…the greater tragedy of his passing is that it lies in the shadow of another demise; and not one one-billionth the angst and sorrow and sense of loss will be felt or expended as it has torrentially been in the mawkish tide of phony patriotism expended elsewhere.
Year: 2004
Won’t be fooled again
I, like a lot of people, worry about the Tories pulling a W on us.
PJ for PM!
Apparently, showing the maximum amount of forehead is considered good…. Perhaps that’s the reasoning here. If so, Jack Layton shouldn’t just be prime minister–he should be Emperor of the Known Galaxy.
Claire and Allison
Claire Jenkins and Allison Brown are in town tomorrow and Sunday. I don’t see info on any of the shows on Claire’s site, so I’ll highlight the three London ones: tomorrow morning (early!) at Covent Garden Market on CFPL-TV’s New Day, tomorrow evening at the new London Music Club, and Sunday afternoon at The Ugly Mug. Both ladies are worth the effort to hear, so come out and listen!
Conservatives 0
I just received a call from one of the worst telephone representatives for a political candidate I’ve ever heard. Not only did he speak quickly and mumble–even after I pointed out the fact that he was doing so–he wouldn’t say anything about the candidate’s policies when I asked him directly in response to one of his inflammatory rhetorical questions. When he requested my e-mail address (ostensibly to send campaign literature, although I’m hardly naive enough to believe it wouldn’t soon be overflowing with propaganda from the leader and the interest groups that fund the campaign) I instead asked him if I could visit the candidate’s or the party’s website; he was either unable or unwilling to provide the information, and instead gave me an 800 number to call.
Did I mention the candidate’s name? No? Funny, the caller hardly did either, preferring instead to rail on against the federal Liberals. What galls me even more is that, through the wonder of caller ID, I saw that the call was placed from the 416 area code, i.e. Toronto, which means the candidate’s team didn’t even hire local people to do his electioneering.
I don’t know who I will ultimately support in this election, but I’m absolutely certain now of who I won’t. Tim Gatten, you’ve lost any possibility of receiving my vote through your staff’s ineptitude, your lack of constructive policies and ideas, as represented by the script given to this phone monkey and the rhetoric spouted by your party’s leader, and your obvious lack of loyalty to your own community. I’m taking the advice given in your own campaign slogan: I demand better.
Choice editor
[The] vi commands are so ingrained that if someone asks me how to do something in ‘vi’ I can’t tell them. I have to actually do it and watch what I do and then tell them.
Frazz
I’m not sure how I missed finding it until now, but in the last couple of hours I’ve become a huge fan of Jef Mallett’s Frazz. It’s more than a little similar to Bill Watterson’s late, lamented Calvin and Hobbes, to the point where there are conspiracy theorists that think Mallett and Watterson are the same person. (They’re not… or is that just what they want you to think?)
There don’t appear to be any Frazz collections available or in the works, so for now there’s only a month’s worth of previous strips to peruse. Still, it’s 30 days of one of the better comic strips available today, and one I hope stays around for a long time.
Mallett and Frazz are both into triathlon competition. John informs me that We Tri-Deads dig Frazz.
MovableWordTypePress
I’ve been considering switching weblogging software recently. MovableType 2.6 has been good enough for a while, but it’s stagnated, even with the release of version 3.0. (There’s also the whole freedom issue, although that’s been less of a factor in my thinking.)
I’m most interested in WordPress. However, it relies completely on PHP, which I have an extreme (and perhaps undeserved) dislike for. Call me crazy (you’re crazy!
) but I prefer to not introduce a lot of CPU, RAM, network and database overhead just to serve what is, 99.9% of the time, static content; I’m also not a big fan of the single point of failure. Disk space is cheap: my web hosting provider has increased the allocation given to every user by over 150% since I signed up less than a year ago. And I’ve never had an HTML-based site go completely offline due to a typo in a template; sure, comment posting or entry searching may not work for a bit, but the content of the site still exists.
What I’d really like is a form of funky caching, where pages are generated only when they (or their associated resources) change. A request to view any page would retrieve the HTML source directly from disk, not go through the page generator or even a script that redirects to the page.
So, pending a change of heart, I’m going to stay with MovableType 2.6. To slightly paraphrase Weird Al Yankovic,
You’re sort of everything I ever wanted
You’re not perfect, but I love you anyhow
You’re the software that I always dreamed of
Well, not really, but you’re good enough for now.
Damn lies
Via Rebecca Blood is a chart from the U.S Department of Energy that shows, clearly, that recent gas prices are the cheapest they’ve ever been. I’d like to see companion charts that show the amount of fuel used by cars over the same period.
In a similar vein, the Internet Movie Database seems to have removed their lists of all-time highest-grossing movies when adjusted for inflation and average ticket price, although they still have their unadjusted lists (which favour newer movies). I’ve found a similar list at Rave Central, but I’m curious why IMDb dropped theirs. Pressure from Hollywood, perhaps?
sdrawkcab
Proving once again that everything is on the Internet, I just came across a study that found that about 25% of Japanese people read newspapers back-to-front. Reading the paper backwards is a habit I’ve had for a long time; I don’t just read from the last section to the first, but from the last page of each section to the first. (There’s one exception: the local Sunday paper comes in a tabloid format with pull-out sections, and I tend to read the sections in order, each section front to back.) I’ve come across a few people that behave similarly, but the fraction who do is nowhere near a quarter.
This begs the question, then, of whether this is a predominantly Japanese trait or if it’s simply more common than my personal experience would indicate. I don’t have enough regular readers–at least, not enough who actively comment–to generate anything close to a reasonable statistical sample, but I’ll put it out there anyway: in what order do you read your newspaper?