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Shrinkrap

Every year I forget how much effort goes into the holiday CDs – building the perfect playlist, burning a pile of non-coasters*, making the playlist fit onto a printable square, selecting cover images from old National Geographics, gluing playlists to backs of pictures, labeling discs, finding envelopes, writing notes, going to the post office… and I love it all. Great way to spend a rainy weekend.

* Never made coasters on the Mac before, but for some reason having a lot of trouble lately – I always liked Sony blanks best, but they’re crapping out now, one after t’other. Switched to Memorex and turned down the burn speed, seems fine. What the heck has changed between last year and this?

Music: Lovage :: Strangers On A Train
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The Saucy Vicar and More

Taking the associative database concept one step further, Recommended Reading will examine your web site and recommend other sites you might like to watch … Did Bill Gates really say this? … Who can tell their arse from their elbow? … Careless use of fonts can lead to misunderstanding … Dancing Spidey renews my faith in the coolness of animated GIFs — and I’m not even a big Spidey fan … Was recently reminded that the wayback machine can be used to dig up truly ancient pages and sites – try visiting the site of an old employer or something – scary … Remember when the Incredible Hulk and friends were advertising Hostess cake products in the pages of your favorite comics? … Use Entourage rather than Mail.app (like me) and wish iPhoto’s “Mail” feature would export images to Entourage? You need the iPhoto mail patcher … The W3C has completely redesigned their site(s) with CSS, just as Wired did a while ago and I’m planning to do at the J-School this summer … This saucy vicar ruined Christmas for a bunch of kids, telling them that Santa would burn up from the friction of traveling so fast if he was real … A chair slips on a pile of spaghetti, which is great entertainment if your’re insane (nice Eno/Budd soundtrack though!) … Think the press is rightward-leaning? Right … America is having technical difficulties, please stand by … who is the single most influential media reporter in the world? … Swell rapping horsies (click on them sequentially) … A bar where the drinks are named after famous artists – I’ll take an Yves Tanguy, straight up – Nice Bosch sequence … Hunter S. Thompson: Dumbness deserves no sympathy (don’t settle for second hand hasish smoke) … You’ve never heard “YMCA” sung like this … One of the great things about moving from LiveJournal to Movable Type is that you get a lot more comments from nut-jobs.

A flag … flying free in a vacuum
Nixon sucks a dry martini
Ghosts of american astronauts
Stay with us in our dreams
      – The Mekons

Music: Gong :: Tropical Fish Selene
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Capitalization Madness

I’ve always hated the industry trend toward capitalization of the words “internet” and “web.” The arguments in favor of capitalization are that one or the other are proper inventions and thus count as proper nouns. Other arguments maintain that because “web” comes from the acronym “World Wide Web,” it should carry the capitalization with it from the acronym.

I don’t buy either argument. Lots of things are invented but aren’t proper nouns. The internet isn’t a product like a Yo-Yo or a Segway. It’s a technology, like “computer” or “radiation.” These words are no more deserving of proper noun status than are “power grid” or “sky.” Heck, we don’t even capitalize “earth” in most contexts.

Nevertheless, more style guides and publications are formalizing the capitalization of these pedestrian terms, elevating them to a god-like or person-like or country-like status I don’t think they deserve.

Should "Internet" and "Web" be capitalized?

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Update 08/08: In 2004 Wired magazine changed their official house style to lowercase internet and web. Now waiting for the rest of the world to get on board…

Music: The Fugees :: Fu-Gee-La
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Contribute

Just attended a demo of Macromedia’s new product Contribute, which is designed to provide an easy way for non-web-staff people to add to or modify content on a web site. This could potentially be very useful to me at work where staff and faculty have a lot of plain content to get online – this could relieve a lot of the burden of tedious, repetitive conversion of text data into simple pages.

It does a lot of things very well, e.g. lets you drag a Word doc right into a template body and have its contents cleanly formatted and inserted into the template (rather than dealing with the rat’s nest of spaghetti that Word generates on HTML output). Allows for restriction of users to given directories. Lets you force no FONT tags, force users to title their documents, etc. Upload is virtually transparent.

On the other hand, it’s tricky to imagine how something like this could integrate with a fuller Content Management System, where content would be stored in a database and which would provide lots of other benefits but probably wouldn’t offer WYSIWYG editing, etc.

Oddly, there is no server component to the system – it all runs with keys that are sent to the user and interact with the desktop app to restrict access as specified by the administrator. Kind of weird to think of running security that way, but I can’t actually think of a hole in the system — it’s just weird.

Hmmmm… will have to ponder this one. I’m very shy of proprietary solutions, trying to do everything open source here, but damn, this is a good product for what it is.

Music: Rickie Lee Jones :: Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys
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100 Words

An interesting blog variant – commit to writing exactly 100 words – no more no less – for one month. This forces concision and a form of poetics you don’t often see in weblogs – sort of a long-form haiku. The sister of a friend of ours came up with some beautiful entries, mostly dream.

Music: Led Zeppelin :: The Lemon Song
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Help Open Source Gobe Productive

Funny how StarOffice gets all the press for being the best alternative to MS Office — compared to Gobe Productive, StarOffice is an ineffectual pig. Gobe was forged from old Claris Works engineers dissatisfied with Apple, who went off to develop BeOS software. I wrote quite a few glowing reviews of Gobe Productive during the Be years, not just to be a cheerleader but because Productive truly rocked. They were doing stuff with cross-app data integration that Microsoft hadn’t even dreamed of yet — one app to handle spreadsheets, word processing, graphics, illustration, and presentations, shifting seamlessly between modes in a single document. Awesome.

Be belly-flopped, and Gobe did Windows and Linux versions of the product. Then the dot-com teat fizzled and Gobe hit hard times. For a while there’s been talk that Free Radical Software was going to buy the Productive license from Gobe and open source the product. But they too are cash shy, so now organizations like BeUnited are going door to door to raise collaborative money (more discussion). An open source Productive would benefit users of all platforms (even Windows). Yes, there’s got to be a good Office alternative for the open source crowd. No, StarOffice ain’t it.

Music: Other Dimensions in Music Special Quintet w/Matthew Shipp :: 2 >
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Grandpa’s Vinyl

It is surprisingly difficult to get rid of old classical LPs. When I inherited the capiz shell stereo console, a couple hundred of grandpa’s old classical records came along for the ride. Most of them are very good, but neither Amy nor I are huge classical fans, and we have no place to store them (I’ve already consolidated my LPs to just what will fit in the console).

So I selected out a few keepers and took the rest to Amoeba and Rasputin’s. Each store wanted about 2% of the collection, and offered nickels and dimes. As in, $1 for a big stack of great old records. The problem is:

  • This stuff was being pressed for decades – there are zillions of LPs out there.
  • So few are in good condition today.
  • Most people have replaced their vinyl collections with CDs.
  • Classical music appreciation is at an all-time low.

Put these factors together and there are way, way, way too many classical LPs on the used market. My problem was not that I wanted money for the records – I couldn’t care less. What I wanted was to find a good home for them – I didn’t want them to end up at the dump, or unappreciated. It was the music collection of my grandfather’s life, the LPs I remember him listening to in the 60s and 70s. Amoeba said they would be willing to take them to the dump for me if I agreed to take less money for them. Rasputin’s agreed to take them all for free and put them in their discount bin. I just wanted someone to listen to them again, so left them on a counter and walked out.

It’s over. LPs are over, classical is over, grandpa is 15 years dead. Moving on.

Music: Plastic Bertrand :: Ca Plane Pour Moi
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padding:10px;

Not all bugs are IE’s, and Chimera’s CSS implementation isn’t always perfect. Every CSS spec I read says:

An element’s padding is the amount of space between the border and the content of the element.

So setting padding:10px; should not cause the border of a box to move – it should cause the contained content to be pushed in, as with the padding attribute for table cells. But no… Chimera pushes the DIV boundary out instead, forking up the design. This is solvable by creating a new containing class and applying the padding on that. Not elegant, but seems to work in all CSS browsers.

Update: As far as I can tell, this is the official bug report on the issue. Scanning through the comments is an object lesson in just how difficult it can be for browser makers to interpret the W3C’s recommendations. The Mozilla team really cares, but even with the requisite will-power, some ambiguities are difficult to resolve. Kind of like Biblical or Constitutional interpretation — except that in this case the framers are still alive ;)

Music: John Coltrane :: Russian Lullaby