Year: 2007

Categories
Writing

Short takes

The editing process can be fraught with possibilities for humor, especially when looking at typos. In one example, the text of the sample web site talked about “Poor the margarita into a glass”, leading to expressions of sympathy from my editors. My favorite so far, though, is “Transversing collections of data..” instead of “Traversing collections of data…”.

Alternate lifestyle code, indeed.

I’d already found the occurrence of “can’t” misspelled with a ‘u’ before sending it off for editing. Good thing, too, as editors never let you forget slips like this. Ever.

Speaking of geekery, OpenID is now the new cat’s jammies. For those new to this darling, all you really need is a bit of open source software and a URI, and it magically opens doors for you everywhere. I had an OpenID URI once but found it too blasè. I know what I really want, but unfortunately, iamgod.com, is already taken.

Categories
Critters

iCephalopod V

More cephaloporn thanks to Mr. Moult, who is also the happy owner of the einsteinslock.com domain.

The site linked has some wonderful, though short, videos of Taningia danae, eight armed squid, captured recently by Tsunemi Kubodera. They demonstrate how amazingly quick and aggressive squid can be. When you consider how big the colossal was that was recently recovered, 39 feet long, almost 12 meters, makes you think twice about going for a dip, eh?

At least I didn’t invoke Gorton’s Law and equate colossal with tire sized calamari:

In the tradition of Internet adages, I’d like to add another. In any discussion of sea life, no matter how rare, strange or disgusting, some knucklehead will always ask how well it goes with lemon or butter. I am calling this Gorton’s Law.

In case you haven’t been around, like, forever, I wrote a four part story on giant squid, Nessie, legends, and cryptozoology back in 1997, which is when I started developing a fascination of all things in our Other World. In celebration of its ten year anniversary, a link to the first part, A Tale of Two Monsters: Legends.

I wonder if I’ll get my annual nasty email from Jan?

Categories
Weblogging

Links Feb 27

What an absolutely beautiful fish.

From Galactic Interactions: Gravity as the curvature of spacetime— it’s such a simple, elegant, beautiful concept that it almost pains me to think that efforts to unify gravity with quantum mechanics may result in our learning that General Relativity is just the effective limit of a deeper theory (much as Newton’s gravity is an effective limit of GR).

(I hope to actually finish my copy of Kip Thorne’s “Gravitation” before I die. I may have to live a long time.)

The Head Lemur’s Ning–the Latest Sharecropping Network, Part 1 and Part 2. Zing!

Via 3Quarks Daily, Marvin Minsky writes on Love. As always, a unique perspective from one of the premier AI scientists.

RDF and microformats rumble: post here, then comment, with follow up and referee. Why does all technology have to break along adversarial lines in weblogging? Probably needs more women.

Speaking of…Dori Smith: This is about claims that I “simply don’t exist.” This is about claims Shelley doesn’t exist. This is about claims that people like Molly don’t exist — ’cause nobody, but nobody could know that we exist, talk to any of us for five minutes, and still say that. Being as we three are the shy and retiring type.

Oop! Oop! No more of that. This year’s Diversity Steeple Chase and companion, Wondering where are the broads is over. Stay tuned, next year: same time, different channel.

via onegoodmove, Why I refuse to blog for Edwards: “So, it’s not a problem that I’m an outspoken atheist?” I asked.

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday. Let’s spend more time on congressional resolutions on Iraq that don’t do anything–and more billions in Iraq so kids like Deamonte can die.

It’s spring in California. Speaking of which, we’re expecting our first spring storm tonight or tomorrow, if it doesn’t float north of us.

Bill has loaded his first spring photo.

Come midnight, it will surely sound like spring.

To all my fellow Missourians: Be safe.

Categories
Burningbird

Moved

You can never keep an old bird down…

The mass weblog integration has been made, but not without a lot of problems. Most of the category associations were lost, and since I used categories as part of the permalinks, posts will end up with a new permalink that doesn’t map to the old. The only way to fix this will be to manually edit the posts.

WordPress also sets up the .htaccess file in such a way that if a subdirectory is protected with .htaccess authentication, such as my Adding Ajax review directory, it intercedes and wants to fulfill the request. In the .htaccess file, two conditions check to see if the object being accessed exists as a file or a directory. If it does, the request is passed through; if it doesn’t WordPress assumes it’s one of its pages.

However, an authentication request is neither a file nor a directory, and these ended up triggering WP processing.

I found that several other people had this problem, but I’m using workaround which seems to work well. Once the book review is over, I won’t have a password protected subdirectory and can get rid of it.

The site design: simple. My main interest was reducing the amount of white in the text area, providing a site that could display photos, and I wanted to incorporate Hubble images. The banner has a changing Hubble image, which of course you have to click through to see if you’re reading this in a syndication feed.

Speaking of which, these are all redirected, and should show up in your aggregators.

This is brand new, and I only have so much time with the work on the book. Please be patient while I work through the kinks, but do let me if there’s a problem.

Categories
Diversity

Last words

I don’t have anything further to add to the discussion about women and whatever. The same old same old happens.

I’ve listened to men who are in the loop who look around and say, “There’s no problem.”

I’ve heard other men say there is a problem, and what are ‘they’, the men, going to do to fix it.

We’ve gone through another round of again listing out women who can speak/do tech/write and so on.

It’s more or less the same list that is always published.

It’s more or less made up of women who live in Silicon Valley.

I’ve heard how the only reason why women bring this up is that we somehow want to have an ‘easy’ in to things, and if we only worked as hard, we wouldn’t have problems.

That it’s all choice, and women aren’t interested in the web, internet, technology, design.

Well, I guess my career is shot.

I’ve heard ‘positive discrimination’ mentioned too many times to count.

I’ve heard eloquent arguments, many put forward by men. More arguments by men, but then there could have been as many arguments by women and I just couldn’t find them.

I watched as men formed the core of this discussion, while the women, like so many little moons, circled in desperate orbit.

I wonder at men who won’t work for change, unless it somehow benefits themselves.

But then, I wonder the same about the women.

I’m more disappointed in what the women have said, or not said, than anything written by the men.