April 2003 Archives

Look closely. Yes, that's a hand in his hand. With one finger extended. Comments?

Those wacky Asian people. What'll they think of next?

So. It's been a few days since I posted. Life's been kind of hectic. I'm moving into my first ever apartment within a week, and the preparation has left me with little time to do much else.

A quick summary for tonight. pottymouth has been cleaned up a little to get it back on track. Feel free to contribute.

Andy has a new post up. I absolutely enjoy reading his work.

The Celtics are a game away from going to the second round of the NBA playoffs. It feels almost like the Patriots, with the whole "they'll never make it" vibe in the air. We want them to, though. The green Celtics towels are out, the radio is abuzz with "Like the *old* Celtics" quotes, and Paul Pierce looks like he's feeling pretty damn good. Some people may think professional basketball isn't worth their time, but I'm enjoying it...

Zeldman: Unsyndicate

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

Zeldman, always on top of things, on why he hasn't set up an RSS feed yet. As always, an excellent piece that provides a counter argument to the "Syndicate your site or die trying group".

I don't use an aggregator, but I do provide an RSS feed of excerpts for my entries. Unlike Mark, though, I let the system take care of creating the excerpt as opposed to doing it myself, making it not as useful as it could be. I've been asked to create a full-post feed, but I'm still not interested in doing that. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that RSS has gotten to the point where it's so easy to find a good template or decent examples that even people just getting started have the option to choose whether or not they want to syndicate. The tools available are giving people more opportunities than they've had before. That's the important thing.

algorhythm/Patriot Act defiance on the rise
Arcata, California has passed an oridnance outlawing voluntary compliance with the Patriot Act. Excellent.

There's a man who more often then not takes the train at the same time as I do. He's the kind of man your mother would tell you not to stare at when you were litte.

"Stop that. It's not polite to stare."

The man is short, between 4' 5" and five feet. On his face are lots of different sized bumps.

The problem is that everytime I see him, I look away as if to say "I'm not staring at you. Seriously, look at me, my gaze didn't even hesitate, nevermind linger. Hell, I don't even know you're there. In that seat. Right across from me."

To me, this seems almost worse than staring. In my attempt to make him feel ok, like he's just like everyone else, I alienate him. It would be easy to interpret my actions in the wrong way; it would be very easy to think that I thought he was so "ugly" and such a "freak" that I couldn't even look at him for a second.

What's the point of all this? Life is always more complicated than it seems. You may think you've found the answer, but if you look a little closer, you kight find that things aren't quite what they seemed, and your answer isn't as good as you thought it was. Man. I hate when that happens.

I noticed something interesting today at Sam's site... He trackback's posts on his own blog.

I'm sure that's not what's really happening, as most of the technical side of Sam's site is way over my head. He's probably just merged categories and trackbacking in some fashion, so as to create a web of posts. By viewing on post and it's comments, you can find other similar posts that he's written that relate. It never occured to me that it might be worthwhile to trackback other posts on my own site... Hmm...

I've added a new sidebar item: a CD section. The idea came from what Jonathan over at motorskills is doing. He's definitely doing it a lot better, as well as more completely, but this is a start.

Ok. I admit it. I finished reading Tolkien's Silmarillion weeks ago. In the meantime I've cruised through The Belgariad series (five books) by David Eddings and am halfway through the final book of his Mallorean series (five books as well). Curse me and my book review writing procrastination.

If you're a Tolkien fan, the Silmarillion is amazing. Don't get me wrong, it's tough to read and tough to get through. Definitely worth the effort though.

Why's it so hard? Written using what is most easily described as Old English or Shakespearean, the style and tone are difficult to get a grip on. It's heavy and dense. For those familiar with LOTR, it's a far cry from the easy readability those books had. There are many characters with similar names, and many characters with more than one name. I found myself frequently flipping to the name index in the back of the book (which completely ruled) to figure out who we were talking about.

Even though it's a little tough to read, the stories are amazing. Epic and heartbreaking, Tolkien pulled no punches. Face it: in life, sometimes we get screwed. In Middle Earth, it wasn't sometimes. People got screwed almost all the time.

And that's part of what makes it so great. The hardships and difficulties, losses and tragedy that plague the different races in the Silmarillion set the scene for the incredible triumph we see in LOTR.

The Silmarillion is written and edited with the same care and attention to detail that went into the other books. The stories are enthralling and addictive. This is definitely one book I plan to read again, well worth the effort and the time.

I've been playing The Legend of Zelda, Wind Waker for a few weeks now. To be honest with you, the only reason I even invested in a Game Cube was for this game. I've been a fan of Nintendo's Zelda from day one.

Produced by Shigeru Miyamoto (who directed the original Zelda titles as well as numerous other Nintendo classics including the Mario Brothers games), this game had a lot of potential. The first Zelda title to be released on the Game Cube, it had the ability to follow in the footsteps of Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask, introducing us to the most realistic Link of all created with new and better hardware. Instead, though, a new Link was created, a cartoon Link.

Much has been said about the schism this created among hardcore Zelda fans. Some thought the new look was absurd, others loved it. It gave the game's designers room for much more creativity and expression, though. When Link gets startled and his eyes bug out, or an enemy gets wacked from behind and runs around holding his butt, you begin to understand the benefits of this type of animation. As I've been playing through, though, I can't help but feel like I'm playing a Flash movie.

And that's it: Wind Waker feels like a Flash movie. Clean vector looking graphics and beautiful shading give the world a brilliant and exciting feel. Subtle visual effects like the rolling ocean and blurring of items and characters farther out in Link's field of view are hard to get used to at first, but make the game feel more realistic, even as the cartoonishness of it makes it easier to immerse yourself in.

The only drawback I've found so far is the lack of recorded dialog between characters and strangeness in character interaction. With digital audio and DVD based storage, you would think that dialog could be read and acted out and character's movie sequences would be more fluent and smooth, but that's not the case. In one section, Link is talking to two other characters, one who apologizes for causing him so many problems. In the blink of an eye, his face goes from showing no emotion to having a huge smile that disappears in an instant. It's easy enough to interpret this as Link emphasizing that it's no big deal and all is forgiven, but it feels like bang, bang, bang, and he turns and walks away. Those are the things that snap you back out of Hyrule and make you realize it's still only a game.

I'm not sure how far into the game I am, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. Worth the wait and the time it takes to play, Wind Waker is a great next step in the Zelda series, even though there's still room for improvement. As far as I'm concerned, if this is where games are headed, at least we're going in the right direction. Artistic and rich, exploring Hyrule is a great way to relax and unwind.

One of my more memorable moments in Providence: we (my sisters and I) were with my dad, travelling back to his apartment when we stopped at a light. On the corner was an amputee in a wheel chair. As we waited for the light to change, he dropped his unit out one of the empty legs of his shorts and peed on the corner. As I pointed and my sisters innocently looked out the windows, the light went green and my dad sped away.

Last Friday my cube neighbor and I went for a walk to get something for lunch. Passing a man screaming out loud about nothing at all, I launched into a tirade about the crazy people in Boston. The day before, a woman had been standing on the train in front of a seated man who was sleeping. I'd seen this man once before, and that time he was laughing out loud for no reason, stopping periodically to glare at passengers. This wasn't a little "remember that funny joke" giggle, it was a full, all out hysterical, "I'm going to eat your children" type laugh. The kind of sound that made the woman sitting near him move her child further away.

So the lady is standing in front of this guy who I know is a psycho, and she must have accidentally bumped his foot. At this point he opened his eyes, lifted his head and screamed at her, "Move Over!"
And she did. Quickly.

He put his head back down and went back to sleep.

Nearing his stop, he awoke again, stretched and let out this ear splitting roar after yawning. If you weren't already convinced, the guy is a nut.

Back to Friday. I'm yelling about all the wackos and my cube neighbor says "Maybe they're just on the T", to which I reply "No way man, they're everywhere. Look around you, Boston is filled with crazy people". As I'm saying this, there's a woman walking towards us on his side of the sidewalk. No sooner do the words leave my mouth and the lady tips her head to the side, leans towards us and launches this huge snot rocket from her nose. We're talking stuff hanging and she's wiping at it. Cube Neighbor and I jump away, I laugh in her face, he wipes his coat trying to make sure nothing got on him, and she continues swatting at the gunk hanging from her face.

I laughed for the next ten minutes before I could get myself under control. You have to watch out; you never know what's going to happen on the streets of the big city.

I've been watching American Idol... Or listening, at least. For instance, last night I turned on my TV and listened to the perfomances while I made lunch, etc. It was ok, but not thrilling. Last season, I happened to hear Kelly Clarkson and I was hooked. This season no performance has grabbed me the same way.

Speaking of Miss Clarkson, in case you missed it she sang her new single tonight. Thanks to Dave I found out today that Christina helped write the song. After listening to it, that fact was obvious.

Kelly started off a little shaky, but when she got into the heavy stuff, her voice took over and she sounded like she did at the end of last season's competition. When she was done, I realized I had that same stupid smile on my face, the one I never noticed until she had finished. She still sounds great, and I'm looking forward to hearing what else they did with her on her new CD. So far, they taught her to dance, taught her to wear tight fitting clothes that lift her boobs and make them jiggle. I guess that's what it takes to make an American Idol these days. Ah well... In any case, I'm looking forward to hearing her new disc.

I've been reading Erik Benson's site for a few weeks now, and I'm hooked. The guy is a geek's geek. His latest post about queue theory as well as the post before it about FOAF and the hypothetical perfect architecture of software are both quite interesting. I'm fascinated by algorithm theory, so learning more about algorithms I'm already familiar with is always interesting. As for his post about FOAF, every geek dreams of perfect software. In this case, Erik goes a step further and maps out a specific application, and one that would be very intersting to see in motion. It fits in with the idea of a personal proxy, in that it automates some tasks and aids you with others while remaining unobtrusive and easy to use. If you ask me, there's not enough of those kind of applications in the world...

According to this article from the Telegraph, researchers at Harvard are soon to publish findings of a study that shows that global warming may be part of the world's natural order of things.

Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.

Duh. I'm not saying that humans haven't caused some problems on the old ball of rock we call home, but I also don't think it's all our fault. We need to be careful and we need to protect forests and other natural resources, but we don't need to run around screaming that the east and west coasts are going to slide into the ocean. I mean really... At the rate we're going, we'll die in a nuclear war long before we cause our atmosphere to blow away...

I know I've been away a lot lately, and I promised myself none of these "I'm sorry I haven't posted" posts, but I wanted to let you know to stay tuned.

I have a couple things up my sleeve for this weekend and next week. A new T story, a new web app, and a new tutorial are all in the cards. I also want to test out the pre-dated/post-dated options for articles to see if I can post a lot on the weekend like usual, but have it trickle out over the upcoming week. This will help keep fresh content up when I don't have time to write it.

Stay tuned

Baseball season has started, and in true Red Sox style, we lost our opening game to Tampa Bay and proceeded to struggle through our second game, barely squeaking out with a win in the sixteenth inning. Again, true to our history, we got a new General Manager (the youngest in MLB history), a great statistician, a whole new outlook on things, got our hopes up, and bam: take a loss to what is supposed to be one of the worst teams in the league. Then, Jeter separates his shoulder! I mean, we're Red Sox fans! What are we supposed to do? Send him a get well card? And so we seal our fate, sending not only ourselves, but our team straight to hell by secretly cheering the Yankees' loss. Someone out there, maybe even The Babe himself hates us, and he's setting us up to not only be bad, but to have bad karma. Sheesh... Well, the Patriots did it once, maybe we should start looking forward to football season again... Not like the Bruins or the Celtics are going to help us out any...

In other news, more and more cool people have been visiting my site. I've quietly been adding them to my bookmarks (yeah, I'm old fashioned... no blogroll, just bookmarks). Look for me to share some links soon.

I've been working on some other projects. Hopefully I'll be able to share some more info soon, but that's based on whether or not I get any more work done on them. In any case, here's a tip: DO NOT ever forget the style rule clear:both/left/right. It is your friend. Love it, use it, and keep it with you always. Twice now it has solved sticky problems I couldn't figure out.

Yesterday was April 1st, otherwise known as April Fool's Day. Needless to say, I got had. My buddy Dave and my host Ron convinced me that something I had done to the server was causing it to crash and that my account was going to have to be suspended until we figured it out. They had me going for about ten or fifteen minutes. Dave finally told me. To make it worse, on my way home the local radio station announced that the Famed Buddy Cianci, Providence's former and currently incarcerated mayor had been parolled. I believed them too... They had this "interview" with him that was made with bits from old tapes. They announced the story a few days earlier to set it up. Man. What bastards...

Mozilla Development Roadmap
It's been a while since I've posted about Mozilla. However, I haven't become less of a fan.

Mozilla recently turned five. I was using the original milestones my freshman year in college, four years ago. I loved Mozilla then, and I still love it now. A great program built by the people for the people that was useful and felt like you were giving it to the man at the same time made it my browser of choice. As a tech on campus, I eagerly awaited the Netscape releases built on Mozilla code and rolled them out as soon as possible. I preached web standards and increased my knowledge as much as possible. Mozilla became my most favorite application of all time.

And then I installed phoenix. It was mozilla but better. Open a whole series of tabs in a window with a single click? I was there. Clean interface, easy to use, small footprint. Beauty.

Over the last few weeks Phoenix development has slowed down. Suddenly, though, today, the new Moz roadmap was published. Mozilla and Phoenix will be merged, with Phoenix becoming one of the central development items. I couldn't be happier. This will lead to nothing but good things.