Year: 2002

Welcome to my home page

Apparently almost 2.2 million web pages are under construction. (Most of the top ten references are anti-under-construction-image pages.) Only 3600 are not.

There are a lot (about 120,000 by Google’s estimate) of friendly people out there on the web who actually welcome you to their pages. I wonder if they’re as friendly in person?

Just under 2 million people say hello (not counting programmers). Slightly more say goodbye. (Several are quite rude about it.)

What can we deduce from these facts?

  • There are about 2.2036 million pages (in English) on the world wide web, most of which are unfinished.
  • People are happier for you to leave their pages than they are for you to visit them.
  • If you’ve actually read this far, you’ve obviously overstayed your welcome. Please leave, or I won’t bother to fi

In the key of Oscar

Dr. Oscar Peterson has more talent in his right arm than an army of clones of me could ever hope to acquire. Even with restricted use of his left hand, he’s still one of the best jazz pianists ever, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to see him and his NATO quartet tonight. The crowd at the Festival Theatre in Stratford gave him no fewer than four standing ovations, the first before he performed a single note, and the last going on for close to five minutes and two curtain calls.

In the last seven days I’ve seen a jazz singer near the beginning of her career, Jennifer Thorpe; an incredible quartet fresh from their first major award, the Great Uncles of the Revolution, winners of the 2002 Grand Prix at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal; and one of the greats, Dr. Peterson.

It’s been a good week.

It’s contagious

Mike has set up a weblog on his sick day. I’m only marginally upset that his looks cooler than mine.

In other news, I’m starting to think I should just redistribute Dive Into Mark, Hixie’s Natural Log, and the Daily Report every day instead of trying to write my own entries. Mark and Zeldman both point out Microsoft’s anti-standards retro redesign today, and Hixie has been having fun with numbering and glyphs. Not to be outdone, Eric Meyer and the folks on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets are way too clever for their own good…. I’m about to set up the CSS signature #peterjanes-homeip-net #peterjanes-ca for my own pages.

Just a half a mile from the railroad track

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’d never actually listened to Alice’s Restaurant until today, prompted by a documentary on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition called You Can Get Anything You Want: Arlo Guthrie’s New Religion.

The weird thing–and I use that word deliberately–is that my brother and I independently recognized it as the stylistic source for one of Weird Al Yankovic‘s early original songs, Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung. Al does a lot of these style parodies, and I often like them better than his actual song parodies.

(I should point out that we’re hardly the first ones to notice the similarities.)

This post also gives me an excuse to quote Arlo’s father, Woody:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Woody Guthrie, via Eric Costello

Breaking down the door

I’ve been listening to Steven Page on CBC Radio’s Stranded

We interrupt this post to ridicule the CBC’s radio guide page. I wanted to link to Stranded, so I went to the site and clicked the title link… which moved me back to the top of the page, as most poorly-written open-in-a-new-window JavaScript links do because I’ve disabled window opening in Mozilla. So I went to the source to find out what page was actually being pointed to–often embedded verbatim in a JavaScript function–and found the following:

<a class=”lgblackbold” href=”#”>Stranded</a><br>This Saturday on Stranded, host Jane Hawtin welcomes Steven Paige of the Barenaked Ladies. Find out which book, movie, munchie and – most of all – music – he’d like to be stranded with – and where! That’s Stranded, Saturday morning at 11 (11:30 NT) on CBC Radio One.

What’s wrong with this? You can’t get there from here, because there is no target. In fact, according to the list of programs, not only is there no page for the program, but it doesn’t even exist.

(And I’ll be kind and refrain from pointing out that they’ve misspelled the guest’s name.) (Um, yeah, whatever.)

Ahem.

As I was saying, I’ve been listening to Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies on Stranded, a program hosted by Jane Hawtin where her guests discuss their stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-only selections. While discussing his food of choice, and whether he’d want something he likes or something sustaining, he mentioned that he’s Jewish. And I realized that a) I didn’t know that, and b) it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t know what religion most public figures belong to–other than the ones who are known for their faith, like, say, the Pope–and I don’t particularly care to. I’m slightly more interested to discover that someone’s an atheist, but as a trivia buff, any religious affiliation (or lack of same) is just another fact.

Continue reading Breaking down the door

Still here

Not much to say recently (obviously). Two updates on the banking front and a conclusion of sorts to the competitive trivia thread are on the way in the near future.

A recent discussion prompts me to remind people that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Further deponent saith not.

What I did on my day off

Slept in until 9.

Read my online comics page. Put off working out until afternoon.

Read the dead-tree newspaper.

Started cleaning my condo. Checked e-mail while cleaning office. Got sucked in to reading blogs and other sites.

Started sorting paper in my office. Got sucked in to updating records in financial software.

Checked e-mail at work. Discussed new buzzword-enhanced open source company with coworker. Suggested using CSS instead of writing printer-friendly code to another coworker.

Looked for XML software. Wrote weblog entry about XML software. Put off working out until later.

Realized I forgot some blogs earlier. Read them.

Checked web logs (er, web site logs). Nimda sucks. Decided to artificially mention Ashcroft, Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, Hussein and Ashcroft just to inflate numbers on the Index of Evil (71 scans and counting, with no respite available.) (Updated–go away already: ipchains -I input -s 66.111.194.10/32 -j DENY)

Wrote weblog entry about my day off. Put off working out until tomorrow.

My kingdom for an XML validator

So all I want to find is an XML validator that will read the various documents I’ve written and check them against the various schemas and DTDs referred to by the namespaces within. I don’t want an editor or a tree browser or a schema builder or anything fancy, just a tool that I can use to check a bunch of files (find . -name *.xml | xargs validate). Something like that shouldn’t be that hard to find, should it?

Maybe there’s something inside Xerces2, but the README isn’t clear (or I’m just too dense to understand it).

As soon as I’ve finished writing one, of course, there will be twenty-seven better versions out there. So maybe that’s the solution to my predicament–if you build it, they will come, in an odd way.