Nick Lewis: The Blog

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

-George Orwell

My egotistical and delusional side wants to think that the SXSW 2006 site snagged the look of this site's navbar. Not entirely unlikely, since this site ranks rather high for "css horizontal navigation". However, they used seperate unordered lists for each row -- so their technique isn't entirely inspiring. Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and pretend that I had influence on that site, so ya'll just play along.

Oh, which reminds me: registration for the 2006 conference has already started. Looks like Craig Newmark of Craig's list will be the keynote speaker. I actually got to speak to Newmark at last year's conference. It was an entirely odd occurance -- there was an interesting discussion going on about online communities, and being the cocky 22 year old I was, I decided to chime in. Midway through my second sentence, I suddenly realized who I was talking to, and that Dan Gillmor also happened to be listening -- I think I slighty faultered. It was at that moment that I realized my involement with the Internet would forever end my sex life.

I don't know exactly why -- what the correlation is, or why I'm posting this graph. The trends struck me as significant for some reason that I can put into words. It feels like -- maybe -- perhaps I shouldn't even jinx it -- this is some sort of tipping point that will carry over to the 2006 elections.

Now, if only the democratic party would stop nominating the usual parade of cursty gubers.

Not to mention, I may at this point have entirely lost my faith in the wisdom of the American electorate. I still can't believe G.W. Bush was re-elected. Its as though our entire country has just snapped. I fear that in 2006 they will again take the GOP's bait and start jabbering and voting on the basis of gay marriage. Delay will be re-elected, the house and senate will continue to be dominated by Republicans. Its as though the electorate doesn't care that our politicians are selling each and everyone of us out to corporate interest -- so long as there is some "show trial" involving child molestation on TV... God I'm depressed.

Lance Arthur couldn't be more right. Google's logo is fugly[1]. I'm afraid Lance couldn't have put it better too:

It's ugly, it's got a drop shadow, for crying out loud, and it's multicolored like a circus tent. The first G looks weird, like someone was trying to draw a G but was using someone else's memory of what a G looks like, the letters are oddly kerned, and the whole thing looks like it should be painted on the side of an ice cream truck.

Some might think that Google's logo is an eye sore which we have to just accept -- much like the ads in Time square. And indeed, I shudder when I think of what might happen if Google rebranded. However, google probably could totally rebrand so long as they kept their name, and avoided becoming a new consignia.