Monthly Archives: July 2004

Kawai Ducks Taking Over

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Anyway, we talked a lot about gadgets, blogs and Creative Commons. I got him to agree that it would make sense to put a Creative Commons license on his site so that people could use pictures of products and clips of his text to review products. I think that his stuff is PERFECT for blogs.

I hope no one will be busting down my door and confiscating anything just because I thought those ducks were so damn kawai (cute) a few months back. Not to mention all the other fun things encountered at Dynamism and other sites that were just so damn kawai (and NOT sinister) that they had to be seen to be believed.

(YAWN) Close Enough For Jazz

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Good… GOD! There was much gnashing of teeth over center content that was playing “tag” and “hide ‘n seek” with the side columns on the 3-legged blog today.

Lots of futzing and saving of various close-but-not-quite stylesheets later, I finally tracked down the problem.

It was the italics in the blockquotes. No matter what values I set for the various columns, the italics were just enough to throw it all into confusion.

End result: no more italics in blockquotes. So then what do I do? Download Firefox and muck about a bit more.

Huh. Not bad – it works in both browsers, though what the heck is the dealio with the heavy text? It looks like I’ve got the whole thing set to “bold.” Or perhaps “BOLDASS!!”

But hey – bottom line is the friggin’ 3 column layout nightmare is over.

Florida Is The New Florida

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MIAMI, July 27 – Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.

Oh, here we go again. And guess what? It wasn’t made public until a citizens’ group requested audit data for the 2002 election. Turns out election officials knew something went wrong in spring 2003, but didn’t publicly acnknowledge a “malfunction” until a year later.

Good for the citizens’ group for bringing this to light, and good for everyone that’s been hammering on this issue so that it hasn’t gone away.

TAR 5 Episode 4 Recaplet

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Now this is a punishing leg. Start with 20 hours on a bus (oy), and follow it with flying all the way from South America to Russia. Then choose between being pelted with hockey pucks and downing a shot, and just when you think you can’t get any queasier, you get to choose a member of your team to eat two pounds of caviar — an item intended to be ingested by the teaspoon. What begins as bus-station jostling over some very bizarre notions of racing (“Can we agree that you won’t try to get ahead of me?” “Uhh…”) matures into complications at the airport and the navigating of multiple connections in Europe. Finally, in St. Petersburg, there is hockey and vodka, and then the killer Roadblock appears. Say what you want about Christie and Nicole choking on the caviar, but they’re not getting flack from me, because that is clearly hell in a bowl. Nobody wants to eat two pounds of anything, particularly if it’s entirely made up of fat and salt, and when you see a twin at the end physically shaking, it becomes clear that you don’t have to be a “pageant girl” to struggle. In the end, Christie pulls it together in time for her and Colin to slide into second place behind a surging Chip and Kim after Chip takes advantage of his caviar-snarfing ability to lap the competition. Nicole and Brandon drop to the middle of the pack, as do Charla and Mirna, and after they come up short at the airport, it’s time to say goodbye to Bob and Joyce. Aww. They’re very sweet, though, and have the classy exit you’d expect. Thanks for playing, Bob and Joyce — we dug you.

Oy is right. I like this season a lot, but not having a Fast Forward available every leg is really killing the unfortunate teams that get stuck with a bad flight or a pack of horny dogs.

Not that I didn’t actually cheer for the horny dogs, mind you. But it’s culling the nice people (again, with the exception of Team Horndog.)

Blogger Burnout

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But running the website soon became a dominant activity in his day, and on June 28, Billmon announced: “Last call.” Whiskey Bar would no longer accept comments.

“You’ve only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I’ve got a full-time day job, and something had to give,” Billmon said. “In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn’t able to keep up with it.”

It’s always a shame when a well-written, popular blog stops taking comments, or stops getting new posts from its author. However, the pressure to perform can be enormous (not on this damn thing, obviously).

I’m still having technical problems with the comments on Blogula Rasa: I thought I had uninstalled the MT-Bayesian package that was mistakenly marking all new comments as spam, but it’s still operating. Perhaps some more tweaking (and banging under the hood) is warranted.

Also in the department of tweaks, quirks, and splats: the center column won’t render right until I actually (ugh) do some math and fiddle with the CSS. In the meantime, if there is no post visible on your browser, resize the window in or our slowly until they alll show up.

It works fine in Firefox. Windows: breaks down and cries like a baby unless the edges of the window are juuuuust the right width. I think I’ll be able to fix that, but it involves the dreaded “math kudzu.”

Hoax Returns UA Flight To SYD

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A US-bound flight from Sydney turned back on Tuesday after a note found on board raised fears of a bomb threat, Australia’s government said.

Flight UAL840, carrying 246 passengers and bound for Los Angeles, landed safely back in Sydney airport nearly three hours after take-off.

Okay, that’s interesting. I looked up the flight information in SABRE for this flight, and it’s described as a crew issue.


¤QUA/2840/27JUL«
UA RESPONSE
F:UA840/27JUL
MEL/2029CT/OFF 1129A .14E
SYD/0503CT/IN 550P 5.00L ‡DPTS CNCLD
LAX/0504CT/ARVS CNCLD ‡ETD 100P OT
JFK/0504CT/ETA 927P OT
SYD/WAS OFF SYD 257P - RETURNED TO FIELD DUE TO CREW
SYDLAX/PSGR PROT - FIRAV

I had been wondering how flight disruptions would be coded in the flight information – the gobbledey gook above – and perhaps this is considered more tactful and less fear-mongering to word it that way.

It means:

“United Flight 840 on 27JUL04 departed from Melbourne at 1129am, 14 minutes early. Arrived Sydney (on the ground 509pm, at the gate 550pm) 5 hours late. Departure cancelled. Los Angeles arrival cancelled. Estimated time of departure onward 1pm, on time. JFK estimated time of arrival 927pm, on time (this means they substituted another aircraft for the domestic flight to New York). Notes – flight had departed Sydney at 257pm, then ‘returned to field due to crew.’ Sydney to Los Angeles passengers were or to be protected on the first available flight.”

Australia’s a bit nervy about terrorist threats these days, so there will probably be more incidents and developments. Whoever the idiot was that pulled the hoax will probably be caught, since all they have to do is fingerprint everyone on the flight. It’s unlikely they bothered to glove up for a little joke.

The Chinese Mouse That Roared

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She began participating in discussions on a Web site called “Democracy and Freedom,” which is often at odds with the government. By 2001, she opened her own site, much of it dedicated to literature, but she also published some articles calling for more freedom. As cyberspace became her home, she began to defend what the Chinese call netcitizens.

Fellow SF fan and netizen Liu Di and I have a lot in common. We write about our interests in science fiction (she’s more interested in books, I’m currently more interested in television and movies). She writes about politics and dabbles in parody and satire; I mostly quote articles that I either agree with, or strongly disagree with, and natter on in a mostly ranty mode.

She went to prison for a while, and sometimes there are guards outside her door now that she’s back home. Apparently, what she writes is dangerous in China. Bloggers in China had problems connecting to their own websites for a time, because the Chinese government feared the power of the published word.

When I bitch and moan and post about a whole lotta nothing, I don’t have to worry about the thought police or the political cadres battering down the door (or more realistically, pulling the plug on our big, wide pipe here).

I’ll try to remember that.

Don’t Panic (You’ll Blow The Air Marshals’ Cover)

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Just don’t do it. Don’t panic, or the air marshals will be forced to smack you silly. And then you’ll end up as an ignominous dupe on the Urban Legends page… even if you are an otherwise smart journalist.

The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves.

Oh, and by the way Ms. Ima Responsible Journalist Scaredypants, way to inject your progeny into the story so we all know you’re a caring nurturer. Feh.