See You In Virtual Church

Via AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Fools’ Errand, a new interactive virtual church experiment at Ship of Fools.

With pews made from pixels, the congregation logging in from their home computers and the collection sent in by mobile phone, the world’s first 3D online church is going to be church like never before. The House of God is set to become the Mouse of God.

Well, it sounds interesting, might be fun to log in and check it out when they get it running – it begins May 11th, but they’re still looking for funding.

The Ducks Are Attacking! Aiiiyee!

ducksfood.jpgIt’s time to stop screwing around with the machanics of the stupid blog and make some entries already. So soon there’ll be some more entries covering the week David and I spent hiking, eating, and drinking in Grassington, Yorkshire Dales. But first this cautionary tale. Do not go anywhere with dry toast in your pockets, or They will attack you from the sea and from the air. Who are They? The shadowy evil figures that haunt your dreams and turn them to nightmare. They are… the massive continuity of ducks!! Mu-ahahahahaha!!

No, really, there are some really pretty canals in Britain – this is the one in Skipton, a few steps from the train station. You could conceivably arrive by train, step aboard a canal boat for a week, and putter along quite happily on the canal all week. Accompanied by a vigilant escort of ducks and geese. This lot evidently thought our pockets were stuffed with bread – wrong, they were stuffed with maps, bits and pieces of London guidebooks we hadn’t thrown away, and chicken tikka sandwich wrappers.

Maybe it was the chicken tikka? Bloodthirsty savages. That’s poultry.

There should be a new entry up in the September archive (with lots and lots of pictures) in a day or so. Category is the same as this post.

A Different Shade of Flail

blockquote {
font-family: verdana, georgia, arial,
color: #2F4F4F;
font-size:small;
font-style:italic;
background: #F5F5F5;
padding: 20px;
border: 1px solid #999;
}
code {
font-size:14px;
font-weight:normal;
color:#000;
background: #F5F5F5;
text-align:left;
}
.floatimgleft {
float:left;
margin-top:10px;
margin-right:10px;
margin-bottom:10px;
padding:2px;
border:3px #a9a9a9;
}

So… do I have the “code” macro working right now?

And here is the stylesheet CSS if I do.

Helpless Flailing With CSS Drop Shadows

Hey! My Kitty!Since working with a cat image seems to be traditional, I thought I’d use one of Stuey for this next exercise in CSS madness. I was trying to get this to work the other night, adapting one of several methods for adding drop shadows in CSS, but doing it “the MT way.” I may have to concede that such things will have to be done “as is” and learn not to rely on the MT “show me the HTML feature.”

Now I’m trying it “by the book” as described at Alistapart.rather than applying the CSS class with class="floatimgleft" as an attibute of the image the way MT seems to be pushing me to do. I can at least use that style to move the image to the left and get text to wrap successfully, but when I tried to add the drop shadow effect to the same style the other day, I hit the wall. Let’s see how this goes.

Results:
1. D’oh! forgot that MT likes absolute URLs…

2. Whoa! it ate the next post! Hmm. Dammit. Forgot to close a div. Let’s try this, the way MT likes it:

3. The code stylesheet either isn’t working right again, or it’s not wrapped right.

4. Yeesh. I tried to hand code the image in MT before. I forgot that it likes the image size and border set in a particular way. So I re-uploaded just to get the picky way MT wants to do it.

5.okay, try this way of doing it:

div id=”floatimgleft” img alt=”Hey! My Kitty!” src=”http://www.blogula-rasa.com/images/stuey.jpg” width=”288″ height=”177″ border=”0″ />

6. Oh, my God, this is still a mess, and it doesn’t help to chat and listen to the radio at the same time.

7, 8, 9. Lather, rinse, repeat.

10. You know, I could be happy with a grey border and a tiny peep of parchment colored background showing between the image and the frame.

All I have to do is add class=floatimgleft" to the image attribute. I can live with that.

Register, Register

Okay, let’s try this again:Air America Radio has the registration page up again, and it seems to be working now. Also, their Real Audio software seems to have been upgraded (yay!) and is more seamlessly integrated.

In related news, the Majority Report website will soon be redesigned to add more features.

But here again are the 6 Reasons You Should Register to be an AAR charter member:

1. John Ashcroft will know where to find you.
2. All our annoying pop-up ads are invisible.
3. Because they shut down the Dennis Kucinich dating chat room.
4. Our spam is vegetarian.
5. You like making up passwords.
6. You were banned from the Fox News website for having your own opinion

Hoppy Easter To All And Sundry

Happy Easter, Hurray Spring, and so on.

daffodils.jpgIt’s been a interesting weekend for a holiday. Easter for me was last night, because Holy Moly chooses to do all the Easter celebrating on the Saturday night Vigil service, and skips a Sunday morning service entirely. Every parish does things “the way it’s always been done;” our way takes the view that nobody wants to go to church late one night and early the next morning if they’ve got little kids (theoretically, at least, on the “if they’ve got little kids” score).

Here’s how it’s done, according to the powers that be. Actually, I have to set this up starting from Palm Sunday. Next year, we’ll have a priest of our own again, and may end up with a full slate of Holy Week services.
Continue reading

Makeovers for Redheads

Hey, Kuri at Mediatinker.com is another member of the Redheaded Band.

She had a makeover done at MAC in Japan.

I wonder how their colors “suitable for redheads” stack up against the Just For Redheads ones?

I had a makeover (or my colors analyzed) years ago (actually, two different times, in different towns) and the result was the same for both: I ended up with a very limited palette of colors to choose from, because my eye color and hair color are in different “seasons,” and was also told that I’d always have trouble finding foundation light enough for my complexion.

I’ve been pretty happy with the JFR products, but their packaging is pretty cheesy (they claim it’s a cost-savings measure). I used to use Garden Botanika back in the days when they still had retail stores… I used to drop in to the shop at Westlake Center in Seattle every month or so.

I might try out some of their new eyeshadows some time for old time’s sake…

The Herd Instinct

Consider: In Berkeley, an event featuring three authors whose bestselling books at least touch on the Bush presidency (generally critically) drew 3,600 people who paid $15 a ticket. The panel featured Al Franken, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (“The Great Unraveling”) and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips (“American Dynasty”). Proceeds went to KPFA-FM radio and Global Exchange, an international human-rights group.

Tickets sold out immediately, said Bob Baldock, the station’s public-events producer and a former bookstore owner. “I think people are hungry for information,” he said. “They want the opinions, not just from hacks that go on television all the time. Secondly, they want to be together in large bodies because it counteracts that sense of alienation you get from television. We had trouble getting people to leave the auditorium.”

I think there’s been a trend toward bunching or finding tribes for a while now – social networking software is just a part of this.

Air America listeners like me “bunch” or “herd” or sort ourselves into groups to interact with each other while listening to or discussing the show. There are several chat room options (fan created, such as at the Liberal Voice or via IRC on the Undernet (various IRC chat clients). The comment thread for Majority Report’s blog got 1030 posts long on April 7th, forcing MR to open a new thread for every hour of the show.

They really need to start a true discusson board, or direct people to Liberal Voice.

Conservatives also bunch. The instincts on both sides are the same; gather together for support and information and mock or engage the opposition.

There’s a lot of scary shit going on in the world these days. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading or listening to non-US news sources for a while now (such as BBC News World Services).

Political? Moi? I guess I am. Now, that is.