PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

October 18 2002

Subliminal

Look what I got at Borders today: the 2003 Day Calendar of Presidential (Mis)Speak.

I cannot wait for next year.

7 editorials

October 14 2002

What being a public servant means to me

So thanks to my cushy government job, I have Columbus Day off. And what am I doing with it? Funny you should ask. I’m completely ignoring the awesome weather outside and surfing this interminable sink hole we affectionately call, “the web”, gagging at the suckage that is my alma mater’s home page. Could overzealous lab monkeys, the second grade students at PS 135, or George W. Bush have designed a better page than the heap of crap that is clogging my bandwidth? Yes, yes, and — well lets not get too carried away. That collage in the top right hand corner of WSH, Ezra Cornell, a hockey helmet, the clock tower, a violin, and two matress pads says to me, sampled full chateau underpowered comfort coil sonata?

One lonely comment

October 10 2002

What integrity?

In a gross failure of basic editorial review, the Daily Evergreen published a story with a headline that translated to “The Big Ass Spanish Boat.” It was supposed to read, “Our Lady of Good Hope”, but the writer got the translation off of some web page and figured it was correct, thus paving the way for the best print retraction, ever. Of course, the inside story was that the author, Kim Na, was like totally stoned when she was brainstorming about a topic for her first assignment and thought it would be “so far out rad” if she could somehow put the words big spanish ass boat into the headline and get it approved before her editor came down from his ecstacy high and stopped fondling the AP newswire machine.

One lonely comment

October 9 2002

Hotness

I have a really hot body. It’s not that I’m extraordinarily active all the time, but the amount of heat that I produce sometimes leads me to believe that I could be classified as some kind of thermonuclear device and put on active duty. I get very hot walking to work in the morning, even when wearing short sleeves while others (obviously native Californians) don the latest wool peacoat regalia from J. Crew. Oh, and don’t get me started on people who use their fireplaces when it hits 50 degrees (totally uncalled for.)

I get hot standing at a CD station in Virgin Megastore, reading magazines in Borders, and lying perfectly still while trying to fall alseep. If I were one of those space heaters that they sell in Brookstone, I’d be the one that looks completely innocuous but can put out 43,000 BTU with a built-in clock that runs off of the atomic clock in Colorado.

5 editorials

October 8 2002

Childish

“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” If you can finish that lyric, you’re my hero.

I came home today to find my apartment squeaky clean and my bed made, which, insignificant in the high holy grand scheme of Life, is still an amazingly comforting feeling after coming home from a jam-packed day of meetings. I now look forward to messing it all up again.

4 editorials

October 7 2002

Sex and the City of Whiners

The whining and nagging of women — traditionally limited to one-on-one situations — has now reached global broadcast proportions. Pickupyourowndamnsocks.com has empowered wives and girlfriends to join forces and extend the cacaphony of bitching into the online world, thus obliterating the last refuge for men from verbal abuse. The best part is the subsequent analysis and dissection in the comments and at Metafilter, where two basic opinions are expressed: women defend the site and support the wholesale dismissal of males; guys defend the accused and surmise that the female posters need to get a life/need to shut up. It’s like Jerry Springer but with unlimited global guests!

3 editorials

October 6 2002

Accept No Imitations

They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery — so I’m quite flattered today. Aprism.com, some kind of company hawking solar-powered solutions, has completely ripped off my review of the Che-ez! camera. The plagarist basically edited the copy and inserted their own opinionated commentary amongst my technical review, and wherever I used the word “I”, they substituted some passive voice pronoun. They still link all the sample images back to my server, so I decided to implement a little security by blocking image requests from external pages. Now when you click on the sample images on Aprism’s page, you get this image instead.

In the words of my friend Nancy, “tee-hee!”

Do you feel lucky?

October 6 2002

New and Improved

I’ve gone back to my minimalist ways, and redesigned my pages again. Let me know what you think, and any suggestions you may have. If you are browsing this website using screen readers or handheld devices, I would greatly value your feedback.

In redesigning, I was tempted many times to revert to using tables for layout but I persevered and took the high road with CSS-P instead. Therefore, this document properly separates content and presentation (do a Print Preview to see the effect.) I managed to find a bug with Mozilla while writing my floating comment window, where specifying an XHTML doctype caused Mozilla to stop registering the scrollTop property (some related discussion at ppk). Consequently, the fancy floating comment window only works in IE. Whatever — 80–20 rule works for me.

8 editorials