Amusings & other creations (from the early web)

by | Sunday, October 15, 2023

I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a variety of personal websites when I moved to MSU and they sat at punya.educ.msu.edu till I got my own domain name. You can actually see early versions of my website (and its evolution) by going to the Wayback Machine, The earliest instance that I could find was archived Nov 4, 1999, and amazingly enough has my daughter Shreya’s birth announcement archived as well. And for some strange reason, a snapshot of my website (from Jan 2008) is archived on the the servers at the University of Hawaii!

These early websites were hand coded, HTML pages with lots of content that has been lost to time. In most cases this is a good thing, since not much of it deserved being saved. But there were other little things that I had played with and created that I miss. These were random things like palindromic poems, and clerihews about famous (and not so famous) people; short essays and more.

Imagine my surprise when, while digging into my dropbox archives, I discovered a bunch of stuff, that had survived after all. I am not sure they have any intrinsic value but, they ARE meaningful to me. They also capture, visually, the aesthetic of the early web! (This isn’t the first time that my dropbox archives have surprised me, more about that in A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past).

Anyway, once I found them I took a few mins this morning to upload them to this website. What I didn’t want to do was redesign them to fit what my website looks like now. So be warned, early web experiments coming up. Small font sizes, glowing text, it is all there. In spades. But without further ado here we go, in no particular order.

First up, are a series of short essays that I called A-Musings: Occasional essays on technology and life. Looking back, I realize that what I was doing was blogging, before the idea of blogging had entered the general consciousness. I am guessing that I wrote the first one of these (Tea and Technology) sometime in 2000/2001.

Back in 1988, after having graduated from my undergraduate in Engineering, I joined the Industrial Design Center at the Indian Institute of Technology to get my masters in Visual Communications. (I have written and spoken about that shift in various contexts: a keynote at IDC, an essay titled My Favorite Failure, and even my TED talk.

It was in design school, that I started just for fun, a little project called “A2Z: A dictionary of design.” That ended up becoming a book and it is still archived on the IDC website. What I had forgotten was that I had designed a web-version as well.

I do want to apologize in advance for the design of this website – but it is a historical relic of the early days of the web, and the interface is quite clunky. I remember most of the alignments on the page are done with “invisible gifs” (does anybody remember that!). Anyway, here it is for your enjoyment: A2Z: The dictionary of design.

Clerihew’s are short biographical poems with a certain fixed format. As the Atlantic defined it:

The clerihew is a bit of rhyming doggerel invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Traditionally, it’s a four-line verse made up of two rhyming couplets, with meter intentionally (often ridiculously) irregular. Its purpose is to offer a satiric or absurd biography of a famous person. Here are three of Bentley’s own creations:

At some point I got inspired to write a bunch, about famous and not so famous people. Here they are.

I have always been interested in the idea of symmetry, which can be seen in my ambigram designs as well as in my experiments with palindromic poetry. The first one I wrote was most probably when I was in graduate school, maybe 1994/5 and then a few more have come by since then.

Once again I should warn the reader that the interface of this mini-site leaves a lot to be desired. I was experimenting with javascripts and pull down menus and clearly went too far. But here they are: Palindromic poems.

My interest in fractals led me to think about the architecture of Indian temples (something I was introduced to by my professor Kirti Trivedi.). Once during my web browsing I came across this site, which is now gone. I just archived the entire site since I did not want it to get lost. This not created by me, and my attempts to find the author have come to naught. Here it is Indian Architecture.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The Attribution Problem: Why we can’t stop seeing ourselves in AI

The Attribution Problem: Why we can’t stop seeing ourselves in AI

Note: For over 20 years I have been taking photographs of everyday objects that appear to have faces, a phenomenon known as pareidolia, for a series I call 'Faces in the Wild.” The above image was captured during a family trip to Mexico in 2012. I have “cleaned up”...

Absolutely brilliant video

The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College's Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.

TPACK in the land down under

I recently received an email from Debra Bourne, IT Coordinator at St. Paul's International College in Australia informing me about some work related to TPACK being done in Queensland. Specifically she mentioned a paper to be presented at the upcoming Australian...

Tech Trends, Special Issue on TPACK

TechTrends is a leading journal for professionals in the educational communication and technology field and is the official publication of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The current issue has 5 articles devoted to the TPACK...

Finding humor in play

Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous...

Putting technology first

Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here... What do you think of Norman's ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss...

The reluctant fundamentalist

I just finished reading "The reluctant fundamentalist" a novel by Mohsin Hamid over the break. (I had mentioned this novel in another context here). It is a tight, powerful novel, structured as a monologue, (reminiscent of Camus' The Fall, a fact that few reviewers...

The political psychology of images

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov's website (see this posting about Nikita's new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. I think a similar issue comes up regarding the...

When is a picture of a sandwich more than a sandwich?

The answer is that when that picture has been taken by someone you know and it ends up on the NYTimes Freakonomics blog! Long story short, a picture of a sandwich taken by Leigh Wolf has been used by the cool people over at Freakonomics to illustrate a story. Check it...

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