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Assume Nothing

Note to self: Don’t ever assume that the most popular web browser in the world, with the most amount of funding behind it, can be counted on to be standards-compliant where it counts. According to this page, CSS allows developers to use either 3- or 6-letter hexadecimal values. Some Moveable Type templates use the 3-letter hex values. But IE 5.5 for Windows apparently chokes on those, which is why Mikepop saw the poll table with a black background earlier – rather than ignoring what it didn’t understand, as browsers are supposed to do, IE chose to block out the sun instead.

With that problem “solved,” there remains the revelation that IE 5.5 for Win will shove all the right-hand nav content down to the bottom of the page if even one pixel of extra horizontal matter is present. In other words, if you have two DIVs, 70% and 30% width, and throw in a one-pixel left border on a bounding box somewhere, IE 5.5 / Win will freak out and think the content is too wide for the space, rather than including that pixel in the percentage tally for the overall page width.

Argh.

Music: The Mar-Keys :: Philly Dog
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Miles Smiles

Miles working the expressions, experimenting with facial muscles and how they affect ma and pa. Watching Miles smile is like eating popcorn — once you start, hard to stop.

miles_2mo_still.gif

(Click) for 236k animated GIF

Music: Sly and the Family Stone :: Everybody is a Star
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Billboard Hack

Citibank billboard on College Ave. a few days ago read:

“Try making time instead of money for a while.”

With the application of a small horizontal stroke of black paint by the invisible samizdat now reads:

“Try making time instead of money for a white.”

Music: The Stylistics :: I’m Stone in Love with You
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Mommy, Where’s French Indochina?

Absolutely astonishing report from the National Geographic Society on the state of geographical awareness among young people in the United States and elsewhere.

… fully 30 percent estimated the U.S. population to be a billion or more. … Worldwide, three in 10 couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean, which covers 33 percent of the earth. … Less than half the Americans could identify France, the United Kingdom or Japan on a world map. …

It goes on like that. Home schooling for Miles starts to sound like a better option all the time.

Music: cLOUDDEAD :: Apt. A Pt.2
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Apple Store, Body Butter

Went to the grand opening of the Emeryville Apple Store, which coincided with the grand opening of Yet Another Hugemongous Shopping Mall, this one like a little Disneyland world within a world – fake city streets lined with Banana Republic and Body Shop and Williams Sonoma and whatnot… The inside of an Apple Retail Store is precisely what one would expect – like walking around inside the Apple Online Store – all white diffused light bouncing off white walls and ceiling, brimming with oh-so designed Apple Toys and Apple Software… like stepping into Cult HQ, seductive and scary.

I mostly wanted to talk to the Apple Geniuses to try and find an answer to a hanging problem with CUPS printer sharing – a problem I know is not in the vendor’s driver but in Apple’s CUPS layer… but the Genius of course threw the onus for the problem right back on the printer vendor. For crying out loud, it’s an Apple bug but I can’t get tech assistance without paying for Apple Care (je refuse) and the Apple Geniuses just deflect the blame… an absurd comedy of errors resulting in Amy not being able to use our “shared” printer for the past two months.

Went into Body Time and was assaulted by no less than half a dozen moonies, er, employees all wanting me to slather myself in buckets of Body Butter, sugars, salts, aromatherapy, yoga incense, etc. I must be missing an appreciation gland for this kind of thing – I don’t know what it would feel like to come home and think, “What I want most is to slather myself in fruit-scented butter.” With them, it’s all about making one’s body into a great hunk o’ toast.

Music: The Upsetters :: Curly Dub
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Culture of Fear

Bowling for Columbine (which I have yet to see) has put Michael Moore back in the limelight, and he’s using the opportunity to represent on fear-mongering in our culture. Fear sells, and so the media give us plenty of it. Issues that are statistically peripheral are put at the forefront when juicy. We end up thinking the world is about to implode, making ourselves sick (literally) with worry and paranoia. Example:

In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress? Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story.

Moore is currently featuring a lengthy excerpt from Barry Glassner’s book “Fear” (from which the above excerpt comes) on his web site. Scary stuff. Or not.

Update: It appears that Michael Moore has been dipping his fingers into the revisionism jar — in an article on his site, he had predicted victory for Dems in the recent election. But rather than eating crow when everything turned out wrong, he took the essay down, vanished without a trace. Critics are having a field day.

Music: Black Cat Orchestra :: Ikh Hob Dikh Tsufil Lib
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The Ballad of Conor Oberst

My old girlfriend from Boston Pagan Kennedy wrote a piece for the New York Times, The Ballad of Conor Oberst (free reg required) about this scraggly 22-year-old musical / lyrical prodigy, pure, honest poet gone political, writing from “the Omaha of the mind” and now I very much want to hear this music.

“… if any generation ever needed a new Bob Dylan, this is the one.”

Music: Steve Hillage :: Leylines to Glassdom
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How-To Goodbye Depression

Amazon is hawking a highly-effective looking title designed to help combat life’s dark clouds through a truly unique scientific approach. Is this the book that could put self-help on the map at last? Haven’t read it myself, but feel like I’ve been exploring its methodology all my life.

Dreamed that I woke up with a note from Amy pinned to my chest:

“Scot – ran out of breast milk for Miles and had to pump yours. Took every last drop, sorry.”

Music: Blue Room Boys :: Royal Garden Blues
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Tom Petty Is Pissed

The Rolling Stone is running an interview with Tom Petty in which the good man pretty much slams modern life on planet earth… or at least the music industry, rampant greed, decline of common sense and moral compass, and total lack of inspiration. Couldn’t say it better.

What happened between 1979 and now? How did we get here from there? More importantly, will music ever be good again? Will the industry just keep getting greedier and more apathetic? Ack packet via Weblogsky.

Music: Brian Eno :: My Squelchy Life