Written By: Patrick Grote
Date: July 17, 2003 (Previously published)
Section: Viewpoints

It comes as no surprise that I impart to you that I browse the web a lot When I say a lot I mean many hours a week. I have unique browsing methods and it is shocking to know I keep no bookmarks. I keep all the links I consider important on my My Excite page. Other miscellaneous links, less than 10, I keep in a folder on my Windows NT Workstation desktop.

I see many, many, many websites. I am by no means a website design expert. When it comes to websites I prefer a clean, fast loading site with a minimum of flash and an abundance of function. The sites I prefer such as cNet's News Site, CNN, NewsHub and Broadcast.com demonstrate my leanings.

When a favorite site of mine changes its design I cringe. Typically, the site is "upgraded" with more graphics, more information crammed on it and terrible navigation procedures. Former favorite sites that have fallen prey to this include ZDNet, TechWeb, ABCNews, ESPN and Microsoft. I no longer have links for ZDNet or TechWeb, because their changes were so bad. I still have links for ABCNews and ESPN, but they have been replaced as must see sites with CNN and Sportsline. When sites change I take the initiative and always give my feedback and each time I am sent a very warm automated response. Why in the heck ask for my feedback if you aren't going to give me a personalized response. Since I have been on the web, I have only witnessed one site make a good design change. That site is cNet.

Even my search engine choices demonstrate this preference. I use HotBot when searching for specific text or name, but use Yahoo! when looking for a specific category.

It was with great anguish that I found that My Excite "upgraded" recently. The "upgrade" is just plain awful. Excite took a very usable interface, which originally converted me from My Yahoo, and made it so unusable I found myself cursing. The page takes longer to load, isn't available often and is very unforgiving when it comes to the layout of information. I was so distressed, I looked at My Yahoo again and almost switched. The two things that kept me from changing were My Yahoo's inability to show reminders on the My Yahoo screen and the anemic TV listing functions. Again, I sent a message using the procedure the My Excite people indicated and again I received a form letter. Why do company's create these changes? Do they actually think they are better?

But what about the truly awful websites? Rarely do I come across a website that is entirely unusable or so horribly designed it makes you laugh. One of my trips to Sportsline caused a pop up windows to appear on my desktop. It was for the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End of Days. I hate pop up windows, but this one did its job. I clicked on it and was taken to the End of Days website, I think. The site's design is past horrible. I would venture to label it as disgusting. If this is what passes as creative website design I say we're all in trouble. The website looks as if it were designed by a teenager under the influence of Marilyn Manson and a bad sausage pizza.

Now, why would a person want to go to a movie website? 87.7% of the time, it is going to be for the trailer. When you go to the End of Days site, you are popped onto the http://www.end-of-days.com/landing/index.htm page. I swear this is not an exaggerated count, well maybe a little exaggerated, but after thirty clicks you finally get to the trailer page. To save you a ton of time, especially on a modem connection, just go to http://www.end-of-days.com/landing/EOD.ram.

I hope you share my concerns about website design. I don't know of any effective methods to combat this except to quit using the sites. Do you know of any? Let me know . . . mailto:pgrote@i1.net

SETI AT HOME

I believe we are not alone in the universe. I believe folks from other planets are visiting us, but we shouldn't get swelled heads. The chances that we are little more than an interstellar rest stop are very small.

Still, we as mortal beings like to think that there is something else out there. The US Government used to spend some major bucks in attempting to listen for communications from other planets or civilizations. This project was called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and used many radio dishes to find the proper needle in the universal haystack. You may have seen something like this in the beginning of the movie Independence Day or the movie Contact.

In the early nineties, I am winging this part of it, SETI lost the majority of its funding. Educational types picked it up and ran with it, but if the funding once let them hear symphonies of space noise, now they could only hear notes.

Flash forward to this year, the Internet and collaborative computing and you have Seti At Home. The idea behind Seti At Home is to harness the collective computing power of the computers on the Internet in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The premise is beautiful and the execution is ingenious. By using screen saver programs for a wide variety of computer types, SETI uses your CPU to help find someone out in space. The screen saver downloads a chunk of data from SETI that has not been processed. Your computer then processes the data from SETI automatically when the screen saver is enabled. Periodically the results are sent to SETI. Once your chunk of data has been processed, you get another one. Simple and clean. You use your PC as you normally would and SETI gets it when you are not using it. Who knows, maybe you will be the one to answer ET when he calls for pizza.

There are a number of cool statistics being kept about the process including who has processed the most data units, who has used the most CPU time and who has come closest to getting a hit. You can group your computers under a name, so your results are tallied together.

Why not try this? I know you will like the cool processes that work when the screen save is up and running. Seti At Home can be found at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html

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