Rearranging a bit

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I’ve done a bit of reorganizing to the sidebar, in an effort to group things together a bit more logically, and move sections that are more likely to be used closer to the top (above the ‘fold’, ‘Above the fold’ is a carryover from newspaper publishing. In print terms, it just means that the most important items should be on the top half of the page, so that they are seen when the paper is folded and lying face up. It’s the same concept on the web, only the ‘fold’ in this case is considered to be the bottom border of the visible area when the page first loads at a standard resolution (usually 800px by 600px).so to speak).

I decided to start off with the more ‘interactive’ elements — ‘Music of the moment’ and the most recent comments. While ‘MotM’ isn’t really interactive, the voyeuristic aspect to it has some of the same feel (at least, that’s my justification for keeping it towards the top).

After that we have the search form and the archives list, as they’re both related to finding older information, or information elsewhere on the site. The search form is one of those things that’s commonly ‘supposed to be’ above the fold, anyway, so this helps. Also, I’ve taken the calendar display off of the archive list. I’d debated its usefullness before, but finally made up my mind to remove it after reading Jonathan’s reasons for removing the calendar on his site (which I stumbled onto thanks to Burningbird).

Next come all the various links to other places to go, the Amazon voluntary paybox (which would be just as useful if I put it on an entirely seperate page with some horridly dry, academic-sounding title not likely to interest anyone, named the file something else entirely [and misspelled it to boot], and then didn’t post any links to it anywhere — but that’s another matter alltogether), the syndication link (almost as useless as the Amazon box, except that I occasionally use it for testing purposes), and the linkback to MovableType.

And, that’s about it for now. Woohoo?

40.5 days

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Over the past few months, I’ve been working on converting every audio CD I own to .mp3 format on my computer. I just got done tonight — and the results are kinda frightening, in a very cool sort of way.

Here’s the final tally:

  • 1,147 CDs imported
  • 2,911 artists
  • 12,509 individual .mp3 files
  • 40.5 days of music
  • 67.14 GB of storage space used

40.5 days. It would take me over a month to listen to everything I have, listening 24 hours a day. Just crazy.

But very, very cool.

If anyone’s bored/morbidly curious enough, feel free to download my .mp3 list (586.6kb .zip’d .xls file).

I like being a music whore. :D

Why can’t Bush speak?

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Mark Miller comments on Bush’s recent “Fool me once…” flub:

Bush actually believes that he can do no wrong. This fixed conviction of his own infallibility has come out often, in remarks not laughably sub-literate or confused. He’s boasted that he knows what he believes, and that he never changes his position, or his mind, and that he sees the world in black and white, and so on. He’s made it clear repeatedly: George W. Bush is always right, George W. Bush can do no wrong. And now he’s accidentally made the point again, by showing himself incapable — psychologically, and therefore physically — of saying “Shame on me.”

Without really knowing anything about Mr. Miller’s credentials, I’m tempted to chalk this little bit of armchair psychoanalysis up to being just another off-the-wall theory by someone unimpressed with Bush. However, it does make me wonder if this really could be the case? It seems a bit far-fetched for me to jump into believing right off the bat, but it doesn’t seem to be an unthinkable premise. A fairly frightening premise, also, especially for the President of our country, and moreso given the current state of the world. It’s worth thinking about, at least.

Also, ‘Quiddity Quack’ posits this theory:

While plenty of folks chuckle at the Presidents verbal stumbling, we think that it’s more serious. It appears that Bush’s inability to handle complex thoughts may have led him over time to forsake rationalistic approaches, and instead, make decisions based on his feelings. This may explain why he disdains nuance (as he’s said), and why he has simple solutions for everything. E.g.

  • Tax cuts always help.
  • Good people will make any controversial program (like drilling in ANWR) come out all right.
  • American military power is benevolent. (Again, Americans are “good people”).
  • Evil is the reason for misfortunes.
  • …and so on…

I’ve got to admit, this theory sounds a bit more sound to me than a psychological disorder so severe that Bush physically cannot utter any self-deprecating remark, no matter the context. Now, neither of them are qualities that I’d really like my President to have, but, in a ‘lesser of two evils’ situation, I’ll take the latter over the former.

If I had my druthers, though, I’d like a third option.

Found via Anger Management Course

‘Up-skirt’ photography ‘reprehensible’ but legal

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Well, here’s something handy just in case I decide to take my photography in a new direction — in public areas, peeking up skirts is completely legal.

The state’s voyeurism law protects people who are in a place where they “would have a reasonable expectation of privacy” — meaning the person could expect to be able to undress in seclusion or “be safe from hostile intrusion or surveillance.”

But the court found the law doesn’t apply to filming people in a public place, even if it’s underneath their clothes.

“It is the physical location of the person that is ultimately at issue, not the part of the person’s body,” Judge Bobbe Bridge wrote.

Laws are funny things, sometimes, both with what they cover and what they don’t.

Reviewed!

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Last week I stumbled across Bloggy Opinions a blog review website. It seemed fairly entertaining, and the reviewers seemed to do a good even job of reviewing the sites they visited, so I went ahead and submitted ‘The Long Letter’ to them.

Bloggy OpinionsI got my review back today — and whaddaya know, not only was it good, it was really good! The review is posted on their site, but as there currently seems to be a slight HTML glitch that’s rendering my review invisible, I’m taking the liberty of copying it here.

DJWUDI — The Long Letter

Now here’s a blog I loved. It was excellent! It’s filled with multiple daily entries to keep you entertained, as well as a plethora of archived entries, features, and links that kept this reviewer busy for many hours. It generally amusing too, and though I’m sure a lot of work goes into the site, it appears effortless.

It’s the little things that make this site a gem in the drudge that can be the Internet. In the top right of your screen is an embedded applet that displays the mp3 that the author is currently listening too. It gets updated in real time and is the coolest thing I’ve even seen on a personal website! Unfortunately the version he uses is for the Macintosh operating system, so I won’t get to test it out on my blog. Another interesting feature is that he has implemented a help box on some of the more technical terms. Move your mouse over ‘Mbps’ and up pops a box displaying the full name ‘Megabytes per second’.

The layout is minimalistically beautiful. You’re not bombarded with a messy design; he takes a more newspaper, monochrome type layout. The text is the right size to read, and the font is easy on the eyes.

I can’t say enough about this blog. The author definitely deserves kudos. The only complaint I have is that he doesn’t seem to get that many readers, so the comment section is mostly empty.

Many thanks for such a glowing review!

Read more

Yikes

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I think I just heard gunshots. Eight, very quick, all together, no pauses. Creepy.

[2:30] Called the police, they’re going to check out the immediate area.

[2:33] Nice response time — there’s two police cars looking around now.

[2:55] Haven’t heard anything else, nor have the police felt the need to get back in touch with me for any reason. I’m going to assume that all’s well — or at least well enough that I don’t need to actively keep an ear cocked.

Hooray for living downtown! ;)

The Turing Test is in no danger

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Just some fun wordplay, from this MeFi thread dealing with AI, language, and other such goodies.
Some English sentences likely to trip up any AI program attempting to understand them:

  • We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry.
    We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were ripe.

    How do you determine what object ‘they’ refers to in each sentence?

  • It’s hard to recognize speech.
    It’s hard to wreck a nice beach.

    Say these two aloud.

  • Visiting relatives can be boring.

    One sentence, two ways to understand it.

  • We saw her duck.

    Three meanings (the least obvious involves a serrated blade).

  • Time flies like an arrow.
    Fruit flies like a banana.

    With thanks to Groucho Marx, I believe.

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers

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Interesting timing on this one. My friend Prairie is working on getting her teachers degree, and teaches English classes at her college. She stopped by for a few hours last weekend on her way through Seattle, and we ended up chatting for a bit on just how often students seem to have, at best, a very questionable grasp of the English language.

One of the things that drove this home for me within the past few years was corresponding with a friend of mine who I know is quite intelligent, knows how to express herself quite well, and generally is quite handy at doing so. However, all these strengths are almost entirely verbal — when it comes to the written word, reading e-mail from her was like corresponding with a different person. Little use of capitalization or punctuation (and what there was was often used incorrectly), poorly constructed sentences…the works. Eventually I had to break down and ask her about it, and she attributed it in large part to how she was taught in school. Apparently, teaching basic things like grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all the building blocks of the English language had fallen by the wayside, usually being replaced with an admonition from the teacher to be sure to use the grammar check and spell check on the computer.

Quite frankly, I was pretty floored by this. Admittedly, much of my command of the language (which, though it may be somewhat egotistical, I like to think is fairly decent [though I do tend to over-use parenthetical remarks {like this} too much]) was greatly influenced by having two parents with a love of the language, but even without their assistance, I know that proper writing was still being taught when I was in school. Is this just not deemed worth paying attention to anymore? Or are teachers just getting lazy? Either way, it’s a fairly disturbing development.

What started all this rambling, though was an article in the New York Times about how today’s teachers are coping with students using online abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons in their writing.

Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”

As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today’s students are “Generation Text.”

On the one hand, suddenly typing — and writing in general — is ‘in vogue’ again among kids, due to the explosion of the ‘net and its associate technologies, such as IM programs like Yahoo! Messenger, chatrooms, and weblogs. However, if teachers aren’t able to help train these kids in the differences between the online slang and the correct usage, today’s students may very well be in for a world of hurt later in life, when they’re asked to write something more formal than a quick IM note to set up a date or pass gossip along. The teachers in this story sound like they’re all at least making some effort to make sure they’re actually instructing their students well — it’s the other teachers, those who ‘teach’ their classes to rely on all-too-inaccurate grammar- and spell-check software, that really worry me.

“Kids should know the difference,” said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. “They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing.”

Found via MeFi