Month: February 2004

notes from home and hearth

* a pep talk from my (much) better half today, reminding me that my not being a wage slave has other valuable compensations
* our daughter was playing with some classmates and one threw some playground bark at her. Another gallant brought her over for medical assistance (a wet facecloth and a shoulder) but the best was yet to come. Her brother, out at recess at the same time, noticed her jacket on the ground, and went in search of its owner. When he heard the details, he “went to have a talk with _____.” He was the victim of a thrown punch himself this week, so I think he handled it rather well.
* my day to volunteer at school today and five kids came in without valentines day cards for their classmates. Out of 23, that seemed high, and looking at the kids (my task was to find 23 for each of them from the teacher’s stash and help them sign them all), it’s not obvious there’s a question of need or want, but a question of will. Apologies to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but some of these kids watch entirely too much crap.
* A child’s birthday tomorrow, a 6 year old girl who likes dinosaurs (the fete is at the science museum) but is all girl, no tomboy. The only crossover I see is One Million Years BC. Perhaps not . . . {:)}

now playing: Call Mr. Lee from the album Television by Television

yes, it’s possible to stoop lower than Drudge

Anger

[ . . . ]

You know why the blogosphere doesn’t get much respect from the traditional press? It’s not because we’re brave and iconoclastic and they resent our freedom. It’s because we pull jackass stunts like this, with no thoughts about the consequences.

Jesus.

[Crooked Timber]

This is pathetic. Even if it didn’t reflect badly on the “blogosphere” it’s evil, stupid, and mean-spirited.

<update> The link has been taken down, but why it was deemed worthy of being posted in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader.

in search of validation (XHTML validation, that is)

I managed to whittle my 80+ validation errors down to 20 on the main page of this weblog.

validation

The fixes so far were easy. The easiest fix was to make sure all hrefs that used an image as their target were all on one line: hang readability <sigh> . . . I was accustomed to opening the href on one line, indenting the img src on the next line, and then closing the href. bad, bad, bad . . .


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Now to work out the remaining score of gotchas . . . for what it’s worth, tidy passes the page with flying colors.

now playing: Guiding Light from the album Marquee Moon by Television

one man’s rant is not necessarily everyone’s

I got an email from the tech manager at UW who was trying to fill that job I mentioned: he was following up on the post I left and added some background on what the specific challenges were.

And he suggested I drop my resume his way, even though it’s likely he had seen it before. I have been thinking about a new way to present the same old information (borrowing from an idea I saw a week or so ago): rather than break it out into jobs and time served, it might be better to break out projects and specify what needed to be done, what I did, and what I learned in the process. Let the work come to the forefront and let the positions drop into the background.

I apologized for venting spleen on his weblog, but he didn’t take it a rant at all, he said.

riding in search of release

Took a brisk 15 mile or so ride today (I didn’t watch the miles) and worked out some kinks, physically if not mentally.

My goal for now is to keep an eye on cadence and let speed and distance go for now. Keeping it at 85 – 90 strokes a minute seems to work pretty well, though: it seemed to get easier to stay consistently at 90 after I had been out for awhile.

A quick Google search tells me that is 15 miles: I was relying on my memory of riding the Burke Gilman last summer.

My general sense of purpose and worthiness is not much improved, but I’m closer to being too tired to care.

in pursuit of XHTML purity in MovableType

I have working on making all my pages as close to clean XHMTL as I can. One of the tools I use is HTMLtidy and I have it rewrite my pages as it goes through my site.

cd /www/movabletype; find . -name "*.html" | xargs /usr/local/bin/tidy

That leaves the pages machine-verifiably valid, but not what I’d call good-looking. One issue was in the individual entry pages: the navigation menu to go to next entry, previous entry or back to the main page was broken across three lines. Tidy was wrapping a <p> container around each element. As it turns out, it was taking its cue from the markup in the template.
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innovation: AIDS for computers

Microsoft Warns Software Users of “Critical” Flaw:

Microsoft’s version of that protocol is flawed, and could be used to gain control of the target machine [affected OS versions include Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP versions of its software, as well as Windows NT Server, Server 2000 and Server 2003]. The company said there was no evidence that any attacks based on the flaw had occurred.

Russ Cooper, a security expert with TruSecure Corporation, said that the latest vulnerability was especially insidious because it could allow attacks on the equivalent of the computer’s immune system. “It’s like AIDS,” he said. “This is the stuff that’s supposed to protect us.”

political science

I have seen a couple of bumper stickers that have caught my attention. One was a few months back, suggesting “a bounty on liberals.” I saw another today, with the crosshairs of a ‘scope, and a similar caption about shooting liberals.

Am I missing something? In the grand small-d democratic free-for-all, did if become OK to talk about killing one’s political opponents? The strongest I have heard from what passes for the left is “regime change begins at home” (I took that to mean the use of ballots, not bullets) and the like. These seem to be peaceful messages, even if they’re shouted.

Is this yet another sign of liberal weakness, lack of cojones? Is it more American to want to kill off dissenting voices?

I have to wonder what it would take for someone to become desensitized enough to act these ideas out. They get them from radio and TV, they buy bumper stickers and, I assume, T-shirts and caps and beer coozies with these messages. How far will it go?

As it turns out, it’s already happened.

how not to get a job

Well, it’s been pointed out that my cathartic posts on my abysmal experiences at the UW law school might be poisoning my chances of getting interviews.

I had thought of that. So what do I do now, take them down? Rewrite them?

I should perhaps write up a summary or recapitulation of the whole experience, how it started off, how some things went really well, how the founding director left and wasn’t replaced and what happened then.
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