Month: March 2005
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Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Writing
Techwriters and the Prescriptive Attitude by Bruce Byfield
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Trademark foolishness
A long description of a trademark dispute. Apparently, Shops At Willow Bend have pitbulls as attorneys. A few superficial observations. First, try, just try, to guess how many pages of steps are in this website. Just try. Second, although I understand the victim’s desire to try to defend himself on his own, it’s clear he…
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Paypal Payment Schemes
Paypal-like web payment schemes: a discussion. Handy list by Cam Barrett on meme tracking . Rant about gentoo I’ve been catching up on a lot of things recently.
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CSS For Not-so-Dumb People
Recently I’ve been trying to add a css feature to a website and catching up on stylesheets. I was pretty hip with stylesheets in 2001-2 (and that’s when css was tough going with browser support). Recently I redid the stylesheets for one of my sites and found it remarkably easy to do. (Also, I’ve been…
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Political Showboating
Frank Rich on playing political football with the Schiavo case: The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same Mr. Bush who couldn’t be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” flew…
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Kevin on SXSW
Kevin Smokler on Surviving South by Southwest. Kevin is a West Coast literary dude who has a book coming out soon and told a great story at Fray Cafe about being a student intern at the Baltimore Sun. (I’ll post audio links when they become available).
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Living a long time: J.M. Coetzee on Faulkner
The first thing you have to do to win a Nobel Prize is to live a long time. J.M. Coetzee I’ve been reading his fabulous essay on William Faulkner which has convinced me to read Faulkner for real. (Coetzee was a writing teacher of mine from Johns Hopkins). Here’s some of Coetzee’s online essays. I…
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What’s Up? HD is!
Although I’ve been back from sxsw for several days, I haven’t been posting although my mind has been busy on several things. First, I’ve been doing massive amounts of research on HD videocameras. As crazy as it may sounds, I’m at a point where I can and should buy an HD videocam, probably the Sony…
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Academic Supression
Whiskey Bar notes parallels between the rhetoric of the Chinese cultural revolution and that of modern conservatives: For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity–which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be…
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XFN at SXSW
This post (actually a list of links) is unlikely to interest anyone who doesn’t use XFN or didn’t go to SXSW. It’s just me using the rel=met tags to indicate people I met there:
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Engineers or Lawyers?
From a roundup article Grant Gross on the Grokster case (scheduled to be heard March 29) “The question really boils down to, will America’s technology companies be hiring more engineers, or will they be firing engineers and hiring lawyers instead?” von Lohmann said.
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Video Odds and Ends
ANT a Video RSS Feed viewer for downloading and watching videoblogs. Rocketboom, a daily entertaining video blog starring Amanda Cogdon. Here’s 2 recent vids: one on Austin, another on Fake Interviews. (BTW, Amanda told a story at fray cafe after I did). Nokia videoblog, a PC-based application for syncing and organizing your multimedia content and…
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Recovering from SXSW
Discoveries and insights from going to sxsw will trickle out in bits and pieces, but suffice to say I had a great time and learned a lot, both about technology and new ways of storytelling. I also met a lot of cool people, all with unique backgrounds and talents. Here’s a notes section for sxsw…
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In case you are wondering…
In case you have visited this weblog in the last few days, you may notice that the template is acting up. Don’t worry; I know about it and will fix it. I’m not sure what’s going on, but after I upgrade wordpress and install the latest spambots, I’m sure things will be fine.
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That Cursed Enchanted Tower! (Sainte-Beuve on Racine)
While shopping for tortillas at a supermarket, a literary friend Mike B. called me up (oh, the glories of having a cellphone!) and recited to me this astonishing passage by Augustin Sainte-Beuve. I stood in a supermarket aisle, listening to a recitation that took almost 20 minutes for him to read. I am reprinting the…
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Pocket PC App’s
I’ve been busy installing and customizing applications for my axim x50v. Here’s a good discussion about products for it.