Where I’m @

20020531

MERDE!
Opening match of World Cup 2002, and France loses 1–0 to Sénégal. Frankly, we are pleased with the victory for anticolonialism, and France’s strength of the past several years has come in large part from drawing on its former far-flung empire (Zidane is of Algerian descent, Pires from Spaniards, Henry from the Caribbean, and on and on), so there’s some cosmic justice to the ascendancy of the former colony — but here at Bleahh, we’re still fans of the métropole and les Bleus are co-faves for the whole magilla, fercryinoutloud! <sigh>
Ideally, report on NOLA later today.

20020528

Jury duty today, report on NOLA tomorrow.

NYCBloggers is up! Put me on the board!

20020523

That’s it for several days. Off to New Orleans for the wedding of a friend of nearly twenty years’ date. Time does march on, doesn’t it?

31

20020521

Blame the Victim Dept.
In a continuing effort to spread fear among the American populace and to scare same into not asking what went wrong around September 11th 2001, the FBI director has said that (more) suicide bombings are inevitable here. And what, exactly, are we supposed to do about it? And what does that mean anyway? Should the good people of Poughkeepsie be worried? How about Dubuque? Truth or Consequences, NM? How much of our lives are we going to have to turn over to the authorities to be able to avoid unlawful detention? (Perhaps our white skin is enough.)

Evolution
In other sad news, Stephen Jay Gould died. About how many people can the words evolutionary biologist, household name, and The Simpsons be used in the same obit? “Adenocarcinoma of the lung” reads the obit in the New York Times, but most of us call that lung cancer. Some time ago, he wrote about recovering from abdominal mesothelioma, but its cousin got him in the end.
News of his death also from the AP (short version via the New York Post, long version in Salon), NPR (in Real Audio), and Harvard. The New York Review of Books has opened access to his articles for that publication. Skeptic has a wide-ranging interview with him from 1996 as does Salon. (Thanks to Le Monde’s “Sur le net” section for many of these links.)

20020516

Independent Site of the Day #8: Pixelhugger
Consider the pixel. Reduced to merely a face in the crowd by those obsessed with size, it is nevertheless the atom of the GUI. Heck, there would be no computer visualization at all without it. We’d be sitting around trying, like a rookie car thief, to figure out which of these darn wires we connect to make our document print out. Whose contents we only know from hearsay anyway, because we couldn’t look at it on the computer when our friend sent it to us.

Enter the cult of the pixel, those designers who have lifted this entity to a much greater status, emphasizing it’s presence in their art. Pixelhugger is just such a designer. The site is reasonably limited, but with cherce elements. Download a font, a desktop background, a game. In fact, the stickiest part of the site (do we even say “sticky” any more?) is a little Shockwave game called PixelHugger in the Field of Typography, a devilish and addictive — like Pixie Stix, baby — little thing. You are PixelHugger, racing around a GameBoy-like environment, trying to stay away from the spiders and sheep, urging your avatar on faster and faster to collect all the letters in the pixelized world, just so that you can eventually face Auntie Alias. Keeping things basic works very well for this game; the goal is always attainable if you just play one more game, and then four hours have gone by.

Independent site review concept by Aortal

20020514

A New Way to Feel Old
The spinning class at the gym (next to where we do what we need to do to keep our limbs attached to our body), playing Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” this a.m. Not like Bronski was ever not commercial, or anything like that, but they were of a certain scene and now they’re part of the straight gym scene?
Nostalgia crops up in funny places sometimes, like watching The Wedding Banquet and wishing for the days of ACT-UP and such. But that is also the trap of nostalgia (an eighteenth-century word meaning roughly “the pain of returning home”), that things were not really that good then, any more than they are so great now. Reductio ad pop absurdam would be Carpe diem, wouldn’t it?

20020510

Good news?
Search for the words amber dongle at Google Germany, and a post from this site from March 2001 is the numero uno result. First time that’s happened, that we know of. Go Bleahh!

Fantastic (and succinct, which makes it all the more fantastic) article on gettin paid, at Evolt. Your author is in a dicey situation now, even, having just finished some freelance site maintenance with nary a convo about money had along the way.

20020509

Followup from yesterday:
Today a nice combination was found in listening to RFI through RealAudio and having the Cazan Cathedral Mix of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” running through WinAmp. Don’t ask why neither one hogs the soundcard. We don’t understand either.

20020508

New Web Fun and Games
Just as the DJ is a symbol of the Postmodern times in which we live, so remixing is the order of the day in the world on more practical levels. The Situationists would be (are?) proud, perhaps, but also ashamed, because subversion (détournement, in their lingua français), culture jamming, has been taken up by the multinationals as much as by the skate punks and the businesses they would kill to be sponsored by.
Two recent activities, one ensconced and one nascent, exemplify this trend. Activity the first: Googlewhacking. Somewhat in the fashion of Google bombing, Googlewhacking is a sort of alternative API for that famous search engine. Pick two words, any two words, and search for them in Google. Retrieve but one result, and you’ve made a Googlewhack. There are subrules, along the lines of having to use words that exist at Dictionary.com, but we’re sure you can dig deep into that part of your brain you last worked on just before the SATs and scrape out a winning combo. This author’s success? rambunctious multinationalism
Activity the second: Web page soundtrack remixing. (Needs a catchier name, to be sure.) This one was just invented this morning, when Digital Web magazine directed us to the website of this month’s cover artist, José Illenberger, whose site, Redberger, in turn gave respect to Dark Elephant. Redberger has a looping soundtrack of a moody yet light nature, and Dark Elephant has sound effects attached to certain mouseover actions. Open Redberger in one window, Dark Elephant in another, and whilst the Redberger loop is going in the background, selectively mouseover the Dark Elephant hotpoints and hey presto! you’ve created a temporary chill-out mix. There are innumerable sites with loops or sound effects, but the trick is to find them. Tell us when you find a good one.

20020507

Speaking of Textism . . .
Though it doesn’t really qualify for Pirated Sites, it’s worth noting (and has been) the striking similarity between Technoerotica’s design and that of Textism/Cardigan Industries.

20020506

Dean at Textism has asked his readers for another Google Bombing (one of the best neologisms in these, the dot-economy’s 3 a.m. days) on behalf of Hoopla. Never been to Hoopla.com, but anything to give Verisign a big pain in the tuchis. Hence:

Verisign

Sadly, our tenant, Ishbadiddle, let us know that he’s taking up some of our pointers from “How to Survive a Funeral” sooner than he or we would have liked. Seems that an aged grandmother died over the weekend. Not unexpected, and Ish got to have his last conversation with her, but nothing’s really that fun or easy about it.

A mild amendment: There are some things fun about it, and it’s important not to forget them. It is fun to see family (ideally, it is), it is fun to talk about the good things that this person was to you, it can be fun to travel as necessary. Most belief structures, as I understand it, provide for some sort of relief for the deceased, which should give some comfort to the survivors. At most biological, the person returns to the Earth, furthering life; at most spiritual, the person exists (or is beyond existence) in a way that is “good” beyond mortal comprehension. Unless you anticipate a bad rebirth or Hell for the deceased, how could this person be in a bad way?

For going forward in France, there’s a good piece breaking down Le Pen and the rest of the Far Right letter by letter. Petite dictionnaire pour lutter contre l’extrême-droite par Martine Aubry et Olivier Duhamel. Though the text is directed against Le Pen, it’s not invalid for here in the good old U.S.A.

20020505

For good or ill, Jacques Chirac has been reelected president of France (in French), but for any of us who love France and are politically Left, it’s a gut-wrenching result. Not that we have any particular love for Lionel Jospin, who was the Socialist candidate, unceremoniously bounced after the first round, but as KRS-ONE said, “Whether you vote for the lesser of two evils, you vote for evil.”
Besides, would you have this man as your president?

20020503

The jig’s up . . .
For a while now, there was a server at CNN that served up just news (insert snarky comment about CNN’s biases and bootlicking the average American consumer), without all the distracting, space- and bandwidth-hogging, and ugly advertisements. And certainly without the Netscape (read:AOL/Time-Warner) navigational banner across the top. But they must have started looking at their server logs, because robots.cnn.com now is just the same as the rest of the CNN servers. Fortunately, Mozilla, our browser of choice, has the ability to block images from any given server, so there’ll just be empty boxes where the ads used to be.

20020501

Somehow an offhand mention of an oddness in the recent ALA article Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept made it onto Jeffrey Zeldman's front page. Now if only he could have linked to this site. Back-scratching linkwhore.
As he reported, though, the important thing is that there's a bug in Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1 that turns carriage returns in element attributes into what-the-hell-is-this?! characters. (You know, the ones you got when you tried to open up that database backup in Notepad.)

Update: Asking nicely has its rewards, and Mom always said that thing about squeaky wheels and grease.