Erin, TiVo commander, on the Oscars: “Ugh, it’s
even boring in fast-forward.”
Archive for February, 2004
100 Parking Lot Way
Manvel, TX
77578
Hey, just kidding. (By the way, you see the four-car driveway at the far left of the picture? Yeah, they have two cars in the garage too. And at least one of the cul-de-sac cars belongs to them. Awesome!)
Update 10/2005: Entry un-blocked since we don’t live there anymore and aren’t trying to sell our house.
You know, I didn’t know I was a sucker for over-voiceovered infographic
animation. Until now: Man of Action!
As if it weren’t bad enough that several major players are proposing
mutually-incompatible anti-spam (really, message-source authentication)
measures, now Sendmail has
announced it will support them all. This is terrible news: if more
MTA providers attempt to sign on in a similar way, we will
never be able to put the multiple-conflicting-implementations
genie back in the bottle. The Internet works because there are
standards; are we to return to the days of Prodigy and Compu$erve?
The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.
At least in NYC, the push-to-walk buttons are inactive. [via harbinger]
This from the Burnt Orange
Report (a liberal tex-politics blog out of UT Austin): New Paltz,
NY will start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on
Friday. Look, this is a pattern. And if the laws of the land
are supposed to evolve to mirror the evolving consensus
of the land, then, consider recent events to be a clear indicator of “punctuated
equilibrium” in popular opinion. And the law had better follow!
I really like this sentence: “This is an election year, a glorious time
in a free country where facts go into deep hibernation.” [—Al
Kamen for the WashPost]
A preview release of the Palm OS Developer
Suite is now available. The suite is based on the Eclipse IDE, Cygwin, gcc (for 68K and x86), and
PalmSource’s own resource tools and ARM compiler.
“Locked! Isn’t that always the way? Thou hateth adventure games.” Go
check out Thy
Dungeonman 2. (Sequel to the enormously popular Thy
Dungeonman. “Ye cannot get ye FLASK.” Oh, good times.)
“The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS
people — it’s also to beat up on every other open-source designer who
does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a
slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. … This kind of crap is exactly
why Linux has had such trouble gaining traction among nontechnical users — and
it becomes less forgivable, not more, when it’s surrounded by a boatload of
GUI cotton candy that adds complexity without actually delivering friendliness
to the user.” ESR explodes all
over the Common Unix Printing System and OSS user interface.
“California ain’t so bad.
The people though, fall victim to a kind of provincial snobbery
unsurpassed by pretty much everyone except the French.” (If you glaze
over at all the text, scroll down to the second map—that’s where the
funny really begins.)
I have the front window open, and Albert spotted a bird … so, as is his custom, he started chirping at it in his very incongruously-high-pitched voice.
It responded!
He actually speaks bird! (I always thought he was just shouting gibberish, the way we do to them when we make mewling noises.)
Thank goodness for the Internet. Finally, we can get the skinny on Cool “Disco” Dan, a DC-area
graffiti master of the 1990s. (Some of his stuff is still
around, I guess, leaching through coats of whitewash and paint.)
Linked everywhere, and with good reason: it’s quite tasty. “Mario
Brothers,” a tragic story, in Flash:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3. Is there more coming?
“I have to know if the
princess is dead or simply in another castle!”
Snrk. (Unfortunately, some
are tasteless. That’s what happens when you get an entire Internet of people
in a room to tell their favorite jokes.)
Think you have a foolproof spam solution? Hold on a moment, while I fill out this handy
form to give to you.
More from Slacktivist, this time about the Nader candidacy by way of an interview with
Tony Kushner: “Listen,
here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral
purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some
utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.”
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,–I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.”
—Rep. A. Lincoln, 1848.
Slacktivist has the full text of this letter as well as one just prior.
So, the whole “abrupt halt of the Global Oceanic Conveyor leading to
famine and war” stuff has turned into kind of a foofaraw on the Net. The
Oakland Tribune seems to have a good summary
of both the report and the subsequent overinflation that seems to be
floating around now. (Read the full
report (PDF) if you like.)
<ctate> ♪ ghoti heads, ghoti heads, roly-poly ghoti heads…. ♪
OSNews has a very nice interview with GEH
about Palm OS Cobalt, including a few screenshots from the keynote demos
(not, unfortunately, including mine).
President Bush: “If we’re to prevent the meaning of marriage
from being changed forever, our nation must enact a
constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America.” (story)
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing: Easy
on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Hooptedoodle.
Houston blogger Matt Mullenweg notes
that, yes, some of the sites in the Well-Designed
Weblogs series are easy on the eyes, but “some look plain,
unimaginative, squished.” He mentions the CSS Vault as a more earnest source of CSS
pornography (if that’s all you’re looking for); of course,
don’t forget to stop by the venerable CSS Zen Garden.
“This is just a small Ruby book. It won’t crush you.” Why’s (Poignant) Guide to
Ruby.
The
Development of the C Language, by Dennis Ritchie (the “R” in “K&R”),
from the proceedings of the second ACM History Of Programming Languages
conference, April, 1993.
Subversion 1.0 out in
source form; I hope some Mac OS X packages show up soon. Related:
Slashdot poster’s Perforce
vs. Subversion breakdown; super SCM
comparison chart.
They’re far from perfect, but I’ve stumbled on some transcribed lyrics (cached search page) for the “Zelda” song by The Darwins. Erin and I differ on some of these interpretations, so perhaps we’ll have to put our heads together and come up with something more complete.
Joe Pleiman—aka The Rabbit Joint, as featured in Josh Spaulding’s
Zelda (“Zelda”
audio mp3)—has surfaced again, this time writing and performing songs for the opening
and closing credits Robot
Stories, a critically-acclaimed set of low-budget sci-fi vignettes
currently making the film festival rounds.
If anyone’s looking for a cheap ($10) gift for me, how about an offset
screwdriver?
New over at OverClocked Remix: Pirates of
Dragon Roost Isle (based on a theme from The Legend of Zelda:
The Wind Waker).
c|net: PDA
prizefight.
Sorry about the dead air—Erin and I have been in Dallas for Kelly and Kale’s wedding. We’re
back now. All is well.
