Count Dracula is being driven out of Germany by Neo-nazis and bureaucrats.
7:30 p.m. CST. I just discovered that Daylight Saving Time is over. Heh. I've gone through the whole day an hour ahead. Not a big deal, except that I suspect that i annoyed my friend Michael by calling an hour early this morning.
My father was working in radio when Minnesota was debating the move to Daylight Saving Time. One listener called in angry about what an hour of extra sunlight would do to his lawn. This was sadly typical, apparently.
Mr. Barrett installs LinuxPPC. I can relate. Although not my first Unix experience, LinuxPPC is my first and basically only Linux experience. Whereas the latest release is reasonably easy to install and to use, it is not for the meek. As if this is a surprise. And unless I find enough time to get seriously interested in hacking my system, I probably won't use it all that often. I have little reason to. Perhaps if I were hosting my own web site or something, I would dig into it more. As it is, I turn to my Linux installation only when I need to do something with MySQL, PHP, Perl, and so on. Then I take what I've learned to work, only to discover that it doesn't apply. :)
This is one of the many reasons that I'm looking forward to MacOS X. I like the MacOS, but would occasionally like to dip into Unix to check something--hey, does this work in Perl? Oh shoot, does MySQL support that? Having to reboot all the time to quickly do something in Linux just ain't worth it. I'm curious about BSD, too. Well, soon. Need more RAM first, and need to ask Apple why they expect me to have OS 9 installed to use the OS X beta.
And then later, oddly, I stumbled into an article on O'Reilly Network about installing LinuxPPC on a G4.
I'm amused and occasionally outraged when I come across an article like today's weblog posting by Edd Dumbill, discussing the (I thought obvious!) fact that technical news or discussions have a bias:
By the very inclusion of one story over another, we're making a statement. Whether the tone of a report is neutral, enthuasistic or critical makes a statement. What was different in this case was that we were overt about it, and readers actually noticed an opinion coming through.
His readers' reactions puzzle me. Why do people insist on believing that journalism of any sort can possibly be bias-free? Objective journalism, at least as most people understand it, is a lie. If you haven't done so yet, I urge you to read Steven Feuerstein's recent article on this topic and the responses to it.
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A friend just sent me this:
October had come again,
And that year it was sharp and soon:
Frost was early,
Burning the thick green on the mountain sides
To massed brilliant hues of blazing colors,
Painting the air with sharpness,
Sorrow and delight -
And with October.from "October" by Thomas Wolfe
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The Volkswagen Golf has been by dream car for a long, long time. It's fun to drive, reliable, and I can fit my 6-foot-4 frame into it with ease. But my recent dealings with Saturn, in particular Saturn of Saint Paul, may have changed all that. I love our car (I fit pretty well in it) and have rarely done business with such straightforward people. They just went to bat for us in some unpleasant dealings with our credit union, for which I am exceptionally appreciative. I understand now why Saturn owners are so happy about being Saturn owners.
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I'm putting this here so I don't forget it: some folk at UMD have put together a nice list of references for web development. I may break down and set up a page that keeps links like these, if nothing else so I can reference it when I need it in my own work. I'm always afraid that my bookmark file and its backup will mysteriously disappear.
Trouble in Paradise: Problems Facing the Usability Community
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Kiara came home a month or two ago with a non-stick skillet. Since then we have rediscovered the fried egg. I may be a little nervous what this is doing to my cholesterol (and god knows what else), but damn it's nice to have a halfway decent breakfast from time to time. Been drinking coffee, too, which I'd given up on for some time--more out of a lack of quality coffee than anything else.
I've been pretty quiet here lately, I know. If not swamped with work, which I've been quite good about not bringing home with me, I've just been busy with lots of other things. And right now I am tired. I will tell you that I downloaded Mozilla M18 not too long ago and have been playing with it. For some reason it, too, now ignores the hover pseudo-class, like Netscape 6PR3 does but Mozilla did not used to. :-( I've been playing around with different skins/themes, too, which is fun but ultimately not terribly interesting to me.
This is where I would be if I had lots of time to spend there.
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K, a teacher, was working with young kids on traffic lights and what the colors mean:
K: What does red mean?
Student: Stop!
K: What does green mean?
Student: Go!
K: What does a yellow light mean?
Student: Go really, really fast!
<sigh> This has to change. I was almost struck down today by a motorist racing to beat the red light--and failing. Had I been any less attentive than my normal morning catatonic state, I may have been. I appreciate that Saint Paul police are beginning (allegedly) to ticket jaywalkers. I am concerned, though, that drivers need to slow down!
I was not jaywalking, by the way.
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore). (Thanks, Jim)
I have spent the day internally tormented by Thompson Twins songs.
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Ripped from today's headlines...
Oh wow. 250 million year old bacteria revived.
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Local TV station KMSP interviewed US presidential candidate Duke this morning. It was great! Mandatory gun ownership, protecting small family marajuana growers, "sometimes you have to force freedom down people's throats"...this guy just about has my vote. Although I read the Wired story on the Duke campaign a while back, I never really looked at his web site. I love what Trudeau and team are doing.
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Minnesota residents can renew their vehicle tabs online...if they can make it past the blinking paragraph! Ye gods, how annoying. One word is bad enough, but a whole paragraph? Rather than emphasizing the text, it made me completely ignore it. I love that I can do this online, though. Now maybe K & I will actually renew them on time!
A friend writes to tell me that it took her a full minute to read that one paragraph because of the blinking. Oh yeah, that's effective.
Update, 2:00 p.m.The blinking has stopped.
Our voicemail system at work assumes idiocy, every now and then greeting us in the morning with instructions for how to use some feature or other. Today: "Do you always need to talk in real time to your colleague, or would it be faster just to send him or her a message?" Let me not disguise my own idiocy: I only just today figured out how to skip these minute-long (but seemingly interminable) messages. Evil, pure evil.
So we bought a car, a Saturn. Our dream car may still be a VW Golf, but that may change: we're very happy with the car and with the Saturn-buying experience. At the very least, it runs better than our old car, which didn't run at all. But it really is a sweet, sweet car. If anyone wants to buy a 1989 Honda Accord with cylinder head problems, cheap, let me know.
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Mozilla Milestone 18 has been released.
I don't have time to comment on it right now, but go read Steven Feuerstein's discussion of his using politically charged examples in his Oracle books (e.g. accusing Henry Kissinger of being a war criminal). I like what he's doing, I like what he says, but not everyone likes mixing politics with tech. This amuses me, because as Feuerstein points out, "almost every technology book we buy and read is full of politics." You just don't usually notice because they reflect the dominant, often business/consumer-oriented ideology.
Cogent points abound. More later.
Sorry, not many updates this week. It's been crazy. The car is indeed turning out to be quite expensive, which means...I don't know what. Either way, we'll be a lot poorer.
On the up side, I've been doing some more fun things with PHP and MySQL at work.
Microsoft Linux ships November 2001. via dack.
Okay, I'm bored. I have to do something interesting with this site fairly soon. I've just been too focused on other things to spend much time here.
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Zeldman's having problems that sound nothing like my experiences with Netscape 6. For the record, I'm using it on an iMac 333MHz running OS 8.6. I have been having occasional weird problems when I launch it from the Apple menu: it opens on a blank screen, no toolbars, and no matter what I do I have to relaunch the app to get it to work.
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Turning out to be a more expensive weekend than a social one. The car died mysteriously on me yesterday. Just quit.
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I downloaded Netscape 6 yesterday and have been playing around with it. It's nice, I recommend it. Hasn't crashed on me once. :) It has a new, very OS X-like appearance. Renders pages quite quickly (even scifi.com, my favorite bandwidth hog). Handles CSS pretty well. I am disappointed that they've chosen not to support the hover pseudo-class, though. I'm fairly certain that Mozilla does, so why the switch? Netscape does finally deal with the title attribute, however, which is nice. I haven't done any serious testing; I'll leave that to others. I'm not ready to switch away from IE5/Mac, but we're getting there.
We've been recording the widescreen version of Babylon 5, and it's been great, but I fear that we may miss a couple days. Our VCR started munging tapes and is in the shop. :-(
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Jim & Camille got a puppy!
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What was looking like a quiet weekend is turning into an unexpectedly social one. I'm going out for bad coffee, My dear friend Melina is in town, and hopefully I'll be able to square away some time to see her. And I would not be half surprised to discover that I'm forgetting something.
Having found myself having to explain public key encryption and digital signatures at the conference last week, I decided today to write a quick non-technical intro. Critique welcome.
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This is kinda cool. British Telecom is trying to model network design on baterial reproduction, designing "junctions of a network so that each could be run by a piece of autonomous software. Like bacteria, they had no central knowledge or overall control, yet ... they were able to run the network very efficiently." I'm no networking guy, but is this really extraordinarily different from the way the internet now runs? From what I know, it is and it isn't. What BT is doing is being a little more selective about the packet data that gets dropped...oh, just read the article.
I had a dream the other night in which I was doing plumbing in an enormous, many-floored house: tracing the pipes, where they flowed, intersected, and bent back recursively; carefully observing where some other piece of plumbing, whose inner workings were obscured from view, handled the water before sending it down another pipe. I scurried back and forth, up and down, trying to make sense of how the plumbing worked and what was wrong. Upon waking I realized that in my dream I had actually been debugging a program I've been working on, sorting out its internal logic and seeing where the problem(s) lay. <sigh /> Maybe K's right, maybe I have been working too hard. :-)
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Busy with a Chet Raymo book that I forgot I had (and busy not working!), so just a couple updates. First, Netscape 6PR3 has been released, as has Seti@home 3.0.
Space station Mir has a mold problem. Never woulda thought of space fungus.
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Three excitng things fell into place at work today: MySQL, PHP, and a decent SSH client for Windows. Yee-hah! Now the real fun begins. I've been hankering to move a number of projects over to MySQL, and PHP should make some of that quite a bit easier.
Etymology lesson for the day, courtesy of some PBS program that was on last night. Ostracize comes from early Greek democracies, where each citizen would vote to banish someone by writing their name on a potsherd (ostrakon). The person whose name was most often chosen would be exiled--i.e., ostracized.
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I hesitated to post a link to this, but it's just too weird. The Peculiar Art of Mr. Frahm walks us through the 1950s-era art of Art Frahm, illustrations of women whose underwear has just fallen down. As if. (via Astounding Websites)
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Fatbrain has changed their layout. It's nice, except for the word spacing. Not sure that you can see that in Netscape, but damn it's annoying. For example. this sentence mimics the sort of thing they're doing on the site. I don't know about you, but I find this hard to read.
Unable to get Meerkat feed.
