04.02.04

Germany in 1933

Posted in General at 1 pm

Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism
By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
June 9, 2003

[…] a goodly number of folks wonder if they’re living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933.

All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society, identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred constitutional guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched on weaker nations, the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging of corporate and governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace that tends to believe the slogans and lies it’s fed without asking too many questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the administration’s reckless adventurism abroad and police-state policies at home, etc. etc. The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003 and Germany seventy years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But there are enough disquieting similarities in the two periods at least to see what we can learn — cautionary tales, as it were — and then figure out what to do with our knowledge.

The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from our own observations, and various writers — from Shakespeare to Sinclair Lewis (“It Can’t Happen Here”) — have shown us how easily populations can be manipulated by leaders skillfully playing on patriotic emotion or racial or nationalist feelings.

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03.29.04

Gearing Up

Posted in General at 8 pm

Wednesday starts a new class:

Art 120 at Portland State

First time teaching a new class is always difficult, but I’m well prepared and I may sit in on one of the other teacher’s sessions earlier on Wednesday.

Of course this is the day after my Authoring Digital Media course starts up as well. If I remember right, this is the first time I’ve had two classes the same term. Let’s hope I can keep them straight!

Metro Recycling

Posted in General at 5 pm

Dear Metro:

Can I put my empty prescription bottles in the recycling? The translucent brown bottles have a triangle with a ‘5’ and ‘pp’ underneath. The white ones all have ‘2’ in the triangle and ‘HDPE’ underneath. I’d guess you would want them washed out well.

Perhaps you should have a list of items that can be recycled, with pictures of some of the items, on the Metro site.

Yours,

…Ross…

Dear Ross,

Unfortunately, the brown containers you mention are not recyclable. They’re just garbage.

The white containers, if they have a screw-top lid, can be recycled at the curbside. Throw the lid away and put it in the bin with other plastic bottles, tin cans, etc. It’s generally not necessary to rinse them out, unless there’s a lot of powder-y stuff left in them.

I hope this helps. If you have any further questions, please call us at 503-234-3000. We are here from 8:30am-5pm Monday through Saturday to help you.

– Metro Recycling Information Desk

03.26.04

Producing Digital Media

Posted in General at 9 am

Decide, Describe, Design, Develop, Deliver. Is there any other way that projects really happen?

03.24.04

Last Bit of Meta Notes

Posted in General at 12 pm

With my next rebuild, the older entries (Pre-2001) will have proper timestamps, no longer referring solely to 1 – 23 PM. (I have no idea what happened to ‘0’ as in ‘oh’ hundred hours, but I did have twice as many 12pm entries as any other hour, so I fudged a bit and renumbered about half of them.

Most of the time I tried to remember or figure out if it was an entry I would have written late at night or while I was at lunch at work. Best guess was the best I could do.

That was the very last piece of this whole migration thing. I promise, not another word.

03.22.04

JavaScript The Smart Way

Posted in General at 10 am

As part of importing nearly 400 older entries into GreyMatter, I have had to come up with a work around because of some poor planning and a poor feature set.

GreyMatter (the software that I use to author this journal) has URLs that are made up of serial numbers. If you are looking at a page that has only one entry on it, you’re probably looking at a page with the url of www.bad-seed.org/notes/archives/00000xxx.shtml where the xxx refer to the serial number of the entries. That’s all fine and dandy if you have started counting from 1 and never need to put anything before it, but it sucks if you haven’t thought that far ahead, because you can’t put in entry number 0 or enteries with a negative number.

So when I added my 400 older entries, the URLs for the the original entries now point to 000004xx.shtml, or 000005xx.shtml or 000006xx.shtml or 000007xx.shtml. (I only had 370 some odd ‘new’ entries when I started bringing in the older archives.)

The problem is when I have links to entries that should point to entries that have moved ahead 400 places in the serial numbers. I don’t have control over all of these links: Many of them originate from other people’s weblogs or from search engines or even other informational websites. These URLs were supposed to be Permanent. The URL should have always pointed to the content that was there in the first place. But since I needed to reorder the serial numbers in order to get the archives in place, I ended up needing to let visitors know where they can find those new entries //if they want it.// That’s the tricky part. In the future, people using serach engines and newer web site will be on the page they expect to be. But people who have followed outdated links need to get to the information they are really looking for.

Wanna know how I dealt with it, and how JavaScript came into play? Read on…
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03.21.04

Split Three Ways

Posted in General at 6 pm

So Dwelling has finally switched over to the structure that OrederSomewhereChaos has had for some time: a separation of 1) Document Structure, 2) Page Content, and 3) Visual Styling.

Document Structure is the most basic outline of what an HTML file needs: the HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags plus the barest outline of the overarching layout table that I use to set up the columns, the header and the footer.

The Page Content consists of very basic markup: H1-H6 headings, P paragraphs and a few DIVs and BLOCKQUOTEs. These also have a certain amount of class structure attached to them as well. These classes are “semeantically rich”. Instead of having a class named “smallblackcenteredtext” that would set the styling of the text, I’ve used classes like “sidebarnote” or “calendar”. These classes say nothing of the look of the elements, but simply give me hooks to make them visually distinct.

Finally, I use a style sheet to provide that visual styling. By hooking into symantic classes rather than classes that are tied to a specific look, I can reuse and modify the look of the elements without altering the Page Content or the Document Structure.

So what do we have? Three separate pieces of each page that can be modified with little regard to the other pieces:

A) I can rearrange the major elements of the Document Structure (the header location, the number of columns, etc.) without worrying about getting the visual look to be consistent for the other exisiting pages, or worrying about the content on those pages as the words will flow into their proper ‘buckets’ just as before.

B) I can add and edit the Page Content of any (and every) page and will not have to worry about the HTML structure that it flows into or the look of the page that it gets from the styling.

C) Finally I can change the look: the typefaces, the sizes, the spacing and the margins. I can alter these to my heart’s content, without touching the Document Structure or the Page Content.

I must say that GreyMatter doesn’t take to these concepts very easily. Particularly in the Document Structure arena, it doesn’t really fit well. It’s not bad, it simply has bad default templates and a few tools that have to be ‘massaged’ to make it work.

(I should note that there is a “D) Behavior Commands” layer that could be referenced here as well, but I use JavaScript quite sparingly.)

I can already see that I will eventually want to move away from GreyMatter and into a system that better supports these concepts. I’ve been keeping an eye on {{link http://www.wordpress.org/ WordPress}} and I hope that it will actually be as easy to transition to as it says.

However, for now, I will continue to use GreyMatter simply because it doesn’t require SQL or any other database, or even PHP.

03.20.04

Please Rewind

Posted in General at 11 am

This is hillarious: {{link http://broken.typepad.com/b/2004/03/rewind_dvd_labe.html DVD Label}}

This is Broken has been a great blog of weird and bad designs in many ways. I actually helped Mark move forward from the old version of this site which was basically hand coded (and had a poor user experience) to a blog-orriented version. I originally had recreated TiB on a Blogger and had repopulated the most recent 10 entries.

He had started working in that direction and got help from a friend who gave him a grat deal on his TypePad account. The story here is that I went to all that work simply to be able to do what I just did: Link to one entry that really caught my eye.
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03.19.04

Basal Cells

Posted in General at 1 pm

Great, as if I needed more excitment in my life right now:

{{link http://www.aad.org/pamphlets/bcc.html American Academy of Dermatology on BCC}}
{{link http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic214.htm Basal Cell Carcinoma}}

It looks like this is a pretty common, highly treatable situation. Let me rephrase. It’s common in people over 40 who have had prolonged sun exposure.

That fits me to a… well, it doesn’t fit me at all. I’m rarely in the sun without a shirt, and I’ve still got 10+ years before I hit 40.

So I get to see the dermatologist again next week, and then again in a month, again in 3 months after that, 6 months after that and a year after that.

It’s all well and good, right? Easily taken care of, very treatable and it doesn’t end up roaming around the rest of my body.

Maybe I should rethink this whole Karmann-Ghia convertible thing…

03.17.04

28 Days Old

Posted in General at 2 pm

It’s been 28 days since I last rebooted my iBook. 28 days is nothing for a server, but for a laptop that constantly switching networks gaining and losing file servers and having USB devices swaped in and out, even while sleeping, that’s pretty damn impressive.

If it weren’t for the upcoming 10.3.3 upgrade, I’d probably keep running for weeks.

The only hitch has been a few times were I’ve begun to note some Finder wackiness. For instance, when using the pop-up menu off of my Apps folder that I’ve got on the dock, and then opening up the proper submenus to get to the app, and then releasing my mouse button while the app is highlighted there would be a problem. Instead of opening and running the app like it should the Finder would open up the folder that contained the app. Very odd. But also easily fixed.

One way would be to relaunch the Finder, and I may try that next time, but this time I simply logged out and logged back in.

Every once in a while I’d notice odd things about Mail and Camino and such and I’d simply quit them and relaunch them and all would be fine.

This whole microkernal thing seems to be working out pretty well for Apple. Now if they could just get the file server services to not hang or pause the Finder, we’d be really in business.