July 31, 2003
Citizen sends $400 tax rebate to Howard Dean
Erica Derr of Greensboro, NC has decided what to do with her $400 tax rebate (which she asked both of her senators to vote against), she's sending the full amount to Dean for America as a campaign contribution. You can read her excellent “Guest Post” to Howard Dean's Weblog here. This is the kind of direct democracy I support. Unlike the California model, where we elect leaders who refuse to act on anything and we end up voting on Propositions for everything… and now we have this stupid recall, but I digress… Derr's example is the way it's suppose to work… support a candidate that you believe in… help get them elected so that they can govern…
July 30, 2003
memo to dictionary.com
My second most visited reference site on the internet (the first being Google) has to be dictionary.com. I love the site, and now that I am writing more frequently, it's pretty much essential to making sure my blog entries are not riddled with spelling errors. I also get their “Word of the Day” via my RSS aggregator and that, of course, is all good as well. My only beef with dictionary.com: your site looks ugly. If I have to visit a site multiple times a day, make me happy with some simple elegance (e.g. Google). Maybe Google should buy Dictionary.com… I understand that you Dictionary people need to make a living, and you need your ads and all, but you could still make the house a little more inviting. How about a front page with just a pretty logo and a search box, then pummel me with an elegant ad sidebar on the results page and no top ad banner. I don't know, I'm opinionated, but I'm not a designer, so go hire great one and have at it… because I really love your words…
July 23, 2003
Ammonia on cup rim = bad
I frequently go to a Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood for lunch. I go because the food is good and fresh, they don't use MSG, it's close by, and the price is right (the lunch specials are about $6 with tax and tip). There is just one thing that keeps it from being perfect: the place makes a big deal about being clean, and after every table leaves and is cleared they procede to clean the glass table top with some sort of Windex type stuff and wipe it down with a cloth napkin. Then they set the table for the next customer. Part of the standard setting is a teacup which they place rim down on the table. Here's the problem: they wipe up the ammonia cleaner with a polyester-type napkin, which doesn't totally absorb the spray. It eventually evaporates, but not before they place the teacup rim down. Thus the rim of the teacup is coated in ammonia cleaner, and smells like it. Also, if they are cleaning a table next to you while you are eating you get a good whiff of the ammonia smell as well. The teacup is the problem for me though, because I like tea, but I don't like a blantently sanitized cup.
The real question then is how much of a picky freak am I? I'm really not sure, but this place has been in business for around five years now and apparently no one has complained about this practice. This includes me, because I can't think of a way to bring it up with the manager that doesn't sound like I am a) really wierd and picky, b) just complaining, or c) a know-it-all. I have even thought about writing an anonymous letter to the owner to point out this defect in their cleaning protocol… but that sound's like something a crazy person would do.
It's hard to know how aggressive or assertive to be in the world today. Last night I was quite assertive about securing a “first-come, first-serve” table in the cafe portion of a nice place we frequent because I was in the right and in that situation people will take advantage of you if you are not somewhat aggressive. But the teacup ammonia thing is different, maybe I am the only one that can smell it, maybe I am a freak. I don't really lose any sleep over this, but I was thinking of it yesterday because it's hard to know when to assert and to lead and when to not be a particular know-it-all.
July 22, 2003
Hydra, baby!
Mr. Coates points out that Mr. Hammersley has pointed out what I am now also pointing out: the most lovely text editor, Hydra has reached version 1.1.1 and now includes live updating HTML previewing. (Yes, exactly, how flipping cool is that?) Answer to my rhetorical question: very. The collaborative editing over Rendezvous feature is icing on the cake. (“icing” is a funny word in print, I just had to look it up on Dictionary.com to make sure I had spelled it correctly).
July 20, 2003
aka "The City"
Well, Ernie seems to have gotten his knickers in a twist over a recent U.S. Census Bureau report in which San Jose gets top Bay Area billing because of population… some funny stuff.
About ten years ago a friend of mine moved out here from North Carolina. He found a nice little place in Oakland. The first time he crossed the bridge to meet me for dinner I said something about being happy to finally see him in the City. He said “The City?”, and I explained that in the Bay Area people just referred to San Francisco as “the City.” Well, he didn't like that at all and in the typical stubborn fashion of my group of friends attempted to not call San Francisco anything like “the City” for the next few years. Eventually, like river water smoothing a stone, he gave in and started calling it what everyone else did.
July 19, 2003
small business is an art
Just one of many reasons to patronize small, independently owned businesses: they are an art. Seriously, small business is raw creativity. Nothing gets run through a focus group or given special corporate marketing polish… small businesses are the unfiltered artistic expressions of their owners and operators. For example, I just ate for the first time at this little place a few blocks away from our apartment. I had always sort of wondered about it, so I decided to give it a try. It's on a strange block of businesses and not what I would consider a great location for foot traffic. The food was fine, the service was good and the decor was not to my taste but you could tell someone had a vision and designed the space accordingly. This place was the little bistro that the owner had always wanted to open. It was more than just a business, it was someone expressing themselves, making choices and putting the result on display for acceptance or rejection. It is almost impossible to have the same intimate experience in a large chain store where things are filtered down to a dull and homogenous finish. I like the feeling of being in someone's place. It makes the transaction so much more human.
July 16, 2003
experience the beauty that is...
Sporting a brand new 3.whatever design version, the massively beautiful etherfarm is back. This is one of those sites that I was talking about a few days ago, so well done that envy must be suppressed. If there were a degree program to learn all the design and coding skills found there, I would be signing myself up. As it is, I'll just spend another hour tweaking my CSS I guess.
July 15, 2003
braided
July 14, 2003
idea: write more stuff
It's easy to get caught up in constantly tweaking little design things on this site, like “should .side be 9, 10 or 11px?” Kind of drives one a bit batty after awhile. Content is king after all, but some people's weblog design is so heartbreakingly good that I feel at a loss. No matter, I can always take a page from Mr. Hammersley's book and start offering free iPods for design services.
Design is a personal thing. Part of me would gladly give an iPod to someone with real skills to redesign my site, but all the people that have sites with designs I admire seem to be rather gainfully employed… and then I think, blogs are rather personal after all, and it's a bit like hiring someone to decide your haircut or buy your clothes… still, dressing is easier than designing something beautiful.
July 12, 2003
a different sort of web standard
Scott Rosenberg's Matters of Public Record is an interesting take on the process of publishing, editing and tweaking on-the-fly that is common in some parts of the blogosphere and the Internet in general:
“There's a fascinating dispute in the blogosphere right now that is worth talking about beyond the emotions of the personalities involved, because it touches on a substantive issue: What is the public record of the Web and of blogs?”
Rosenberg's article deals chiefly with the question of when one can or should post a specifically noted update or correction rather than just changing the content of the file with no mention of the edit. Aside from simple spelling or grammar corrections, I personally find it troubling to have something that has previously been published (even if only a short time ago), later undergo substantive editing without any reference to the fact that it has been changed. This issue suggests to me that the world of web publishing, including blogging, needs to adopt its own set of journalistic standards. These standards would take into account the nature of the web and define appropriate practices accordingly. These standards should be clearly defined and bloggers and other content producers should be able to publicly commit to adhering to them.
new books section
I've successfully added a “books” section to my right-hand column. Hopefully it won't get too crowded over there. Thanks and credit goes out to the authors of the MovableType plugins I am using: BookQueue by Jacob Hesch and MTAmazon by Adam Kalsey. I find it exciting and comforting to be able to refer to the world of print from within the world of e-reading. While it can be tempting to think of things published on the Internet as rather ephemeral, we all know better… still, books provide a tactile intimacy while feeling more permanent or “finished” in some way.
July 09, 2003
A.S. Byatt on Harry Potter
You'd think an excellent novelist like A.S. Byatt (I loved Possession) would have better things to do then get severely snooty and rip into J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books with a simplistic Freudian analysis in an Op-Ed piece for the NYT, but if you thought that, you would be wrong. Author Caleb Carr, who also makes far less money than Rowling, piles on with praises to Byatt's piece in Letters to the Editor. It must be interesting to be so awfully high-brow. (via boingboing)
July 07, 2003
Weblogs and politics
Tom Coates links and comments insightfully on an event in the UK regarding: Can Weblogs Change Politics? My view is that the potential political uses of weblogs are just starting to be realized by both elected officials and candidates. In the US, the major media outlets are making much of presidential candidate Howard Dean's fundraising on the Internet, but it's not simply about using the Internet for fundraising, it's the grassroots networks and communities that are enabled and in many ways facilitated specifically by weblogs that are making a difference. Good weblogs are not static, they are frequently updated. Dean's official blog is updated very regularly and was constantly updated on the last day of the most recent financial reporting quarter. Dean's weblog served as the common point of gathering for a community that raised around $800,000 (of a total of $7.5m for the quarter) on that single day. But just as, if not more importantly, Dean's message and campaign news are being constantly broadcast through his blog. This means that people from all over the country can take part in the campaign and contribute to the campaign in a real-time way. This feeling of community is empowering to say the least, and goes far beyond just being an effective fundraising tool.
July 05, 2003
mountain mama
I'm in the mountains in South Carolina right now. Yes, South Carolina has mountains… or at least one, the one I'm on… in Cleveland, SC… just over the border from Brevard, NC at what I imagine must be the tail end of the Blue Ridge. A group of my friends from college and I have gotten together every year for the last eleven or so years… not always here, but many times for weddings… and if no one is getting married, then just a reunion somewhere. This mountain house will hopefully be our spot at least every other year for the forseeable future, and maybe we can add a west coast venue on the off years. Most of us have known each other now for going on 15 years… which is a long time when you're 33. We've gone from being single to married to parents… chosen different paths and careers… live all over the country with exactly zero overlap (sadly)… and yet the same things we saw in each other 15 years ago still spark in us today… with the care and feeding of an occassional email or phone call, and these yearly meetings. In a world that encourages us to be guarded most of the time, with these people I am open… and with these people I laugh more than I do with anyone else outside my immediate family. Laughter is a good thing.