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In daringfireball, BareBones’ John Gruber posts detailed notes on how differently the W3C’s HTML validator works compared to the one built into BBEdit. In essence, both validators report different classes of errors, but that doesn’t mean that one is more broken than the other. The W3C’s will even let you set width=”fred flintsone” on a table cell without complaining. Neither validator reports false positives though – may as well use them both.

Validate? Sounds wonderful. I’m all about validation. Oh wait – I don’t have time to update 5-year-old designs, let alone validate new ones.

Music: James Chance and The Contortions :: Twice Removed

bIPlog

Finally went live with bIPlog (Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog) today – several months prep time to launch a blog, which sounds odd, but I think the quality of the posts will justify the up-front energy. More on the process here. Surprising amount of detail-y, nit-picky work behind the scenes to get ready for launch, in part a result of design by committe. Satisfying to see it go live.


Music: Fripp & Eno :: An Index Of Metals

Chimera

Count me among the growing throngs of Mac users heading for the greener pastures of Chimera. Faster and lighter than IE, better bookmarking, tabbed browsing, nice hotkeys for increasing / decreasing font size, not from Microsoft, and not subject to IE’s retarded stylesheet cacheing bug (which is murder for CSS developers) … what more could you want in a browser?


Music: Marc Bolan and T.Rex :: Children Of The Revolution

Toast This

If you put a blank CD in your Mac, you can drag files onto it, eject it, let it burn, and get a nice cross-platform ISO9660 CD out the other end. Do the same with a blank DVD and you get a Mac-only HFS+ DVD. There is apparently no way to make a cross-platform data DVD from the Finder. Of course, Apple doesn’t tell you this – doesn’t even mention it in their Knowledge Base. You just waste a bunch of money on $5 blank DVDs, thinking something else must have gone wrong, since you’ve never made a coaster with this technique before.

The solution turns out to be Toast. Hooey.


Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu

Pelted by Pine Needles

My dad lives up in the mountains. His life is not like yours and mine.

Thurs, I finally got a day off and planned to do so much. What happened? A major wind and rain storm came through. At 2.30 am I am buck naked on the deck tieing down tarps on my woodpiles. Swing, bar-b-q etc. It was blowing 30-40 mph, heavy rain and pine needles pelting me like arrows. Just as I finished the power went out. I cooked breakfast on the coleman stove, meditated in the dark and tried to read in the gloomy light. Thank goodness for the wood burning stove.

I read stuff like that and wonder if I’m going soft, wonder whether city life may have run its course. Wonder what I’m missing by having cushy comfort handed over on a platter day after day.

Any way you slice it, my dad rocks.


Music: Son House :: Government Fleet Blues

Saber

Young boy next-door swinging a tree branch like a sword and making Star Wars sounds with his mouth.

“Is that a light saber?,” I asked.

The boy stopped and looked at me. “How did you know?”

“Because The Force is very strong with you.”

He made a “Pppphhhhzzzztttt!” sound and pumped his fist in the air, smiling big.


Music: Babatunde Olatunji :: Oba Igbo

Gluttony and Foolhardiness

I’m not just making stuff up — foobar is a real word. … Flash doesn’t get much more Hi-Ho than this. … DecafBAD explains the Semantic Web. … The Guinness Book of World Records now discourages gluttony and foolhardiness. … Bummed that no one says “Hang ten!” anymore. … The ultimate hand-drawn digital clock. … Propaganda machine got you down? Try some remixed propaganda on for size. … From now on, any software or scripts I publish will be released under The Free Object-Oriented License. … Conclusion of this cutting edge analysis of contemporary advertising: Ads are stupid. … Don’t let your left hip know what your right hip is doing – learn the Black Bottom Dance. … These Burning Man pix are so good I regret missing it… for the 7th year running. … Bored of a Sunday afternoon? Don’t miss the Colossal Colon Tour. … How the Seattle waterfront has changed over the years. … The Best Page In the Universe. “This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.” … Step-by-step instructions: how to be Electroclash. …

“Erase the vision which has trashed this planet.”
– Michael Brownstein


Music: 13th Floor Elevators :: Slip Inside This House

Miles Pix Month #02

Miles won’t be two months old for another two weeks, but what the hell – he’s well into his second month and becoming more engaged by the day – everything we do, he’s involved with his eyes, with his voice, with his little body. He even offers mini-reviews on the quality of the day’s breast milk: “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm!”

So we have a new gallery of amazing Miles pix: Shades, slingshot, thumb grab, stim-mobile, naked, comfort…

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Also, little Simone Micah was born to Andrew and Gina a couple of days ago – went to visit them last night – so tiny so precious. Congratulations to the Shapiro/Golleges! We’re just swimming in babies all of a sudden, and Paula/Roger’s baby is still to come.


Music: New Air :: Apricots On Their Wings

Magic Band

Not sure whether to be afraid or ecstatic — Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band are reuniting after 20 years (without the good cap’n, of course). One show in LA, two in the UK. I just pray it doesn’t become an embarrassment for them, although I have confidence they wouldn’t be doing it if they’d lost their thang in the meantime.

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Music: Fess Williams And His Orchestra :: Eleven-Thirty Saturday Night