Testing, testing...

This posting is to inform those most loyal readers of the fact that for the second time, I have made my return. Due to this site bursting out of its account size and my moving to a new hosting provider as a result, and due to a lengthy holiday in a remote nation where blogging is prohibited by law (ahem), this site has been a mere empty shell for way too long.

But all that's gonna change, readers. Soon.

Obscure Factoids

Here are some fun facts you may not have heard before¹:

• An apocryphal version of the New Testament has Jesus say, "Let he who is without snowballs cast the first stone", giving the passage a more profound meaning.
• snowstoned is urban slang for 'under the intoxicating influence of cocaine'.
• In fundamentalist Islamic countries, wives who are suspected of being unfaithul to their husbands are sometimes snowed to death –a particularly cruel and slow process.
• The nineteenth-century American poet Geoffrey Benlon refers in one of his poems to 'the snow's tone'.

Nielsen Ratings

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen released the 2002 Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes. My score's 7/10:

1. No Prices. I don't sell anything.
2. Inflexible Search Engines. Guilty.
3. Horizontal Scrolling. Nope.
4. Fixed Font Size. Nope.
5. Blocks of Text. See the 100 words rule under About.
6. JavaScript in links. Nope.
7. Infrequently asked questions in FAQ. My About page isn't a FAQ but follows the format. Guilty, your honor.
8. Collecting email addresses without a privacy policy. I don't and won't.
9. URL > 75 characters. Nope.
10. Mailto links in unexpected locations. A mailto hidden under Respond.
11. No decent 404 page. Ha! (OK, I made that one up.)

Twice the Fun

For some reason, the month of December 2002 has seen snowstone’s visitors nearly double, even though I would expect surfing to subside during Yuletide or similar festivities. I guess I must be doing something right, although I still can’t see what it might be.
Shameless plugging will indubitably have something to do with it. But the dozens of Google hits for the search string "see through girls clothes" remain puzzling. The entry containing it has been around for ages.
Needless to say, I’ll attempt to keep my updates regular and entertaining. In other words, 'Y'all come back now, ya hear'?

Off Hiatus

Like many other weblogs, snowstone has been ‘updateless’ for the holidays: I’ve been virtually without internet access for twelve days (during the one chance I got, I discovered snowstone looks crap in Mozilla). I suppose I could have phoned in my entries and have someone enter them (the weblog equivalent of watering the plants), but somehow, there were more pressing matters to attend to.
No matter; to make up for lost time and to ring in the new year, here is an update: ten entries in one go.
By the way, may 2003 bring you at least 2003 memorable moments.

The critics raved!!

The people over at Bloggy Opinions have recently checked out snowstone to review it. The verdict: "I found this blog to be very knowledgeable, interesting, and fun. To the creator of snowstone, you are a very intellectual author, overall this blog is inspiring, interesting, and I enjoyed my time here!"
The distinct lack of personal info (photos, about me, etc) was also noted. I don't intend to change that: there's enough exhibitionism on weblogs. The layout was deemed "really simple but effective", which I'll take as a praise/constructive criticism-combo. All in all, a positive review, for which thanks are due.

Dance, snowstone! You're now a Movable Type, after all!

Recently, snowstone failed to celebrate its one-year anniversary. Plans to make something of this event were smothered by pressing matters in real life, and the date of September 21, 2002 passed unnoticed. What's worse, snowstone wasn't updated for ages.
Now, by way of a belated festivity, snowstone is powered no more by the simple but heavily restrictive CMS that is Blogger, but instead by the fabulous, 'databased' system known as Movable Type. I'm still tweaking the look and feel of the site, but I'm very glad to have both date- and category-based archives (see the column to your left).
This has been a service announcement, actual content coming up soon.

Work in progress

Please note, hear ye hear ye:
This site is undergoing major reconstruction.
I expect to be up and running again in a few days.
Excuse the mess.

What's a snowstone?

When I created this weblog, I was looking for a name that was easy to remember and was not yet in use. The word 'stone' attracted me for its connotations of calmness and simplicity, and combined with 'snow' it made me think of Zen and haiku.
But do other people feel the same way? In order to find out, I searched for the word 'snowstone' in Google. I found out that the term snowstone can be roughly categorized as follows:

• Nicknames
  
  
  
  • Over at Geocities, a woman named Cory Vitello presents her collection of Cabbage Patch Kids under the name 'snowstone';
  
  
  • Someone in China has snowstone@peoplemail.com.cn as his or her email address. The word 'snowstone' pops up and several more Chinese pages.
  
  
  
  


• Fantasy concepts, materials or characters:
  
  
  
  • A fanfiction enthusiast called "StarryTamara" introduces "the Snowstone" as an object in one of her own spinoffs of the animation series, 'Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders';
  
  
  • Original fantasy fiction in Chapter 7 of "Jason and the Kodikats", "a fantasy for children. It is the story of a young boy from Seattle, who is living with his parents and his skate board in Anchorage[, who] finds himself in the realm of the Kodikats. They are the little people who live in Alaska." "Snowstone" is a material used in the construction of houses;
  
  
  • A character called Queen Vivienne in a log of an online RPG is described as wearing a 'snowstone silver ring'.
  
  
  • More fantasy references as Snowstone is a character in fiction produced by a writing group called DI'Quinasev;
  
  
  • Someone called Polina Hristova wrote fan fiction based on the Nintendo 64 game called "StarFox" and/or a book by Orson Scott Card called "Ender's Game". The character SnowStone, however, is all Polina's.
  
  
  • Someone called J.M. Scott wrote a book called "Snowstone", 'a tale of adventure in Greenland;
  
  
  
  


• Snowstone as the name of a material, product or object
  
  
  
  • A designer of lamps called Dave LaMure jr made a small lamp with a cracked base and called it 'snowstone';
  
  
  • The snowstone ranch sells miniature horses;
  
  
  • A carpet seller at New Millennium Carpets identifies one of his rugs as 'snowstone';
  
  
  • An German internet company talks about making a site called Snowstone for mountain biking enthusiasts.
  
  
  • A site dealing with oceanography refers to a certain stone (sucrosis dolostone) informally as "snowstone";
  
  
  • On a Canadian newsgroup, a student of mathematics refers to his "hotrod 486/66 sandbox" as Snowstone;
  
  
  
  


• Word coinage: A cowgirl from Wyoming called Cris Paravicini refers to a hard layer of snow in her diary as 'a "snowstone" drift'.


• Animation: someone made a nice Flash animation of an Oriental watercolor scroll.

A ragman

Ones 'n' Twos
Net Swoons!
Ow! Sonnets!
Tons o'News
Newton's OS
"Soon, we..." "Sst!"
Snow on set!
"No. West, Son."
SOS Went On
Snow's Tone
Owns No Set
Noses Won't
Noon's Stew
Toons News
Now's Notes
To New Sons
Snow Tones

Just added: About snowstone (also under the "About" link)

Q: Hey, where are all the links to funny websites, Flash movies and personality tests?
A: Look for them elsewhere. Some people make links, I make content. Don't get me wrong, I like browsing the web via a blogger, but there's enough of those to go around.

Q: So this is a personal weblog, like a diary online?
A: Wrong again. First of all, I hardly find my daily life entertaining enough to report about (I don't believe in a "show and tell" for adults); second, the interesting bits are, frankly, none of your business.

Q: So what can I find on snowstone?
A: Movie reviews. Ideas and inventions. Poetry. Satire. Politics. Fiction.

Q: Why are most of the entries 100 words long?
A: This is an idea I picked up at the 100 words website. I have a tendency to ramble, and this rule keeps me in check. I sometimes break it if I feel the subject requires it.

Q: What is this Esc comic?
A: I made the comic myself, but it is now discontinued. Esc may reappear in the form of blog entries from time to time.

Q: Where can I respond to your postings?
A: It is not my intention to be polemic or controversial, which is why the site offers no way of offering comments that appear on snowstone itself. But feel free to mail me at cronopio@snowstone.com

Q: What or who is "cronopio"?
A: Google will help. Knowing Latin American literature will also help.

100 words

I checked this site’s email inbox for the first time ever today. Among the spam, I found a mail from “Jim”, sent to jenn@snowstone.com (all mail ending in @snowstone.com ends up in the inbox). I don’t know any Jim or Jenn.
The mail describes a dream Jim had. In it, he summons storms, locks people in the underworld.. it reads like a fantasy novel blurb. Then it turns more psychological, that’s where I felt I was invading someone’s privacy. Or is this some prank?
I’m not making this up. Should I send Jim a mail? Mail your response to cronopio@snowstone.com.

Esc returns!

After a month-long leave of absence, the Esc comic is back with a vengeance! Will Esc's blind date work out? Will any eggplants explode? And what about Esc's job security? Learn all, and more, in the exciting new adventures of Esc. Esc, it makes Microsoft look like a software company! (Please use the month arrows in the calendar to navigate to earlier comics.)