Archive for February, 2002

Let it be known that the MBTA train conductors are not trained in the “what to tell the passengers when the train breaks down and it’s going to take an hour and a half to get moving again”. And I quote the conductor’s only bit of information tossed our way last night: “we’d like it if you didn’t get the idea to get up and move around. ’cause that’s come up recently as an idea.” ‘Nuff said.
I thought the Grammy’s last night was the worst awards show I’ve witnessed, save for the O’ Brother Where Art Thou performances. Commerical music is sad right now.

Evhead just reminded me of a really excellent book — The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. The book covers trends, why they happen, why they reach a certain point and die down. For instance, when Hush Puppies shoes suddenly became hip again cause all the cool people in NYC were wearing them. Months later, the company reports a record amount of sales out of the blue. Just one example of many from the book. A good read.

Adobe announces Photoshop 7 for OS X to ship in the 2nd quarter of 2002. That will be huge.
I’ve decided. I want to win an Olympic medal. What if, starting tomorrow, I dedicated my life to one goal — winning the gold at the next Winter Olympics. Ok, first I need to choose a sport. Bobsled. Too dangerous, plus I hate roller coasters. Ski jumping. ditto (I want to win a medal, not kill myself). Curling. Yeah! Oh wait, that’s not a real sport… Speed skating. Hmm, that’s a possibility, but damn I’d be tired. I need some more ideas, but I have 4 more years to figure it all out.

Two guys make a bet — one has to eat nothing but frosting and peanut butter for 7 days, the other has to spend 16 hours at Home Depot. Sophmore hijinks follow. Entertaining reading.
A co-worker forwarded me this interesting intro to the world of SVG graphics, and animation. SVG is an XML-based vector graphics standard. Looks to be the next big thing. Amazingly simple code, and extremely fast downloads. Plus, SVG animations can be fully dynamic. Wow. Be sure to download the plugin for your browser (linked from the article) and check it out.

Slashdot posted their first story to their new apple.slashdot.org site. Also found at slashdot was the incredible story of some Harvard people that hacked a dartboard — connecting it to a wireless-ly connected laptop. Fun ensues.
This news made me chuckle.

Just finished reading The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester — the forgotten story of William Smith, the father of English Geology. I thought the book looked cool on the shelf, so I bought it. It turned out to be a really interesting read. I had forgotten that when I was little, I wanted to be a geologist for a brief time, collecting rocks and stuff. Anyway, the book is recommended, if not a little academic in some areas. In the end, it’s a good story.
Very useful link: an entity code converter. [via zeldman]
Watching so much of the Olympics, it dawned on me. Why is it so predictable that each run of a particular event (whether it’s bobsled(sleigh?), figure skating, ski jump, etc.) gets progressively higher marks — every time? First place is always held by the next guy. Seems that way, anyhow.

Interesting article at pbs.org regarding the argument of bringing Mac OS X to the Intel platform. Not sure it’s all that good of an idea, but…
Even with the flu, The Princess Bride was highly entertaining, once again, yesterday.

A List Apart’s latest installment “Better Living Through XHTML” looks to be a worthy one. I especially liked the workaround for whitespace bugs in the browser, like not putting a </TD> immediately after an IMG tag, and getting horrid spacing results. Worth a look.
IE/PC glitch report: It was discovered today at work that <TEXTAREA>s in IE on Windows convert HTML entities back to a Unicode character therefore breaking XSLT processing. Blah. Someone please start sticking to standards for encoding, entities, etc.

Amaryllis: an autumn-flowering So. African bulbous herb (Amaryllis belladonna of the family Amaryllidaceae, the amaryllis family) widely grown for its deep red to whitish umbellate flowers; also : a plant of any of several related genera (as Hippeastrum or Sprekelia). My Mom gave us this a few months back, and it’s finally in bloom. It’s a crazy plant, and well… it’s Valentine’s Day.
Is it just me, or are there striking similarities between the figure skating pro Scott Hamilton and Luke Skywalker — Mark Hamil? Not only are their names similar, but they also look a lot alike. Hmm… there’s also a Dorothy Hamil in the figure skating world to further confuse me.

Apparently, Quicktime 6 is on hold at Apple because of some MPEG-4 licensing issues.
This proves that Gene Simmons is a laughable freak. An amazingly bizarre conversation with Terry Gross on NPR.