neurotwitch

Friday, March 01, 2002

orsinal

It's worth a look just for the design. Nice stash of games: Orisinal

posted by lee on 03/01/02 at 05:40 PM
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Sunday, March 03, 2002

compelled to finish

Not much time to read or think or do anything except get a new site up - enough of it up so there is a there there because the newspaper ad is out on Sunday - my, that's today ... funny how sometimes doing the actual build of web pages is dreary because, to me, the design is the challenging part - but sometimes building web pages causes total flow, which is what hit me yesterday and today. Maybe it's because I really like the site. Or the client. Or both. But it happened for this site, Small to Tall Scholars, and the last one, Connecticut School of Etiquette.

Of course tomorrow I'll have to spend an hour with a broom sweeping up the dog's debris. She snatched just about every loose scrap of paper she could find and shredded each one. Trying to get my attention, or Stanley's attention - we'll make it up to her tomorrow. After I sweep. We should've named her Arthur Andersen instead of Ginger.

She'd barely begun to shred at this point.

Speaking of dogs, Stanley sent me this today (I forget where he said he got it - Langa List maybe?):

13 rules for being a successful dog

Visitors: Quickly determine which guest is afraid of dogs. Charge across the room, barking loudly and leap playfully on this person. If the human falls down on the floor and starts crying, lick its face and growl gently to show your concern.

Barking: Because you are a dog, you are expected to bark. So bark -- a lot. Your owners will be very happy to hear you protecting their house. Especially late at night while they are sleeping safely in their beds. There is no more secure feeling for a human than to keep waking up in the middle of the night hearing you protective bark, bark, bark...

Licking: Always take a BIG drink from your water dish immediately before licking your human. Humans prefer clean tongues. Be ready to fetch your human a towel. (Ginger prefers a big drink out of the toilet.)

Holes: Rather than digging a BIG hole in the middle of the yard and upsetting your human, dig a lot of smaller holes all over the yard so they won't notice. If you arrange a little pile of dirt on one side of each hole, maybe they'll think it's gophers. There are never enough holes in the ground. Strive daily to do your part to help correct this problem.

Doors: The area directly in front of a door is always reserved for the family dog to sleep.

The Art Of Sniffing: Humans like to be sniffed. Everywhere. It is your duty as the family dog to accommodate them.

Dining Etiquette: Always sit under the table at dinner, especially when there are guests, so you can clean up any food that falls on the floor. It's also a good time to practice your sniffing.

Housebreaking: Housebreaking is very important to humans, so break as much of the house as possible.

Going For Walks: Rules of the road: when out for a walk with your master or mistress, never go to the bathroom on your own lawn.

Couches: It is perfectly permissible to lie on the new couch after all your humans have gone to bed.

Playing: If you lose your footing while chasing a ball or stick, aim for the flowerbed to absorb your fall, so you don't injure yourself.

Chasing Cats: When chasing cats, make sure you never--quite--catch them. It spoils all the fun.

Chewing: Make a contribution to the fashion industry... eat a shoe.

posted by lee on 03/03/02 at 05:16 AM
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The Flying Car

The Flying Car - Kevin Smith

posted by lee on 03/03/02 at 06:43 PM
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Tuesday, March 05, 2002

Record Producers with Honor - wow!

The New York Times ran this article: An Ex-Convict, a Hit Album, an Ending Fit for Hollywood (registration required - but it's free). It detailed the hunt for James Carter, who's rendition of Po' Lazarus was used on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. They gave him a royalty check for $20,000, with more on the way. The soundtrack was produced by the label of Universal Music Group. (Note: there's not much to be found at the Lost Highways label site - just a list of Grammy winners. Too bad.)

Pretty classy. They could've just forgotten about it, assuming the singer was either dead or would surface as a result of publicity about the movie, but they didn't.

posted by lee on 03/05/02 at 02:52 AM
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Finally figured it out

Was going nuts trying to figure out why Movable Type breaks every time I make a change to the template. Then I remembered colleagues complaining about how the spacing in their code (for ASP pages) changes after I open them for tweaking with Dreamweaver. So I set DW not to change anything in ASP pages and the complaints stopped.

But the MT template isn't an ASP page. And I have DW set to automatically render everything in lower case to comply with XML standards. So, when DW opens a page, it converts everything it reads as a tag to lower case. So it would read the cgi call as an html tag since it's set between < & >, and convert it to lower case whether I want it to or not. And therefore break MT because MT is case-dependent. And I have to go in and re-do all the tags. Which takes time.

So now I have to make DW stop changing anything when it opens any page - it sucks, to have a feature that's potentially handy be pretty much damaging instead of useful. I liked it because it would make the html tags uniform - helps when more than one person is working on a page. But now it's more trouble than help, so I'll ditch the feature.

DW is starting to remind me of Microsoft Word - many more features that I could possibly ever use, bloated, and too much potential for damage.

But I like DW because it quickly builds in the code if you need it, such as for mouseovers and dhtml, and because there are a lot of handy extensions to go with it. But if I have to keep the code pure, I'll stick to Arachnophilia - which is STILL the best html coding tool I've ever used. (OH DAMN! I just read Arachnophilia programmer Paul Lutus' note - the next version of Arachnophilia will run as a java program. So it doesn't have to run in Windows, he says. I wonder if it will run well or if it will be a slow pain in the ass like most java programs are?)

posted by lee on 03/05/02 at 10:02 PM
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Wednesday, March 06, 2002

gee, i’m so shocked

IHT: Web searchers get what advertisers pay for. Interesting article in the International Herald Tribune. What surprised me was that one company, Overture Services, managed to rack up $288 million in ad fees last year - and it was even profitable. All this blathering about the death of advertising on the Internet - guess it's the TYPE of advertising you do.

posted by lee on 03/06/02 at 10:01 PM
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the upset of the century? i think not.

Condit loses in California primary

posted by lee on 03/06/02 at 10:38 PM
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Thursday, March 07, 2002

Now we’re xenophobes, too

Pentagon may limit tech jobs to U.S. citizens / Plan restricts access to sensitive projects. Such stupidity. It would be beyond belief if it were any organization but the Dept. of Defense.

posted by lee on 03/07/02 at 05:48 PM
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Saturday, March 09, 2002

The universe isn’t cosmic green - it’s beige

Well, it looks like linen white to me. I wrote about the color of the universe in January, and frankly, I was disappointed in the green. However, there was a bug in the calculations. The universe is really off-white. A good painting color - I can see it now, Ralph Lauren's Cosmic Beige Interior One-coat Latex ... here is the chip:

The explanation is here: The Cosmic Spectrum. I think it's so cool these guys didn't have a problem admitting they screwed up and went to the trouble of fixing their web page and making a public announcement - a truly inspiring lack of that puncture-begging arrogance too many scientists nourish.

posted by lee on 03/09/02 at 06:03 PM
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Twitch’s Big Adventure

We decided to take Twitch on our jaunt today. Usually it's Stanley, Ginger, and me. Never mind that Twitch seemed perfectly content exactly where he was:

Stanley, Ginger, Twitch, and I headed to Sherwood Island. It was 64 degrees out and pretty overcast. But the beach was fairly empty and the tide was coming in, so it was pleasant.

Ginger & Lee

We walked along the beach, and explored the rocks.

Twitch was making funny noises as he climbed on the rocks.

I said it was because he could smell the rats in the rocks.

All was going well; everybody seemed happy:

While I was angling for another shot, Twitch decided to take off. In about 12 nanoseconds, he was up the nearest tree:

Stanley freaked, which just made Twitch climb higher. We were afraid his leash would get caught or that he'd try to jump down and end up hanging himself. I knew Twitch would stop going up if we calmed down, so I walked away with Ginger and Stanley took some deep breaths. I figured we'd have to call the fire department of something and end up on the front page of the local newspaper (nothing much ever happens here).

We dragged a heavy-as-hell picnic table to the base of the tree - maybe if Stanley could get closer to Twitch, the damn cat would come down. Stanley saw that he could climb the tree, and did. I didn't have to presence of mind to take any shots of this adventure - I'm terrified of heights whether it's me up there or someone else. So I just semi-froze - had to keep Ginger out of the way. Stanley reached for Twitch, and Twitch came down to meet him, and rode Stanley's shoulder on the way down. They both made it, safe and sound:

We walked some more, and Twitch practiced for the Cat Olympics, coached by Ginger:

He showed off his form:

All in all, it was a good trip. Not bad for an indoor cat's first nature hike.

Now the only question is: Will Stanley recover?

posted by lee on 03/09/02 at 11:51 PM
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