“They tell me now that SpongeBob is gay. SquarePants is not gay. Tight pants maybe. SpongeBob Hot Pants? You go, girl!” — Presenter Robin Williams, mocking those have connected the cartoon character with pro-gay messages, prior to presenting the Oscar for best animated feature.
Archive for February, 2005
I don’t think I could have done any of my redesigning without the help of A List Apart whose articles and tutorials are just about the most useful, clear and timely there are. They’re invaluable and stunning and fresh and free.
An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy.
Some hardware geek, the sort who actually reads press releases from obscure Pacific Rim component manufacturers, posts a link to the press release in a Mac Internet forum.
The Mac rumor sites spring into action. Liberally quoting “reliable” sources inside Cupertino, irrelevant “experts,” and each other, they quickly transform baseless speculation into widely accepted fact. […]
Do you speak Google?
- Make every single page on your site accessible via a text-based link - as opposed to Javascript, Flash, DHTML, etc. The Googlebot only speaks text.
[See #6 in Nine things you can do to make your web site better]- Keep the number of links on a given page less than 100.
[See Google’s Webmaster Guidelines]- Give every single page on the site a complete and meaningful
A new exhibition of Caravaggio’s work is is ’stunning’, says the Observer:
If you care about web coding, this bit of code - making a text box without having any divs is really quite stunning. Without any containing code, just using relative code based on where text is, Dunstan Orchard has managed to create an exact replica of a box (for Mozilla.org) that has retaining code in other versions of the site.
NTL’s servers have been caching my images, which really doesn’t help when I’m trying to see what updates look like ‘live’ on the site. I would add no-cache code into my header if only the code weren’t there already. I don’t know what’s going on at NTL - they seem to be caching despite no-cache instructions.
I know there are problems and I know it’s not pretty so far but it’ll come together in time. Just deciding on some sort of design took an absolute age so the fact that I’ve got one is good enough for me. I’ll try and put the CSS and the images together once I decide how exactly I’m going to do that, and following that it’ll all get a bit more refined, more polished and hopefully, more accurate. I saved my image in photoshop a moment ago only to find that a little screw on the top right isn’t quite in line with the rest of them. Darn.
But at this stage of the evening, I simply can’t be bothered to fix it, so there it will stay until tomorrow.
I got an email the other day that started out:
Dear Bob Dylan fan,
They must have meant it for someone else.
Not me, I don’t even know why they would think that of me. What a horrible thing to say. So I forwarded it to everyone I know just in case they were the intended recipient. No-one else wanted it either. Bob, what happened - why do we all hate you?
I never thought I’d be linking to a theological site from here, but in my travels looking at CSS and other web giggery-pokery, I came across Movable Theoblogical. I haven’t read all of the site but just for one, it’s reassuring to see that the author would accept the category of ‘Progressive Christian’ blogging. There’s a sense of outrage and disbelief and yet, faith that is heartening. Of course, I’d be surprised if we didn’t disagree on a couple of issues but I’m really enjoying the tone.
For so long I’ve missed any sort of belief, of religious sentiment without hypocrisy or hatred or vilification that to read something that isn’t like that, actually makes me really happy! This summer I went to a Unitarian Universalist service with Alaina’s family. Like a breath of fresh, very enthusiastic and vocal air their faith was something to be admire partly because they were so keen, welcoming to everyone not tied to a particular religious ideology but rather a faith in the goodness of all people.
Right to life. Respect for life. SANCTITY of life. The Religious Right should be ashamed for keeping their vision so insanely and tragicaly narrow, and to think for one moment that a President— who so clearly WANTS war (”I’m a War president”) despite what he says, all his actions show that war is his “manly option”, and selfish, nationalist, economic interests come first , defended by deadly force— that this president is a “man of God”, I shudder at what has happened to the image of Jesus as the Word made flesh. This is NOT what Jesus would do, or is calling us to do. We MUST not participate in EVIL, for that is what this is, plain and simple.
The esteemed Wall Street Journal columnist has an opinion piece dated Feb 17 on his website which discusses why Apple computers may be difficult and not ideal for all PC users.
Even if you aren’t happy with Windows, don’t consider switching to the Mac if you are resistant to learning new ways of doing things. The Mac and Windows are close cousins, but there is a learning curve that comes with switching.
For instance, Apple uses a one-button mouse without a scroll wheel, which takes some getting used to. There are differences in the way menus and desktop windows behave. And the standard delete key on a Mac works like the backspace key, not the delete key, in Windows. Mac desktop keyboards have a second, Windows-type delete key, but Mac laptops lack one.
And don’t consider switching if your budget covers only the cost of the Mac itself. There will usually be extra costs. To maintain compatibility with the Windows world, you will probably want a copy of the Mac version of Microsoft Office, which isn’t included by Apple. And you may want a standard two-button, Windows-style mouse, which works fine on the Mac but isn’t included.
I think this is especially funny, considering how I was pointing to the WSJ’s failure in web strategy just last week. Oddly enough Mossberg’s columns are unique in being placed online for all to see for all time whilst the rest of the Journal is left in the analog world. One problem with Mossberg’s arguement is that he approaches the Apple software compatability problem and the hardware differences issue from the standpoint of someone who’s deliberately not switching entirely to mac. If a user needs Office compatability on Windows they’d really need a full version of MS Office just as a mac users would need Office:mac. The difference is that Office:mac is generally acknowledged to be superior to other versions of Office in usability and cleanliness of design.
Mossberg’s strongest arguement is that of software compatibility. Some industries will have only had their software written for the Windows platform which severely restricts the case for buying an Apple, however there is a movement within the alternative OS community to generate compatability. Because OS X is built on a Unix core, many of the most technical programs created for scientific and mathematical uses are easily ported to the mac. With time and a greater user base the mac software collection will greatly increase and the arguement against buying a stronger, more attractive, more versatile and more stable computer will become less and less legitimate.
I really like how the National Health Service in Britain is getting all techno-savvy. They’ve begun placing the registered waiting times of people on hospital waiting lists on the web for all to see. I really value this kind of action - they’re becoming more accountable and more open about the NHS’s successes and failures meaning that we can now garner a more accurate and objective picture of the quality and speed of service provided by taxes.
I hope that in the near future they’ll also begin to publish results which aren’t a complete fiction - which appear to have numbers grabbed out of thin air and hopelessly optimistic numbers of patients waiting ‘Less than 2 months’ for an appointment. I know, I’ve been on a list more than 6 months whilst they claim to have only a handful. Somehow I doubt that my position is rare. It’s nice when doctors listen to you during consultation sessions, it’d be even nicer if the words they spout back about the services offered were actually true.
Experts familiar with the deal have scorned the idea that IBM personal computers could be used as weapons aginst the US, pointing out that most of the parts used to build them are already made in China.
“The only way an IBM laptop could possibly be a dual-purpose technology and used for a military purpose is for it to be dropped from an aircraft on somebody below,” one told Times Online.
