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Over a period of almost 3 more than 9 years, I (BMcC)
have put well over 1,000 3,000 hours into working on this website.
To what purpose and use? What value has accrued from the effort? I think these are
important questions to ask about anything one does. From a personal
perspective, it seems especially important to ask these questions about things into
which one puts a substantial number of the hours of one's always
too-short lifetime. From a societal perspective, it seems
especially important to ask these questions about hi tech activities, since
a key purpose and outcome of technological development ("progress") should be to free up persons' time,
not to use it up.
These questions started to
"bother" me for the easy-to guess-reason that I began having
doubts about the value of having put so much time into
this activity. Especially: Doubts about the
value of continuing to put more time into it. Are there ways I can
make doing this worthwhile: more worthwhile than
the other things which thus do not get done (reading -- serious engagement with
books -- is one activity from which I find
working on this website takes time away)? Are there ways I can continue to get value out of the
results of the time
I have already put in? What can I do to feel with good warrant
that the time has been well spent -- that I have not just "put", but worthily
invested my time developing and continuing further to develop (and maintain...)
this website?
One obvious use of the text and images I have already
placed here is as "added material" for email I write to persons ("For further
information about [whatever], see [whatever page] on my web site..."). I
also hope persons will continue to find things of value and use here, e.g.,
by getting "hits" on my site in response to
Google, Altavista
and other "search engine" queries.... That I get pleasure from the activity is a consideration,
but I find I cannot fully enjoy anything that uses up significant time or other resources without
producing value for others as well as for myself. --In The Human Condition,
Hannah Arendt noted that, for the classical Greeks, anything that was
merely private was by its nature: deprived.
I have just begun to
work on this page (18 Oct 98); I play [that's a typo: I meant to type:
"plan", but
maybe the "error" is significant...] to elaborate these thoughts over the
coming months -- a process which, I hope, will unfold in dialog
with others (including, yourself?) --as of
29 Mar 06, it so far has not. I hope you will check back to see how my
thoughts progress, and whether they have anything to say to others (perhaps including to
yourself?)![[ Email me! ]](emailme.gif)
Curiously, as of late March 2006, I have unexpectedly come to feel that
this website is finally "complete", after unexpectedly receiving a picture of the
IBM "How to Stuff a Wild Duck" poster, which I had been looking for -- for years.
Adding that one item seems to have brought a sense of closure to the site. Lots of stuff
can still be added, but, after adding the "wild duck", I feel that it's "basically" a
complete whole (mature?). Getting the "wild duck" was a big -- and entirely unanticipated after
so many years of not finding the poster --
step
in this work,
a big "piece of the puzzle"....
One thing to note: I rarely delete anything from
this website. Thus there are things here that are outdated, and which I would not do
the same way if I was re-doing afresh. Perhaps it is conceited, but I consider
these "fossils" to be archeological sedimentation. In that way they may have
value other than as directly addressing [failing to address...] present concerns. --As for starting afresh, I think the
only way this site has grown so large -- and hopefully and far more importantly: so deep --,
is that I did not undertake to make anything so big, and thus I was
not discouraged from making small steps that have turned out in retrospect to
be steps in
such a long journey.
Crescit eundo.
Your thoughts?
![[ Email me! ]](emailme.gif)
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/purpose.html
Copyright © 1998-2005 Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
bradmcc@cloud9.net ![[ Email me! ]](gif/email2me.gif)
17 April 200CE (2006-04-17 ISO 8601)
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Some other
themes I have used this website to explore: |
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1. | Strategies for effective "hypertext navigation".
(My Site Map, my
table of contents page, and the "apparatus" at the bottom of each
page, are some things I have tried and which seem to work fairly well...).
Please see my Website design criteria page for more
details. |
2. |
Using
"the net" as an enhanced "notebook",
to accumulate items of interest for future reference and
further elaboration. On a day-to-day basis, this has worked fairly well, but the viability
of personal websites as a new and better kind of personal library + archive (etc.) seems dubious
(see, e.g., below). |
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Some concerns arising from my experience working
on this website: |
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1. | The "entropy" of website technologies. E.g.: a Java
applet that works today will probably
not work a year from now, between new releases of Java itself and new releases of web browsers.
Moral: Avoid technologies that do appealing things but which
will likely require lots of work just to maintain (not to enhance!). Unlike printed text, it may be almost
impossible to write web pages that will be readable for as long
as the human language their content is written in, if, e.g., HTML 4.0, with its substitution of
style sheets for style attributes in element tags, ever substantively replaces HTML 3.2.... |
2. | The "entropy" of links to other websites (i.e., the fragility of access
to whatever one feels has value "on the web"). SoftQuad Corporation's
divestiture of its Panorama SGML web browser product line was my worst "hit" for 1998.
Moral: Analogous to item #1 -- although, one can sometimes "squirrel away" copies of
link targets, and substitute a link to one's personal [pirated?] copy when the original disappears. The preservation of
online knowledge is going to be
a serious world cultural problem (unless nothing of lasting value is conveniently
accessible only online) -- See Quote #229 for more
about "a world in which documentation and verification melt into air". |
3. | The "flakiness" of web browsers. Items: (1) The
Opera browser
advertises itself as being HTML 3.2 compliant, but an early version failed to render at least one of
my HTML 3.2 validated web pages in a reasonable (I won't speak of "correct" or, a fortiori:
"canonical" -- whatever that might
mean...) way. (Note: Opera 3.60 works much better!) Also, it seems impossible to get
cell widths correct for nested tables, when (e.g.) one wants a "picture frame" effect,
as in my Mouse Cartoons and Doraemon
pages. (2) Netscape 4.7-4.8 cannot render my "japan fantasy" page, apparently
because tables nested too deep (Special version
with less table nesting does work). Page works OK with Netscape 3.04, however.
Moral: You can't solidly count on anything vis-à-vis the Internet --
even though much of it works much of the time in a far more convenient way than (e.g.) printed books,
so that it bears some analogy to a drug addiction? | |
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