More (and detailed) ragging on George Lucas and his revisionist Star Wars DVDs. Amusingly, the “counter-point” article defense of the DVD tweaks is not all that strong a defense in…
More (and detailed) ragging on George Lucas and his revisionist Star Wars DVDs.
Amusingly, the “counter-point” article defense of the DVD tweaks is not all that strong a defense in the final analysis.
We managed to watch about ten minutes of the debates before Margie insisted she had to leave the room (her Cheney threshold is a lot lower than mine). Since I’d…
We managed to watch about ten minutes of the debates before Margie insisted she had to leave the room (her Cheney threshold is a lot lower than mine). Since I’d seen all I really wanted to see myself, I just changed the channel. Doubtless that means I missed the Really Key Moment that Proved That Guy’s A Lying Buffoon If Only I’d Seen It (fill in the That Guy of your choice).
Major observation:
I’d certainly much rather hear John Edwards giving speeches for the next four years. I’m less sure I’d rather have him representing the US at a negotiating table.
I find Cheney’s “we” and “our” (Administration) references only slightly less irritating than Edwards’ “John Kerry and John Edwards” third person references. Neither of them used the first person singular enough.
I didn’t find either of them significantly less fact-challenged than the other. Both repeated the same charges as their campaign ads have been making, with the same errors and misrepresentations. Both were willing to paint things as jet black or gleaming white depending on what their own interests wanted it to be.
Feh.
This blog has traditionally (i.e., MT 2.x gave me) two RSS feeds, 0.91 (as index.xml) and 1.0 (as index.rdf). MT3 provides templates for RSS 2.0 and for Atom syndication. Now,…
This blog has traditionally (i.e., MT 2.x gave me) two RSS feeds, 0.91 (as index.xml) and 1.0 (as index.rdf).
MT3 provides templates for RSS 2.0 and for Atom syndication.
Now, it seems goofy as all heck to have four different syndication feeds. So I poked around, and found this history of RSS formats (not even counting Atom). There are seven different formats out there right now, with varying histories and owners (and not necessarily in numeric sequence). Yeesh. Another look here.
I have no basis for judging which one is best, which one more RSS readers will handle, etc. So … heck with it. It’s a trivial thing to write the actual feed, upon contemplation. So I’ll now include an Atom feed (atom.xml) and an RSS 2.0 feed (index.rss). And if performance goes in the crapper, or someone sees some horrible error I’m making, I’m sure folks will let me know …
Hrm. Despite not actually changing any code (as far as I know), the “Remember me!” bits in the comments here seems to be distinctly not remembering me. Or, presumably, you….
Hrm. Despite not actually changing any code (as far as I know), the “Remember me!” bits in the comments here seems to be distinctly not remembering me. Or, presumably, you. I’ll see what I can do.
It’s been making the outraged rounds in some quarters, but there’s been nary a peep (that I’ve read, at least) from any more conservative blogs about this particular journalistic scandal….
It’s been making the outraged rounds in some quarters, but there’s been nary a peep (that I’ve read, at least) from any more conservative blogs about this particular journalistic scandal.
The following showed up on the Fox News website for some hours last Friday.
Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night’s debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.
“Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!” Kerry said Friday.
With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going. Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.
“It’s about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures,” Kerry said.
Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.
“I’m metrosexual he’s a cowboy,” the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.
A “metrosexual” is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.
Go here to see a capture of the (now-vanished) the news blurb.
The Kerry quotes in the story are, of course, utterly fictitious. And Fox got rightfully called on it.
Comparisons to “Rathergate” are obvious, though not directly analogous. Fox pulled the story as soon as complaints came up, apologized for it, and the journalist involved was at least “reprimanded“; CBS and Rather continued to back the faux documents far too long and too defensively, and, so far as I know, there hasn’t been a slap on anyone’s wrist for going with a story even Michael Moore declined to go with.
That aside, it’s still inexcusable, and, frankly, I fail to understand why the reporter, Carl Cameron, still has a job (let alone still being assigned as the Kerry campaign point man for Fox). (I don’t understand why Rather has a job, too, but that’s a different tale). Even if, as the Fox apology has it, it was all a matter of “fatigue” and “bad judgment,” they should still fire his ass, and let him work his way back up through the bush leagues (so to speak). It’s the sort of black eye to journalistic integrity for the organization that Fox cannot afford.
And overlooking this story is the sort of hypocritical myopia that the “Right” cannot afford, either.
(No, I don’t think this was some great Rupert Murdoch-inspired conspiracy. It’s so ludicrous on the face of it, that the only people likely to believe it were the folks who already think Kerry is a supercilious metrosexual fop, and the obvious cost to the news organization, even one with a slant to the Right, to have something like this retracted is far higher than any benefit that could accrue. I think Cameron noodled around with the story, adding in some funny quotes, to show some people, and either posted it intentionally as a very bad joke, or posted it inadvertently as a very bad lapse of judgment. It makes no difference — even in the most charitable light, Cameron should be off pounding the Fairbanks beat for a while. And whoever had editorial oversight of the pages where it showed up should be banished to the Fashion section for a while.)
Joshua Claybourn regrets news reports that voter registration is way up for this election. But the reality is that most citizens aren’t informed, and quite frankly I’m okay with them…
Joshua Claybourn regrets news reports that voter registration is way up for this election.
But the reality is that most citizens aren’t informed, and quite frankly I’m okay with them staying home and not voting. Why would anyone want uninformed votes determining the next leader of the free world? Most of the readers of this site are highly informed; does it make sense for those votes to be canceled out by someone who’s casting their ballot because MTV said to do it? I think not. The more voters there are, the less important your vote becomes.
I have to disagree. Indeed, I’d have to disagree strongly. I’d rather have a lot of uninformed votes than only a few informed ones. Of course, I’d like a lot of informed votes best, but voting vs. not-voting is more important to our society, it seems to me, than voting-well vs. voting-poorly.
I know, I know — sometimes (more often than not), I think the guy who won is a dolt, or I can’t believe that “they” voted for some piece of populist crap masquerading as a ballot proposition. But people deserve the government they get, and the best way to lose your political rights is to not exercise them.
Vote. I care less whether you are voting the same as I am or directly opposite, but that you’re beside me in another voting booth on November 2. That’s a bond of unity more important than our ideological (dis)agreement.
I mistrust technology trend estimates, because they are so often off-course and driven by the pundit’s desires and the need to be on the Next Big Thing. (I feel the…
I mistrust technology trend estimates, because they are so often off-course and driven by the pundit’s desires and the need to be on the Next Big Thing. (I feel the same way about political polls, for analogous reasons. But I digress.) That said, I keep reading more and more articles like this about how Micro$oft is in big trouble with IE, and how Firefox (as an example and in particular) is picking up its defectors. And not just in “Mozilla Gazzette” or “Microsoft Haters Journal,” but in mainstream trades.
So what does this mean for the majority of Windows users, who aren’t even on Windows XP? Microsoft officials have said these users must upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 to gain the new security and capability improvements in IE.
I think Microsoft has it at least partially right. A lot of users will decide they want improved features and increased security in their Web browser, and they will decide to upgrade — but not to Windows XP SP 2.
We’ve already seen the beginning trickle of users moving away from IE: For the first time in years, IE’s market share has dropped slightly. But I predict that this trickle will soon become a full-fledged torrent. In fact, I fully expect that, a year from now, IE’s market share will be below 75 percent. (Check me on that in October 2005.) And that’s being conservative because this would be a smaller drop than the Netscape browser ever took once it began to lose share. (And Netscape the company never did anything as stupid as telling users they could get new features only by using one operating system.)
More important, the writer gives some anecdotal evidence that this is not just geeks preaching to geeks, but that the word about Firefox and other browsers is leaching out to mainstream users.
Should be interesting to see what happens. I’ll know it’s arrived when my folks ask to have it installed on their PC …
(via adot)
Margie did yeoman’s duty last night in sifting through various deal on travel and lodging for our holiday travels. With her conference scheduled so close to Christmas, the big question…
Margie did yeoman’s duty last night in sifting through various deal on travel and lodging for our holiday travels. With her conference scheduled so close to Christmas, the big question was whether we’d go to Orlando, come home a few days, then go out to SoCal (which we did the last time), or just go direct from one to the other. It looks like the latter is the cheapest and easiest, even if it maximizes the time we’ll be actually away from the house. (I don’t say maximizes the vacation time, since I will have a finite amount requiring me to work much of the time I’m in SoCal — so be it.)
Even though the conference is not being held at the quasi-Disney resort hotels of the Swan and Dolphin, but at the nearby Orlando World Marriott Complex Thingie, we’re going to be staying once again at Port Orleans at WDW (great rate), and renting a car (which also gives us some non-conference opportunities to do a tad of touring and visiting outside of the park). I get the onerous duty of playing Mr. Mom and escorting Katherine through the various WDW parks — gads, say it ain’t so!
It will make December pretty insane, of course, moreso than usual (and makes getting Christmas cards out on time a necessity, but it should be a lot of fun.
Amazon.com actually seems to have decent (if still exorbitant) printer toner prices. And if you buy a couple of cartridges, you’ve almost certainly dropped enough to qualify for free shipping….
Amazon.com actually seems to have decent (if still exorbitant) printer toner prices. And if you buy a couple of cartridges, you’ve almost certainly dropped enough to qualify for free shipping. Sure, there’s a delay, but balance that against sales tax. And if you have a “discontinued model,” it’s a lot easier to find toner online than at the local OfficeMaxpot.
    O wad some Power the giftie gie us     To see oursels as ithers see us!     It wad frae monie a blunder free us     An foolish notion … — Robert Burns,…
    O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae monie a blunder free us
    An foolish notion …
— Robert Burns, “To a Louse”
Have you ever run into a perception of you that seemed so stunningly at variance to your own self-perception that it left you in a quandary? I’m not talking simple judgment call sort of stuff (“You’re not as Xxxx as you think you are, you know,” or “Did you know Xxxx went out of fashion a decade ago?” or “I just don’t like the way you do Xxxx“). I’m talking serious mind-blowing cognitive dissonance sort of stuff (“Did you know you have a evil, glowing eyeball in your forehead?” or “I’ve told all my friends you’re the Antichrist because I truly believe you are,” or “Based on the evidence you are an evil, bitter, nasty fellow“).
It is … a puzzlement. To say the least. And even when you’re rock-bottom sure that there’s really nothing to that opinion, you keep glancing in the mirror anyway to see if you can spot that eyeball. Because assuming the other person isn’t simply insane, obviously there’s some basis for that judgment call, no matter how outré. If you could just figure out what it was … or if it’s something you can change … or even want to … and, ultimately, what you do aside from that to deal with it.
And, yes, I realize that there’s a certain measure of the US “Why do they hate us?” thing there, but that’s really not what I’m talking about.
Just dealing with a local patch of surreality.
Okay, here’s the good news: I figured out what was wrong with the dynamic publishing options I had set for my main blog (this one). In my IDC blog (/blog/idc/),…
Okay, here’s the good news: I figured out what was wrong with the dynamic publishing options I had set for my main blog (this one).
Go figure.
Note that things are marginally complicated by my having an archives directory in MT. That means I need to have that dynamic publishing .htaccess code in both the archives directory and the main directory. Except …
… well, that’s another interesting complication. I’ve been making heavy use of SSI (server-side includes) in my templates. That lets the page be loaded semi-dynamically — blocks of code that (e.g., a list of sidebar pictures) that is fixed doesn’t need to be repeated across umpteen thousand individual archives, but can be stored as a single file (MT lets you do this by defining an output file) and then inserted dynamically by the server. You simply include the code …
<!–#include virtual=”/blog/blockoftexttoinsert.txt”–>
… in your template, and, hey presto, the server inserts it. And if you don’t want to have all your files end in .shtml, you can just add …
AddHandler server-parsed .html .htm
… into your .htaccess file to tell it to have the server parse .html and .htm files as though they were .shtml files. (Note: the above is what works on my server’s particular configuration. Check with your ISP for more info.) Very significant disk storage savings are possible this way.
Problem is, dynamically generated MT pages (via mtview.php) don’t support SSI in that fashion. There is no .html file involved (even if that’s how you’ve defined your archive files’ extensions); looking for the .html file just causes mtview.php, once the file isn’t found, to generate it directly to your browser with that name.
So … for all dynamic archive templates that use SSI, I need to go back and remove those #include statements and put in MTInclude statements instead. Static templates can keep the #include statements, if it’s worthwhile (the disk savings plummit, and the load time increases a scosh).
(Btw, this is a fine article on the .htaccess stuff and dynamic publishing.)
In the meantime, though, I have to use the older .htaccess file in the root of my main blog because all the funky dynamic publishing .htaccess code seems to override the AddHandler code, even if the file is actually found. Which means I’ll probably end up removing all the server-side includes in my regular index templates, too. I’m sure there’s a way to tweak the .htaccess code, but it’s beyond me without more research.
This is not an animated GIF. For more eye-bending graphics, go to Akiyoshi’s Illusions Page. (via J-Walk)…
This is not an animated GIF.
For more eye-bending graphics, go to Akiyoshi’s Illusions Page.
(via J-Walk)
News flash: caffeine is addictive: Don’t be surprised if missing that cup of morning coffee gives you a headache or makes it difficult to concentrate at work. It’s all part…
News flash: caffeine is addictive:
Don’t be surprised if missing that cup of morning coffee gives you a headache or makes it difficult to concentrate at work. It’s all part of caffeine withdrawal, say Johns Hopkins University researchers who released a study that could result in the official classification of the condition as a mental disorder.
In the most comprehensive review and analysis of the effects of caffeine abstinence in humans published to date, the researchers conclude that as little as one small cup of coffee daily can produce caffeine addiction.
In general, the more caffeine consumed, the more severe withdrawal symptoms will be, with some people even reporting depression, nausea, vomiting or muscle pain.
Results of the study could result in caffeine withdrawal’s inclusion in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM ? considered the bible of the psychiatric profession.
I can, of course, quit caffeine any time I want. I’m just waiting for someone to give me a good reason to want to …
(via Fred)
Most excellent. SpaceShipOne has won the Ansari X-Prize, a tidy $10MM, for being the first privately-financed reusable craft to reach (and return from) space twice within two weeks. Big congrats….
Most excellent. SpaceShipOne has won the Ansari X-Prize, a tidy $10MM, for being the first privately-financed reusable craft to reach (and return from) space twice within two weeks.
Big congrats. With luck, this could be the start of something big.
(via Scott)
The neighbor was out sweeping their driveway this weekend. I didn’t think the leaf situation was quite to that level yet, but it will be by this weekend. Hmmmm ……
The neighbor was out sweeping their driveway this weekend.
I didn’t think the leaf situation was quite to that level yet, but it will be by this weekend.
Hmmmm … wonder what the Boy is doing Saturday …
As noted before, Spellbound still rocks as a spell checker for Firefox. Except for its checking of HTML tags. And the fact that “Firefox” is not in its baseline English…
As noted before, Spellbound still rocks as a spell checker for Firefox. Except for its checking of HTML tags. And the fact that “Firefox” is not in its baseline English dictionary. Aside from that, it rocks (and beats not having one). Now reinstalled and ready to rock, er, spell.
A description of an “Engle Matrix” game: The game is then played in turns. At the start of each turn, the players move the characters around the map, arranging them…
A description of an “Engle Matrix” game:
The game is then played in turns. At the start of each turn, the players move the characters around the map, arranging them is some mutually satisfactory fashion. A player can move any character, and not just his or her own character. In fact, they can even move someone else’s character — though of course some mutually satisfactory situation must be achieved. This phase can include as much or as little roleplaying as the players like, or as much of an authorial attitude as they like. Often, when the players want a conflict between some characters, they will ensure that they end up at the same location.
Then, the players each make an argument about what they want to happen that turn. The referee rates each argument’s plausibility on a scale of 2-6, and the player rolls a six-sided die to and tries to roll that rating or higher. So a very convincing argument is 2-6, and a weak argument succeeds on a 6. It’s worth noting that this is the referee’s only role! Unlike a GM in a traditional rpg, the referee never introduces any elements into the setting (beyond the choice of scenario). The ref’s only authorial duty is to rate the plausibility of arguments.
It sounds like an interesting way to tell a story, not so interesting a way to play a character. Depending on your preference, it may or may not be a satisfying evening. But it’s a seductively simple mechanic I’d be interested in trying some time.
Airport security in Australia was on the ball for this one: An emergency was declared at the airport in Mackay, 500 miles north of Brisbane in tropical Queensland state, after…
Airport security in Australia was on the ball for this one:
An emergency was declared at the airport in Mackay, 500 miles north of Brisbane in tropical Queensland state, after airport staff heard a strange noise coming from the bin, Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio said on Monday.
“It was rather disconcerting when the rubbish bin started humming furiously,” cafeteria manager Lynne Bryant said.
Police evacuated the terminal and were about to call in bomb experts when an unidentified passenger came forward to identify the contents of a package left in the bin.
I’m sure John Ashcroft would be suitably appalled and call for a criminal investigation.
No (confirmed) star, and no director signed, so no Bond flick in 2005. Maybe they can work on a solid story in the meantime….
No (confirmed) star, and no director signed, so no Bond flick in 2005. Maybe they can work on a solid story in the meantime.
Well, aside from all the other stuff I wrote about (the diocesan convention, seeing Shaun of the Dead, I still managed to have a pretty busy weekend. Never did get…
Well, aside from all the other stuff I wrote about (the diocesan convention, seeing Shaun of the Dead, I still managed to have a pretty busy weekend.
Never did get back to working on the dynamic Category archives thang on this blog. On my list of things to do this week.
My grandmother was in, but is ready to get back out, of the hospital. Ongoing thoughts and prayers always welcom.
Margie ran her Voyage into Discovery game on Sunday, and I actually posted a game log for it. Could it be that game logs are making a comeback?
Saturday night, Doyce also ran us through some character generation stuff in HeroQuest, as part of his Living Jungle conversion. I was completely confused, but had a fun time nonetheless, writing up Ookah the monkey katanga.
Got planted, with Katherine’s help, a minor slew of bulbs and irises, with an eye toward the spring.
Admired the completed dry wall in the dining/living room. Next up is getting a new garage door ordered trim painted before the weather keeps that from happening this year.