Alternative travel: Gridskipper – How to go on an urban safari if your’re not an SUV driver. Hard and edgy travel guide for people who prefer alcohol to bucolic. Alternative software: Lifehacker – Wonkette meets Gizmodo, hackette driven guide to stringing together all those useful software bits and bobs into something more useful – softly softly approach to give late adopters the early adopter scoop.
PFK Fish News | Deep sea fish in hoax tsunami email “An email containing photographs of bizarre-looking deep sea fish reportedly washed up on Thailand’s Phuket beach after the tsunami actually contains images of fish collected during a study undertaken in 2003.” Nonetheless the fish are deeply weird and interesting, check them out.
On a day when the government is preaching the values of listening to the people are they listening to the people who know, when it comes to the environment? There is an additional kind of democracy, the democracy of ideas, the principal by which superstition or ideology or agenda is avoided by considering evidence. Current evidence points overwhelmingly to the notion that Global warming looks real, but the evidence is being ignored, like so many ‘just a theory’ stickers peppered out by brainwashed zealots. Bryan Lawrence quotes Science magazine on climate change: There were 982 peer reviewed papers indexed by ISI with keywords climate change in the last ten years, till 2003. 75% dealt with the immediate threat of climate change. Of these, NONE refuted the idea that climate change is real. [NB, I was under the impression that the term ‘climate change’, like ‘death tax’ instead of ‘estate tax’…
Whatever your opinion of the war, lets hope today is as peaceful as possible in Iraq.
Continuing on my anti-CSS rant – 3 columns, with fixed-width left and right and a fluid center column, are ofter referred to as the ‘holy grail’. The problem is that this is an obsolete solution, when people increasingly have massive screens where any fluidity breaks the design if people auto-expand windows – which they do. Mike Golding breaks the mold and argues the case very well for fixed width CSS layout: notestips.com :: The benefits of a fixed width design
Tables may suck, but CSS is no improvement. Yet web designers who have never used page layout tools for offline printing, or object based CAD software are still brainwashed by it. I just came accross this classic: BlueRobot “Many a talented web designer has struggled with CSS-based centering. Though CSS vertical centering eludes us, two techniques for horizontal centering are BlueRobot approved. Take your pick” First one: “Unfortunately, IE5/Win does not respond to this method – a shortcoming of that browser, not the technique” Fair enough, but then why recommend it (This is still one of the largest browser versions in use). Second one: #Content { position:absolute; left:50%; width:500px; margin-top:50px; margin-left:-266px; padding:15px; border:1px dashed #333; background-color:#eee; } All this to avoid ‘align=center’.
What happens when you have a product that is designed for the masses but remains with the minority? Nobody could ever figure out how to program a video recorder, but Tivo the king of DVRs fixed that – and so much more. Tivo created a really simple user experience, right down to the design of the remote. One click recording and wishlists and automated suggested recording. Surely a DVR like this is must have at a time when people are shelling out 5 times what they used to for their TV experience just to hang a flat screen TV on the wall? And Tivo is not new, it predates plasma screens and DVDs, by all accounts, DVRs should be ubiquitous. The problem can’t just be that DVRs are a threat to traditional business models. MP3 players are now commonplace having first appeared well after. I suspect that the main problem…
Officials at Catholic University are allowing Newt Gingrich to speak. Gingrich is a strong proponent of the death penalty, which is opposed by the Vatican. Actor-director, Stanley Tucci, on the other hand, was turned down because he supported family planning. It constantly amazes me that many people who purport to be part of a religion centered around someone who faced the death penalty, have more compassion for semen than human beings facing the same punishment as the person they worship. Gingrich Speech at CU Opposed (washingtonpost.com)
…of Austria? Reuters: “California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a citizen of both the United States and Austria, should be stripped of Austrian citizenship for allowing a convicted murderer to be executed, an Austrian politician says.”
OK, for a perfect example of the absurdity of not looking before legaling: Lawyer writes a blog about trademarks. Lawyer includes not for commercial use Creative Commons licence. Lawyer notices that people can read his entire blog reformatted in Bloglines. Reaction: lawyer goes batshit (new word stolen from Jeff) and sends cease and desist to Bloglines and posts about it. Suggestion: perhaps not having syndicated full content RSS would have been simpler.
Scott Kiesling of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh analyses the word Dude Full of such classics as: “Next we turn to investigate how this term is used in contextualized interactions among college-aged men in 1993, and to view some examples of its use in interaction, to understand how these indexicalities are put to use. I
Jeff Jarvis points to an LA times piece on the latest antics of the ‘F*CCed’: “The FCC posted the complaints on its website. One person reported hearing an obscenity; one objected to the male anatomy on a representation of Greek sculpture; another thought a woman’s breast had been revealed; and yet another claimed to have seen a couple making love.” PDF of Olympic complaints from FCC website – much more entertaining than the Olympics themseves. The classical architecture of Capitol Hill may be similarly peni ridden and has anyone ever been to a sports event where there wasn’t swearing? Should all Christian religious programming should be censored – for containing an image of a naked man being tortured to death? If the FCC is seriously going to waste time and money considering complaints from people who have clearly lost their marbles, then perhaps we should all start complaining about everything…