Comment Blog

2005-03-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

Here's another image with the same handwriting:

http://msittig.freeshell.org/imgs/sohu/weirenminbi.gif

...only it's an MMS image I downloaded from sohu.com a while ago that says 为人民*币*服务:

为 = "for"
人民币 = "the people's currency"
服务 = "serve"

A cynical take on the new Chinese socialism.

2005-03-26T10:59:00.000-05:00

I picked up some He-Man comics last summer from a street-vendor in Dali, Yunnan, China.
希曼，宇宙的巨人: Cover 1, Cover 2, and a blurry sample page.

2005-03-26T07:41:00.000-05:00

Oh my, http://www.chaile.org/ is a great site! (ahh, I should have known; I see it's by Adam of therobots.org fame)

We down here in Shanghai ( http://my.calendars.net/micah ) area are always jealous of the music that is going on in Beijing. Shanghai apparently has a bigger DJ/dance culture, but it's mostly for the expats and nouveau riche, ugh. My friends always get excited when a Beijing band comes on tour (and disappointed when they bypass us to play in another city with better support for rock/punk/metal *sad*).

Make sure to check out a show or two at the Nameless Highland ( http://www.music1234567.com/xc/ ). It's a pretty legendary venue; I check up on rock sites for cities around China, and they often post events listings for Namelesss Highland, even though it's hundreds of miles away in Beijing. And if I were you I would hit up at least one metal show; even if it's not your thing, in my opinion it's the music that the Chinese do best, so it's worth getting a taste of.

2005-03-26T07:27:00.000-05:00

This is Micah in Shanghai. Haha, how come I only discover this on the evening of the 26th, the night you are set to play here? And how come I have you down for next Wednesday the 30th on my calendar[1]?

[1] http://my.calendars.net/micah

2005-03-26T07:19:00.000-05:00

Guidebook author and China travel specialist Peter Neville-Hadley wrote an interesting rant on The Economist's coverage of Shanghai, and also on Xintiandi, recently on his Oriental-List mailing list. I made a copy of it available here:

http://wiki.wubi.org/PeterNHsXintiandiRant

Note that his perspective is that of a travel writer, so he's particularly interested in the preservation of artifacts and culture. From my perspective, Xintiandi has one of Shanghai's greatest live music venues for rock music (the Ark). Other than for that, I have no reason to go there.

2005-03-26T02:39:00.002-05:00

You might (or might not, when you think about it) be surprised to find that, when you distill it down to basic principles, life "in the boonies" still means confronting some of the same personal spiritual challenges that you probably struggle with in the developed world. Or maybe not. But that's my experience, although I'm not exactly in the boonies.

Remember when you were considering going to a Bible school somewhere? Capenwray (sp?)? That's not such a bad idea, and would probably push you further in the direction you seem to want than simply challenging yourself on a physical level... or maybe, like me, you might want to just work your heart out for a year at a couple of jobs and save up some money for an exploratory period. I'm still using my Borders/BOHS-sub money as a cushion to float me while I figure out how/where/when to settle down.

2005-03-09T02:41:00.000-05:00

Hey, this is Micah. I was studying at Michigan last year and somehow stumbled across your weblog at that time (maybe a link from the The Goodspeed Update?). Funny how we both ended up in Shanghai.
Where are you studying at specifically?

2005-03-09T02:30:00.000-05:00

All your base are belong to Shanghai.

2004-07-03T14:50:00.000-04:00

Couldn't resist; I feel strongly about this one, and I thought my analogy was particularly rude :)

I don't think it's right to say that Cathy "shows her rage against those fighting for equal rights." She is encouraging like-minded citizens to take part in the democratic referendum process. This kind of over-the-top speech is like public masturbation, self-serving and offensive. On the other hand...

> If the majority remains silent on this
> issue, the moral values of a small
> minority will be endorsed by law...

Woah, I'm getting a flashback here. What was it called... de-segregation?

2004-06-29T18:01:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-19T04:17:00.000-04:00

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''

2004-06-18T02:26:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-16T05:17:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-14T18:09:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-11T11:10:00.000-04:00

There may be one or two more here:
http://wiki.wubi.org/FiveDollarMeal

2004-06-11T05:04:00.000-04:00

Love the photographer’s stance.

2004-06-10T23:31:00.000-04:00

The Swiss are stuck up.
Or so my German housemate tells me.

2004-06-10T23:20:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-10T16:45:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-10T14:43:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-09T14:09:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-09T13:40:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-08T22:15:00.000-04:00

What's up with this:

http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2004/06/richard-hale-shaw-steaks-scotch-and.html

2004-06-08T17:04:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-08T01:07:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-07T06:29:00.000-04:00

Stencil Revolution has helpful tutorials.

http://www.stencilrevolution.com/

2004-06-06T18:46:00.000-04:00

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/

2004-06-06T15:32:00.000-04:00

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 ;)

2004-06-06T14:12:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-02T19:34:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-02T14:56:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-06-01T02:46:00.000-04:00

I did something like this too, it's great fun: http://msittig.freeshell.org/css/edit_styles/

2004-05-23T02:21:00.000-04:00

I had a friend in fourth semester Chinese named Jaime, the Spanish name. The teacher found out that he had never been given a Chinese name and insisted he take one, so Jaime thought up...
还没
It was promptly vetoed. Like wulong said, this cuts both ways, but I don't think anon should be so sensitive about it. Part of the learning process is making mistakes and looking like a fool, and the job of the teacher is to point out your mistakes and correct them. Thank goodness for students exploring the language and trying out silly names. But thank goodness for Name Nazis, they are just as necessary.

2004-05-22T20:35:00.000-04:00

It's sometimes helpful to compare the rights of "ugly people" across legal systems. This article in Bankers Online [Link] says that for American companies:

* It does not appear to be a violation of federal anti-discrimination law to hire on the basis of looks, attractiveness, personal appearance.
* However, such a policy may be forbidden by state law (e.g., District of Columbia Human Rights Act: unlawful to hire on the basis of personal appearance).
* But it does violate federal law to hire on the basis of gender, race, national origin, disability and other protected characteristics.

Meaning that a company can have minimum standards of "beauty" as long as the standard is applied in a non-discriminatory fashion across lines of gender, race, national origin or disability.
That's the legal position of the US federal government. Now, if you want to talk about ethics, civility, business smarts, or just about any other measure, it's another matter completely... I think you're absolutely in the right to react that way to your school, and to fiancee's (ex-)potential employers. Not only do they show that they're just "not nice people", but like you point out, they just demoted a very competent employee. Hopefully they'll recognize their mistake.

2004-05-22T19:17:00.000-04:00

Dave Enders left the University of Michigan (go Wolverines!) to study abroad in Beirut, and then decided that starting the first English-language newspaper in post-Saddam would be more exciting. Well the paper folded after a few months but Dave is back in Iraq freelancing for, among others, High Times magazine. His writing is edgy, frank, and slightly jaded. Occasionally he will post sound bytes of interviews with soldiers or locals. His weblog is a slightly more personal view of the situation on the ground, and Dave is one heck of a writer.
If you want a single entry to judge this blog by, try the latest:
http://66.241.226.47/davidsblog/archives/000082.html
Here's an entry with an audio clip of poetry by a soldier posted in Najaf:
http://66.241.226.47/davidsblog/archives/000081.html

(submitted to BoingBoing.net)

2004-05-22T02:02:00.000-04:00

Like some of the commenters in the Marmot's thread said, the uniform size of the fires and the season suggests that this is simply agricultural burning. When I was a kid, we would watch Spanish farmers do this after the sunflower harvest. But I hear you on the China analogy, it's incredible to me that so much of North Korea is still a mystery to us.
Here's another impressive picture from North Korea:
http://www.uriminzokkiri.com/Russian/data/album/janggun/html/084-2.htm

2004-05-22T00:59:00.000-04:00

Ever since the World Wide Birthday Web went down and came back, it hasn't been the same as it once was.

2004-05-21T17:35:00.000-04:00

I didn't figure this out until recently either. The Wikipedia has a few good articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno_music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music

2004-05-20T15:43:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs has got to be either chuckling amused or hopping mad.

2004-05-20T15:37:00.000-04:00

Since you mention Jeb Bush, have you thought about writing to your Representative in Congress and see if an exception can be made? They have been known to work "miracles".

2004-05-20T12:32:00.000-04:00

Yup, sometimes. I'll add a disjointed link to the bottom.

2004-05-19T19:39:00.000-04:00

For what it's worth, JVDS [link] is doing a pretty good job for me. Service is pretty bare-bones, but my issues have been resolved quickly. 0xDECAFBAD [link] is also hosted there. _Debian_ or RedHat VPS starting at USD 12.50/month, FreeBSD starting at 15.00/month. Unmetered (actually, hardware-limited) bandwidth starts at 40/month.

2004-05-19T14:04:00.000-04:00

This picture is my new desktop pic.

2004-05-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

For folks interested in the financial side of this deal, Walter Hutchens has linked to an article in Finance Asia about the Tencent IPO. Interesting quotes:

The main difference between standard SMS services and IM services is that the latter operates on the basis of a closed system. Customers can only message other users of the system, but the system itself has a far wider range of applications than phone based SMS services. IM users, for example, can send messages between computers, mobiles and pagers.
Tencent's IM service, known as QQ, has become one of China's most recognisable brand-names, although it has virtually no name recognition outside the Mainland. According to a 2003 People's Daily study of Chinese internet usage, QQ ranked among the top 10 most used words alongside the likes of Bin Laden.

(This comment will be posted when the CDN weblog is fixed. UPDATE: posted 2004-05-28T22:01:59-05:00.)

2004-05-18T21:58:00.000-04:00

And like Photo Matt says, the DomainKeys page is styled entirely with CSS. Try the disable stylesheets bookmarklet on it. Very nice.

2004-05-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

I've considered it:
Pros: 1) # of comments listed on each post, 2) links to commenter profiles, 3) HTML
Cons: 1) closed source, 2) data recoverability, 3) HTML, 4) "anonymous" posters
Either way: 1) comment functionality, 2) e-mail notification (for me)
It's a close call.

2004-05-18T03:04:00.000-04:00

I had trouble finding your photos from the links above, folks can try using this one:
http://community.webshots.com/user/kekingChina
Thank you for taking pictures of food! It's so scrumptious-looking, it's making my mouth water right now. In particular, the spicy(?) pepper dish from Suzhou looks wonderful.
http://community.webshots.com/photo/144078721/144088621QYGXEE
It's funny that you made curry, I just did the same on Saturday night. But I made it with the Japanese curry that comes in big blocks, it's great with potatos and carrots over rice.
The story about "bu hao yisi" is hilarious, I can just imagine the looks on the waiters' faces when they discovered that you could understand them.

2004-05-18T02:29:00.000-04:00

Les Orchard points to ocblogs atom feeds. Sweetness.

2004-05-17T20:13:00.000-04:00

The ironic thing is that it has the *look* of a CSS-styled site. It reminded me of this comment:
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/15/tables_oh_th/#c005009
that refers to Andy Budd talking about CSS having a higher barrier to entry, and web standards being an "ivory tower". My interpretation is that sites like the Michigan Theater's are gimmicky imitations of more elegant — and time consuming — CSS design. But then again, there has been plenty of valid criticism of the ivory tower mentality, so I won't be too arrogant :)

2004-05-17T15:01:00.000-04:00

A couple years ago, I heard tabular data described as data that still makes sense when its rows are made columns and columns made rows. I don't remember the source for this idea, probably a member or link from the css-discuss list. I wish I did, because it made a lot of sense to me and has guided how I think semantically about tables and use them in marking up content.
As a special case, the data in a table with a single row and multiple cells will read the same whether read row by row or column by column. The same is true for a table of a single column. So as long as an author is OK with having an immutable order dictated for his/her content, a single row/column table should be semantically OK for marking up a series of data points / cells / sections.
This perspective is attractive to me because it's an argument based on semantics for the light use of tables in marking up "non-tabular data". I can appreciate the "just gotta get the job done" approach, but I rest just a bit easier when I have a justification based on semantic reasoning.

2004-05-15T17:53:00.000-04:00

The Chinese text is, in fact, Chinese. Some sort of classical poem, I'm guessing. It's actually traditional Chinese characters, so I'm going to paste some simplified characters into this comment:
这达标、那达标，
都要农民掏腰包；
这大办、那大办，
都是农民血和汗。

2004-05-14T14:16:00.000-04:00

Not mushy enough! Glad you had a good time.

2004-05-14T11:20:00.002-04:00

Dude, I use this all the time. Have a copy saved locally. Greatest thing since the edit styles bookmarklet.
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html

2004-05-13T04:59:00.000-04:00

How could I forget one of the best?!
http://wobumingbai.typepad.com/ (Shijiazhuang, thereabouts)

2004-05-12T19:25:00.000-04:00

The author name on the Atom feed for this weblog is "Jason Goldman", and there happens to be a Blogger employee... here , with that name. So, hi Jason?
Anyhoo, regarding the Scribe template, I do believe the designer was Todd Dominey. In fact, his last post is about Scribe, so you may wanna check it out.

2004-05-12T17:23:00.000-04:00

Well, waddayaknow. Good eye there. I got those in a forwarded e-mail about a year back. Put them up on my msittig.freeshell.org space, then had to move them to the school account when bandwidth became an issue. Now if I could just find pictures of cute bento being eaten off of naked people...

2004-05-12T15:16:00.000-04:00

The point of my terse previous point being that the decision each person makes of who to vote for should be much more complicated than simply thinking "who would Osama vote into office?" Besides, I don't see how the beheading changes things at all; soldiers are dying by the handful every week, and just because the DoD manages to de-sensationalize their deaths (as best as they can) doesn't mean that they count more or less than Berg.

2004-05-12T15:02:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a John Stewart analysis, try this question: if we had elected Kerry last time, would Berg have been in Iraq to be beheaded?

2004-05-12T12:28:00.000-04:00

Ahh, thank you Xiao.

2004-05-12T09:09:00.000-04:00

Are there any weblogs or templates that you think tastefully incorporate the banner ad?
The Google weblog uses an alternative button:

2004-05-12T08:34:00.000-04:00

I dunno about photoblogs about Chinese cities specifically, but I keep a few Chinese photoblogs bookmarked:
http://54boy.com/ziboyhome.htm (Beijing)
http://21mm.net/ (Beijing)
http://dsbym.blogone.net/ (not sure, probably Beijing)
http://www.chinesetriad.org/ (forgot)
http://www.socoolbbs.com/500miles/ (Tianjin)

2004-05-12T06:11:00.000-04:00

Can somebody comment on the significance of this news? I did my best to read through the corporate-speak in the press release, and the way I interpreted it is that Tencent (QQ) is a relatively inexperienced company ("limited operating history, the limited financial resources, domestic limited management infrastructure") with an exceptionally large user base (but slowly losing users to MSN) hoping to draw on Telecom's experience to expand into other areas, e.g. SMS-related services.

2004-05-11T14:32:00.000-04:00

The Moztips wiki uses an ascii art captcha system, generating a string of letters in different ascii-art fonts for the user to identify. It addresses both points that Ken brings up in being both monochrome and large in size.

2004-05-11T06:48:00.000-04:00

Neato; isn't it validating to see your ideas adopted by very internet saavy folk?

Matt, isn't cutting weblogs out of the PageRank equation something that many people were asking for when Googlebombing became the rage about a year ago? It makes me wonder if Google will ever drop the redirects at all.

In the meantime, though, we can have a little fun with them. For example, chain the redirects to jump from site to site. Or visit Google's redirect script without a target link to generate an infite loop of redirection. I can generating about 6-8k/s of traffic by letting it run continuously.

2004-05-10T14:54:00.000-04:00

(via your comment on Jeff Veen's weblog)
You echoed my feelings about the new blogger app; it's so dumbed down that some of the conveniences were lost. Like you said, it was nice to see your previous posts on the same screen as the textarea for composing a new post. And when I'm logged in and type "blogger.com" into Mozilla's Location bar, it takes me to the Dashboard, where both Blogger News and Recent Updates are below the fold, both sections that that could be enjoyed without scrolling on the old Blogger.

2004-05-08T03:38:00.000-04:00

To the folks worried about having to write personalized DTDs: I don't think the point of XHTML modularization is to have each web designer write his own DTD, I think the idea is to allow other bodies to create standard DTDs for people to adopt. For example, Amazon could write a custom DTD for marking up data on books, and book enthusiasts across the web could link to Amazon's DTD. Even the W3C itself could write a small DTD defining the target attribute and allow people to link to that. It's probably just a matter of time before this process becomes commonplace and a natural tool for any XHTML newb (and hopefully vets too).

2004-05-08T02:59:00.000-04:00

But how will you survive without your rou-song sandwiches!?
I'm totally behind you on this one. Not only do big animals take up more resources to grow for food, meat is darned expensive at the grocery store.

2004-05-08T02:56:00.000-04:00

Is there anything Bittorrent can't do?
http://www.animenfo.com/animetitle,1245,ykywyy,r.o.d__the_tv_.html

A little into the future from now. A few years after the army's "Human Selection Campaign".
In a street somewhere in Hong Kong, there was a detective office. The name of it was "The Three Sisters Detective Company". The 3 beautitful sisters there were working day and night to settle an incident regarding a book. The girls' names are Anita, Maggy and Michelle.
The oldest sister Michelle who likes all kinds of books, Maggie and even the youngest sister Anita who doesn't like adult books, in truth possesses the special power of a "paper user".
Using and not using their powers, what will happen to the cases they get?

Sounds... exciting.

2004-05-07T11:16:00.000-04:00

May I add an "amen" to this post? The DOM inspector has saved me countless headaches trying to track down conflicts in the cascade. It is especially nifty to be able to view the _computed_ styles rather than simply the styles that are dictated by the various style sheets. It's the one feature in Mozilla that kept me from switching to Firefox for so long.

2004-05-06T00:07:00.000-04:00

If you do, I will be happy to write something to try and convince you otherwise :) Basically, the gist of my reply would be that there are plenty of ways to live a lazy and inactive life in the United States too.

2004-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

I get the idea that the author was trying communicate that the traffic on Chang'anjie is normally slow -- like you wrote, rush hour traffic -- in contrast to, and in order to highlight, today's brisk clip. That's why he would also use 《转眼间》 and 《捏了一下车闸，车晃了晃》 to show that the stop was very sudden.

2004-05-04T18:15:00.000-04:00

If you can drive through Detroit snow, you can drive anywhere. Don't let these people get you down. Practice defensive driving.

2004-05-03T03:29:00.000-04:00

CRTL-PgUp and CRTL-PgDn work for switchign tabs in Mozilla on Linux. As for the dictionary, I also use dictionary.com when I'm in X, dict when I'm in the console. In fact, using Mozilla's keywords I can type "dict [word]" into the Location bar, hit enter, and Mozilla will look it up (bookmark is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s, keyword is dict). Very nifty.

2004-05-02T06:26:00.000-04:00

Annie, I read this story and thought of your post:

"It was just one of many recent curious moments for Mr. Haimovitz, who was once a major cello prodigy accustomed to playing in the elite halls of Europe and America. Now 33, he has chosen an alternative world, traveling the nation to perform in country and folk cafes, jazz spots and nightclubs: places where Budweiser flows freely and Beethoven does not, including the legendary punk club CBGB in New York, where Mr. Haimovitz will perform on May 15.

"This is not another marketing gimmick, nor a strained attempt to make classical music hip. It is one man's unlikely quest to find meaning and connection in an art form that for years set him apart from the world."

2004-05-02T04:07:00.000-04:00

The China Digital News weblog has good coverage of the annual China's Digital Future conference, that took place this weekend at UC Berkeley. Some of the speakers seemed pretty knowledgable on technology-government interaction.

2004-05-01T01:36:00.000-04:00

Is "sort | uniq" the same as "sort -u" ? Uniq is cool, though, I'd never seen it before. And very nice scripts, it's (almost) always fun to read other peoples' code.

2004-04-30T16:29:00.000-04:00

Kip Fulbeck came to Michigan this month and gave about art and hapa identity. At one point, he asked if people drove rice rockets at UMich.
...
The room went dead silent.
Welcome to Michigan.

2004-04-28T23:12:00.000-04:00

Funny how it all comes around to where you started. I accidentally uninstalled my fav Mozilla sidebar, so I've been searching desperately for the past 20 minutes to find a way to reinstall it, and finally your page pops up in the Google listings. Thanks again, Simon.

2004-04-28T04:26:00.000-04:00

OK, so when I first heard that ms hirosue had married, I naturally felt a bit jealous of whoever the guy was. just now, though, I looked up his picture, and I'm a bit jealous of her :) Oh, and what is she, 23? does anybody else get the feeling that she has spent 2/3 of her life in front of a camera?
http://www.tokyomodels.net/cgibin/mgazouj.cgi?KEY=clM01
[img]http://www.tokyomodels.net/cgibin/mgazou/clM01b.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.tokyomodels.net/cgibin/mgazou/clM01a.jpg[/img]

2004-04-27T22:52:00.000-04:00

But... the word "I" is very post-modern. No two people can have the same experience because we all bring different personalities to bear our daily discourse with our environments. So how can we claim to write definitive, factual sentences about anything? All we can do is write about our personal experience, and that entails a generous helping of word "I".
Haha, ignore the above; I totally agree with you. The world would be a better place if we all forgot about our own needs and started looking out for others.

http://mesh.diaweblog.com/item?id=11414

2004-04-24T21:33:00.000-04:00

no ski poles essentially neutralizes the Norwegian terrorists

2004-04-22T20:42:00.000-04:00

Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7b)
The principle you quote is based on this verse. How can I know anybody else's intentions? I am forgiven but I am still a sinner, so how I judge other sinners? And what responsibility do I have to ensure the correct behavior of my fellow man? None, because I do not know his heart. In the end, the only person I am responsible for is myself.
Under this principle, George Bush would have no right to judge Sadam Husain's heart and intentions because God reserves that right for himself. Furthermore, applying the first principle means that soldiers in general are barred from killing, which is directly related to the war.
General principles are important for me, because they enforce consistency across different areas of my life.

2004-04-22T20:11:00.000-04:00

Let me give you an example of principles that would cause one to oppose (the) war, then:
1) the right to give and take away human life is God's alone, and
2) the only moral uprightness a person is qualified to judge is their own.

2004-04-21T22:51:00.000-04:00

Regarding appeals to the "natural formatting" of X/HTML tags:
Every browser (even lynx) has an internal default stylesheet, usually modeled on the W3C recommendation. This means that even "unstyled" X/HTML is pre-formatted according to a certain set of style rules that are, according to the W3C standards, "informative, not normative". I interpret the W3C's position to be that the basis for decisions about markup should be solely semantic value, insofar as CSS is able to generate the desired look (a nod to the oft' abused and overused pragmatic perspective). As an extreme example, a browser could theoretically render CSS-less X/HTML as 1em mono text, with no margins, padding or line breaks, and it would still be 100% standards-compliant and semantically correct.

2004-04-21T15:48:00.000-04:00

m-flo has rocked since the beginning, no doubt, it's fun to hear them bouncing from one fab female vocalist to another. Too bad there's not much promotional material for them out here in Michigan :)

2004-04-20T23:44:00.000-04:00

I found this message on the front page when I logged into Blogger today:
> SPECIAL NOTICE > As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite
> you to be one of the first to try out Google's new
> email service, Gmail.
>
> Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO
This may be part of a slow-rollout plan.

2004-04-20T23:24:00.000-04:00

It warms my heart to see so many people choosing the markup-heavy Steve/Nick solution. To a high degree I'm OK with the header-paragraph answer, but the relation between the title and text is nailed unambiguously by the definition list.
If this was a vote, though, and I realize it's not, mine would go to zinckiwi because it's the only entry that left me in stitches. Hey, it looks good to me.

2004-04-20T21:39:00.000-04:00

Those three expressions are priceless.

2004-04-20T01:31:00.000-04:00

Not a sham, but perhaps... overrated?

2004-04-17T08:19:00.000-04:00

So you mean, not escaping certain characters or including every required element. That's cool, I was just curious.

2004-04-17T01:37:00.000-04:00

Invalid feeds? Whatever for?

2004-04-16T01:46:00.000-04:00

It even made the front page of the Chinese Embassy website, which I happened to be browsing today.
http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/xw/t84856.htm
Just for kicks, I plotted the GDP per capita of all the countries that voted on this issue, color-coded by their vote. The y-axis is the GDP/capita, and the countries are ordered by how they voted, and alphabetically within those groups (as above). Check it out:
http://msittig.freeshell.org/imgs/china_vote_graph.gif

2004-04-15T14:57:00.000-04:00

So earlier today I tried accessing your website because you showed up on arborblogs as having a new entry -- but your site was down. It made me think, though, when I logged into bloglines and I was able to read your posts, that we could just do away with weblogs and have Google host all of our RSS feeds. Make weblogging a desktop app, and simply upload your updated syndication file to the Google server, and have it served from a Google URL. Google (who else) could have a searchable page for each user so that people would be able to find your feed, maybe with your blogroll on it, and some personal information.
This is tongue-in-cheeck theorizing, don't take me too seriously.

2004-04-14T23:12:00.000-04:00

I would disagree with George, I think the labels on cigarette packs have been a part of the stigmatization of smoking, and part of the necessary compaign of education about the deadly and costly habit.
Agreed, though, that the idea of labelling food would never work, simply because restaurants would never go along with it. It took some very bad press for McDonalds to finally withdraw their super-size option. Unless someone is able to make a *very* good case for why selling healthy should not just be an "extra feature" but central to running a profitable business, and in the process disprove decades of marketting research about the public craving for high-calorie foods, I'm afraid we'll continue to see no cooperation from the food industry.

2004-04-13T23:19:00.000-04:00

I'm surprised by the number of novels. I expected more technical books.
My entry.

2004-04-13T20:38:00.000-04:00

"200 baby chickens"
Only 200? When I was a kid, we used to see these all the time at the street market in southern Spain. They even do this in China nowadays, and there's pictures to prove it.

2004-04-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

From the horse's mouth, U.S. Dangerous Attempt to Launch Nuclear War Denounced:
"The "proliferation security initiative" touted by the Bush group only brings to light the arbitrary motive of the nuclear warmongers to deter other countries from having military deterrents for self-defence and dominate the world with nukes as they please. The U.S. is putting military pressure upon the DPRK and amassing armed forces for war in and around south Korea under the pretext of the "nuclear and missile threat" from the DPRK, escalating the tensions on the Korean peninsula. This is aimed at igniting a nuclear war on the peninsula."
What I want to know is where they get the writers for this stuff. You'd think they would practice their English by reading the Economist or something, and would eventually develop a more natural style. But instead, they probably spend all day with their nose in Marx's "Wage, Labor & Capital", and that is why their articles are full of phrases like "brigandish logic" and "Kim Jong Il... as the lodestar of national reunification."

2004-04-13T12:59:00.000-04:00

Should this entry be titled "Regret" ? Very nice write-up.

2004-04-13T01:21:00.000-04:00

She looks like she got food poisoning.