I said in the last update to the weblog, posted yesterday, that it was time to put it to one side; and I think the same is true of the site as a whole. It’s almost four years exactly since I started putting this site together. Elements of the site date back to 1999, but the site itself came into being in 2000 as a result of my being so pissed off with the behaviour of one woman at what was supposed to be a birthday party (not hers!) that I wrote a rant because of some of her comments. Looking back at it, I think those who were there that night and then read the rant were right: I was too kind to her; but that’s water long under the bridge. Once I had put the rant together, I had to build a web site for it, and the rest just grew around it. Not the best way to build a site, but you can be a bit off-the-wall with personal sites.
The weblog apart, the last item put online here was almost exactly a year ago, on 12th July 2003. Since then, I have been very busy with various things which are very demanding of my time, and keeping a personal web site has to be low in my priorities. I simply have too much to do to keep this up regularly. So I’m effectively shutting it down; it won’t vanish — not in the foreseeable future anyway; I think Jakob Nielsen is right about link rot, so the pages will remain for those who are interested. As a final touch, the home page has a new look, featuring, for once, a rural scene and a more tranquil look. The koan, by the way, says “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” It is quoted by Alan W. Watts in The Way of Zen, where he explains, “This ‘by itself’ is the mind’s and the world’s natural way of action, as when the eyes see by themselves, and the ears hear by themselves
” — in other words, spontaneously, without the illusion of the mind being separate from the world of experience. (I’m looking at a 1968 reprint of the 1962 Pelican edition; a more recent reprint can be obtained via Amazon, as well as a slightly older one.)
One thing I have not had time to fix is a problem that has cropped up on some pages with recent Opera versions; it is handling the box model unexpectedly in certain circumstances, but the CSS support is so good that it can’t be fed the “broken browser” version that IE sees. I can see how to fix the problem, but I simply have not had the time, so it will have to stay broken, I am afraid.
Looking back on the site, I see that there are some opinions I have held in the past which I no longer hold. They can just stay there: that was what I thought at the time. The only section, I think, where I would say much the same now as then in every case is the book reviews.
To anyone who comes along here who has not visited the site before: I hope you find something of interest, something useful or entertaining; to anyone who has been here in the past: thanks for visiting, hope you found something that was at least interesting, and thanks for the constructive comments and the words of thanks you have occasionally sent me.
Regards,
DC
