BoingBoing linked to this online time machine, which shows you what your website would look like (and sound like) back in 1996:
Presenting Geocities-izer!
April 29, 2010
April 28, 2010
Sorry for the lack of bloggishness
Today was a triple-whammy of first-thing-in-the-morning dentist appointment, followed by a meeting with my accountant, then a trip to the bank to open a vein pay my 2009 personal and business taxes. That left no time for more pleasant activities like blogging.
Regular blogging may resume later today.
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April 17, 2010
Busy
In my traditional manner, I’m just starting to do the books for 2009. I doubt there’ll be much blogging for today, as a result.
April 2, 2010
Travellin’
On the road for a bit, don’t know what my internet access will be like for the first part of the trip, so updates may be somewhat irregular. I’m sure you’ll all cope just fine.
March 26, 2010
Times to go pay-for-access in June
The editors of the Telegraph, Guardian, and Daily Mail rub their hands in glee, anticipating more page views from former casual Times readers:
The Times and The Sunday Times will become the first British newspapers to charge readers to access the titles online from June, Rupert Murdoch’s News International announced on Friday.
Customers will have to pay one pound for one day’s access and two pounds for a week’s subscription, in a move that will be closely watched in a newspaper industry suffering steadily dropping sales.
Both Times titles will launch new websites in early May, replacing the existing combined site, Times Online.
I rarely link to Times articles as it is, so their decision to pull everything behind a paywall won’t have much direct effect on my reading habits. If it’s a success (for varying values of “success”), other newspapers may follow suit. That might start to impact me, as I do link to articles from other British newspapers on a more regular basis.
Personally, I think this move won’t work, but it’ll be interesting watching the experiment happen.
March 19, 2010
Light posting in forecast
Taking Victor up to Trent University today, so no posting until later. Maybe.
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March 10, 2010
Slight stylesheet change
A comment by “sm” let me know that not everyone was seeing the same formatting on the blog that I was seeing (the term he used was “spidery” to describe the text). As I’m not an expert at stylesheets, I consulted Jon, my former virtual landlord. He quickly diagnosed the problem as a stray lettering specification which affected most paragraphs, but which didn’t show up for visitors using ClearType. Each of the machines I’d been using to post on the blog had ClearType turned on, so I wasn’t seeing any issues.
So I’ve changed the stylesheet to remove the negative letter spacing, which should provide a better viewing experience for anyone not using Windows XP/Vista.
February 20, 2010
The editors at the National Post have the reverb setting too high
In two different articles I looked at today, there appears to be a slight problem with repetition. For example, in Rex Murphy’s piece on the on-again, off again boycott of oil from Alberta by BB&B, he appears to be trying to make some sort of point by repeating the company’s abbreviated name:
It cannot be very encouraging if one of the most dynamic industries in our recession-plagued country is operating in a state of mental waywardness. And if Bed Bath & Beyond, with an assist from Whole Foods, have rescued the captains of our oil industry from unknowing mental distress, why then this apparent BBB BBB BBB boycott would be worth its weight in stacked linens and whole sacks of the finest nickel-plated multiple-nozzle shower-heads.
[. . .]
Bed Bath & Beyond “clarified” in a press release: “Characterizations that we [BB BB and B] have ‘rejected’ any particular fuels are not accurate as we are not in a position to do so” (emphasis mine). Which is a little ambiguous since it leaves open the thought that were BBB BBB BBB in “a position to do so,” they would. So Albertans might take home the message that Bed Bath & Beyond have distanced themselves from the idea of “rejecting” oil sands fuel, not to spare Albertan sensibilities, but because there is no way for them not to do so. They’re just stuck with it. A little lacking, wouldn’t you say, in grace and tact?
[. . .]
My guess is the wavelet of backlash from Alberta at the ForestEthics press release was sufficient to haul the monks of BBB BBB BBB out of the eco-choir. BBB BBB BBB may have thought that sending a little incense to the Al Gore contingent of The Science is Settled and The Himalayan Glaciers are Toast Church of Global Warming (pre-Climategate Division) would titillate the balance sheet among the eco-fervent. But they quickly thought better of it. Oh that old Gloria Mundi. How Sic it Transits.
[. . .]
The IP IP CC has less prestige now than the Golden Globes, and bears no little resemblance to that farce’s incestuous relationship with its “industry.” The IP IP CC chairman is a rude, busy man who writes erotic novels — his muse, apparently, Jacqueline Susann.
(Emphasis mine). I decided that I just didn’t get the joke, until I looked at the lengthy criticism of the Liberal Party’s insistence on incorporating abortion rights into the government’s plans for targeting foreign aid to mothers and children, where Conrad Black seems to stutter over the acronyms, too:
Canada should tax provincial transactions and elective energy sales, the sale-of non-essential goods, and reduce income taxes and abolish capital gains taxes on sales by Canadians of Canadian securities. We should reintroduce private medicine alongside the public health system, as most advanced countries have done. Our health-care system should not be a model for the United States of what not to do, as it now is. We should be proposing drastic reforms to the UN UN , NATO NATO NATO NATO and the IMF, and building our defence capacity. An army of 19,000 is a scandal for a country as important as Canada. We should assist the private sector in making Canadians owners of a serious automobile manufacturer, and in the fair and advantageous repatriation of more of our industry. And the stocks, if not the lash, should be restored to deal with Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest for fouling our nest by criticizing the Alberta oil sands at the most futile international conference, Copenhagen, since the Defenestration of Prague.
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February 7, 2010
Hosting service suffered an outage
HostGator, my ISP, had some router issues this morning, so apologies if you tried to access the site and couldn’t. Things appear to be stabilizing now.
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January 12, 2010
Headline writing 101: get the reader’s attention
For a perfect example of how to grab the (male) reader’s attention, pay heed to Lester Haines:
Women to ‘chest drive’ Bulgarian airbags
‘Simulated breast prosthesis’ – sport before you import
As you’d imagine, based on the headline, there are images in this article that might be unsafe for certain work environments.
January 7, 2010
Tracking the effectiveness of bloggers by arrests
2009 was a tough year for journalists, with at least 76 killed and arrests and physical assaults increased over last year. In a back-handed way, the effectiveness of bloggers and other informal journalists could be measured by the ways in which they get harassed, intimidated, or otherwise interfered with as they tried to report on the news:
Meanwhile, the spotlight is increasingly falling on bloggers, as 2009 was the first year that more than 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were imprisoned.
In a number of countries online dissent is now a criminal offence: authorities have responded to the internet as pro-democracy tool with new laws and crackdowns. A pair of Azerbaijani bloggers were sentenced to two years in prison for making a film mocking the political elite.
China was still the leading Internet censor in 2009. However, Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan have all also made extensive use website blocking and online surveillance to monitor and control dissent. The Turkmen Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer remains in jail, while well-known Burmese comedian Zarganar has a further 34 years of his prison sentence to serve.
However, the Report also notes that democratic countries have not lagged far behind, instancing the various steps taken by European countries to control the internet under the guise of protection against child porn and illegal downloading. It also notes that Australia intends to put in place a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.
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January 5, 2010
Updated to new version of WordPress
In case there are any style or functionality glitches, that’d be the reason why. If you do see something clearly not right, please drop me a comment on this post and I’ll flail around to try to fix it . . .
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January 1, 2010
Here’s to a better year (decade) this time around
Happy New Year, everyone. 2009 wasn’t my favourite year, but it was a mild improvement over 2008, which in turn was nearly as shitty as 2007. 2006, that was a pretty good year . . .
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December 31, 2009
Government moves quickly on TSA . . . to silence critics
In a bold move in the wake of the latest terrorist bomb attempt, the government has pounced . . . on the bloggers who reported on the TSA’s response:
As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.
TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.
Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.
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December 14, 2009
Sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend
I hadn’t planned to avoid blogging all weekend, it just sort of happened. Of course, at this time of year, many of you aren’t reading the blogosphere as frequently, so it probably balances out.
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