pointless snarky web ranting
or, ad.doubleclick.net, I hate you

I used to really enjoy the Hollywood Stock Exchange. It was a fun, pointless exercise in trading celebrity and movie futures and a chance to pontificate, even if only to oneself, the feelings about up and coming films. I'm not much into the stock market myself, but it was fun and I stopped playing for two years with bonds for Tim Roth and Morgan Freeman, and I had made something like $700,000 (oops, no, 700,000 Hollywood Bucks, which sounds like a bad Disney flick) on the two while I hibernated. Thanks, guys.

I started playing again recently (lo and behold, my old username still worked) and found that while the appeal was still there, the site had gone through Yet Another Redesign (I wonder exactly how many redesigns it has gone through in the past two years) but this time, with the addition of the ad banners and java applets and excessive amounts of tables and quite possibly user load, the site had been almost rendered unusable. Load time? Don't make me laugh! And when Netscape has to dilly around with the applets and whatnot, it freezes up all the other Netscape windows I've got open. Can't do a single thing around them. Can't even bring 'em up if minimized. While this may be partially due to the system I've got here, it surely can't be the only reason. Fun and games, especially one with admittedly just a overspiffed-up CGI interface, should be accessible to as many platforms as possible. I wouldn't expect to play HSX via lynx, mind you, but with a 4.0 browser on a P200+ with buggabugga RAM, it should be easily doable. But it ain't. Hrumph.

The Chicago Sun-Times also recently redesigned its site, joining the ranks of the Technologically Up-To-Date by working this newfangled concept called 'frames' into their site design. That way, they reason, no matter what content you're viewing, there's always this stuff on the left-hand side you can use. Or somesuch nonsense. Golly, have you ever heard of a site doing this before? The Sun-Times must be betting you haven't, because it abandoned a perfectly good frameless format for this.

Of course, had they done this in, say, early 1996, the preceding paragraph might have not been as facetious as it is right now. But it's 1999. There's almost no need to feel obligated to use such conceits as frames if you don't really need them. They're not cutting-edge; you don't use frames for frames' sake anymore. And the Sun-Times did indeed attempt to fix what wasn't broke in the first place. I visited the site several times a week for Roger Ebert's stuff (hint: his Bigger Little Movie Glossary is priceless) and grew to enjoy the "New Movie Reviews" listed by date of review. They don't do that no more, neither. I realize, resigned, that I'll have to accept the site redesign, even if it means Ebert's smug little grin isn't hanging over the title graphic like it used to. And isn't that what counts the most? Sigh.

At least perl.com's redesign is lynx-friendly. And, as Dan Shiovitz notes, there's a front-page link to the all-important FAQ.

September 2nd, 1999 marks the 30th anniversary of the first packet sent over what would eventually become the Internet as we know it today. Well, hooray! All around the globe I hear tell folks are celebrating by using the Internet for what it was created... hardcore pornography and the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted software! Yeeee-haw!!

Take care, and don't eat anything you shouldn't.