Camp Pigeon

Pigeons like to hang out on our railing and poo on our balcony. Katherine’s become a bit obsessed about it and has strung razorwire a Slinky across it. It seems to have worked so far. I wonder what the neighbors think.

Proposal: Kill All Meatbags

This weekend I went back to an old saved file, turned my character to the dark side, and beat KotOR as a bad guy. I realized that I didn’t like most of the supporting characters. HK-47 is by far my favorite. I really wish I had worked up my Repair skill so that I could have updated him.

Homer Simpson on Independent Media

“You see, Lisa: instead of one bigshot controlling the media, now there’s a thousand freaks serializing their worthless opinions.”

Hyperlink Research

The web has been around long enough that newspapers’ websites should have policies regarding when to cite a company’s webpage. Generally the first mention of an entity should either be a link or be followed by one in parantheses. Articles should also have a section at the bottom containing all the links mentioned above so that people can do futher reading on their own. Under no circumstances should an article be published without links when they’re available.

TrackBack Circle Up

I’ve been debating back and forth with myself about whether or not to send TrackBack pings to sites I link to on eXtremities. My interpretation of TrackBack is this: it lets you read other posts inspired by the one you’re currently reading or written about a similar topic. The other interpretation is that it lets every page contain links to every page linking to it. I don’t think the second version is very useful. What I want in reading a TrackBack is more information or thoughts about a topic. Otherwise following a ping to my linklog just gives you a page linking back to where you found it. Great if you want to click in circles all day, but not very constructive.

My inclination is to only send TrackBack pings when I have something to say about a post, not just whenever I link to one.

Daring Fireball has a lot to say about this. My feeling is that lists of referrers are interesting but not altogether useful, whereas TrackBacks would be used to provide easy extra reading material on a topic. In that vein I almost think people should delete incoming TrackBack pings that don’t have anything but a link in them.

.mac Webmail’s Unreliability

Dear .mac Team,

I pay $99/year for your service. For me, the most important parts of the .mac package are the wonderful email and webmail interface you’ve designed. While I love the ease of use and ability to use iSync to keep my address book mobile, I feel it is inexcusable that I see this screen an average of 2-5 times a week. I only use webmail during office hours. Such unreliability should not occur during peak times.

You need to fix your reliablity issues if you want me to continue paying for your service, especially considering the good things I’ve been hearing about Gmail.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

For my birthday my dad gave me a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss. Some of you might never understand how great a book about punctuation can be. Here are a few excerpts for the rest of you:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Here’s a great example of a punctuation mishap from history:

[Witness the] example of the fateful mispunctuated telegram that previpitated the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal in 1896 […] The Transvaal was a Boer republic at the time, and it was believed that the British and other settlers around Johannesburg (who were denied civil rights) would rise up if Jameson invaded. But unfortunately, when the settlers sent their telegraphic invitation to Jameson, it included a tragic ambiguity:

It is under these circumstances that we feel constrained to call upon you to come to our aid should a disturbance arise here the circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue of people who are so situtated.

As Eric Partridge points out in his Usage and Abusage, if you place a full stop after the word “aid” in this passaged, the message is unequivocal. It says, “Come at once!” If you put it after “here,” however, it says something more like, “We might need you at some later date depending on what happens here, but in the meantime — don’t calls us, Jameson, old boy; we’ll call you.” Of course, the message turned up at The Times with a full stop after “aid” no one knows who put it there) and poor old Jameson just sprang to the saddle, without anybody wanting or expecting him to.

Anecdotes and excerpts aside, this is a book you can judge by its cover. It features two panda bears. One is on a ladder erasing the errant comma. The other is off to speak to the author of said comma, revolver in hand.

Dorky Sidebar

Here is (I think) how one would tell that titular joke in HTML:

<p>Panda:</p>  <ol> <li>Eats</li> <li>Shoots</li> <li>Leaves</li> </ol> 

Which should instead be written in semantic code:

<dl> <dt>Panda</dt> <dd> <dl> <dt>Eats</dt> <dd>Shoots</dd> <dd>Leaves</dd> </dl> </dd> </dl> 

Rendered in a web browser you would see:

Panda:

1. Eats
2. Shoots
3. Leaves

And:

Panda

Eats

Shoots

Leaves

Enhanced Rehydration

Container design must be a bizarre profession. Here’s a bottle of Gatorade I bought the other day. Note the explanatory text regarding the easy-to-grip design:

The innovative bottle design maximizes function and flow for enhanced rehydration.

How important a priority is increasing bottle-design confidence that the Gatorade people decided to provide a diagram on every bottle?

Pre-Floated

Why has no one ever (to my knowledge) bottled a root beer float and sold it? Sure, you couldn’t get all the floating, melting, yummy greatness of a real float, but why not a creamy root beer with a hint of vanilla already mixed in?