Thursday, October 14, 2004
Team spirit
Jack was running some errands with Niki on Tuesday afternoon and decided to pay a visit to
the final resting places of Billy Martin and Babe Ruth. He was surprised to find that several people had been there
before him and was intrigued by the offerings that had been deposited.
Billy Martin’s tombstone had a beer, a bottle of scotch, a shot glass and a hot dog.
Babe Ruth’s grave had a baseball (that Jack wanted to take home), a bat, several caps, dozens of pennies, flowers, a Yankees pin, a cigar and a pair of baby socks — red socks to be specific. One of them had a “19” written on it and the other one had an “18”.
Seems to be working so far. (Sorry, Leigh.)
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Monday, October 11, 2004
You’ll believe a man can fly
One of my favorite childhood movie memories was seeing the first Superman movie. We had
been living in Brooklyn, NY for almost a year after moving from Virginia. It was New Year’s Eve and it was snowing
lightly. We went for a long walk in Bay Ridge and arrived at a movie theater that would later become a fur store and
finally a racquetball club.
There were giant posters for the Superman movie everywhere and I immediately wanted to see it. I was eight. My parents said no. I’m sure I complained and probably even cried before my dad bent over and “found” four tickets for the next showing. He had them all along.
Years later, my dad would tell me what he remembered most about the movie. He looked over at my sister during the romantic scene where Superman takes Lois Lane flying and my five-year-old sister’s mouth was hanging open. “Can you read my mind?” was playing. She was completely mesmerized. It was magic.
I watched Margot Kidder on the premiere of Smallville a few days ago. She played an assistant and ex-girlfriend of Dr. Swann, the billionaire astrophysicist who knows more about Clark’s Kryptonian origin than Clark does. (The name “Swann” is a tribute to the late Curt Swan, the definitive Superman comic book artist from the late 50’s to the early 80’s.) I hoped he would make more appearances on the show.
Christopher Reeve died yesterday of complications from a systemic infection that is common to people who suffer from paralysis. His mother told the media, “He put up with a lot. I’m glad that he is free of all those tubes.”
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Wednesday, October 06, 2004
You can pick your friends and you can pick your apples…
Last weekend we needed a break from work and medical misfortunes, so Niki, Jack and I headed to Connecticut for some apple picking. I could have sworn she said we were going to the “Apple Store”, but it turned out to be an amazing afternoon anyway.
Jack ate apples off of trees and had a blast at their petting zoo. While other kids were running away from goats, pigs, buffalo and emus, Jack had no fear and gladly offered handful after handful of feed to the animals. It helps that he lives with two cats and two dogs.
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Sunday, October 03, 2004
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
It’s like “Ebert and Schrödinger”. Instead of reviewing plots and performances, this site reviews the accuracy of the physics in movies. They also have a list of commonplace movie physics errors.
It’s by the Intuitor:
Intuitor (noun) a person with a passion for learning and innovating that is so strong it is often more powerful than the desire to eat, sleep, or seek personal wealth.
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Thursday, September 09, 2004
First Peter Gabriel, then Jeffrey Zeldman
Amnesty USA picks some pretty cool people to work with. Even Jason used to work with them.
Happy Cog Studios started Amnesty’s redesign project nearly a year ago. Even though I have been a “lead developer” on Happy Cog projects, Amnesty already had their own sprawling international content management system and my lone contribution to the project was information architecture: “Learn. Join. Act.”
Fortunately, they had Jeffrey on board for design. Left up to me, their site would have looked a lot like Human Rights for Dummies.
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Monday, September 06, 2004
It tastes great on potatos
Saw a link yesterday to a site that proclaims:
You don’t support Democrats.
Why should your ketchup?
Interesting. They’re probably just taking squeezable Heinz bottles, soaking the labels off, sticking on their own labels and jacking up the prices. Gotta love those clever Americans.
I’ve also heard that every time a Unix admin uses “wget” to snag a Web page, Bush’s campaign fund receives a dollar.
Are you a democrat? Use Perl and LWP instead! You don’t support Republicans. Why should your system administration utilities?
This is going to get ugly.
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Wednesday, September 01, 2004
RSS would be perfect if…
RSS is pretty simple. In fact, RSS wears a big t-shirt that says, “Simple is my middle name.” Publishers are adopting RSS all over the place and advertisers are trying to figure out how to reach this elusive and finicky audience of early adopters, but RSS is a pretty unfriendly medium for advertising compared to the regular Web or even spam (formerly known as “email”).
Me? I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do. Many solutions to RSS problems involve server-side scripting — like the HTTP Conditional GET, which spares Web servers some of the load of repeated requests for feeds that have not changed — but scripting can only do so much.
Clarification: one reader pointed out that Conditional GETs don’t require scripting. That is correct, but basic Conditional GETs will still serve your entire 120K XML file even if only one item has been added. Combining Conditional GETs with a server-side script that returns only the new posts is the only way I’d ever want to do Conditional GETs so I consider this a “scripting” solution.
Continue reading “RSS would be perfect if…”
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Saturday, August 28, 2004
That’s why they call it LeBron’s medal
If the Olympics counted the total points across all of the basketball games played — like
they do in gymnastics and swimming — our Dream Team would have brought home the gold.
Better luck next year, guys.
Update: Our caption contest winner was Charles B. of Leeds, Alabama.
He suggested “Always a bridesmaid…”
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Sunday, August 22, 2004
Munch and run
This morning in Norway, two masked armed robbers stole Edvard Munch’s famous movie poster
painting of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
There wasn’t much security in the museum — the thieves just plucked the paintings off of the walls and walked out the front door to their escape car.
Our local Applebee’s bolts three-dollar posters to the wall so they don’t get stolen. But a $75 million painting is just hanging on a wire in a museum in Norway and “it took a long time for the police to come.”
Isn’t it enough to make you want to, oh, I don’t know, shout?
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Friday, August 20, 2004
No can do
Last month, officials at several military bases
were concerned about the security risks of a Coca-Cola contest
that rigged Coke cans with cell phones and GPS chips. The NSA and Army bases including Fort Knox declared these cans
a threat to security and advised engineers and soldiers to examine their soda in advance and to leave them at home if
they contained any of this eavesdropping technology.
Now that’s not practical for a caffeine addict like myself. You can’t open a can of Coke at home and expect it to still be fresh when you get to work. A caffeine addict’s motto is: never open a two-liter bottle that you can’t finish today. Tomorrow morning, it’s just not the same. It’s well on its way to flat. It has lost that certain, oh, I don’t know what, but I know the French have a nice way of putting it.
Anyway, caffeine addicts don’t really drink tiny little cans of soda and that’s not my point.
Well, they finally figured out what was going on. It had nothing to do with cell phones or GPS chips. Somebody was worried that if you put two cans of C2 next to each other, you get C-4.
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