gorriti.com » Nostalgia

Diccionarios Visuales, esos grandes olvidados

gorriti — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:00:57 +0000

El otro día Juan hablaba de guías visuales para resolver el problema ese de la torre de Babel. Y en un ataque de nostalgia me acordé de sus precursores algo más voluminosos pero igualmente prácticos: los diccionarios visuales.

Basados en el principio de que una imagen vale mis palabras compilan un sinfín de ilustraciones que cubren todos los tópicos imaginables. Sustituyen el tener que acordarte de un término por el reconocimiento visual del mismo. Con una misma imagen “traduces” a todos los idiomas del mundo (suelen incluir los nombres de los objetos en varios idiomas). Además, la agrupación no es alfabética, y por tanto artificial, sino por actividades.

De paso se ahorran la barrera entre idiomas como el japonés o el chino, que carecen de ordenación alfabética (cada diccionario tiene su índice específico).

Más intuitivo imposible.

Hay versión online de alguno que otro, pero no nos engañemos: son bastante inútiles. Yo seguiré gozando con la experiencia de ver pasar un mundo de animales, personas y cosas página a página, sin moverme del bar de turno.

One day you are a top rated consultancy…

gorriti — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:26:56 +0000

… and the next you are a forgotten scrap inside the guts of a DNS machine somewhere in the backlot of a redneck landfill.

What am I talking about?

Back in 2000 I started working for what back then was a top notch internet consultancy. One of the big guns, full of bright kids with funny ideas on what to do with the new shiny toy that dad had put on their christmas tree: the Internet.

Founded by swedes, IconMedialab went around the world buying here and there smaller companies like there was no tomorrow, like it didn’t matter as long as you kept growing, forgetting about the product, the sales, the quality of their hires, their ultimate customer and saviour: the users. Everyone was to blame.

They burnt talent like the midnight oil.

Eventually someone bought them. Reminds me a bit of the rising female actress who ends up as a two-cent crackwhore for an unknown man with loads of cash that wants the attention she brings into the relationship. In this case the attention meant the stock market.

Anyways, I digress.

What I wanted to say is that now www.iconmedialab.com is as forgotten as known it was back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble. Take a look at despair, it might not last.

UPDATE: Well, seems like the pimp got around and bought the whore a new dress. No need to visit her now. Ahh, the fleeting tenderness of the internet.

This website is fueled by the power of nostalgia

gorriti — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 12:41:50 +0000

The other day while trying to import ye olde posts archive from Blogger, in the midst of the failure of such process, a copy of the whole she-bang managed to crawl into the depths of the webserver. Those posts are worth a year or so of posting, but they are incomplete since in an attack of unproper teenage foolery the even older posts were deleted.

“It was an attempt to reboot the site” is the official excuse when asked why on earth anyone would delete, forever, inane and harmless posts.

Anyways, take a look at the archive that could be recovered, uglily formatted in a blogger template.

Ye olde gorriti.com’s looks

If you have the guts, here is an even older version.