The Case Against Hyperblogging
Permalink | November 30, 2007 by John in JB.com
Finally, someone provided me with a justification for my blogging style/frequency. Tumblr? Don’t Bothr: The Case Against Hyperblogging:
Someone who talks a lot has less value to their words than someone who rarely speaks. But when that quiet person speaks, people listen. When you publish 20 posts a day, your individual posts lose value. And when you finally do have something important to say, it gets lost among the clutter. Your signal to noise ratio is too low.
Now I need the justification for very short blog posts. I can’t stand blogs with 1000+ word blathering, stream-of-consciousness posts. Of course, 90% of what I post is other people’s words, with 10% being my commentary on what they said. Just like this post!
Mohammed Ruckspin UPDATED
Permalink | November 28, 2007 by John in Current Affairs, Religion
Teddy Teacher Gillian Gibbons Charged In Sudan
A British teacher has been charged with insulting religion and inciting hatred after allowing her class to name a teddy bear Mohammed.
When are we just going to start cleansing the earth of this stupidity?
Here is the headline I want to see before I die: “Genocide triggered by teddy bear scandal.”
Although “genocide” probably isn’t quite correct (not that any mainstream journalist would have the professional integrity to get it right). The Free Dictionary says:
gen·o·cide (jn-sd)
n. The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
In this case I’m not specifically talking about any entire race, country, political party or ethnic group. What would it be called if you carried out the systematic and planned extermination of the members of an extremist religion? I’m talking about discrimination based on behavior, not uncontrollable factors like race.
Oh, it gets better. Whipping is too good for her:
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Strike Three, You’re Fixed?
Permalink | November 26, 2007 by John in Household
Just a little update: Had a guy from Tri-County come out and look at the furnace this morning. Looks like the fan motor was toast as Fenske had already surmised. The repairman is on his way back with a new motor mounted in the squirrel cage. Should be up and running shortly for a few hundred bucks. Now I can take a breath and (hopefully) wait until Spring to get the new furnace, mounted in the crawlspace.
Update to the update: All better now.
The Prototype is Finished! I really mean it this time!
Permalink | November 25, 2007 by John in JB.com, Web Design
(Update: looks like ass in Internet Explorer 6. See below.)
Today I put the finishing touches on the prototype for my new blog design.
I was having trouble getting it to look right at 800×600 resolution, letting the layout degrade gracefully to the narrower width. The layout was based on a width of 850. The long term solution is to completely overhaul the layout, which I will do someday. For the short term, I chopped 90 pixels out of the width, a little from the racing stripes (sidebar 210px), a little from the perforated metal (Page navigation 150px) but most from the main content column (400px).
It took a fair bit of fiddling around to get the slideshow to look the way I wanted, that is, sit “behind” the top edge of the main content column. The creator of Monoslideshow was very helpful in getting it working and looking right. Right now I’m using my photos from my ‘07 British Columbia trip, from my ride on the Kootenay Bay Ferry. When my bike makeover is done I’ll swap out the BC pictures for fresh bike pictures. Eventually I’d like to use Flickr to manage the photoset since I’m not really doing anything else with my Flickr account; monoslideshow is supposed to have that functionality but I couldn’t get it to work. Something else to troubleshoot, I suppose.
All that remains is to chop it up and make a WordPress theme out of it.
Internet Explorer 6
Okay, I fixed the layout in IE6. I put the IE6-specific changes in a separate stylesheet with conditional comments in the main file. I replaced the maincap graphic (it overlaps the bottom of the slideshow), eliminating the softer drop shadows that overlay the slides and replaced the bulldog with a traditional GIF, since none of the published hacks worked for displaying PNG-24 transparency properly. Probably has to do with the fact that the images are placed in the background of div elements, not as inline images. I also hid the number plate graphic that is located at the bottom of the sidebar; IE6 users just don’t get to see that bit of fluff. I also made the navigation buttons aliased (read: jaggy edges) but I don’t like that solution so it’s back to the drawing board …some other day. The layout breaks down but is readable in Internet Explorer 5.5, gets progressively worse in IE5, and blows up real good in IE4. I don’t really care about anything older than IE6, but I was curious. There are still a couple of weird text formatting issues. Apparently after a blockquote tag, the following paragraphs don’t want to behave with regards to their margins.
All in all I’m pleased with the IE6 fixes.
Waiting for Strike Three
Permalink | November 23, 2007 by John in Dentist, Household
“Whole f***ing world’s against us dude, swear to God.”
I’m not the superstitious type, but I’m starting to wonder if a third strike is waiting in the wings.
Strike 1: Went to the dentist for my semi-annual checkup and cleaning. Good news? The cleaning took about 5 minutes. Bad news? Two of my old fillings have cracked and I have a new cavity. Not sure how all those factors, great hygiene and three cavities, came about at the same time. I guess even when flossing and brushing regularly shit happens.
Strike 2: Last night my furnace died. I woke to a house below 50 degrees. Fenske came over and near as we can tell the fan motor is toast. The thermostat, pilot light, controller, etc. all seem to check out. Naturally this happened on Thanksgiving weekend when not a single HVAC business is open. So I just got back from the rental store with three small electric space heaters.
Strike 3 (speculation): I’m thinking a water pipe might burst due to #2. Just throwing that out there. Or maybe the head gasket will blow in the Golf. Or one of the space heaters will catch on fire. Actually, that’s not a bad thing if I can get me, the dogs and my backup hard drive out safely, and the garage doesn’t catch. I could start from scratch. Hmmm, Maybe I should put that ultra-rare Thunderbird Sport wheel out in the garage, just in case. Of course, if that did happen I’d be screwed now that I’ve mentioned it here.
I have no idea if I’m going to be able to have the fan in the old Lennox (probably 20-22-ish years old–the manual is dated 9/85) replaced for a smallish sum of money, or if I’m going to have to bite the bullet and finance a brand new furnace. If I can do the former it will buy me some time until the Summer when I can tear out the floorboards (water damage from various other problems) and do it all up right.