September 11, 2003

Europe

I'm having a discussion elsewhere with a gentleman from a European country which I will not name. Here's a snippet - my comments are in plain text, his in italics):

The way I look at it, is this: the concept of democracy has a number of elements which we can use to ascertain the degree of democracy. The GDR was a socalled "peoples democracy" which in our definition was not a democracy.

Yes, this is known as "a lie".

Another interpretation is not necessarily a lie.

This is not "another interpretation". Calling East Germany a democracy is a lie. There's no complication here, it is simply and entirely untrue.

From our point of view it is a lie, not from theirs. Why would our truth be more true than that of others? Because we have proven it to be so because the wall fell?

And here we get to the crux of the problem, the post-modernist fallacy that all points of view are equally valid.

Words have meaning. "Democracy" has a meaning. East Germany was not a democracy. This is a fact. They called it a democracy, therefore they lied. This is also a fact.

In fact, they knew damn well that it wasn't a democracy and the whole thing was a sham from the beginning.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:18 PM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 This "words have meanings" problem seems to be a recurring theme among certain ( liberal) groups of thinkers. It goes hand in hand with moral relativism, especially when they things like "What the U.S. did in Afghanistan was terrorism." No. Terrorism has a specific meaning.

Posted by: Daniel at September 11, 2003 10:58 PM (Oc6V9)

2 Exactly. Though I take exception to this use of a perfectly good word (liberal) when we have a much more specific term (left-wing nutcases). Also with your use of the word "thinkers".

This particular individual might not have the full disease, and might respond to a treatment of facts and differing opinions. He is at least polite.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 11, 2003 11:10 PM (jtW2s)

3 This explains the invention of the Cluebat™.

Posted by: Susie at September 12, 2003 03:53 AM (SM1Wt)

4 or the Clue-by-four

Posted by: Ted at September 12, 2003 09:51 PM (bov8n)

5 Where do words get their definitions?

Posted by: Ron at September 17, 2003 07:53 AM (sEgIW)

6 At the Meaning Shop. They're having a sale right now - buy two meanings, get a free conjugation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 17, 2003 10:07 AM (jtW2s)

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September 11

It is September 11 where I am, and likely will be for you by the time you read this. I really can't do the topic justice, so I suggest you all visit Voices at A Small Victory to read people who can.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:12 AM | Comments (56) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Shitferrets Are Us

SilverBlue is not happy with the shitferrets* at the RIAA.

Not happy at all.

* In one post I used the term shitweasels to refer to the senior management at SCO, and received an irate comment from a shitweasel complaining that I had unfairly maligned shitweasels the world over. Hence the neologism.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:59 AM | Comments (62) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bloggers Under Glass

N.Z. Bear has a particularly fine collection of bloggers in this week's New Weblog Showcase.

Jerry McCusker of Machine in the Ghost ponders the question of what things would be like If Americans Ran the Afterlife, and suggests that Purgatory could be run at a profit.

Open Source Software Law has a background article on SCO vs. IBM, but they lose points for failing to use the word "shitferret".

Virtue Pure (sounds like a bottled-water company) muses on the value of role-playing, and suggests that playing Dungeons and Dragons may in fact lead us to better understand other people.

And if that fails, we can zap them with Leomund's Lamentable Belabourment. That'll teach them.

Aaron at Pardon my English suggests that giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants may not be the smartest move.

Iocean at Inspiranote returns to an essay written shortly after the September 11 attacks. This is warm fuzzy new-age stuff, unfortunately, and not for me at all.

Eye on the Left picks up on some unusually insane ramblings. The post consists almost entirely of the quoted insanity, which confused me a little when I read it reformatted on the Bear's site.

Brainstorming spotted James Dean keeping an eye on holiday traffic and stopped to take pictures.

I couldn't find the selected post from Like a Packet of Woodbines, but this picture is a classic.

And Jim at Snooze Button Dreams wonders why he can't be gay.

So, who are my picks?

Brainstorming, because, well, that's cool and funny.

Snooze Button Dreams because it's funny and insightful, and because I have an addiction to the snooze button myself.

And Pardon my English, because sometimes irony will not do and you just have to cut loose with a rant.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:32 AM | Comments (68) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Nice linkage!

Posted by: Jennifer at September 11, 2003 01:50 AM (rZmE1)

2 Thank you!

I'm still not getting links to ambientirony.mu.nu counted I think I know why, and I left a little note for Mr Bear, who perhaps can look into it.

So in the mean time I'll just have to link to everyone else!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 11, 2003 01:52 AM (jtW2s)

3 I can't find the correct post at Snooze Buttons Dreams...stupid bogsplot!

Posted by: Susie at September 11, 2003 02:20 AM (SM1Wt)

4 Stupid Blogspot! Hey!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 11, 2003 02:24 AM (jtW2s)

5 Hi Pixy,

Wait until they hear that you were my first, uh....trackback that is. I had been meaning to find out what that "trackback" button actually did, but I think I get it now! (You might have picked up on the fact that having a blog is a real new experience for me.....lol.)

I like the design of your site, clean and easy on the eyes. It looks like you're in Australia? I plan on adding a list of bloggers around the world.

Nice to meet you and a sincere thanks for being the first to link to a post in brainstorming!

DC

Posted by: DC at September 11, 2003 08:22 AM (hXV8K)

6 thanks for voting in the New Blog Showcase.... there is an angry blogger, however, that is critical of your multiple votes for certain entries (curi.blogspot.com). This person has also made a mockery of the democratic process by casting 25+ votes for another entry in an attempt to bring up VirtuePure's vote count.

Posted by: Aaron at September 14, 2003 03:46 AM (P3ldy)

7 There is always an angry blogger. It's one of the Laws of the Net. (Another law is that any forum will contain at least one crazed lefty.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 14, 2003 04:41 AM (jtW2s)

8 Well, the link whore won the showcase.... he had 6 separate bloggers vote for his entry TWICE, and they dind't do what you did, and vote for everyone once, and their own personal votes a second time...

Whatever happened to fair play?

Oh well... life goes on.

Posted by: Aaron at September 15, 2003 11:58 PM (P3ldy)

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September 10, 2003

Feces-Flinging DRM

Feces Flinging Monkey (no, not Ethel, a different one) has a rather depressing look at digital rights management (DRM) and how it will destroy civilisation.

What he fails to consider is that all DRM is ultimately doomed for the simple reason that DRM is digital and humans are analogue. Can't rip an MP3 of that song? Play it back and record it again. So you lose a little quality. Can't cut-and-paste that article from the New York Times? Well, you can read it, yes? You can type, yes?

And so on. Which doesn't mean that the DRM-types aren't evil - they are evil, no question - just that DRM isn't going to bring about the heat death of the universe.

That's my job.

I would have left a comment at the Monkey's blog, but his comments don't work right now. Funny how that happens to the not-Munuvians.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:27 AM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Um, how come you have a "more" link but there's no more?

Can I help "bring about the heat death of the universe" in my capacity as Linkmistress of Chaos?

Dang, now I'm going to be late for work!

Posted by: Susie at September 10, 2003 05:22 AM (SM1Wt)

2 There's more, you just can't get to it... Now there's a bug if ever I saw one. Or at least a misfeature.

Run, Susie, run!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 10, 2003 11:20 AM (jtW2s)

3 Hi...it's me. Thank you for inviting me to get off Blogsplat and into the real world. Just tell me what I need to do...and, bear in mind that I am a computer-illiterate blonde. I can't even fix my stupid template. Linking from Blogspot gives me pin-point bleeds in my brain. I downloaded MT once and didn't get anywhere with it. Of course, at the time I was using a computer that was at least 10 years old. I'd like to try it again.
Honestly, I'm starting to feel like a blog on blogspot is like cubic zirconia. Pretty, but not real. Besides, in the not-too-distant-future, I fear there'll only be me and a few crickets left at blogspot.
In case it doesn't show up for you and you need it, my email address is srv200163 at Yahoo dot com.
Thank you again and I sincerely hope my ineptitude doesn't make you regret this...
(I gotta go warn Ted that I'm probably gonna need his help with this.)

Posted by: Stevie at September 10, 2003 03:14 PM (AJ0RC)

4 The "play it and record it again" trick is called "the analog hole" by the recording industry. DRM is specifically designed to deal with this.

It works like this: you get your music and play it, re-record it, write a nice unprotected MP3... and nobody can listen to your new MP3, because DRM machines won't play media that doesn't have a DRM authorization. Obviously, if they did allow old MP3s to play, the analog hole would remain open and the entire system would quickly implode, just as you described.

A full-bore DRM machine will not run unauthorised programs. Authorised programs will not open unauthorised media. That's how it works.

Sorry...

Posted by: Mike Spenis at September 11, 2003 12:39 PM (43gaF)

5 Good point. So either (a) we need to fake DRM (which will be illegal, if it isn't already) or (b) we need to keep our old machines that actually work.

Mind you, a full-strength universal DRM requires a level of totalitarian government and big-business control that is utterly terrifying far beyond the mere inability to play music when we want to.

As I said, the backers of DRM are evil. I wasn't engaging in hyperbole - these people want to control your thoughts. Literally. I think you at least realise that.

This needs more though than I can give it right now. I'll come back to it soon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 11, 2003 12:47 PM (jtW2s)

6 So either (a) we need to fake DRM (which will be illegal, if it isn't already) or (b) we need to keep our old machines that actually work.

Faking DRM is pretty hard - the core of it uses something called public key encryption, which, if properly implemented, is essentially unbreakable. The implementation will certainly have some flaws which could be exploited, but as those flaws are discovered, they would be fixed. Eventually, it would not be practical to fake it out.

Older machines (or, for that matter, Linux machines) will serve you well until they are no longer able to connect to the internet. In my opinion, DRM will eventually be required by the ISPs before they let you on. You could still play your own music files, but you would no longer be able to trade them.

Posted by: Mike Spenis at September 11, 2003 11:53 PM (3bPQJ)

7 We need a common blog for this

As you say, DRM builds on public key encryption. But that in itself is not enough. With public key encryption, you can do one of two things: encrypt something with someones public key so that only they can read it, or encrypt something with your own private key so that others can verify that it came from you.

Now, where are these keys going to come from? People can't be allowed to make their own, as they'll just share them when they need to share files. And you'd have to rely on people keeping and never losing their key. It would be a nightmare for the media companies.

No, it's going to be implemented in hardware like DVD region codes, and kept as a trade secret. (Patents won't work - though aspects of it will be patented. Copyright is completely useless.)

So every machine that can play digital media - everything from watches to phones to cars to fridges - has to be replaced with a DRM-locked version. And that trade secret has to remain secure and unhacked or the whole thing is screwed.

As for the analog hole: The only way to block it is to take away - forever - many things that people can do right now and indeed have been able to do for years, things that are taken as very basic functionality in a huge variety of devices. Rather than preventing people releasing their own DRM'd stuff copied through the analog hole, they could instead track this - if they had a global registry of every DRM-capable recording device and who owned each one.

As I said before, the really scary part is not DRM itself, but the level of legislation and policing required to make it leakproof. George Orwell was a piker compared to these guys.

tom beta 2's point on opponents is a good one: China and Taiwan and many developing countries have a rather relaxed view of copyright laws and would love to build a profitable industry selling DRM circumvention devices.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 12, 2003 12:16 AM (jtW2s)

8 We need a common blog for this

Aw, what the heck. It's easy to cut-and-paste.

You made a good point about embedded keys. I don't know exactly how DRM would address this problem. If they do embed keys, they are going to have to deal, somehow, with these keys being uncovered.

As I understand it, users have keys, too. They are tied to your name and credit card, and are used to originally purchace the copyrighted work. If you trade away your key, your name and card go with it...

WRT overseas competition, that goes away as soon as DRM becomes part of the law. Just as nobody tries to sell radios that aren't FCC compliant, nobody will try to sell non-DRM hardware, either. Even if they did, it, like the older hardware, would probably be excluded from the internet anyway.

Posted by: Mike Spenis at September 12, 2003 03:11 AM (W64Mu)

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When You Care Enough

Darl McBride, Chief Shitferret at SCO (member of the Axis of Bloody Nuisances), has posted an open letter to the Open Source Community. Not surprisingly, the letter is filled with mistruths and untruths and has generated appropriate levels of flamage at sites like Slashdot.

There's also a feedback feature at LinuxWorld's site, where the letter is posted. This is what came up when I stopped by:

127 feedback items so far - last one posted 9 September 2003 12:08 PM

* Aaron Graves commented ...
Open Letter from Aaron Graves to SCO:

Dear Mr. McBride;

Go fuck yourself.

Sincerely,

Aaron Graves

Meanwhile, fellow Axis of Bloody Nuisances member the RIAA has taken to filing lawsuits against twelve-year-old girls. Nice move, public-relations-wise.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:46 AM | Comments (60) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL? They really are idiots. That just makes me so angry. Thanks for bringing this article to my attention.

Posted by: Wanderer at September 10, 2003 06:05 AM (hnF59)

2 I love that term: shitferret. I've long been searching for a catch-all word to sum up my exes.
And the post was very informative too.
Thanks.

Posted by: LeeAnn at September 10, 2003 07:42 AM (HxCeX)

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September 09, 2003

Mister Green

A very warm Munuvian welcome for [Who is it this time, Susie? Right, thanks.] Mister Green. Mister Green is the product of early bioengineering experiments conducted on [What's that? Oh. Right, I see.] Mister Green is not the product of early bioengineering experiments, and in fact comes certified 100% natural ingredients.

Snap! Crackle! Mister Green!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:47 AM | Comments (56) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 08, 2003

This Comes As No Surprise

To anyone who knows me:

My inner child is six years old!

Look what I can do! I can walk, I can run, I can
read! I like to do stuff, and there's a whole
big world out there to do it in. Just so long
as I can take my blankie and my Mommy and my
three best friends with me, of course.

How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Thanks to Cherry)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:50 PM | Comments (63) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 lol

Glad you liked it!

Posted by: Cherry at September 08, 2003 02:00 PM (i7dMY)

2 I think your blankie is in the fort with Teddy and Gerry the Giraffe....

Posted by: Susie at September 08, 2003 03:54 PM (SM1Wt)

3 Thanks Susie!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 08, 2003 03:56 PM (LBXBY)

4 I'm in the fort? Dang, I'm supposed to be at work!

Posted by: Ted at September 08, 2003 10:10 PM (Qj620)

5

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 09, 2003 01:15 AM (jtW2s)

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Daniel Moore

Another new Munuvian! This time it's Daniel Moore, nanotechnology researcher and all-round good guy. By curious coincidence, not long before joining us here he discovered this:

The Japanese have a word alleged, by Douglas Hofstadter - writer of this great book I read in AP US History forever ago called American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions." I recently had a long discussion with a friend in which my answers were based on how I can't answer her questions because of the underlying assumptions to her argument that I didn't buy into and I didn't want to validate them. I could have just used this word. It is pronouced "moo" like the cow noise and is unfortunately transliterated to "mu" (unfortunate because it only supports people mispronouncing the Greek letter with the same transliteration).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 AM | Comments (60) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 07, 2003

Slow News Day

So I'll do what all the big news people do... Baby animal pictures!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 PM | Comments (65) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Kitties!

Posted by: Susie at September 07, 2003 11:24 PM (UA6yw)

2 Awwww. While installing the wood floor at my parents' house yesterday morning, I turned on Animal Planet for background noise. They had polar bears...a mama bear and her two adorable cubs. It was all cute and sweet until they ate a baby seal. Then when a male bear started stalking them and ate a cub, my own mother had enough. We watched college football after that.

Posted by: Jennifer at September 07, 2003 11:59 PM (rZmE1)

3 Yuck. Thanks, Jen--now I have to go to work with THAT image in my head....

Posted by: Susie at September 08, 2003 12:37 AM (UA6yw)

4

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 08, 2003 01:36 AM (jtW2s)

5 If I had to be horrified, YOU have to be horrified.

Posted by: Jennifer at September 08, 2003 07:31 AM (rZmE1)

6 Ewwww!!!

Posted by: Cherry at September 08, 2003 09:08 AM (i7dMY)

7 Firstly, on the cute babies: awwwww!
Secondly, I saw the frozen-baby-polar-bear-for-dinner show. Unfortunately, I was eating a popsicle at the time.

Posted by: LeeAnn at September 09, 2003 03:15 AM (HxCeX)

8 New desktop pictures!

hln

Posted by: hln at September 10, 2003 01:25 AM (CWwGn)

9 Oooooh, they're beautiful! I want one! Of each!

That second thing? That is why I refuse to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom-type stuff. I had the horrible misfortune of seeing an adult male lion kill a females babies to make her come into heat. I love animals, but I'd have gladly shot his face off.

And, don't even get me started on those Nancy-boy, lame-ass, too-rich, ignorant wastes of life like Gerald McRaney (and Ted Nugent) who think it's cool to pay to kill exotic animals INSIDE a fence or cage. Talk about wanting to shoot someone's face off....EEEERRRRGGG.

Posted by: Stevie at September 13, 2003 06:03 AM (cySDt)

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September 06, 2003

What If We Held A Convention

And everyone came?

I think the people responsible for the CounterConvention have a slight problem. Check out this list of groups who have signed on as part of their RNC party-pooping program:

The Committee of Circular Flying Birds
Dwarves for the Responsible Control of Pliers
International Consortium of Those as Drunk as We Are
Glow Rabbit Society
Modern Drunkard Magazine
Society of Poop-Throwing Monkeys
John Dillinger Died for You Society
The Wow, Most People Think We're Idiots Association
Libs Against Basic Web Page Design (their motto: We’re too stupid to understand word wrap)
International Coalition of People Who Just Don't Get It
International Anti-Ismist Anti-Organisation
Bottle o' Pop Action Network
UNIX Users United for IMF Riots
Radical Anarchist Feminazis Against Veganism
Radical Anarchist Veganazis Against Feminism
Organization of People Who Always Show up at Protests
Sedated Gorillas for Masturbation and the Oppression of Iraqis by Devil Bush (We are a society of sedated Gorillas that only want the government to provide us our constitutionally-provided right to the pursuit of happiness, i.e., manual stimulation. And a free bottle of pop. And maybe a taco. It's our right goddamn it.)
Purple Polar Bear Society
Popular Front For the Liberation of This Website (All property is theft, including this website.)
Chocolate Chinchilla Coterie (An organization devoted to pitying the Angry Left while sipping martinis.)
ONOMATOPOEIA NOW! (Bang! Swish! Purr! Buzz!)
National Burping Society
Dead Penguins Society
Twinkies For The Ethical Treatment Of Twinkies
ZIG for Great Justice (Someone set us up the bomb. You are on your way to destruction. )
Australians Against Iowa Cornfields
Judean People's Front
Judean People's Behind
Die, Manatee Die!
Dreadlock Army (Too mellow to march.)
Tigers Are Great (Tigers are cool. Anyone who doesn't want to be a tiger is a fool.)
Organization of Bemused Onlookers

Jimmy Taranto Fan Club (We love Best of the Web! )

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:29 PM | Comments (64) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 The Coalition to Save Us From All Marmite; It’s Pasty Evil

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 06, 2003 03:34 PM (jtW2s)

2 The Clean Musk Ox union (End capitalist (marmite) pollution of our musk ox supplies!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 06, 2003 03:34 PM (jtW2s)

3 Free range veal!!!

Posted by: Ted at September 07, 2003 12:52 AM (2sKfR)

4 ROFL!!!!

Posted by: Susie at September 07, 2003 12:54 AM (UA6yw)

5 I just followed the link and I scrolled through dozens of hilarious "organizations" and still didn't get to the parts of the list you listed....

one of my favorites was the coalition of people without shift keys....they're not timid, really...

Posted by: Susie at September 07, 2003 01:01 AM (UA6yw)

6 Susie, same here! This is some of the funniest crap I've ever read, and I'm still only 1/5 down the scroll bar. Be back in a couple hours!

Posted by: Tuning Spork at September 07, 2003 11:39 AM (Ll8Sl)

7 Wait a minute...I must have missed the Australians Against Iowa Cornfields earlier.

Posted by: Jennifer at September 08, 2003 12:02 AM (rZmE1)

8 Well, looks like they finally cleared all the funny ones. Dang.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at September 09, 2003 11:41 AM (68FmU)

9 I saved a copy

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 09, 2003 11:48 AM (jtW2s)

10 They've cleaned it up now, but it still includes "Pieman (Global Pastry Uprising)". Mmm... pastry uprising.

Posted by: Rob at September 09, 2003 07:08 PM (ISznP)

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Oops

Note to self: If you are setting up a mail server, and using it to receive twice-daily backups of your website, and then you decide not to retrieve those backups from the mail server so that they just lie around, your spool partition will fill up and you will stop receiving mail!

So if anyone had anything important to say to me in the last few hours, please say it again, 'cause it might have got losted.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:35 PM | Comments (59) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 How small is your spool partition? It's either tiny or your web backups are huge. If so, don't backup everything each time. Just grab the comments since that's the only thing that should be changing.

If you're using Exim, it would be very easy to directly archive the email upon receipt. If you don't actually look at this stuff all the time, this would be the simple solution. Just create an email account specifically for this purpose and add a router that archives the email to a different partition (I can show you how, if you wish).

If you're using Microsoft Exchange, you deserve whatever problems you get.

Posted by: Rossz at September 07, 2003 07:19 AM (43SjN)

2 My spool partition is only 500MB. The backups are about 15MB per day. The web site is about 1GB

I'm using Postfix, by the way. I just made a spool directory on a bigger partition and symlinked it back to /var/spool/mail and everything's happy again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 07, 2003 01:13 PM (jtW2s)

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Everything Old is New Again

There's a new Heinlein book coming out. Yes, Robert A. Heinlein. And yes, it's by Heinlein, not about Heinlein.

It's called For Us, the Living, and it was lost more than 60 years ago:

"For Us, the Living," was put aside, and eventually lost. The Heinleins apparently destroyed all copies they had. And because at the time it was written Heinlein was not a member of the science fiction community, no other sf writers knew about it. He had let one or two friends read it, and it is by a long trail through one of them that this rarest of treasures was located.

So, who else has a long-forgotten novel hidden away? A few years ago a lost work by Fritz Leiber, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, was rediscovered and published. Tolkien's unpublished story Roverandom likewise languished for decades before reaching the public.

If you asked me to name the three authors I'd most like to see have a lost work rediscovered, those would be high - very high - on the list. Sometimes things do work out the way they should.

(via Slashdot)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM | Comments (57) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hoppings of Roxette Bunny

The latest Munuvian is a small blue rabbit.

A warm welcome please for Roxette Bunny!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:51 AM | Comments (56) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Patriette

I haven't done a Blog of the Day for a while (in fact, due to pressures at work I haven't blogged much at all in the past few weeks) but I was checking my inbound links tonight and I tripped over The Patriette. (It was dark.)

One can't help but admire a blogger who titles a post "Oh bother! I seem to be stuck in an Argentine prison!" (or for that matter, "Things I Hate: France"). She even has me blogrolled - uh, which is how I found her. Albeit she has me blogrolled as "Alas! Alack! Oh, no!", but that's better than not being blogrolled, right?

Right?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:38 AM | Comments (58) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 05, 2003

The Cheese Stands Alone

Bringing much-needed cheesiness to mu.nu is LeeAnn of The Cheese Stands Alone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:40 PM | Comments (57) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 04, 2003

Annika and Arnold

annika of annika's journal and poetry has a first rate post explaining:

why i begrudgingly, reluctantly, give my enthusiastic endorsement to Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:51 AM | Comments (57) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 03, 2003

Gnat in 2044

Jennifer, when you finish with all the presidents, vice-presidents, and first ladies past, here's something for you to work on:

Natalie Lileks was the bravest, toughest Chief Executive this nation ever had! She did what she had to do, and she paid the political price! Paid it gladly! I still remember the day she resigned...as far as I'm concerned there was NO disgrace in her decision!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:35 AM | Comments (61) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 When I run out of tales of the past start telling tales of the future?

Posted by: Jennifer at September 03, 2003 02:14 AM (rZmE1)

2 Bingo!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 03, 2003 02:32 AM (jtW2s)

3 I loved this post, and just linked to it myself. I linked via the trackback site, but no trackback appeared. Might you know why?

Posted by: Howard at September 03, 2003 05:18 AM (3pfkH)

4 Well, the trackback is there now

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 03, 2003 12:27 PM (LBXBY)

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September 02, 2003

CSS Clueless

Steven Den Beste has lately been wrestling with both CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) and a new version of City Desk (his blogging software) that helpfully rewrites your HTML for you - and indeed, can't be prevented from doing so.

Being an engineer, he discusses City Desk in the context of intrusive tools. An intrusive tool is one that you are constantly aware of using. Notepad, for example, is not an intrusive tool; it sits there and you type stuff into it. Word is very much an intrusive tool, with its pop-up advice and its real-time spelling-error-generator and its fourth-grade reading-level grammarbot. I hate Word; I use Lotus WordPro for any serious writing (my book, for example) because it's not intrusive; despite having just as many bells and whistles as Word, it does exactly what you tell it to and shuts up otherwise.

I find CSS to be an intrusive tool too, not because it beeps and squawks at you (it can't), but because as soon as you try to do anything complicated, it stops working the way it should. Setting up the three-column layout was a huge pain with Internet Explorer; I tried three different ways of doing it - all of which worked fine in Mozilla - before stumbling across something that IE accepted. I don't know if the fault is with the specification or Mozilla or IE, but CSS is clearly not ready for use when it takes trial and error, and in the end, arcane trickery, to make something that really is fairly simple, work. And I ended up with two different stylesheets anyway, and JavaScript code to select the (hopefully) right one based on what browser you are using. (Try looking at the site in both Mozilla and IE - the IE stylesheet is different because I can't be bothered keeping both versions up to date.)

For the new layout I'm considering using tables instead. HTML purists will tell you that using tables for layout is a heinous crime, but I say to the purists: Go piss up a rope.* Tables do what you tell them to, where CSS does whatever the hell it feels like. I get enough of that from people; I don't feel like dealing with it in software as well.

* Where does this expression come from, anyway?**
** Never mind, I googled.***
*** Okay, okay: GO PISS UP A ROPE by 1940s: Go away and do something characteristically stupid; ="get lost", "go fly a kite". "He asked for another contribution and I told him to go piss up a rope." (Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang)****
**** I also found an ad for "Urine Porn". Some days you're torn between "To each his own" and "Ewwww".*****
***** I'm finished now, Tiger, you can have them back.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:28 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 01, 2003

Sticky Is As Sticky Does

I bought a Sara Lee sticky date pudding for dessert. Of course, when I tried to open it, I found that the lid was stuck to the pudding. Stuck so firmly that when I finally pried it off, all of the icing/sauce/whatever it is came with it. So I had to scrape it all off the lid and spread it back on the pudding.

In other news, the garage of my apartment building got broken into. Again. Four times in four years.

I hate thieves. They probably vote Democrat.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:13 PM | Comments (66) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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