Welcome to our world
Hi Dave! I guess I'm a member of the club, too. =) My sentiments exactly on the whole web page thought exchange deal as well... And "brian fart." Ha! I love that term, coined by Henry Hsu, and my bold claim is that it will be the next "spicy." Tense. Whatever...
I'm pretty sure I know exactly the people who are reading this page. So I guess I should tailor this. It is sort of a network, I guess. The DC-GC-DH-HH-PL-DO-MW-AW thoughts page network! Hey Byue, if you read this page too, try permuting the letters and make some cool word or phrase out of that! =)
Unhealthy? Perhaps. Indeed, this is turning into a thought page on thought pages. And sooner or later, it will turn into a thought page on thought pages on thought pages. Like, dood, we're starting to get the recursion action going. Spice. But it is spice best saved for another time, so I'll return to the topic at hand.
Market research
I do think thought pages have value, and they have their own niche. For instace, I'm naturally able to express my thoughts more clearly and eloquently in writing than in speech, so the web page provides a forum where I can clearly articulate my thoughts.
So it seems that we're starting to tailor our pages for each other, more and more, rather than just the general web-surfing public. No, this forum will not become my personal journal or diary, and no Eric, I agree that they are no subsitute for true face-to-face discussions and interactions. So, in the interests of full disclosure, here is how YOU can play Sherlock and find out who has been peeking at your page! If you are not interested in a computer tutorial, click here to go to the start of the real thoughts page.
If you're on www-leland, check out the page on log dumps.
On the other hand, I, having given up the Leland system a while back, just have to type
grep mwang /n/graphics/web/logs/httpd/access_logHee hee.
Anyways, in either case, you get back a list of accesses, with the computer name, date, time, and the file accesssed. You can usually deduce the people reading your page this way. For instance, if you see "fics.stanford.edu" then you can be pretty sure that I was reading your web page. Likewise, computers like "starfox" or "subspace" or "dragonballz" or "dimsum" leave little ambiguity as to who's the human at the other end. If you're unsure about who a computer belongs do, you can type "whois computername.stanford.edu" and you can find out all about it. Spice, no?
If you really want to be anonymous, you can try using lynx on a Sweet Hall machine, so all I'll see is "epicXX" or "elaineXX" or "sagaXX", but even so, one can at least guess... (Hi Eric!)
But, I mean, it's cool. Tailoring a product to its customers is good, right? (Hmmm... are Econ and/or IE majors supposed to be concerned with issues like these, or do you not really get into these things until you go into the real world or biz school? I don't really know --- after all, I'm just a one-sided CS major. =) )
Well, I guess being a CS major, whether one-sided or otherwise, I should decompose this thoughts page into separate files. since what is to follow is basically a whole different ball game. So I'll do just that.
Therefore, click here for part 2 of today's thoughts.