Dear Boing Boing and everyone else:
For the love of Bob, no one cares anymore. Calling it a “transmit mashup” doesn’t make it any more interesting. The horse has been killed, kicked, buried, excavated, buried again, and raped enough for the week, don’t you think?
Fall is the best season for smoking. Spring is a close second, but who wants to stand outside with all that mud around? Winter would be ideal if it weren’t so cold all the time. And summer…summer’s just bad for smoking. Smoking should be done in a cool, slightly humid environment, where one’s lungs can savor the smoke without the additional burden of heat and dry air. A cool, calm evening in October is the absolute best time for a cigarette, hands down.
I don’t know if I should blame global warming or the fact that I’m further south, but this winter has been fantastically mild, making the past few weeks the absolute toughest of the past five months. Rather than a week’s worth of groceries like I used to, I walk a few blocks to the grocery every couple of days and buy a little bit at a time. As such, I keep finding myself outside in the dark, on these cool, calm evenings, jonesing for a smoke. On top of that, I’ve been reading a lot of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs and watching movies like Domino, so that I’m reminded every 20 seconds that my fingers and mouth aren’t being occupied. I’ve quickly gone from “I don’t want to be a smoker” to “fuck it, I’ll do what I want.”
And yet I don’t. I’ve been telling myself for weeks now that I would start again, and find myself a niche as a casual, occasional smoker. I was going to bum one at the Flogging Molly show, but came home reeking and woke up coughing thanks instead to the efforts of others. Every time I pick up groceries I think about buying a pack, and every time I seem to think, “screw it, I’ll get them next time.” It’s almost like thinking, “screw it, I’ll start the diet tomorrow,” but with the opposite effect on my health.
I can’t really decide how I feel about it anymore. I’ve known people that got really upset about it, especially when I (or another friend) would agree to quit, only to renege later in the week. I never really saw what all the fuss was about, until I decided I wanted to quit and started getting all high and mighty on my smoker friends (sorry about that, guys).
Sure, it’s stupid. Yes, it will probably shorten one’s life, but so does prolonged exposure to sunlight. There are thousands of fatal car accidents every year, but we think nothing of driving to work or the store. Maybe there are bigger things to be worrying about.
I’ve always liked to say “Life is short - make the most of it while you can.” Does that trump “Life is short - quit making it shorter”?
I’m trying to find a decent media collection manager. Delicious Library is pretty nice, but the interface is a little bit clunky and I’m not sure it’s worth $40. I like the fact that it can read barcodes, but that would require a $120 dollar iSight (or that new iMac I’ve been pining for).
I’d prefer something web-based, so I can use it from anywhere - Delicious Library is nice, but I could only use it on my laptop. I tried Listal, but it doesn’t have some of the functionality of Delicious, like format (paperback, hardcover).
Really, DVD Profiler is perfect, except for the fact that it doesn’t handle books. Has anyone else found something better?
I had heard mixed reviews about Domino, and I can’t say I can do any better. I really wanted to like this movie - I mean, damn, Kiera Knightley with guns! The trailer was sort of misleading, though: she wasn’t shooting people nearly enough, and half of the movie was done in that style (which got old REAL quick). And what the hell was that thing with Tom Waits? The action movie suddenly turns into a Jesus movie.
Domino’s story is an interesting one, but I don’t feel it was told well. Seeing a crappy movie is one thing, but seeing a crappy movie that should have been good is just a disappointment, even is Kiera WAS prancing around with a shotgun.
Last night, I had the pleasure of seeing Flogging Molly in concert for the third time in a year. The show was over at 9:30, and I went with Bryan and Jeff from work, and Bryan’s fiancé Katie.
I can’t lie - it wasn’t as good as the first two times I saw them. I wasn’t really expecting it to be, though; I knew that seeing them without BP and Sharon just wouldn’t be the same. It was a 21+ show, so the folks in the pit were bigger and capable of doing a lot more damage.
The Rolling Blackouts opened the show with a lackluster set. They were fun to watch, but not very good. Scotch Greens were a lot better - sort of a blue-grassy punk sound - but they played a full-length set, and must have been up there for an hour, so Flogging didn’t even go on until like 10:30. I wound up leaving before the show was even over: I went to take a leak, and decided I had been hit in the chest enough times for one evening. And, the last train was only 15 minutes away, so it was that or $20 for a cab ride home.
Flogging’s set was as good as always, but it took the sound guy three or four songs to figure out what he was doing - the backup mics weren’t even on for the first song. They didn’t play Within A Mile of Home before I left, which was disappointing. The Guinness was $6 a can, which almost makes Rochester look good (which reminds me, I met three different people from Rochester before the show).
So yeah, it could have been better. I blame Scotch Greens for the fact that I couldn’t see the whole show, but what can ya do? Against Me! will be here in April, and my hopes are higher for that one.
I like to call myself a liberal redneck. I was raised on the edge of the suburbs of Buffalo, NY, right where things got a little more spread out and a lot more conservative. I credit my experiences in college with my political slant: the late-night arguments, the exposure to people who held beliefs never heard in my home town, and the anthropology classes where I learned of whole cultures I never would have known about. Over the four years I spent there, my view of the world was totally warped, twisted apart, and put back together to show me that there are a lot of people out there who don’t live their lives at all like I do.
I’ve tried to share this with other people. I’ve come to understand, almost by accident, that my life is not at all representative of the greater global community’s; I never knew how good I’ve had it, and I wasn’t the only one. I’ve known plenty of narrow-minded, ignorant and bigoted people, and I try my best to set them straight when I hear them spewing filth against other races or nations. When I’ve heard people suggest that we nuke the Mid East to a sheet of glass, I argued harder than I’d ever argued before.
However, I’m finding this harder and harder by the day. Innocent commuters in London have died. A Koran was reported flushed, and people died. Now, some Danish cartoonist prints a few sketches, and I see reports that over forty people are dead and some cleric is offering $1 million for the head of the artist.
Shortly after the Koran-flush fiasco, I remember reading some comments about it online. Basically, the author’s point was that the Muslim world flipped shit, and America was apologizing for it. Consider, he asked, what would have happened if the report was instead about a Bible being flushed, and Christians had reacted the same way? It wouldn’t have been tolerated, and certainly no apology would have been offered. We wouldn’t stand for it from our own ranks, and yet we’re supposed to respect and tolerate those who are different from us, even (apparently) when they act like barbaric savages. Remember that artist that did the portrait of Jesus with feces? Yeah, no one died for that - not even the artist.
And now, a Danish guy prints a cartoon, and Christians in Nigeria are killed for it. If this is your reaction, you obviously missed the point of the cartoon. And if there’s something I’ve missed, some justification for your deplorable behavior, please, discuss it at the next meeting and get back to me.
I had to go to an RIT Alumni site to find out that Dierks Bentley is playing at RIT the same night I’m coming in for the CSH 30th anniversary.
This sucks for two reasons. First, no one cares about this nearly as much as I do. I was pretty excited when I found out about it, but no one else gives a damn. And second, I’m expecting to be at Mark’s or a party that night, because I’m not driving eight hours for a concert (well, not this concert anyway).
Why didn’t they have more good shows when I was there? I have to give them credit for Dropkick and Skynyrd, but those were two diamonds in the rough. I’ll have to see if any of the colleges around here ever host shows.
This afternoon, I was hijacked by an old lady.
I was leaving work as she was fishing for her key to get into the lobby. “Oh! Are you from Maintenance?”
Maintenance?, I thought to myself. I look like I’m from Maintenance? I can see how she’d think that, with my rolled up sleeves, manly demeanor, and tool belt full of…well, tools, I guess
I really should get a tool belt.
“Nope, I’m an IT guy,” said I.
“Oh, perfect! Here I am, waiting for a low-tech guy to hang a picture, and along comes a high-tech guy! Can you fix my computer? It needs more memory.”
And that’s how I found myself in an apartment on the sixth floor of our building, looking at a Pentium 333 MHz with 64 MB of RAM and Windows 98.
“Ma’am, you don’t need more memory. What you need is a shotgun.”
“What?”
“You know, like for an injured horse.”
Or so it would have gone, if my wit were sharper.
After advising her to buy a new machine and call me to help her set it up, I was on my way home, wondering if I should really be giving strangers my cell phone number. Random crap like this tends to happen before I really have a chance to figure out what’s going on, but I suppose I can always use the money from the occasional house call*.
* Please don’t make that sound naughty when you read it.
I’ve been trying, with varying success, to start reading more again. I read a ton in middle and high school, but it dropped off sharply when I left for college and found myself with countless better things to do, but I miss it. There’s a lot to be gained from books; I’ve learned things I didn’t even know I didn’t know because I stumbled across them in a book. Plus, I like to know what everyone’s so worked up about when they’re talking about the latest best seller.
The problem is bad books (or, more accurately, books that are “less good”). I’ve probably got a couple dozen books on my shelf that I haven’t read yet, and I feel like I should work my way through those before I go looking for more. However, I keep getting halfway through books that aren’t particularly grabbing my attention, and it sits there for two months before I get through it, or just give up; I probably started Tuxedo Park six weeks ago, and I’m only halfway through. It’s well-written and the subject matter is pretty interesting, but I just can’t seem to get into it for more than a few pages at a time.
Every once in a while, I come across something great and burn through it like nobody’s business. This Sunday, I found myself in Pentagon City with a few hours to kill, so I wandered around Borders for a bit. A small, non-descript spine on the bottom shelf (somehow) caught my attention: Holidays on Ice, by David Sedaris. After flipping through it a bit, I decided to grab Naked while I was there. I finished the former that day, and I’ve been ripping through the latter. They’re incredibly well-written, funny, and just odd enough that you’re not sure when the truth stops and the stories begin.
Moral of the story: I love reading good stuff. I feel guilty giving up on a book without finished it - especially if I paid for it - but there’s too much good stuff out there to waste time with anything but. I reckon it’s time I find the nearest library so I can do some sampling for free.
I like the idea of the Pro Bowl. “We’ve been beating the snot out of each other for a few months - let’s go to Hawaii and do one just for fun!” It’s downright brotherly.
Plus, I like any football game where guys on the sidelines are wearing flip-flops.
Man, even Bob Costas looks good in high-def.
I was disappointed that bobsledding isn’t on, but Norwegian skiers are hot.
Download the .js file (3.7 KB)
The json2dom function will create HTML nodes from a JSON object that defines their properties. The object should be an array of objects, each of which represents a single HTML element. For most elements, the tag property should be used to define what type of HTML element it represents, such as div, ul, hr, and so forth. Alternatively, a text property can be set to represent a text node.
Another property, properties, should be set with any attributes for the element, such as className or id. Any HTML element that supports children can have a children property, an array of objects that will be appended the the parent.
This will probably make more sense once you see it. The following JSON object could be run through the function:
[
{"tag":"div","properties":{"id":"textBox"}, "children":
[
{"tag":"input","properties":{"type":"text"}},
{"tag":"br"},
{"text":"Some text to mix it up"},
{"tag":"br"},
{"tag":"input","properties":{"type":"text"]}
]
},
{"text":"This is some text!"},
{"tag":"hr"}
]
This would be evaluated as a div containing an input box, a break line, a line of text, another break line, and another input box. After the div comes another line of text, and then a horizontal line. All top-level elements are returned by the function in an array - in this case, the div, line of text (”This is some text!”), and horizontal line would be in the array.
I really don’t know if there’s any practical use for this, but it kept me busy on a Saturday afternoon. The example here uses appendChildren() from Prototype Plus, which I haven’t really documented yet. I also used JSON-PHP to generate the JSON object, since it’s a lot easier to build a readable associative array in PHP than in JavaScript.
Feel free to e-mail me with any suggestions or bugs.
Click here to execute the code above.
If not for Risa, I would never have known that Fox was showing a four-episode finale tonight - no commercials, no mention on their website, nothing. It’s no wonder they get dismal ratings; no one knows it’s on. I don’t know where I’d be without TiVo.
This season had been a little lackluster, but those last four episodes totally made up for it. There’s been talk about another network picking it up, but I don’t know what they would do with it after wrapping everything up the way they did. Of course, they allude to a movie in the epilogue, but “on the next” has never actually had any bearing whatsoever on future episodes.
It was a great series while it lasted, but I fear it’s dead in the water now. I’d love to see someone else pick it up, but there’s no chance that it would be as good as the existing seasons. Sooner or later, Fox will have to find a better way to collect ratings, because obviously they’re doing something wrong - remember Firefly? Or the first run of Family Guy? Both axed. That 70’s Show and Malcolm in the Middle are both on their way out (though the network can’t really be blamed for those). A year ago, Fox produced most of the shows I watch, but in a couple more months, it’ll be reduced to obnoxious reality shows and 24.
I was drunk when I booked a flight home for Christmas (it seems to me like there should be federal regulations against that), so when Travelocity offered to sign me up for a trial with a couple different services, I was an easy sell.
Today I found out that I was charged $15 each for the both of them, and probably was in January, too.
Computers should come equipped with breathalysers.