I’ll Not Be Juggled With!

By Evan — — Culture

Overheard between Diane, an attractive New Yorker who is about my mother’s
age, and Mike, who has
(unintentionally) crashed Diane’s dinner party:

Mike: Come on now, Diane, I’m sure you have young men wandering through your house all the time.

Diane: Well, not with their clothes on.

So basically I had a great weekend, all things considered. No, really.
A party on Friday and on Saturday. And then a reading of Hamlet on
Sunday afternoon, where I read the part of Laertes. In my considered
opinion, Laertes is basically the man.
His first line is to the evil Claudius, “My dread lord…” and it just
gets better from there.

His first real speech is to his little sister Ophelia, where he lectures
her to be good and not to fool around with boys. (Meanwhile he’s off
to France to drink, fight, and wench.) I love this guy already! A
man after my own heart. (You paying attention, Sarah…?)

Then Laertes heads off to France, and there’s a lot of boring stuff
with Hamlet. Blah blah blah father, blah blah blah woe is me, blah
blah blah oops! I stabbed Polonius, by the way mom you’re a shameless
hussy, blah blah blah. Fortunately
Bill cut a lot of that nonsense out.
Stanford doesn’t just pick their professors out of a hat, folks.

Then in Act IV, Laertes is back. He wants answers about his father
and he wants them now. “How came he dead? I’ll not be juggled with!
To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil, conscience and grace
to the profoundest pit!” Damn straight.

Well, you all know how it ends. Hamlet leaps into Ophelia’s grave,
like the snivelling copy-cat that he is. (“I prithee, take thy
fingers from my throat…” — wimp.) They duel, Laertes stabs Hamlet,
Hamlet stabs Laertes, they both die. Exeunt.

There were only two bad parts.
First, Laertes agrees to Claudius’s plan to use a poisoned blade. I
mean, that was just dumb. Laertes is fencing champion of France.
He could have wiped the floor with Hamlet if he hadn’t been told
to put on a show. Second, Laertes begs Hamlet for forgiveness right
before he dies. I mean, c’mon. I can only chalk this up to the
potent neurotoxin that was ravaging his acetylcholine receptors,
causing him to twitch uncontrollably and blurt out, “Exchange forgiveness
with me, noble Hamlet,” in some kind of last-second Tourette’s-like spasm.

Like I said, a good weekend. Also, I taught Nancy
HTML (see, kid, that wasn’t so hard) and watched the first two episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Not a bad pilot — although it sure
has gotten a lot better. Not that I would know, this season. I have no working
TV, and besides, Tuesday is Poker Night. I think the guys thought I was
a little off when I insisted that we watch the “Buffy: The Musical” episode,
and I’m afraid to expend any more political capital on this issue…
assuming I have any left.

Bookshelf Artistry

By Evan — — Personal

I had been having all sorts of problems with my new bookshelves.
First, now that I had enough room to pull all my books out of storage,
I wasn’t sure how to arrange them on the shelf. Alphabetical by author?
By genre? Second, what to do with all those embarrassingly bad books
from my childhood? Display them proudly on the shelf, or hide them in
shame?

The second problem was pretty easy to solve. My cousin Michael suggested
that I keep almost all my books, but get rid of the ones that are
so bad that A) I would never read them again and B) I would never inflict
on a friend, son/daughter, niece/nephew, and so on. So that made it
fairly painless. For example, I still have fond memories of the first six
Dragonlance novels, so they stay. But the “apocryphal” Dragonlance novels
are all right out. Also out are all those crappy Robotech and D&D novels —
except for R.A. Salvatore, who just barely makes the cut. And so on.

The arranging-the-books problem was harder, but fortunately my hand was
forced. I had all my books in piles on the floor for over a week. I think
I was trying to dream up some complicated alpha-by-genre scheme. Anyway,
I was having a small get-together last weekend, and the appointed hour
had nearly arrived. I looked at the books, said, “Screw it”, and slammed
them all up on the shelf.

So now my books are in essentially random order, but if you look at them
it appears as if there are little pockets of order. But this
is false. For example, all Orson Scott Card books are together, except oops!
Xenocide is sitting over by The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
So if you think you can infer where a particular title is, guess again! You’re
probably wrong.

The cover plan is to tell people that my bookshelves are an artistic
statement. They represent the ultimate triumph of chaos over order, the futility of
categorizing human knowledge, and the radical and subversive juxtaposition of
different human ideas (“Rousseau’s Confessions next to Jackson’s
Classical Electrodyamics… how droll!”)

My Turner Prize awaits.

Alien City

By Evan — — Personal

So. A story.

A rather scatterbrained young man is at a party in San Francisco.
He spends much of the evening talking to this really attractive, intelligent,
nice woman. She’s a usability engineer. He’s a web-guy who is forced by the
circumstances of his job to pretend he’s a usability engineer. She is
interested in ancient Western civilization. She has read up on Asperger’s
Syndrome. They have plenty to discuss.

She’s not a SF local, and she mentions she needs some guidance to find Hwy 101.
He says he has the same problem. They both laugh. SF is confusing. They ask around and
get directions for finding the freeway. Still, she sounds a bit hesitant. He promises
her that he understands the directions and that she can follow him out.

So they walk to the parking lot. She has his contact information. There is vague
talk of getting lunch. They say good night, and he gets into his battered Sentra.

He drives out into the parking lot exit. She pulls up behind him. He heads out,
turns left onto the one-way street. Drives a few blocks, stops at a traffic light.
She stops behind him — close enough that he is no longer blinded by her headlights.
All of a sudden, he can see through her windshield in his rear-view mirror.

It’s not her. It’s some forty-year-old guy who has been behind him the whole time.
He has left her back at the parking lot. He has ditched her. Casually stranded her
in an alien city.

It is a long drive home.

Back On the Wagon

By Evan — — Culture

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been updating my journal recently.
Well, I’ve fallen off the wagon again. That’s right — I’m back to playing
computer games.

I had been so good for months — no TV, hardly any computer games (well,
an occasional round of Titan).
But last week
3do released Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Let’s just say I haven’t been getting
much sleep this last week. I’m totally geeking out. But look — if
Pat, Nancy,
and Mike can quit and then come back to
EQ, surely
I am allowed my small vices? Remember kids:
EQ kills…

Honestly, it’s a good thing that I’m buried in this computer game, because I was really
starting to worry about my geek credentials. It started when Rachel called me a “jock”
back in Santa Barbara (indeed!) Then my physics and mathematical knowledge
started fading away. And just the other day I stumbled across the old Wired Magazine
article about the relationship between
Asperger’s Syndrome and mathematical aptitude.
The article included a
test to see if you might have
Asperger’s. Yes, I know, the test has about as much validity as an
“How hard do you crush?” test in
Seventeen magazine
(my score: “It’s Just…A Little Crush…”). But I took the stupid Wired test anyway.
I scored a 16. I’m perfectly “neurotypical”. What a disappointment.

M’ris
took the test and got a 19. Like me, she answered with extremes — she likes math,
likes focusing on problems, but she also likes people and social chit-chat.
I suggested that maybe we were some kind of hybrid advanced super-nerds. Math
skills and social skills. Like Blade!
“All
of the nerds’ advantages, none of their weaknesses.” M’ris demurred, however,
saying that after all, she had 20/200 vision. And I have my computer game thing, of course.
Ah well, another perfectly good theory spoiled by the facts.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

By Evan — — News

I’m starting to think that Andrew Sullivan is not all he’s cracked up to be.

In his blog, the “Daily Dish”, he’s been railing against the
Democrats
taking on the war. “Now, it’s official. I don’t think it’s an accident that the
Democrats have launched an attack on the war’s direction the day it becomes clear that
the recession, even if it existed in the first place, is now history… The anti-war left is back
with a vengeance. And the battle to protect this country has only just begun.”
Oh, those nasty unpatriotic liberals, undermining the war effort!

But the thing is, I read
those articles that Sullivan linked to and they were nothing of the sort.
What they did do was criticize Bush and the Republicans (mostly in domestic policy).
The authors were simply exhorting Democrats to not let Bush walk all over them.
But Sullivan is arguing that in a time of war the opposition should simply
sit down and STFU. Sorry… that’s not how it works.

I dunno. Maybe Sullivan and the rest of the “Warbloggers” are
running out of steam.

Back in the good old days of September and October,
they had plenty of juicy, fat, extremely stupid targets. Noam Chomsky!
Susan Sontag! Robert Fisk! Ted Rall! Boy, was it fun seeing those pompous
jerks get ripped apart. Sure, I admit it… I enjoy bloodsports as much
as the next person.

Then November and December rolled around, and hahaha, look! The warbloggers
were right, and the uber-lefties were wrong. We pasted the Taliban, destroyed
the Al-Qaeda training camps, and food and medicine flowed to the Afgan people
in far larger quantities than they ever would have had we listened to the idiots
at Antiwar.com. So there were more insults, more feces hurled, and everyone
had a pretty good time all around.

But now… what are the warbloggers reduced to? Attacking the Democrats… for
what, exactly? Doing their job? Is it so inconceivable that someone could
support the war effort and disagree with Republican domestic policy? Or God forbid,
support the war effort then and disagree with its direction now?
(Is it really so smart to piss off the Europeans now that we sorta kinda
need them to help us with the dirty work of breaking up Al-Qaeda cells?)

Sorry, Andrew. It was great, lots of laughs, but you know… I just don’t
think we were meant for each other. Please don’t blame yourself — it’s me.
Really.

Waffling

By Evan — — Tech

This afternoon (via Camworld)
I discovered an
unintentionally amusing article on
making web pages accessible for disabled readers. Unfortunately for the author, his web
designers chose to set his font to “x-small sans-serif”. On Netscape, “x-small” corresponds to
an 8pt font at best. Not so readable for disabled people… or non-disabled people,
for that matter.

The interesting thing is that just a few hours later, I find that the site’s code has changed:
they are using a new stylesheet class that bumps the font size up a notch. I can only imagine
the number of snarky emails that these people must have received over the last day or so. (No,
I didn’t send one.) But really, I’d rather they adjusted the article’s content —
it’s really just a lazy pile of assertions at the moment.



Everyone and their mother is a “usability guru”, I suppose.

On the advice of Russ Nelson,’97 (congrats Russ on the engagement!), I’m rethinking my
staunch opposition to attending my college reunion.
Maybe it won’t be a tacky schmooze-fest. Or maybe I can avoid the people who
will make it a tacky schmooze-fest, and just hang out with my old friends. Or maybe the
my old friends and the people who will make it a tacky schmooze-fest will not, as I fear,
turn out to be the same people. Maybe, maybe.

Finally, I had to share this story about what the noxious British technology tabloid
The Register calls,
“the CAPS-LOCK Defense“:

During what was to be a routine proceeding to set future court dates, Heckenkamp challenged
the indictment against him on the grounds that it spells his name, Jerome T. Heckenkamp, in
all capital letters, while he spells it with the first letter capitalized, and subsequent
letters in lower case.

The judge was impressed neither with this nor with Heckenkamp’s motion to subpoena the “United
States of America” as a witness. And to think I was just about to send notice to friends and family
that I was changing my name to “eVA3n GOeR”
(the “3” would be silent, you see). Pity.

Quit Slashdot!

By Evan — — Tech

The other day I stumbled into the Quit Slashdot! home page.
All I have to say is: right on, brother. The thing about
Slashdot is that
every time that they post an article on a subject that I know anything about (such as
astrophysics or “nanotechnology”), the commentary is so riddled with inanity and
pseudoscientific blather that I can’t help but read it. Maybe some
people are hardwired to like awful, awful things. I wish I could get over it, like
that guy in that old Onion article,
“Aging
Gen-Xer Doesn’t Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore“:

Erdman, however, is not so certain about his changing sensibilities. “I used to be able to
take great pleasure in not enjoying things,” Erdman said. “But these days, the only things I
like are things I like. Christ, I feel so old.”

If only I were in Erdman’s (fictional) shoes. Sigh.

The sad thing about the Slashdot science articles is that occasionally some poor sap of a
graduate student gets fed up with this foolishness, damnit, and
posts a reasonably literate critique of whatever nonsense the Slashdotters are debating.
It’s irrelevant, of course. Like passing out copies of Our Bodies, Our Selves
at an NRA convention. I want to scream at these grad students, “Stop wasting your
time! Get back to work on your thesis!” But what’s the point? I can’t save the
world. I can’t even save the Johns Hopkins University Physics Department. Bleah.

What else? Saturday night I went rock climbing with Brian and about 60 friends from
One Brick.
I had never really done any serious rock climbing — not anything with ropes and all —
so it was pretty fun. However, it was a mistake to allow myself to get cajoled into
participating in the boys vs. girls speed-climbing race. Picture me in line, arms all noodley
from three previous climbs, hemmed in by seven or eight bad-ass climber dudes.
“You’ll do fine!” Brian said. Clever bastard — this was just his way of getting me back for
refusing to go to our five-year college reunion.

In the good-news department, I went to Target this weekend to buy a lamp for the
apartment — one of those mix-and-match the base and lampshade dealies. Anyway,
on my way out, the security guard complimented me. “Nice lamp,” he said. And as
I walked through Macy’s to get to the parking lot, one of the makeup ladies flagged me
down. “That lamp is so cool!” she said. “Where did you get it?” So things are
looking up, career-wise. I clearly won’t make a very good fireman, Army Ranger, or
Emergency Mountain Patrol Rescuer, but I might very well have the potential to be
a fabulous interior designer.

Web Snobbery

By Evan — — Web

So I’ve been surfing around the web, looking at other journals and weblogs,
trying to see what other people are doing for their design and content
management. It’s been educational, to say the least.

The good news is that I’ve discovered my journaling software Sugar Daddy:
Moveable Type 2.0.
First, I looked into
Blogger,
but Blogger is centrally managed, and its server has been hacked and attacked too many times for
my comfort. There was Radio,
but it costs $40, and said $40 would go directly to
Dave Winer — yuck. I took a look at
blosxom,
which was awfully cute (“only 60 lines of code!”)… but no.

Finally, there was Greymatter,
which was very, very close. Noah Grey deserves a lot of credit for putting this
tool together by himself — and spawning a host of imitators. Unfortunately,
Noah is no longer supporting Greymatter. Also, Greymatter didn’t integrate well
with my old journal archive, and it wouldn’t let me have a different essay for
each monthly archive page (not without playing a little trick or two).

Anyway, it looks like Moveable Type’s got it all and then some. Fast, even more
flexible than Greymatter, and with a stellar web-based user interface. I will never
bad-mouth Perl again. (Not that I’ve ever
bad-mouthed Perl, but from now on if I hear anyone bad-mouth Perl, I’ll
at least know to smirk knowingly, the same way I do when I hear about 32-CPU Intel
systems.)

My other discovery was that the Web designer community is rife with
snobbery
and breathless enthusiasm for bleeding-edge-technology-uber-alles. (And the
Pope is Catholic, water is wet, … yeah, yeah.)
Still, you’d think there would be some maturation over the years.

A couple of years ago, websites were festooned with
buttons that said, “This site best viewed in Netscape/IE 4.” Now things are
worse — a depressingly high number of sites use JavaScript to judge whether
your browser is worthy, and if you fall short, you get a message
ordering you to upgrade to a browser that “supports web standards.” A few people don’t
even bother with the obnoxious little message: they actually
kick you out of their site if you don’t make the cut. Apparently
these people think they are part of
some kind of movement.

Let’s leave aside the fact that no browser fully supports web standards
(HTML4.01 and CSS2) and focus on why someone might not have the latest,
greatest browser:

  • Their boss says so. Once a company standardizes its intranet on one
    browser, that’s it. Everyone’s stuck with the same software, and might be for
    years, end of story.

  • They don’t have the hardware. The latest browsers don’t run so hot on old
    386 computers. This is a particular problem for libraries, schools, and foreigners (but
    who gives a crap about them?)

  • They have no idea what you’re talking about. Your average user could
    not possibly care less what browser they use. They might not even know
    what “HTML” is. And no, these people are not beneath contempt — they
    just don’t care about the same weird, esoteric things that you do.

    Quick, web-boy — under which
    simple physical principle     does a standard flush toilet operate? No? You don’t know?
    But you use one every day!

  • They aren’t going to download 20MB over dial-up just to see your webpage.

  • They might be savvier than you think. Most of the really
    cool kids surf around with javascript, Flash, and images turned off. And they
    are not impressed with your bleating about how people don’t upgrade fast enough.

But honestly, what the heck do I know? I still use a table-based layout. And my pages
only validate HTML 4.01 Transitional.
How sad is that?

Edit, April 2003: Now this site is all CSS-P based and validates HTML 4.01 Strict. Although I should point out that I used <i> tags to make this addendum. Take that, standards-weenies.

Posted in Web

Dance, Ryan, Dance!

By Evan — — Miscellany

About this month’s sidebar… I take it all back. Yes, I’ve remembered why
I read Andrew Sullivan: it’s because he
points me to articles like
this one at Dissent Magazine. Andrew, baby, I’m sorry! Forget all those
mean things I said. I think we can work things out.

And since I’m taking things back, I have to issue another Official Retraction.
Ryan writes to inform me that I was incorrect
to say that he was starting to slow down in his
old age. In fact, now that he is getting more exercise:

…I’ll have you know, I only USED to get winded after a half-hour of dancing. Now
I’m back up to par and shakin’ it with a vengeance for 2+ hours every weekend.
🙂 So put that in your journal and smoke it.

Ryan, I apologize for misrepresenting you like that.
Listen up, everyone: I want you all to know that for the record, Ryan is a lean, mean,
dancing machine. Watch out, ladies!

Yesterday Mom and I went over ideas for her website. I’m going to be helping her out
with it from now on. She even bought her own domain name (hencigoer.com) and everything.
Does your mom have her own domain name? I bet she doesn’t…

In related news, Mom’s book, The Thinking
Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth, just earned out its advance. Not bad! It usually
spends its time hovering between #1000 and #3000 at Amazon, which is pretty good, considering
that they carry well over a million titles. Anyway, you absolutely must get this book if
you’re pregnant, Or if you’re thinking about getting pregnant. Or if you know someone who’s
pregnant. Or if you know someone who’s thinking about getting pregnant.
Or if you know anyone at all who could end up being pregnant in the future.

Incidentally, when I went to Amazon to check my Mom’s book’s stats, I also checked out my
Recommendations section:

  • Books: The Divine Comedy
  • Music: “Iowa”, by Slipknot
  • Video games: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3
  • DVD: PBS’s “The Greeks – Crucible of Civilization”

So according to Amazon, I’m a Late Medieval poetry-loving, heavy-metal listening,
PBS-watching skate punk. Yup, they’ve got me pegged.

Shocking the Bourgeois

By Evan — — Culture

Today M’ris comments on an article
in Salon about Charles Bowden’s, “Blues for Cannibals”. The Salon article’s author
is
unimpressed with the book’s rhetorical tactics:

Bowden tells us that he’s telling us things people don’t want to know, suggesting there’s something
transgressive about what he’s doing. In the book’s long section about this three years as a reporter
covering sex crimes, he repeats a sentence that for him distills the widespread attitude toward his grisly
subject — “Don’t talk about it, no one wants to hear these things.”

I don’t think this is true. If people didn’t want to hear these things then JonBenet wouldn’t sell
newspapers and we wouldn’t have “Law and Order Special Victims Unit,” an entire prime time television
show showcasing a new sex crime every week.

I feel a bit sorry for Bowden… he’s trying so hard to shock us out of our bourgeois
stupor, but in this day and age, we bourgeois are pretty hard to shock. Oh, every once
in a while we get a case like the Texas woman who
ran
into a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck in her windshield, and let him bleed to death while
she went inside and had sex with her boyfriend. But for the most part, I agree,
shock tactics are not the way to go.

Listen, I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. I have an idea for a novel that I got
a few months ago, after listening to Jonathan Franzen on the radio. This idea
is so radical, so transgressive, that it will be beyond the pedestrian tastes of
the Booker prize and the National Book Award. Yes, I’ll be talked-about, vilified,
and made rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Are you ready? Think you can handle it?
Here it is: I’m going to write a novel that says, “Suburbia is just swell!”

Yeah, I bet you wish you had thought of it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… for the last three years at work, I’ve been stuck with
Netscape 4. But in just a month or two, the company is switching us all over to Netscape 6.2.1
(cue angelic music). Yes, our intranet (i.e. my entire client base) will be using a browser
with pretty darn good CSS2 support and a standards-compliant XML processor. Do you know what
that means? It means I can do client-side XSLT, and you can’t. Nyah, nyah!

Edit, April 2003: My bragging was premature. As of November 2002, the company had still not switched over from Netscape 4.7, and there was no publicly-announced date for the changeover either.