I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Rick Mercer, über-Canadian host of the former Rick Mercer’s Monday Report and ex-cast member of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, has started blogging. It will surprise no one to see that the dominant colour of the site is black; equally unsurprising is that he’s as hilariously and cleverly pointed in print as on television.
A few weeks ago I quietly added my personal Upcoming.org events to the sidebar on the main page using mcRSSlist. Stalkers rejoice!
Does anyone know why otherwise-sane Windows boxes—four separate installs of 2000 and XP across machines from different vendors—would advance their clocks by up to 30 seconds every 4-5 minutes? This doesn’t happen all of the time, only when they’re running builds; when the boxes are idle their clocks don’t diverge from NTP by more than a fraction of a second each day. It’s really starting to tick me off, since Tinderbox relies on its build providers having accurate time and complains loudly when someone’s out of sync. (While I was composing this post I received five e-mail notifications of unsynchronized updates.)
None of the Linux or Solaris tinderbox builders under similar load have this problem, so it’s got to be a problem with Windows itself. Maybe there’s a magic registry incantation to fix it… anyone? Please?
I’ve just updated the Robots Exclusion Profile on the brand-spanking-new microformats.org site. (I didn’t even need to move it myself, because a nice guy by the name of Ryan King converted it to Wikipedia for me… thanks Ryan!) There’s nothing earth-shattering about the revision, just some clarifications on precedence with respect to other microformats.
I’ve also started a mostly-private-use microformat for the <cite/> element, which Joe Clark has explained as being meant to mark up titles (of books, films, plays, television programs, court cases, possibly even ships) and words and phrases quoted for themselves.
(The microformat extends Clark’s definition to include names.) I’ve been using the classes for a long time, probably starting back in November 2002, but only now can I actually specify what it is they mean.
Oh, and unrelated to microformats: On Sunday I marked ten years at my job. It’s been with four different incarnations of the company, mind you—Cableshare, Interactive Channel Technologies, Liberate, and now TVWorks—but I’ve been in the same office with the same people and the same manager (who hired me in the first place) for the entire time so I think it counts.
And Venus Terzo should play Wonder Woman, because she’s hot. So there.
For quite a while I’ve read a blog by a certain prominent member of the Mozilla Foundation. As well as discussing Mozilla development it covers several other topics that are of interest to me, including things like space exploration. In the past six months, however, I’ve found that the posts about Mozilla have all fallen into two categories: arrogant, churlish cheerleading (with snide comments about other browsers) and spreading FUD (with a lot more mean-spiritedness). Both are getting really tiresome, and it’s sad to see a high-signal blog self-destruct in an extended series of almost content-free posts. I don’t have a lot of use for propaganda at the best of times, and the degeneration of this individual’s site makes me want to do nothing more than switch to something managed by people with a lot less zombified glaze over their eyes.
Perhaps I’ll just drop the site from my aggregator and see if my attitude changes. I do like using and developing (as much as I can, anyway) for Firefox and Thunderbird, I just can’t stand the noise any longer.
Only five? Wow, this is tough:
In alphabetical order:
As I alluded to earlier, this evening I’m catching up on the more than 500 weblog posts that have gone unread in my aggregator. Not all are totally unseen—there are probably forty that I’ve marked unread because I want to follow up on them for one reason or another—but I’m still way, way behind.
Since it’s become a music night, though, I’ll highlight the blog that’s got the most articles flagged for future reference: scottandrew.com: lo-fi acoustic pop superhero! Scott’s always interesting and entertaining, and he makes good music too; count me among his 5000 Fans. (Go read that article too, particularly if you want to help out your favourite musicians.)
I took some comfort in the knowledge that an artist I greatly admired [Joni Mitchell] thought it worthwhile to do battle with an era of shrill sonic choices that I would characterize as the aural equivalent of being trapped in a Chinese restaurant that boasts of added MSG.
While reading through the huge backlog of weblog posts in my aggregator I came across the 80-odd entries I’d left unread in Wil Wheaton’s weblog. (For those following along at home, that’s all the way back to October 2004 and part one of Viva Las Vegas.) Wil likes to use lyrics as post titles, and the eponymous song of December’s first post jumped right into my head when I read it: fixing a hole. Even though that’s three hours ago now, the song’s still fresh in my brain, and I don’t mind a bit.
It will hardly be unexpected to learn that I’m a Beatles fan. Strangely, though, I don’t own a single one of their records, which also explains the dearth of Fab Four in my MP3/Vorbis collection. (I still can’t decide if the resulting lack of Apple Records content on my Apple iPod is ironic or not.) What I do have, though, is a lot of covers of and homages to their songs, including George Martin’s celebritized In My Life, Eric Idle’s great mockumentary The Rutles (in: All You Need Is Cash) (and its inferior sequel The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch) and Peter Sellers’ readings of A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, Help! and all four versions of She Loves You, to say nothing of the references in songs like Lenni Jabour’s Closet. This winter I also had the pleasure of seeing a note for note, cut for cut
version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in Windsor, which had the added bonus of featuring one Alex McMaster playing cello. A Day in the Life live? Wild.
Which all leads to Tim Bray’s recent disturbing sentiment:
Which Sixties band is more important: the Beatles, Cream, or Black Sabbath? The answer: Black Sabbath. Go anywhere and visit the rock & roll bars or scan the FM dial, and you’ll hear a lot of music that sounds like Sabbath. There’s nobody working these days that sounds much like Cream or the Beatles.
It’s sad but true, and it’s why I try to seek out and support great, unique musicians: Lenni, Allison, Brenda, Bruce Cockburn, David Byrne, Dayna, Emm (who, ironically, has covered Crazy Train), John, everyone else mentioned here, and all the others who don’t get the exposure and attention they deserve.
