): In Memoriam


• Jos Claerbout


• Jos Tree Dedication Photos
• WebTV Remembers Jos

There are many more.

Guess where we were this weekend.
(just a class, no baby yet)

Bruce and Lynda are in town for Seybold, and I went to see the discussion Lynda moderated about web interface design. On the panel were Matt Owens, Hillman Curtis and Jeffrey Zeldman, an interesting mix of talented people with very good ideas about design.

After the discussion, Lynda introduced me to Zeldman and Carrie Bickner, both wonderfully thoughtful, intelligent people who were a pleasure to talk to. Among other things, the two co-authored the NYPL Style Guide, a brilliant resource which will surely become a seminal document for transitioning sites to XHTML and CSS.

Seybold started at 9am, afterwards some other stuff happened and I didn’t get home until almost 10pm. Happy Birthday Graham

Congratulations Al, Mo and everyone at Bagel Zone on a great review in the New York Daily News this past Saturday. The article was written by Irene Sax, who was awarded Food Editor of the Year by the James Beard Foundation in 1995 and seems to have a very good reputation in food reviewing circles.

The DV Show FXScript talk went really well. Thanks to everyone who was there, I hope you all got something from the presentation.

Overall, the room was about as crowded as I thought it might be, but most everyone stayed and seemed to be understanding what I was showing them. The 90 minutes went by faster than I expected and I ended up showing Joe’s Filters 3 after the time was up. We would have kept going except the hotel kind of kicked us out.

OS X worked flawlessly on the iBook, as usual. I’m still having trouble accepting how dependable it is. The video mirroring worked instantly, FCP, PowerPoint 2001 (in classic), Exporer and BBEdit were all running the whole time. My OWC portable FireWire drive with all the files worked perfectly too, technology was not an issue.

I walked home, burning some extra adrenaline and loving New York City. It had been a while since I’d been up to West 34th St, and the long walk was nice despite the cold. Giving the talk was a major accomplishment to cross off my to-much-to-do list, now hopefully I can finish the filters for release and actually relax a little. You know, before buying an apartment, moving, getting a mortgage and having a baby. My plate is full, can I have another?

Mastering FXBuilder with Joe Maller
Monday February 11th, 7:30 –
9 pm
The New York DV Show 2002

Willya lookit that there ad banner. Hell has apparently frozen over.

Yes, this comes from Apple’s marketing department, but the fact that last year more people downloaded QuickTime than RealPlayer is encouraging. QuickTime has always been better quality and RealPlayer is ugly and full of bugs.

Now if everyone would just download Pageot and use the correct QuickTime
<object> and <embed> tags in their code. Me included.

Pageot is an incredibly useful freeware tool for generating proper HTML embedding code for the QuickTime plugin. When this code is used, missing QuickTime components will be downloaded and installed automatically.