Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Hooray for people smarter than me! Or, at the very least, more knowledgable of all sorts of javascripty goodness and magic.
A couple days ago, Phillip found my ‘Live Comment Preview‘ and incorporated it into his blog. However, not satisfied with what I had, he improved the code so that it recognizes and inserts linebreaks correctly!
So, I’ve gone and snagged the improvement, and tossed it into the script on my site. Better and better all the time…thanks Phillip!
A couple bad pick-up lines to add to this list:
Do you come here often? Or do you wait until you go home?
Hey baby — wanna go halves on a bastard?
I’m a bit late posting this, as I’ve been battling with a flu/sore throat bug that’s kept me in bed and downing NyQil for most of the weekend, but Friday’s fun was seeing Henry Rollins spoken-word act at the Moore Theatre here in downtown Seattle. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Henry’s music (Black Flag, The Rollins Band, etc.), I became a big fan of his spoken-word performances a few years ago after one of the people hanging around the Pit brought over a videotape of Talking From the Box.
Rollins is an incredibly intelligent man, and does great spoken-word performances — cynical, insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and about ten or twenty other good adjectives. I’d been able to see him once before when he came to Anchorage a couple years back, and as soon as Candice let me know that he was going to be in Seattle, I knew I’d want to go again. As it turned out, Candice picked me up from work and we went, then met up with Chad, Rick, Casey, Liza (Rick’s roommate), Kim, and Kayo, and then we all went out to a bar after the show. The show was great, the after-show party was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, up until I finally had to head home and put my sick self to bed.
I’d had the Rollins spoken word album Think Tank for a while (autographed by The Man, even, after the show in Anchorage), and I highly recommend it. At the show Friday night, there were two new spoken word albums available — Talk is Cheap, Volumes one and two, both of them 2-disc sets, and both of them just ten dollars each! At the moment they’re only available at his shows, too — needless to say, I’ve got them both.
Snippets from a couple articles about Rollins from local papers plugging his show:
“In a way, I think it’s good that major labels have charged so much money for their wares,” he said. “Because it’s going to cave in and there will only be one record company. A new release will just say, ‘FM Music,’ and it will sound like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez put in a Cuisinart with the Korn guitar player, who will be out of a job….”
— Seattle P-I: Henry Rollins likes to keep himself ‘off balance.’
“TO ME,” SAYS Henry Rollins, “the way to really get close to the material is to go at it from almost an insane or an absurdist angle. If you just go for the straight facts, you know, they kind of come up to meet you with a fist in the face. It’s like the idea of us getting into a war with North Korea. I can’t see it happening, but the way for me to internalize it is to envision these old guys running around the war room with hard-ons, looking for some payback for when they had to bail out of Pusan in the ’50s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s thing: ‘Yeah, we can handle two wars! Absolutely two wars! How ’bout fuckin’ three? Come on, you motherfuckers, we’ll start two half-wars over at your house, and we’ll have another one on the White House lawn right now, bitch!'”
— Seattle Weekly: Henry Rollins Brings the Noise
I’m using a fairly heavily adapted version of the Hide/Show Comments hack from Scriptygoddess to hide and show the clickable smileys I’ve added to my site. I simplified the javascript a lot, but in doing so, the ‘hide/show smileys’ links on any post in my blog only work under Internet Explorer, and fail in various ways in any other browser (Netscape/Mozilla/Chimera don’t seem to be recognizing the javascript, and just reload the page, and Safari (and therefore probably also Konqueror, since they both use the kHTML rendering engine) doesn’t even display the links!).
Could anyone possibly give me some help on getting these to at least work under both IE and Netscape/Mozilla/Chimera, if not Safari also? I don’t know enough about javascript to know how to fix this!
(This plea has also been posted on the MovableType support forum.)
Hot damn. Just when I thought that the media was fairly useless, pointless, and completely under the Governmental thumb, along comes something like this transcript from a press breifing with Ari Fleischer:
MR. FLEISCHER: Good afternoon and happy New Year to everybody. The President began his day with an intelligence briefing, followed by an FBI briefing. Then he had a series of policy briefings. And this afternoon, the President will look forward to a Cabinet meeting where the President will discuss with members of his Cabinet his agenda for the year. The President is going to focus on economic growth, making America a more compassionate country, and providing for the security of our nation abroad and on the homefront.
And with that, I’m more than happy to take your questions. Helen.
Q: At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.
MR. FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.
Q: My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and our allies and friends —
Q: They’re not attacking you.
MR. FLEISCHER: — from a country —
Q: Have they laid the glove on you or on the United States, the Iraqis, in 11 years?
MR. FLEISCHER: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression then.
Q: Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I think you know very well that the President’s position is that he wants to avert war, and that the President has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with the purpose of averting war.
Q: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?
MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.
Q: And he thinks they are a threat to us?
MR. FLEISCHER: There is no question that the President thinks that Iraq is a threat to the United States.
Q: The Iraqi people?
MR. FLEISCHER: The Iraqi people are represented by their government. If there was regime change, the Iraqi —
Q: So they will be vulnerable?
MR. FLEISCHER: Actually, the President has made it very clear that he has not dispute with the people of Iraq. That’s why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq —
Q: That’s a decision for them to make, isn’t it? It’s their country.
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don’t think that has been what history has shown.
Q: I think many countries don’t have — people don’t have the decision — including us.
I have no idea who “Helen” is, but I’d dearly love to. She’s got more cojones than most people I know, that’s for sure.
(Via Megnut)
The category (or, in many cases, categories) that each post on my blog is assigned to is (are) now listed in each individual post, just underneath the time/datestamp at the end of the post. Might make finding older and/or related posts a bit easier than it was before. I’ve also added a lot of categories in order to even further (over-)organize my posts — new posts will get these added at creation, older posts will just have to live without until I get them all assigned.
Someday, I would dearly love to hear Garth Brooks’ ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down ’til the Sun Comes Up’ as covered by Ministry. Possibly with Les Claypool of Primus doing the vocals. I can hear it in my head — I just wish I could hear it with my ears.
A few days back, Phil asked what we’d like to see in a web browser. I initially responded in my usual semi-flippant fashion, but after running it through my head for a couple days, I’ve actually got some ideas.
To start with, I’ll look at web browsers as divided into two core components, as outlined by John Gruber on Daring Fireball:
It is essential to understand that there are two huge, almost completely separate tasks involved in producing a web browser. The first is the HTML rendering engine — the part of the browser that parses HTML and turns it into an on-screen graphical representation. The second is the browser application: the windows, menus, buttons, and dialog boxes.
I’ll start with the second part — the application itself. The things I’m most interested here are scattered across multiple browsers at the moment, and I do end up wishing that they were all in one package. Key things I’d like to have in my ‘ultimate browser’:
When looking at the other side of the browser experience, I was kind of inspired by Jason Kottke’s browser integration musings and Mark Pilgrim’s wondering if Safari should be intentionally buggy (and for the record, no, I don’t believe it should, but that’s another post for another time).
Dreaming about the perfect UI for a browser is all well and good, but we’re still faced with the dilemma of which rendering engine to use. Each of the major engines out there (IE Mac, IE PC, kHTML [Safari, Konqueror], Gecko [Chimera, Mozilla, Netscape], Opera and OmniWeb] has its own collection of bugs to be worked around, causing frustration for both web designers trying to design sites that look equivalent under all browsers, and for end users who, depending on their level of expertise, may or may not understand why any given site doesn’t seem to work in whatever browser they use.
So, what I’d kind of like to see, would be a plug-in based interface for the rendering engine, easily changed via a menu choice somewhere. Find a way to wrap the latest build of any given rendering engine in a small piece of plug-in code, and drop it in an “engines” folder for the browser app. The app would come with one default engine (and as long as I’m living in a perfect fantasy world, let’s make that engine an as-yet mythical completely strict standards-based engine), but at any given point, you could go to a menu and switch to another rendering engine, which would then re-render the current page (or all pages — let’s add a preference option to select whether rendering engines would apply on a global basis or window-by-window) with whatever engine was chosen, which might be less strictly accurate, but might be more compatible with whatever mess of code the user is currently attempting to view.
I have no idea how feasible something like this might be, and I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but hey, I like the idea. Of course, in a perfect world, I’d much rather see standards-compliant websites that worked in standards-compliant, bug-free browsers, but I don’t expect that’ll be happening anytime soon. I can dream, though….
Being silly here. ;) Feel like harassing me about what I listen to? Here’s the place to do it….
The last ten tracks I’ve listened to in iTunes are:
This feature is no longer active, as a consequence of the move to TypePad. Sorry!
Feel free to use the comment form to praise or condemn me — or if you’re feeling rich and/or adventuresome, use the links to Amazon and pick up something new to listen to!
(This is inspired by the playlist comment feature on Phil Ringnalda’s site.)