Back on Tuesday. Have a great weekend!

Ann forwarded a link to a CNN story about Raggedy Ann being inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame. As some of you know, raggedcastle.com comes, in part, from the "Ragged Ann and Andy" moniker our friends have been known to torture us with. Well, I just learned that Raggedy Ann and Andy are brother and sister. I'm deeply disturbed by this.

Some amazing pictures from ENVISAT.

Well, I won't be dying today. At least, not through my own stupidity. I just had my physical and it's nice to hear that I am doing just fine. Sure, I need to lose weight (so do you, by the way, I didn't want to say anything but let's be honest with ourselves, okay?) and start exercising for real but there's nothing wrong with my body that requires a doctor to look at me sternly, yet compassionately, across a desk and start discussing options. And, I suppose not surprisingly, this clean bill of health has inspired me. We're going to go out and get some healthy food and get on the diet and exercise bandwagon.

The Solar System Simulator is an incredible website. I could lose hours there...

Dealing with PWCs when sailing...

Kathy directed many of the plays I was in during high school (including the one I was in with Jennifer Lopez -- really!) She took some interesting risks with me including casting me as Jud Fry in Oklahoma (I also played a background dancer in some scenes and I danced with j.Lo in one of them -- she was 12 or so at the time) and as the Boy in the Fantasticks. I've only talked to her once since I graduated high school in 1986. Despite the distance of years, I am incredibly sad today. Her brother, a New York Fireman, was finally found in the wreckage at ground zero. He was buried yesterday.

Andrew in response to yesterday's musings here: "I think that the more important thing isn't how fast the shit detector works, it's that it works at all and what you do about it. When it comes to detecting the really important shit in our society, better late than never." Ok, I feel better now. :)

Andrew in response to yesterday's musings here: "I think that the more important thing isn't how fast the shit detector works, it's that it works at all and what you do about it. When it comes to detecting the really important shit in our society, better late than never." Ok, I feel better now. :)

It's still cold in the evening and our family room/tv room gets VERY cold at night. So, we've been using the fireplace almost constantly. Tonight, on a whim, I bought one of those Duraflame multi-color fire logs. For most of the night, it was pretty normal. But now it's got these wild blue and teal flames on the bottom and a mixture of blue and normal orange above. I suspect that as the log burns down the colors will get stronger as it seems to be the less high flames that carry the colors. It's a nice way to end a long day.

Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There! "What are the consequences of students' growing reluctance to debate? Though it represents a welcome departure from the polarized mudslinging of the 90's culture wars, it also represents a failure to fully engage with the world, a failure to test one's convictions against the logic and passions of others. It suggests a closing off of the possibilities of growth and transformation and a repudiation of the process of consensus building. "It doesn't bode well for democratic practice in this country," Professor Anderson said. "To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, when they're in school."" A fascinating article that ties in with what I was talking about in this weblog a few weeks ago about the way students in one English class were reacting to Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery where they were far less willing to condemn the practice of the people in the town but, instead, considered themselves not able to judge another culture. What's even more interesting is that this article underscores some of the culture clash that we have at home. Ann was a high school debater and, later, did a lot of debate coaching. She values debate and cares passionately about issues. I, on the other hand, am often very reluctant to have an opinion. Sometimes its because I do not consider myself as informed as I want to be and sometimes it is because I honestly believe that there are too many facets to certain situations for me to take a definitive stand on a given issue. Why were some people able, on September 12th, to immediately see where the Bush administration was going and then start to condemn it as a bad plan? It took me months to reach that point. I do not agree with how the Bush administration is hanlding a great many things related to the events of the last six months but it took me until January or so to feel that internally. I have often felt that I lacked something that other, more fiery people have possessed. But now that I think about it, I see how I am much more a product of this new type of thinking than people like my wife. So, what is to be done? I fully believe that active, vigorous debate is essential and I generally have no problem stirring the soup. Maybe I need to be much quicker to put a stake in the ground and risk being wrong rather than waiting until I am absolutely certain of a given belief. Andrew Pulrang (who I have been referring back to a lot lately but he exemplifies the type of person who appears quick to form strong opinions which, it so turns out, I generally agree with) describes his weblog as the home of shaky opinions. He, too, isn't fully sure of his beliefs but he is far more willing to go out on a limb and speak his mind. And, really, isn't that one of the points of a weblog?

Women Fought in the Civil War"Ms. Cook already knew, however, that some women had disguised themselves as male soldiers during the war, including women at Antietam, where, on Sept. 17, 1862, 22,000 Union and Confederate troops were killed; it was the bloodiest single day of the war. But she had no idea how many women there were. So she set out to document the full story of women who went into combat. "

Redneck Neighbor"In case you're wondering, this Web page is about my next-door neighbors. Since my neighbors have been driving me crazy since the day they moved in, I have decided to dedicate a small corner of cyber-space to them. My family and friends are constantly asking me to tell them the "latest" thing my neighbors have done so this page will save me from repeating myself. Besides, I thought it would be fun. Everything you read here is entirely true, that's what makes it so funny." If we ever have neighbor troubles again, I'll read this and feel so much better...

This is truly demented. I remember seeing something about this at Harvard some years back (probably buried deep in my blog archives).

Art21 - The Alphabet Synthesis Machine

A List Apart: Web Standards and Tools: "If web development tools like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive and Microsoft's FrontPage (among countless other applications) do not generate standards-compliant code, the work of convincing the browser vendors to support standards will have been wasted. The creation of content will be trapped in a shell-legible only in a handful of browsers, locking out millions worldwide."

Don't call in sick from work and then blog that you have an infected uvula. I'm back at work and getting no end of uvula jokes. Heh, serves me right :) One person reminded me of the old "Your Uvula and You" skit from 1975 Saturday Night Live. I'll have to go look for an mp3 of that...

TheMacMind - Compelling Mac Content: "10 OS X Applications you must install or I will break into your computer and install them for you " If nothing else, it's got a great title...

E-Scribe New Media: Mailfilter Stuff. This is a spam filter program for MacOS X. Well, for any UNIX but the site linked above has specific instructions for MacOS X.

Yahoo tacking on fee to e-mail features. The portal's e-mail service is no longer spared from efforts to impose fees around the site: People who want to keep using certain mail features will soon have to pay up. [CNET News.com]

I've enabed the titles and links feature in Radio 8.0.7. I'm curious to see how this works with Radio Express, the Blogger bridge, and in Radio itself. So, I'll be doing some testing over the next day or so.

Iceman "died after knife fight". The man entombed in an Alpine glacier for millennia died just after combat, say researchers - others reject the idea [New Scientist]

moreCrayons - A bigger box of crayons for the web. An excellent site with a new color palette which is MUCH more freeing than the lousy 216 "Web-safe" palette (which I have complete ignored for years in my desinging). How long until more editors and graphics programs support this?

Well, the fire is starting to wind down and I need to be up to go to work in the morning. I'm hoping that I'm well enough to go in but I'm not holding my breath. I never got as much rest today as I needed to get but Ann was in worse shape than I and Jack still requires too much supervision. It will be nice when we can tell him to go downstairs and play and let us *both* sleep a bit. Oh, who am I kidding? He'll be in the room every five minutes looking for help with something, asking a question, wanting to show us stuff, etc. He's far too interested in other people and their reactions and thoughts, etc. And I love it. Even if it means I will never get a nap or be able to sleep in for another... um... 16 or so years... Where was I? Right. Sleep. As in, I'm going to go to. Now.

Las Vegas Mercury: Goldberg: Dear Diary...: "Apparently, there is a new and more dangerous assault to casual obsessive stalking, dating and innocent sexual misadventure: the weblog." This is priceless! And downright scary.

Nick Denton: "Where are the liberal weblogs?" A good list. It's a start.

March 20, 2002 - March Madness: Has Selig Gone Too Far This Time?: "Think about that for a minute. In a multi-billion-dollar industry whose largest investors include Disney, News Corp., AOL Time Warner, and the Tribune Company, a car dealer from Milwaukee not only dictates labor policy, but forbids his employers from discussing the wisdom of his chosen course among themselves. The Iraqi Parliament has more freedom."

YellowTimes.org: ""The 'War on Terrorism' for dummies"" Very interesting reading.

Ruby: Productive Programming Language: "Every few years something significant happens in the land of computer programming. In my opinion the Ruby computer language is such a landmark."

The New Yorker: "The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head."

Leper Messiah is a new weblog I just found which is wonderful. The author (whose real name I didn't bother to find because I'm a sick, lazy, fuckhead today) has a lot of great gems and some insightful observations. I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats. Anyway, my favorite (and it's damned true): "Have you ever noticed how free small children are? For example, at one point this weekend, my goddaughter took off her pants because she "didn't want to wear them". She then spent the rest of the day running around in a purple shirt & undies, without a care in the world. When do we adults lose that feeling of nonchalance? Can you imagine being at the office, in a small, confining, cookie-cutter cubicle, and just deciding to take off your pants because you didn't feel like wearing them anymore? Or running down the street (sans-pants), jumping in the air yelling "I'm a fairy princess! I'm a fairy princess!"? Oh, how I envy her that freedom.... "

Today is the first day of spring. It's cold, rainy, and all three of us are very sick. I have Jack duty first this morning so Ann (bronchitis) can sleep in. At lunch we trade places so she can watch Jack while I (badly infected uvula, if you can believe that) sleep. Jack (general flu) will sleep this afternoon also. Ann and I are both on antibiotics and Jack is on Children's Tylenol Cold. What fun. Happy spring...

Question for anyone out there who knows about weblogger.com: If I wanted to do custom domain hosting (say, raggedcastle.com is hosted as a manila site) could I hook up two copies of radio so I can post my weblog to www.raggedcastle.com/andyjw/ and my wife can post to www.raggedcastle.com/ann/ ? Or can I only publish to the root level (www.raggedcastle.com/)? In other words, can you run TWO radio-managed weblogs in a single manila site?

Business Week: Entertainment Execs, Fear Not the Net "The music and movie bigwigs' antipiracy crusade misses a key point: People are tired of those industries' old ways of business" They got it right.

webgraphics : weblog : CSS Bookmarklet - Show divs and spans -- This is an excellent tool which is going to make my life much easier as I work on complicated CSS-based sites.

The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts : evolt.org, Site Development

Chinese Outdid Columbus, Briton Says

snowdeal.org > ex machina is linking back to me. Thanks! snowdeal.org is one of the more interesting and worthwhile sites to visit. I rarely leave without being finding something new and interesting.

Andrew Pulrang in his apulrang.diary weblog writes very eloquently about a recent "This American Life" program about the mentally retarded and his reactions to the show (follow the link above to his site and his writing). One passage in particular stands out for me: "What makes this worse is that the professionals charged with helping you, and even your parents, are likely to be hesitant to talk straight with you about your disability. They use euphamisms like "differently abled" or "exceptional" and act all nice, but they won't let you make decisions, don't really listen to what you think, and treat others better than they treat you ... even though you can't really tell why. You ask about it, but they hem and haw, change the subject, or else just hug you and call you "special" again. Either that, or they pull out a clipboard and make careful notes about your evey move, mood, and statement. I suppose eventually you get the idea that you were born different, that you need help with things that others don't, but still, it's got to be confusing, especially when talking plainly about it seems to be such a taboo." I remember hearing a report on All Things Considered one night (and if I weren't so lazy right now I'd actually link to it in their archives. Maybe later) in which a group of minorities and one man in a wheelchair were discussing political correctness. The man in the wheelchair put it best (I'm paraphrasing here) when he said that using terms like "physically challenged" and "differently abled" are not there to make him feel better, but for the speaker to somehow feel better about talking about him. Since last May I've been doing a lot of work with making websites compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In other words, making websites accessible. I've learned two key things:

1. It is fiendishly easy to make a website fully accessible without sacrificing design, style, quality; and without adding any significant effort.
2. Most websites are not accessible and the authors of those sites have little interest in making them accessible.

Where is the problem? My guess is that there is little pressure to change and and the number of people who take the time to complain are few and far between. And, look at me, the raggedcastle.com version of this weblog is accessible. I have worked to make it compliant with both Section 508 and with the WCAG 1.0 from W3C (again, too lazy to link tonight). But the radio version of this site uses a default template which is loaded with graphics in a table layout and is likely highly annoying if not outright inaccessible. One of these days I plan on fixing this but it's low on my list. So, essentially, I'm being part of the problem. And I'm aware of the problem! So, you can see why the majority of web designers aren't doing this if people like me who know and care haven't gotten their act together. I started writing this intending to go in a very different direction than where I ended up. I hate it when my brain takes me on a ride like that! :)

Very cool MacOS X tool from Bergen Street Software: "CopyPath adds a Contextual Menu Item option to the Contextual Menu in the Finder. Control-click a document, application, folder, mounted volume, zip disk, anything, and easily copy the full path to that item directly to your clipboard! "

Pinpoint weather forecasts on horizon. Future forecasts will cover zones of just one square kilometre - enough to predict rain within 500 metres of Wimbledon's Centre Court, for example [New Scientist]

World Press Photo of the Year 2001. Check out the other winners as well.

Saving Private Ryan - And also Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a few other Spielberg films. By Tim Carvell. Funny.

Huh. Yesterday's sole link did not get published for some odd reason. Oh well. We're all sick this week so I haven't been surfing much. It's been more of a tv/fireplace week for us. Not that I'm complaining. I just wish we weren't feeling so lousy. And poor Jack doesn't understand why he feels badly. You can tell he's both perplexed and pissed off at not feeling good.

kcgeek>>Gary Gygax. An interview with the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. I haven't played in years and with a 2 year old son, I doubt I will play again in years. Ah well... I wish I had the time.

15483 » March 13 8:36 AM. Are Jesus & Mary buried in Pakistan & Kashmir? Hmm. Suzanne Marie Olsson, a New York-based researcher, claims that the earthly remains of Jesus lie under a Muslim saint's tomb in Kashmir. She is using DNA testing on remains from the Pakistani town of Murree that she believes to be those of Mary. Olsson also believes Moses is buried in Bandipore in north Kashmir and Solomon at Takht-i-Suliaman in Srinagar. "You have more Christian holy sites than even Egypt or Israel," she said in an appeal for help from Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah. (Via alt.muslim) [MetaFilter]

15485 » March 13 8:47 AM. INS grants visas to deceased hijackers - on Monday, the folks at Immigration and Naturalization services finally got around to issuing student visas to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi (who were aboard the two flights that struck the WTC). [MetaFilter] How messed up is that?

Salon.com People | National Geographic finds Afghan girl: "Seventeen years ago, an Afghan girl orphaned and living in a refugee camp appeared on the cover of National Geographic, her eyes big and green, a red scarf draped loosely over her hair." They found her! Amazing!

Cliff Yablonski Hates You. This is priceless.

Ladonia, proud, free and interactive!

I wish I had something pithy to say about the six months from 9/11 thing, but I really have nothing to say. And it's my sister's birthday so I'd rather the day be about that than something awful. So, happy birthday sis!

CNN.com - Exploding star may have sparked Earth disaster - March 10, 2002

Lawrence Journal-World: Unexpected images. This is wild... wonder how many people are going to bathe their digital cameras...

Oh dammit. I was all set in my new decision to hate ER and not watch it anymore. But due to inertia, we started watching it tonight (in fact, we also watched Just Shoot Me which we never do due to the aforementioned inertia) and it turned out to be a well-written, insightful, funny, dramatic, moving, and all-around good episode. They made me care about this new core of central characters (now that all of the old ones have left). Bastards. I was looking forward to having that hour back ;) Then the commercial advertising the upcoming weeks just came on and it was more over-the-top crap. But NBC has always done that with their coming attractions ads. Remember all the Enya in the Friends ads? I mean, Enya with Friends? What planet are they from?

WilliamShatner.com - The Official William Shatner Website. Even William Shatner has a weblog. Wow.

Well, our cable is finally back after 48+ hours. The problem? We were disconnected at the local junction box. The reason? The tech didn't know. He figures it was a mistake. They disconnected the wrong people. What pisses me off is that the people I spoke to at Cox had no idea what was wrong. They were not aware that any disconnections had been performed at my or other nearby addresses. Shouldn't they know that kind of thing? Pretty lousy service. In the week we've had cable it's been down nearly 3 days. Not great uptime. I don't suppose anyone has a copy of this week's west wing I can borrow...

Chinese explorers 'discovered America' "When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.

And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier."

Mark Twain. "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] One of my all-time favorite quotes.

Waiting for the A Train, the Sophisticated Pigeon: "A little more than a year ago, a motorman and a conductor on the A line, which terminates at the Far Rockaway station, swore to this reporter that it was true. They said it was common knowledge among longtime riders and those who worked on the line. Pigeons, they said, would board the trains at the outdoor terminal and step off casually at the next station down the line, Beach 25th Street, as if they were heading south but were too lazy, or too fat, to fly. " The bit in that article about a cat riding a dog is true. I've seen this very thing with my own eyes. I forget if it was here in DC or back in Boston.

Yesterday was Jack's 2nd birthday. Happy birthday Jack! He spent the day watching movers unload all of our stuff from the truck and then driving around with his parents to Target, K-Mart, Best Buy... OK, so it wasn't the best birthday a kid could ask for but, then again, all of the family and all of our stuff is in the same place again for the first time in months and he got a brand new crib to sleep in. So, it wasn't that bad either... :)

A Song about BBEdit Scary thing is, I know how he feels.

Junkbusters Home Page. Excellent tips here for dealing with telemarketers, et al.

Home at last This is the first night we're staying in the new place and the first time I've been online here and blogged, etc. I had one hell of a day though. I wrote up something about it here. It's not my best writing but I'm still a bit wigged out about what happened today so my funny isn't on right now. Maybe I'll rewrite it in a few days when some time has gone by and I can laugh at the events a bit more...

My palms sweat when I read today's installment of Chris' weblog accounts of his trip to Nigeria.

The IBM glass engine. This is wild. I've always rather liked Philip Glass. Comes from writing a paper on minimalist music in college where I got really into minimalism (mainly because I finally understood what they were doing -- my analogy is that the music is like watching clouds on a lazy summer day: they gradually shift and morph into different shapes). This applet is a fantastic way to showcase someone's works. I hope to see other applications for other artists.

Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran: "Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries."

Our new house is less than two miles from a Trader Joe's. I am so very happy now.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, February 28, 2002 Well, this is incredible. Doc talks about an NPR piece on Spike Milligan of the Goon Show (and so much more) who passed away a few days ago. (Aside: I know of the goon show from my friends the Brothers Fisher who always quoted it around the house I shared with them right after college). They spoke about Spike's influence on The Firesign Theater and that got me reminiscing. I grew up on Nick Danger and other gems from those four very, very funny men. They were a huge influence on my own weird sense of humor. So much so that when I finally made my wife sit through side two of "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once if You are Not Anywhere at All" she looked at me and said "That explains it! Now I understand!" Anyway, the wow part of this blog entry is that Doc talked about how Firesign Theater got their start but was unsure of a detail and who should respond in the comments of his blog? One of the original members. Follow the link and read for yourself. That, to me, is one of the great things about the Internet.