2003 – Page 15 – Petroglyphs

Jessie

More to say about seeing Sirens at The Ugly Mug shortly. For now, though, if Jessie happens to read this, please post a comment here or send me an e-mail.

The same, but different

Take forty-dollar friendship and:

modify the first sentence slightly;
shift the anonymizing letter a few places;
change one artist to a group; and
rewrite everything after i drove back up the interstate

and you’ve got something very similar to my version.

Except for one detail: it was seven years earlier and a different group, but I did it twice.

(ticketstubs via Lawrence Lessig)

James Duncan Davidson probably just explained why I wasn’t chosen as a Quicken beta tester this year, after being invited back a couple of times. You see, this year, when they asked what OS I’d be testing on, I responded Windows 2000, under VMware on Red Hat Linux. James’ final words are mine too: So, I’ll be staying at the current version of Quicken Home and Business (which thankfully does run in [VMware]) for the time being and will be migrating away from Intuit’s products soon unless they fix this. Now, I just have to find some software that works as well for my needs.

Eldred v. Ashcroft in Canada?

I don’t know enough about Eldred v. Ashcroft to comment coherently on today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision. I am curious what effect, if any, that court’s ruling will have on Canadian copyright law.

Lawrence Lessig: [To] respond to the disharmony caused by the Sonny Bono Act, now Europe is calling for another increase in their term. Japan too is doing the same.

XHTML2

Not that anyone cares what I think, but I had a lot of the same thoughts as Ian Hickson and Dorothea Salo when I read the first draft XHTML 2.0 specification a few months ago. Eric Meyer is broadly sympathetic with several of its detractors (and I’ve seen even more), but points out that you can use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones. In fact, that’s just what Sjoerd Visscher did five months ago, after showing that current browsers can already deal with a lot of XHTML2 through stylesheets and binding technologies like HTCs or XBL.

Right now XHTML2 is a science experiment, just like publishing a weblog in RSS with embedded HTML (instead of the other way around, published as a separate page). It’s changeable, and changing; it’s been in the works already for more than two years, and will be for at least two more.

Ian points out, correctly, that [the] fact that xHTML2 won’t be widely used before the end of the decade is not a problem. For some reason, the Internet populous has this strange idea that if something isn’t adopted overnight, it must be a failure. Perhaps eventually I’ll think it’s a pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit (NB: I realize that’s a comment on XHTML 1.1, not XHTML 2). But for now I haven’t made up my mind.

Big

Some people would have you believe Londonontario is all mixed up for the various downtown projects the city has recently undertaken, but we’ve got nothing on Soap Lake, WA (via Burningbird).

Even the Soap Lake project can’t hold a candle (ha ha) to the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, though. I mean, Weird Al Yankovic even wrote a song about it. There’s no higher praise.

Or terribly right

There’s something terribly wrong with a world in which kids think their elders’ culture is hip.

Cecil Adams, What the heck is leetspeek? (via kottke.org)

Who are you?

(Who who, who who)

63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:32:54 -0500] "HEAD /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:32:54 -0500] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 37548 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:33:01 -0500] "GET /blog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 200 8298 "http://peterjanes.ca/blog/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:33:01 -0500] "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 5420 "http://peterjanes.ca/blog/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"

63.195.114.133 is a PacBell dialup address, although there’s an occasional Verizon IP thrown in for good measure. You’re retrieving all three versions of the blog every time I update, and checking it via HEAD every hour.

It’s not a problem, I’m just curious–don’t know many people on the West Coast.

Happy Together

I’m not a big believer in fate, the global unconscious, what have you. Still, coincidence is an odd occurrence even without some grander meaning attached. Take Adaptation, for instance. There’s a scene where John Laroche is looking through a door that has three letters prominently stuck to it; odds are it’s just a cute thing one of the set decorators put on, perhaps as an in -joke. Those letters hold a special significance for me, and to see them appear in a movie (let alone now, and this one, with the à propos subject matter) is just kind of strange.

Oh yeah, the movie? Excellent. I get it. I’m going to see it again tomorrow.

Rubbish!

Our inspection of Chief Kroeker’s refuse reveals that he is a scrupulous recycler. He is also a health nut. We find a staggering profusion of health-food containers: fat-free milk cartons, fat-free cereal boxes, cans of milk chocolate weight-loss shakes, cans of Swanson chicken broth (99% fat free!), water bottles, a cardboard box of protein bars, tubs of low-fat cottage cheese, a paper packet of oatmeal, and an article on How to Live a Long Healthy Life.

At the same time, we find evidence of rust in the chief’s iron self-discipline: wrappers from See’s chocolate bars, an unopened bag of Doritos, a dozen perfectly edible fun-size Nestle Crunch bars, three empty Coke cans.

Willamette Week Online, Rubbish! (via as days pass by)

My first clue that the police chief might be off his diet is the fact that an article on How to Live a Long Healthy Life was discarded in the recycling bin. Who needs Total Information Awareness?

Year: 2003