Blog: Ramblings and Rants

On 28 July 2003, to my younger sister Sarah, was born my nephew Devin Taylor Cardarelli.

He was born 7lb 13oz, 20in via cesarean section.

That’s the happy, first-time grandmother’s hands in the picture.

Lulu’s Lines

Words are precious

“Words are precious… Words are precious…” Kelly muttered aloud. It had become a mantra over the last twenty minute’s stare-a-thon. Twenty minutes of a perfectly good Wednesday night were gone, and the screen was still glaringly white. Well, not exactly white, she reminded herself. “I’ve gotta break down and get a new monitor,” she moaned, pushing back from the chipped computer hutch.

The hutch had been rescued from the dumpster, as had most of the furnishings in Kelly’s claustrophic, mix-n-match apartment.

Tip-toeing through the narrow gulley left by the four-person muave couch (which is missing a cushion) and the lopsided secretary’s chair infront of the laminated particle board hutch, Kelly stepped onto the adjoining kitchen’s yellowed formica. The refrigerator yeilded up cold pizza and a colder Rolling Rock, leaving the only other occupant, an unopened bottle of ketchup, lonely.

Back on the lop-sided once-upon-a-time cream-colored chair, her socked feet tucked warmly under her, Kelly munched Dominoes pepperoni pie and rolled the phrase end over end again in her mind. “Words are precious,” she pondered. Clamping down upon the pizza, holding it tight between her teeth, she gingerly reached for the keyboard. “Words… Are… Precious…,” she mumbled around the crust. Slowly the words began to take on a new shape. Maybe it was the beer in the green bottle, but something had changed. “Words. Are. Precious.”

Finally it came, all in a flash, like some cheesy sitcom. Inspiration! Kelly had a story! Kelly had a sellable story. Those three words were propelling her mind through a fantastic symphony of prose. Whole paragraphs materialized in her mind. A protagonist. An antagonist. The impact character. A plot. Even a subplot. Dear lord, she thought. Why didn’t I think of this before? But she had to get it down on the dingy old monitor. She had to get the story typed before it all disappeared.

Filled with energy and beautiful, flowing prose, Kelly’s tomato sauce flecked fingertips alighted on the home row.

BZZT

It was 8:01 PM, at least that’s what the digital alarm clock said the moment before it winked out. The electric company had warned her—she had thought she had until the fifth Final Notice before it was actually final. The electricity was gone, and so was the story.

In the quiet coolness of a Boston night, the freelance writer sat in her darkened apartment and ate her cold pizza and drank her Rolling Rock trying to remember why words are precious.

Behind the office is a tiny body of water—it’s name includes the suffix “creek”, though it is perhaps only a quarter mile long and twelve feet across at its widest (usually only one to three feet wide). Still, the… creek… is home to many water fowl and even a family of nutria (large beaver-like animals originally from South America with hairless rat tails and giant, neon orange beaver incisors). While the nutria respect the mechanized transports of humans, the ducks are far bolder.

Barring my way into work this morning, a flock of several dozen ducks lounged, conversing, and mingling across the drive path of our parking lot. Heedless of my horn or the horns and shouts of those behind me, the ducks continued to mingle. They were mature ducks and juvenile, male and female, gathering and chatting like a Sunday social.

My car inched forward, horn blaring, perhaps a foot. Some of them must have been eye to eye with my headlights, yet they did not move. We humans have trained them well: We will not run over them, and they know it.

Whooping and flailing my arms, I hopped from my car and waded into their midst. They did, of course, scatter, but like sand after a shovel is pushed laterally through it, they poured right back in behind me to repair the gash.

Just as I was considering parking my car where it sat, a valiant coworker, trapped in his own vehicle behind mine, raced up and scattered the fowl. He kept them dispersed, whooping and shouting back and forth, long enough for me to slip my car through. In my rearview I saw them reform around him as if he were their new king.

Ultimately we took turns. The driver behind the one who had rescued me stepped up to scatter the ducks, the driver behind her did the same. It was a surreal perversion of leap frog.

Happy Saturday! The day of Seatere, Seater and Saturn, and of Loki, the Norse god of trickery and revelry.

Today is the Norse festival of Sleipnir, commemorating Odin’s eight-legged horse which could travel from Asgard to Midgard to Utgard, that is, from heaven to earth to the underworld.

I was reading Dirty Whore Diary today. I wish I could write with such unabashed honesty.

I don’t have any tale to tell as wild as DW, but I often can’t write even the tame ones. I’ve felt like this for a while now. I can’t tell you very much about my day at work. And it was one of those chest-crushing stressful days in which I put out a lot of fires and actually made a difference in a few areas. It wasn’t a bad day by any means. It was merely a balls-to-the-wall, non-stop day. Start to finish. One crisis deftly and swiftly handled right after another. Yesterday was like that as well.

Why can’t I tell you? That was rhetorical.

Here’s a representative anecdote that sums up the major reason…

This seems so far away now, almost as far away as the invention of the printing press. I’m nostalgic and humbled at the same time.

WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: proposed new tag: IMG

supergee: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

Just like with page layout, HTML, graphics, and everything else, the right tool in the wrong hands produces bad results. PDFs are designed to work in print, yes, but they are also designed to work in digital form if you take the time to understand them.

PDFs are XML structured (if the human who creates them creates them correctly); PDFs will reflow to fit any display—graphical browser, text browser, PDA, cel phone, WebTV, et al—with less work than HTML generally requires to achieve the same results (if the human who creates them creates them correctly); PDFs display in the font (e.g. the voice) the author intends, unlike HTML (if the human who creates them creates them correctly); PDFs allow the content creator to specify the reading order, unlike HTML (if the human who creates them creates them correctly); PDFs can be secured to protect the document content, layout, usability, and the underlying code, unlike HTML (if the human who creates them creates them correctly); PDFs can be marked up, commented, and collaborated upon without the requirement for print-outs, scans, faxes, or additional hardware/software, again, unlike HTML (if the human who creates them creates them correctly).

I could go on.

The point is, PDF, like the hammer someone else mentioned, is only good for the uses to which people apply it. If you create PDFs that are only good for printing, you’ll get PDFs that are only good for printing—just like HTML and XML were not too long ago only good for presenting technical data; they couldn’t do graphically-rich layouts like this LiveJournal.

MTV.com - News - Metallica Sue Canadian Band over E, F Chords

Metallica is such a pompous, self-important, power-mad band.

Maybe if they put half as much energy into their bombastic, overblown, weakly written music, they might not have to expend so much energy litigating to maintain their lavish lifestyles.

BravoTV.com > Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

If you get the Bravo television network, you’ve got to check out this show. Fucking hilarious!

test yourself at fontlover.com!

Have you ever pondered the question if you were a font what font would you be? Of course you have! Ponder no more! Take the new fontlover.com quiz and find out!

Anyone hit by the web vandalism contest?

From Web vandalism contest results unclear | CNET News.com:

While some 500 Internet addresses corresponding to defaced Web sites were submitted to Zone-H.org, the intermittent accessibility of the site meant that hundreds, if not thousands, more may have not been recorded.

…Expected between 20,000 and 30,000 registrations of hacked sites Sunday, far fewer came in. The lack of response, while apparently due to the trouble that scofflaws had in contacting Zone-H, could also be an indication that the rash of Web site attacks was mainly a flop….

…[Zone-H.org] normally sees anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 Web site defacements on any given Sunday.

I think blogs will be a pretty big target…

CNN.com - Will hackers attack 6,000 Web sites in 6 hours on July 6? - Jul. 3, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government and private technology experts warned Wednesday that hackers plan to attack thousands of Web sites Sunday in a loosely coordinated “contest” that could disrupt Internet traffic.

I was reading about this Wednesday—I even followed the story to the “official” contest website for these hackers. It looks to me (vaguely) like a hoax… But why take chances? If it isn’t a joke, I think blogs would be among the most likely targets. They’re prevalent, easy to find, relatively easy to break into, and the results of the defacing would be seen by many.

Trust me for a minute. Follow these steps:

1. Goto Google
2. In the search blank type, without quotes: “weapons of mass destruction”
3. Don’t hit “Google Search.” Instead, press “I’m Feeling Lucky”
4. Read.
5. Laugh.
6. Hit me with a trackback

I was answering a meme, Dirty Questions.com Question of the week: What is more intimate, sex or kissing?, when it reminded me of a personally significant high school experience I’d like to share.

Her name was Kim. She was a senior; I a freshman. We had one date…

I’ve just added another half dozen memes to the The Memes List. That brings it to 75 so far!

Yahoo! You’ll never be short of blog material again!

There are now 43 names/links on the Who’s Playing Saturday Slant blogroll! Wahoo!

Saturday Slant