(ie, the poor man's trackback)
I've decided that the Comment Blog, while useful and a nice snapshot of my comings-and-goings, doesn't have a large enough utility outside my own purposes to justify its continued existance. I'm rethinking and changing some of the ways I run my life, and haven't found a place for the Comment Blog under the new regime. It will remain online for archival purposes. So-long, and thanks for all the fish.
6/29/2004 06:01:00 PM
http://geegaw.com/jour/2004/06/nunciation.php
AND NOW, RELEASED FROM THE FOSTERING CARE OF MEN WITH PENS BEHIND THE EARS, OR OF MEN WITH GOLD LACE ON THE SLEEVES, THEY WERE LIKE THOSE LIFELONG PRISONERS WHO, LIBERATED AFTER MANY YEARS, DO NOT KNOW WHAT USE TO MAKE OF THEIR FREEDOM.
JOSEPH CONRAD, ``AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS''
6/19/2004 04:17:00 AM
http://mcomment.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_pastthecollegegrounds_archive.html#108751896436466153
A) Here is Phil Ringnalda's take gibberish thing:
http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/06/gzip_well_sometimes_its_simple.php
In a nutshell, it's a gzip+encoding thing that should be Google's responsibility to fix. It's affecting a lot of Blogspot blogs, and there's nothing much you can do about it.
As to the Upcoming Events not being flush with the edge of the page, it's something in your CSS that I wouldn't take the time to flush out, because simply adding this rule to the STYLE section of your Blogger template:
#sideBar table { margin: 0 0 0 auto; }should (*should*) make the events list match up with the edge.
B) No idea about (B), as I refuse (refuse!) to launch IE on a Mac. Mozilla all the way.
6/18/2004 02:26:00 AM
http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/geekery/hatin_on_gmail.php
What are Gmail's strong points? The most obvious is the search function. The e-mails that I find myself searching for most often are mailing list archives. Ergo, Gmail would be good for storing mailing list mail, which usually ends up in the trash anyhow. Any other mail, I agree, benefits little from residing in a Gmail inbox. The cost of switching e-mail addresses simply does not outweigh the benefits.
I'm 100% with you on the XUL Gmail client.
6/16/2004 05:17:00 AM
http://disjointed.org/archives/000932.html
Dave Enders is a one-time University of Michigan student, now reporting freelance from Iraq. I just heard him give a report for Free Speech Radio News on WCBN, UMich's campus radio station. The cool thing about Dave is that he keeps a low-profile weblog (and has kept it since before it was "cool" for journalists to do so; dig the old-skool IP address URI). Today he posted some pics, including a stencil of Moqtada al-Sadr, most likely from Falujah. Want to contact him? You can find his cell-phone number on the front page of his site.
6/14/2004 06:09:00 PM
http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001091.html
Here's to hoping smart people can hack Apache to add Bayesian filtering and POST rewriting capability, and then write a Movable Type plugin that leverages the hack to redirect all weblog spam to this form.
Sweet, sweet justice.
6/12/2004 05:40:00 PM
http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/archives/000411.html
There may be one or two more here:
6/11/2004 11:10:00 AM
http://www.happychen.org/blog/archives/000120.htm
The Swiss are stuck up.
Or so my German housemate tells me.
6/10/2004 11:31:00 PM
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sillygwailo/9798.html
And there's that other tired refrain heard so often from company spokesmen... "[So and so] insisted that [such and such a move] had nothing to do with [an obviously related event]." As in, the McDonalds spokesman insisted that the removal of the super-size option from the menu had nothing to do with the release of Morgan Spurlock's wildly popular film Supersize Me.
Hmm...
Sorry, user sillygwailo does not list you as a friend, and they've set the "friends only" option for who can reply to their journal.
Oh well.
6/10/2004 11:20:00 PM
http://www.livejournal.com/users/chriswaugh_bj/68660.html
Interesting what you write about Mr Ho. We had a speaker come through Michigan this year (Chris Berry, UC Bekeley Film Studies) and give a talk on Bruce Lee and masculinity. He managed to pick out all sorts of lit-crit/post-colonial/queer theory themes from Bruce Lee's movies, and showed several clips from Return of the Dragon.
Before the influence of the West, he said, there were two male archetypes in Chinese lit/film: the wu male (武, martial masculinity, eschews women - body revealed, but not eroticized), and the wen male (文, refined masculinity, cultural prowess). Bruce Lee's films were a mission of re-empowerment for the Chinese male, where Bruce (and by Bruce, I think he meant the HK movie industry) choose to take on a Westernized wu persona: a move away from the absolution of violence, and towards the eroticization of the body (for the female and queer audience, which is where "Mr Ho"/Wei Ping Ao comes in. Mr Ho is also a rejection of the wen masculinity).
In the martial art movies of Bruce Lee there is a tension between the body as "Underdog" (source of power) and "Queer Appropriation" (object of desire). Something was said about the appreciation of Bruce Lee movies by the west as "stealing" the re-empowerment of the Asian male, because homophobia is so central to Western masculinity and the homophobic tension in Bruce's movies are worked out through violence (cf violence towards the Mr Ho character).
His take on the Chuck Norris character is that Chuck is part of a racial hierarchy in the characters that Bruce fights, e.g. note the Russian champion in Enter the Dragon. Bruce's covering Chuck Norris at the end of their battle is a metaphor for sumission to the West, and desire for acceptance by the West of Bruce's new Asian masculinity. Homosexuality is Bruce Lee's take on wen masculinity, affirming the colonial notion of China as the "Sick Man of Asia". It is ironic that Bruce chooses to defeat the imperialists by taking on imperialist values.
The speaker was discomforted at the depiction of homophobia and self-hatred of the Asian/Chinese male identity in Bruce Lee movies.
Needless to say, many Bruce fans in the audience were disquieted by this lecture. One student commented that it was unfair to peg this all on Bruce Lee, that the speaker ignored his books and martial art styles which stress self-defense and harmony with one's-self. Which is a valid point, but if you take Bruce as a synecdoche for the Hong Kong film industry of the time then I think this lecture was a correct analysis.
Of course, any errors that appear in the above transcription are due to my own poor transcription skills and lack of mastery in the language of the subject.
6/10/2004 04:45:00 PM
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/06/09/life-assessment
b--- c- hms-(+) L8@ H2O-- C12H22O11+++ DDS-->++ i-->+ lb CFP@ 1040- bf4e P1R2-- <3U- <3me- uhi-(+++) ***+++ ta--(++) ttyl---(+) WWJD- DHL-$ Yner--- I---
Mark's commenting system doesn't have a preview function, so I wasn't able to save it from mangling before it got posted.
6/10/2004 02:43:00 PM
http://mcomment.blogspot.com/2004/06/you-might-think-that-googling-for.html
BKerr: I'll be in Taiwan for a year, with a semester left in AA after that. I'm going to miss the tech community here in Ann Arbor; before I came, I didn't expect to find such an active and inventive group of webloggers.
Brian: Michigan football games are a real experience: the stadium is mammoth, the fans are spirited, and the team is world-class. Also, I bought the tix with my Bible study group, a buncha great folk. So yeah, it really is too bad.
6/09/2004 02:09:00 PM
http://www.arborblogs.com/archives/000975.php
I was just surprised I had never heard of this "group of distinguished A**2 tech pals". It's nice to have an occasional "the weblog world is smaller than you think"-type wake up call.
6/09/2004 01:40:00 PM
http://www.arborblogs.com/archives/000975.php
What's up with this:
http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2004/06/richard-hale-shaw-steaks-scotch-and.html
6/08/2004 10:15:00 PM
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rainygreyday/106902.html
Hey Julie, overall for what's it's worth from somebody who hasn't had a chance (or have the ability) to read the original I think it's a good translation, it kept me anticipating every word. I agree that finishing the book will give you a better feel for the style, and even more for the characters. The one nit-pick I would make, and you may dispute this with good reason, is that some of the short similes ("like a snail", etc) that may sound very natural in Japanese actually sound abrupt and out of place when the grammatical structure of the Japanese passage is followed too closely in translation. Maybe I'm just used to Jay Rubin's Murakami, I think he tends to be long-winded when dealing with similes, smoothing them out, in a way. Also, does the word "butt" convey the image it does in the original Japanese? Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
But hey, at least you're not translating English:
http://www.multilingualwebmaster.com/library/ten_reasons.html
6/08/2004 05:04:00 PM
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/06/08/remappingShortcuts
For Mozilla users, the Multizilla extension gives you the option to be warned when closing a window with more then one tab open. I was glad to find this out after one too many—no, far too many—experiences like yours.
6/08/2004 01:07:00 AM
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ann_arbor_ypsi/343715.html
Stencil Revolution has helpful tutorials.
http://www.stencilrevolution.com/
6/07/2004 06:29:00 AM
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ann_arbor_ypsi/342714.html
Two that I know of, vastly different atmospheres:
Cafe Oz: Just north of Liberty by the post office, a Middle Eastern restaurant. (it received a liquor license recently, some sites haven't updated with that info yet)
http://upcoming.org/venue/1875/
The Heidelberg: On Main, a German pub. The hookas are at the bar upstairs but folks prefer to take them down to the basement and play darts, listen to the jukebox.
http://upcoming.org/venue/2452/
6/06/2004 06:46:00 PM
http://cookiecrook.com/2004/05/#cc108485654777677651
Glad to hear that you got hooked up; both Cookiecrook.com and Musingsofanidiot.com are resolving on this end. Based on my experience, I'm confident that JVDS should be smooth sailing for ya. Can't understand your decision to go with Fedora, though ;)
6/06/2004 03:32:00 PM
http://www.littleyellowdifferent.com/miniblog/archives/week_2004_05_30.php
Timbaland's early stuff is genius. I think the more exciting revelation is that Hikaru Utada is a stoner:
"I feel a bit freer here," she says. "Japan is the kind of place where if you get caught with weed, your records get taken off the shelves. I feel like there's a bit more room to find your own position here."
From 3 of Hikaru Utada's new tracks will be produced by Timbaland
6/06/2004 02:12:00 PM
http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001058.html
At times, living in Tianjin seemed a little like self-flagellation. It's a wholesome, charming city, great place to raise a family; just make sure you get out every few weekends. Beijing is only an hour away.
ps. I made the same Spears/Stones comparison when I heard the news.
6/02/2004 07:34:00 PM
http://disjointed.org/archives/000912.html
Slashdot (I know, i know...) had an AskSlashdot on schizophrenia that was a great read because so many of the posters had family experiences with the disorder. The conclusion I synthesized is that the chemical imbalances in the body are real, and that drugs can be a quick and effective crutch. But popping pills never trains your body to re-balance itself, which is why the comment about Eli Lilly and Pfizer is oh too sad-but-true.
6/02/2004 02:56:00 PM
http://ryskamp.org/brain/design/editcss-and-userstyled-sites.html
I did something like this too, it's great fun: http://msittig.freeshell.org/css/edit_styles/
6/01/2004 02:46:00 AM
