this is still aaronland

Martin Patriquin “Go Away”

It is time to let the cool-cat-come-latelies know what they'll have to endure if they move here. There's a flip side to our bohemian paradise that rears its patchouli-soaked underbelly every Sunday at something called the Tam Tams. Once popular only with hippies, this event has become a parading ground for yuppies, gippies and guppies, who apparently “celebrate” their love of Montreal by not showering for a few days. They coagulate at the base of Mount Royal, either drumming, dancing or pretending to do both.

Montreal also has Laval, its ugly, suburban cousin to the north — a virtual factory for everything that is tacky, fluorescent, G-stringed and low-riding. People from Laval are the antithesis of what was described in Spin and the Times. They drive onto the island on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, in a convoy of Honda Civics painted the colours of the world's sluttiest peacocks, to dance badly and bark into their cell phones, usually at the same time.

Dave Pawson : Weblog Processing using XSLT

This page introduces an idea I've had and would appreciate feedback on. Many people have their own blog. Often they are forced to utilise open or commercial blogging software which may or may not meet their needs. If you have a server attached to the internet, then you can do your own thing or host other software which meets your needs. Many people don't have that, simply having access to webspace on some host. For people with XML authoring and XSLT skills, the barriers are minimal. I'd like the Mulberrytech community to work towards a system enabling this group to provide a basic processing model which enables anyone in this group to use a weblog. Others may extend this model as needed for their own purposes.

Aaronland 6.0 — the “view source” release

For once, after nearly six years, I am in a position where I can honestly say the source code for publishing this website is publicly available online.

The idea is pretty simple : ( XHTML + ( XSLT + ( CSS + JavaScript ))) + Scrumjax = XHTML . Both the source and the final output are (X)HTML so if your browser can't deal with any of the steps in between it won't affect the content of the document. Since the source is also valid XML the built-in XSLT processors in modern browsers can be used to render the final output.

Please direct all your XSLT versus CSS complaints to the Emacs versus vi department.

Except for the part where XML parsers all special-case old-skool HTML documents and can't figure out what to do with XHTML documents. And none of them do it the same way, least of all web browsers.

So, the reality is more like : ((( XHTML + XSLT ) + an XSLT processor) + ( CSS + JavaScript )) + Scrumjax = HTML . Which is annoying but I can mask most of the pain with a few shell scripts and live with what is clearly an 80/20 solution that affords me more flexibility than I had before. I am tired of thinking of everything as chunks micro-content and would like to get back to making web pages .

Similarly, (( XHTML + XSLT ) + an XSLT processor = Atom ) + XSLT + an XSLT processor = ( RSS 1.0 , 2.0 ) . I like this one because I can use the <ins> element and its datetime attribute to include multiple posts on a single page, along with the creation time, last-modified time and publication dates for each.

Did I mention that the phrase micro-format makes me want to drill my ears out?

Speaking of syndication, I briefly considered changing all my feeds to include only a timestamp and the same text for each item : My website has changed, you lazy pig-fucker. I may still.

“Supermarket Syndrome”

My problem is with supermarkets. I just hate being in them. They make me miserable. They make me less inclined to either cook or eat. Being in a shop that sells food should make me hungry! I hate the artificial lighting and the bad kind of crowdedness; not people flocking together because they like being where they are and they like having all the other people around them, but people stuffed into one place together all wishing the other people had come half an hour earlier or later. I hate that nothing ever seems to inspire me in a supermarket. I hate that the vegetables are ridiculously expensive yet not as fresh as the ones I get in the market. I hate everything being wrapped in plastic, and I hate all the fish being rectangular.