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Thursday, November 01 2001

David Rees : "I think one of the frustrating things for a lot of people in this situation

is you just don’t even know what to hope for. It’s not like I had this un-ambiguous thing of ‘Oh my god, we must stop bombing and turn it over to the World Court.’ So these were more just personal comics about how I’d been feeling about the whole situation. And I was drinking heavily when I made them, frankly. I’ve gone through a lot of Jim Beam in the evenings, because I’ve been working whole days in a midtown Manhattan office, listening to sirens and re-booting cnn.com, which is like the worst thing you can do to yourself psychologically." I'm not really sure what to make of the power of pop-culture comment -- wonder twin powers, anyone? -- but there you go.

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I've been wating patiently for someone else to say it

but it hasn't happened yet, so : scrapping the postal service has got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've heard floated in recent memory. It is a bit unclear but it sounds like the suggestion is that snail-mail ought better be replaced with email because a) email is somehow magically immune from spam and b) it is somehow cheaper to buffer the network from terrorist ne'er-do-wells. two words : PENIS ENLARGEMENT. Not enough? Okay, how about : power failure. It may take a while longer, but the old skool mail system doesn't fundamentally break without electricity. Beyond that, however, there is the issue that the world simply isn't ready to really live in the paper-less office. Go ask a lawyer about it. They sign photocopies, for heavens sake. Their whole world is still orchestrated around the idea that there really is a single, authoritative copy of *anything*. Finally, there is the time-honoured argument that the [insert government agency here] doesn't do things as "efficiently" as the private sector. Two more words : that's right. Sometimes they don't and often for perfectly good reasons. The government, notwithstanding the one-eyed man, is not a fucking business! It has a different set of priorities and a different set of measures. One of the functions of government is to (mostly) provide services to most of the people, most of the time and not with maximizing shareholder profits. Often, the latter is confused as somehow being synonimous with the former but it's not. The government is not just another "service provider". It is a reflection of what a society values. It is one way in which the idea of a community of individuals, bound together in mutual reliance, is given form. And if it costs a little more to make sure that a benefit is universally available then, surprise surprise, that's the price you pay.

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eclectic : Understanding the ID

"I thought it might be useful to post a rolling summary of the current XML-DEV discussion concerning ID attributes, to help avoid creating a "cauldron of seething expectations". "

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Me : render-changes-xml.js

I wrote a JavaScript interface for munging and rendering the changes.xml files, like the one for the changesRss.xml file. Like the original there is a single function named "render" that takes an optional number of blogs to display. It also displays the (local) time of ping, although for reasons unknown the parser sometimes returns the "when" attribute as undefined.

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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is eldritch

| source : web1913 | Eldritch \El"dritch\, a. Hideous; ghastly; as, an eldritch shriek or laugh. [Local, Eng.] | source : wn | eldritch adj : suggesting the operation of supernatural influences; "an eldritch screech"; "the three weird sisters"; "stumps...had uncanny shapes as of monstrous creatures"- John Galsworthy; "an unearthly light"; "he could hear the unearthly scream of some curlew piercing the din"- Henry Kingsley [syn: {weird}, {uncanny}, {unearthly}]

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Wednesday, October 31 2001 ← ∴ → Friday, November 02 2001
 
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