He seems to have a much smaller number of normal nights out, when meeting his future wife is normal. (Since it can't happen very often almost by definition.)
I'm glad that Lynx never got <blink>. I use it on a day-to-day basis!
Why? Well, I used to check the Internet too much while working. I discovered that Lynx can fetch news and not much else, so I decided to use it for my personal browsing at work. It's useful enough to ease my curiosity, and useless enough that I prefer working. Combined with a webpage-blocking browser extension, I can actually complete a decent amount of work during a day.
The web page for our internal build monitor (which summarizes Hudson status) uses the blink tag to flash the word Building when a build is in progress and the marquee tag to scroll the names of the people who broke the build. In most circumstances these tags are annoying, here they are useful.
I can also remember the <marquee> tag, equally annoying. It's impossible to concentrate on the content of a page when something is moving in the corner of your eye. Luckily, back then I used Opera, which had the ability to make the marquee texts stop scrolling.
I know of commercial software that uses a marquee - god knows how it is implemented but is really annoying. It's a service desk system - presumably it is there to deter people from submitting requests.
That was really the most annoying tag. Blinking text was schlocky but usually minor in the context of the page. Marquees were long and annoying by design.
The new thing that technically unsophisticated people do is buy a new HD television and leave the aspect ratio set to stretch their 4:3 picture out to 16:9, making everybody look fat.
I think that I can safely say that I've only seen one single wide TV in a home that was not set that way.
Lou Montulli says he is the inventor because he mentioned something on those lines over coffee. Sadly he doesn't even state the engineer's name who actually took his joke to implementation to get <blink> into the browser.
Somehow I got it in my head that jwz implemented it. And I'm not the only one. But I can't find actual proof of the evil deed, and jwz in fact denies it -- although he does take credit for adding "MilSpec blinking". It seems that at worst jwz was responsible for eventually adding it to the linux version of Mozilla. While the original implementor fessed up last year, and actually got into mozilla's credits for it at long last: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_...
Urk, now I'm remembering one time when I walked by jwz somewhere in SoMa, and thought "if he wasn't on the other side of the street already, I'd have to cross to avoid that evil blink tag creator". And now I'm feeling all regretful. Will the pain that tag inflicted on the world never cease?
I'd always imagined more circumscribed pentagrams were involved. And some chanting. And a cubicle.
<Blink> on, Lynx lovers. It does make sense in that context, especially after my recent 4-month battle with Ncurses.
edit: wow, this guy is influential. And no wonder he was considering Lynx in this: http://www.montulli.org/lou