Month: April 2008

A 412?!!

In honour of St. George’s Day, the following bit of classic lunacy:

  1. Narrator: The legend you are about to hear is true. Only the needle should be changed to protect the record.
  2. …
  3. St. George: I’m taking you in on a 502. You figure it out.
  4. Dragon: What’s the charge?
  5. St. George: Devouring maidens out of season.
  6. Dragon: Out of season‽? You’ll never pin that rap on me!! Do you hear me, cop‽‽
  7. St. George: Yeah, I hear you. I got you on a 412 too.
  8. Dragon: A 412‽! What’s a 412‽‽?
  9. St. George: Over-acting. Let’s go.

…the better part of valour

Rather than stick my nose in further where it doesn’t belong—into an obviously long-standing private argument between members of my reading list that’s reached a point where it’s become bitter, snide, and unfortunately public—I’m going to refrain from further comment, here and elsewhere. None of the participants can win, and there’s a much larger battle that’s being lost as a result.

Califor-nye, eh?

In the chorus of Steven Page’s So. Cal., from his Vanity Project album, he sings about sunny Califor-nye-ay. That got me thinking: what other songs can you name that include deliberate mispronunciations of words? I’m sure they’re out there, but I’ve been having no luck trying to remember them; the only thing I’ve come up with that’s even close, but which I don’t consider another example, is the g-g-g-generation stutter in My Generation.

A shiny penny (or maybe even… wait for it… blog points!) to the person who submits the best/first/most examples.

Welcome home

Ding dong, the homepage is dead.

Since this site’s origin it’s had a glorified splash page containing a few links and pictures. I’ve kept meaning to update it, but I never visit it myself so it’s gotten increasingly out of date—for example, it still said that Sirens are a trio, even though Amber left the group almost four years ago! That’s no longer the case: a few minutes ago I added a RewriteRule that redirects the root of the site to Petroglyphs. A few of the links that were on the splash have migrated to the sidebar on the main page of the blog; the rest are either obsolete or basically unnecessary.

This bit of non-news brought to you by the letter 10 and the number Q.

Wannabe Maven maven

I’ve recently been rewriting some of the more archaic build processes at work to use Maven. I’m not sure I prefer it to Ant—in fact, I’m sure I don’t—but I’ll take it any day over make. Maven definitely has its… let’s call them idiosyncrasies… which are occasionally hard to figure out, especially because its error reporting is less than stellar; a lot of the time even mvn -X is of no use. I think I’m getting the hang of it, though.

Liberated

While I’m at it, here’s another change: all of the styles here now use only the generic CSS font family names, i.e. serif, sans-serif, cursive and monospace. Why? I’ve recently started using the Liberation font set as my default, and when I looked at the comparatively chunky Lucida Grande here it felt like I was reading text written in crayon. So sayonara Lucida, Trebuchet, Verdana, Arial and the rest: you’ve been replaced by whatever the person reading this prefers.

Stupid blog. Be more funny!

I tend not to meta-blog much (when I write at all) but I thought I’d make mention of a change to this here web blog: I’ve changed my category titles. At the time it seemed like a cute idea to base them on quotes (which are still in WordPress’s description field for each, but have never been visible). Unfortunately, as it was put by the Simpsons—the source of all culture—I chose a name for each that was witty at first, but sounds less funny each time you hear it. Except they weren’t even all that witty to start with. Good riddance, I say.

It’s a tough job…

I’ve neglected to mention until now Emerald Austerberry’s December post about being blogged about after interviewing bloggers, and how her feature article wasn’t a solo effort. In my post I didn’t mention the detailed followup call I received from one of the other RRJ staffers (whose name I can’t remember, sorry!) and I didn’t know about the involvement of so many others. Now that I’m editing and doing (light) fact-checking for a book on local history, I’m coming to understand just how hard those other jobs are.

Emerald obviously deserves a lot of credit for her research and writing, but I’m particularly glad to see the generous public acknowledgment she’s given her team.

Just wanted to say that… plus I couldn’t resist blogging about her blogging about me blogging about her writing about me blogging. 🙂

History and future of robots-exclusion

About three and a half years ago I published a first cut at what I called an XMDP-style Robot Profile. XMDP forms the basis of what are now known as microformats, so a few months after that post I created an example and a page on the Technorati developers wiki. Shortly after that the wiki was moved to its own domain and my robots-exclusion page with it.

Since then I’ve been sort of an absentee landlord; several people, including microformat maven Tantek Çelik, have contributed comments, but the profile itself hasn’t changed, or really garnered much attention. Regardless of that—and perhaps because of it—I recently released the document and all of my (few) contributions to the wiki in general into the public domain (it was previously under CC-BY), prompted by this post.

I hope that the proviso that any content added to the microformats wiki from here forward is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse means there will be more of a look at this pseudo-microformat. I haven’t seen other ideas (vendor-specific ones aside) take off, so I think it’s still an itch that needs to be scratched.