Looks like the Dean speech conflicts w/ the Steve Jobs keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference. Nooooooooooo!
— Jesse, in the comments at Dean’s Blog for America
(via Tom Negrino)
Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver
The newest book from one of my favorite modern authors, Neal Stephenson, is now available for pre-order at Amazon: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.
In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.
Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.
Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.
Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.
Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.
(via Atrios)
MSNSearch
Looks like Microsoft’s new search engine knows who I am already. Good to know — the more ways there are for people to stumble across my little corner of the ‘net, the happier I am. :)
Dismemberment sells!
Seeing this post of Jeremy’s reminded me of the following photo I took on the way home from Bumbershoot last August.
Hardly my most artistic photo, but then, it wasn’t really meant to be — I just thought the window display was hilarious, in a somewhat disturbing sort of way. Selling handbags, okay. Selling handbags with dismembered arms, though, I’m just not entirely sure about.
UserSpace early beta
Phil was kind enough to include me as part of his beta testing team for UserSpace, his followup blog client to EspressoBlog, so I’ve been posting most of my posts tonight from UserSpace.
First impressions: quite good! For one reason or another, all of the prior standalone applications I’ve used to post to my weblog have had just enough quirks or annoyances to keep me using the standard MT interface most of the time. Phil actually came closest to what I was looking for with EspressoBlog, and it was the prior reigning champion…but UserSpace has it beat hands down.
UserSpace is fast, organizes the various elements and options available for weblog posts well, and handles all the various little goodies that I like to have available (multiple weblog support, primary and extended entry, excerpt, and even keyword fields, multiple category selection, menus for text formatting and comments — any goodie that you have available within the standard MT interface is in UserSpace). I can even set upload directories individually for any uploaded files. Nicely done!
That said, of course, I’ve stumbled across a couple small bugs (though that’s why they call these ‘betas’, right?). None of them deal-breakers, but worth mentioning.
There’s no indication that UserSpace is doing anything when posting an entry or uploading a file. Some small progress bar or spinning flower (or whatever the OS X dingbat for “I’m thinking, leave me alone” is) would be handy, just so we know that something is going on.
For some reason, I can’t upload files (though this may well be something odd on my end, and not within UserSpace). When I try, I get the following error:
XML-RPC Fault
Fault code: 0
Fault message: Application failed during request deserialization: Can’t locate MIME/Base64.pm in [\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} ([\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} contains: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib /System/Library/Perl/darwin /System/Library/Perl /Library/Perl/darwin /Library/Perl /Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl/darwin /Network/Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl .) at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib/XMLRPC/Lite.pm line 278.
I ran into some wierdness with categories that seemed to fix itself. I had a couple posts that originally showed up on my main page without categories assigned, but when I put the next post up, the categories mysteriously appeared.
The last thing I ran into actually amused me. After posting the ‘Dean calls for Bush accountability‘ post, I realized that I’d mucked up the link. Easy to fix, as UserSpace has the ability to edit past posts. I jumped in, fixed the goof, and saved the edited post.
Imagine my surprise when after saving the post, it showed up with the ‘Hunting Wabbits’ text formatting option — suddenly Elmer Fudd had posessed my weblog! ;) Apparently, if you don’t specifically choose a text formatting plugin, UserSpace defaults to the standard ‘Convert Line Breaks’ plugin when first submitting a post. Upon editing a post, however, as there is no text formatting option specifically chosen, it defaults to the first item in the menu — which in my case, let Elmer Fudd run rampant. Again, it was an easy fix (just choose the correct text formatting option, and re-save), but it gave me a good laugh when I saw what had happened.
All in all, though, I’m quite happy with where UserSpace is, even in its ‘early beta’ stage.
Dean calls for Bush accountability
Howard Dean continues to (IMNSHO) kick much butt and take very brave stances in his bid for the ’04 election, today calling for an independent investigation of Bush and the drive to war with Iraq.
“I think the president owes this country an explanation because what the president said was not entirely truthful, and he needs to explain why that was,” Dean said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Dean cited a number of statements made by Bush and other senior administration officials about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the dangers that the regime posed to the United States. The candidate said the claims were made even though officials knew they weren’t true.
“We need a thorough look at what really happened going into Iraq,” Dean said. “It appears to me that what the president did was make a decision to go into Iraq sometime in early 2002, or maybe even late 2001, and then try to get the justification afterward.”
As far as I’m concerned, Dean is exactly who we need in office. Personally, I’d prefer it if he could swear in tomorrow, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?
(via newsguyati, Len, and Matthew)
Ari the rebel
I guess if Ari had to rebel, being a Republican is better than being on drugs, but not by much.
— Alan Fleischer, Ari Fleischer’s father, in The Advocate
(via Tom Tomorrow)
Roe vs. Wade…vs. McCorvey?
Prairie sent me a somewhat distressing link today — it seems that Norma McCorvey, the ‘Roe’ of Roe vs. Wade, has filed a motion to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision.
The former plaintiff known as “Jane Roe” in the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion sought to have the case overturned in a motion filed Tuesday that asks the courts to consider new evidence that abortion hurts women.
Norma McCorvey, who joined the anti-abortion fight nearly 10 years ago and says she regrets her role in Roe v. Wade, said the Supreme Court’s decision is no longer valid because scientific and anecdotal evidence that has come to light in the last 30 years has shown the negative effects of abortion.
“We’re getting our babies back,” a jubilant McCorvey said at a news conference while flanked by about 60 women, some who sobbed and held signs that read “I regret my abortion.'”
Without meaning to belittle Ms. McCorvey in the slightest, I find it sad that such a landmark decision is being challenged by no less of a person than the original defendant. With all due respect, I really hope that this motion doesn’t carry through — I feel that the ability to have option to have safe abortions when necessary is far too important to too many women in too many different circumstances for it to become illegal again.
Congratulations Reed and Kerry!
I just got e-mail that my friends Reed and Kerry just had their first child!
Tienna Vie Judd Dyer was born on June 16th at 11:45pm wieghing 6.5lbs. Kerry is in good health and I will E-mail pics of Tienna as soon as I get them.
Wonderful to hear — congratulations to all three of you!
No help at all
I got this error message from MS Word today:
Of course, the document has multiple tables embedded in it, and Word isn’t kind enough to tell me which table has become corrupted. I guess I’m just supposed to guess?