2020 Hindsight

Toward Weekend

You're Going to be Huge Ben Mezrich (aka Holden Scott) writes about the ups, downs and sheer absurdities of the writing life.

Two Bits

Blog the man, then burn him Paul Boutin: "I think this is the year that blogging from Black Rock City [Burning Man] becomes a cliche."

Sarah Deutsch, VP-General Counsil of Verizon in a c|net interview about where Verizon stands on the whole Hollywood vs. The Pirates and Lobbying Legislators so that Users Lose mess. A sane voice.

buzz is back Deborah Branscum is blogging again.

you must pay the rent, you must pay the rent NY city landlord demands $27k from the estate of a WTC 9-11 victim. She signs a lease Sept 1. You know what happend on Sept 11. "One of the complaints against the dead woman was that she failed to give three-months notice that she was leaving."

two bits Washington Post: Mint gives no quarter on commemorative coins The L.A. Examiner has its own design idea for the CA quarter, since California is now seeking quarter designs from the citizenry (doubletake: CA State Librarian's named Kevin Starr; I thought it was the other one). Carol Vinzant on Slate asks, Why are they so ugly?. Who'd'a thought that today (the 28th, not the 25th) would be Quarter Meme Day?

memoirs I have read I just finished a book by Mark Doty called Firebird: A Memoir. A story of his growing-up years, of suburbia (several of 'em; they moved a lot), his dawning awareness of being gay, and of his crumbling family. I saw him speak at the LA Times Festival of Books last April and was taken by what he had to say and how he said it. Doty's a poet. It comes out in his prose, too.

Now it seems extraordinary to me, our night singing, loud and completely unabashed. Imagine you are walking a quiet Memphis street, summer, nearly dark, the big shade trees alert with cicadas, fireflies dreamy over the lawns and ivies. Nothing distinguises this house from the other but this homemade music. The father might join in, though more likely he's gone in to polish his shoes for tomorrow; the older sister's usually out somewhere—a date? But the mother and son are reliable, evening after evening. The woman just now forty and the boy recently six sing the doxology.... You wouldn't think that boy has a shred of self-consciousness, nor his mother, while they pour themselves into their duet: I want to be in that number, when the stars refuse to shine. By this time the fireflies are drowsing down near the roots of the hydrangeas, the darkness has cooled and solidified, and some late quality in the air signals that it's time to go in: We'll sing again tomorrow. Oh, stranger, did you ever hear such a pair?

Another recently-read memoir, this one by Lucy Grealy: Autobiography of a Face. At the age of 9, Grealy was diagnosed with cancer, and had a portion of her jaw removed. Here are two excerpts:

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people, and for the specific job of being a twelve-year-old with a younger sister, cruelty is de regueur.

. . . .

Halloween came round again, and even though I was feeling a bit woozy from an injection I'd had a few days before, I begged my mother to let me go out. I put on a plastic witch mask and went out with Teresa. I walked down the streets suddenly bold and free: no one could see my face. I peered through the oval eye slits and did not see one person staring back at me, ready to make fun of my face. I breathed in the condensing, plastic-tainted air behind the mask and thought that I was breathing in normalcy, that this freedom and ease were what the world consisted of, that other people felt it all the time. How could they not? How could they not feel the joy of walking down the street without the threat of being made fun of? Assuming this was how other people felt all the time, I again named my own face as the thing that kept me apart, as the tangible element of what was wrong with my life and with me.

The back cover blurb says that Grealy is a prize-winning poet. Is it a tough life that makes a good poet who writes a good memoir?

Tuesday, 27 August

Geek Squad New Times L.A: Revenge of the Nerds: When the going gets tough, the Geek Squad gets going.

Mars Canyon Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is of Mars— Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars. [via BlackHoleBrain] When I was at Kennedy Space Center for the Endeavor Shuttle Launch, I saw a display that compares the Mariner Valley with our own Grand Canyon:

vocabulary time I've heard it and seen it used here and there, finally I looked it up: sea change. Shakespeare. Shoulda known.

is that a Saudi prince in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Matt Welch in The National Post: Shilling for the House of Saud;

Former U.S. ambassadors have become Saudi Arabia's apologists. [via Ken Layne]

WTF?!?!? Gadaffi to chair the UN Commission on human rights [via Ken Hagler]

The Guardian: Gadafy - Human rights crusader

sticklers for human rights insist that an oppressor of his stature is not really the ideal person to convert the rest of us to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and all the other freedoms which remain, at the time of writing, prohibited in Libya.

More from the "I had no idea" department: According to this (scroll to end), the U.S. lost its membership on the commission.

Stoppt Spam I noticed that a page from Der Schokwellenreiter was high in Daypop's Top 40, so I peeked. Here's the Babelfish Translation (always amusing in its own way). Other people (whose language abilities are better'n babelfish's) linking to the site summed it up better than babelfish: Put 20 fake email addresses on your site. If everyone does it, then the spambots that scrape sites will get so many bad ones that they'll finally lay down their scrapebots.

I dunno; would it really work? The Metafilter thread on the topic.

Hmmm, in light of my earlier post, a bit of faked email address poetry:

gadaffi@freespeech.com

gadafy@excellenthumanrights.com

howmany@wayscan.com

youspell@adespotsname.com

omigosh@thattotallyrhymes.com

humanrightschair@freespeechlybia.com

terrorists@for_u_n_humanrightschairs.com

whenpigsfly@setpoliticalprisonersfree.com

amnestyinternational@goestolybianhumanrightsparties.com

prizewinner@lybianfreepressfoundation.com

whenwillpresidentbush@takeupthehumanrightscause.com

speakyourmind@gotojail.com

onepolticialparty@exampleoffreedom.com

doitmyway@oriwillkillyou.com

notentitled@toyourownopinion.com

afterawhile@itishardto.com

thinkupsomemore@examplesof.com

spoofemail@addresses.org

ifyouwishto@typebriskly.org

itwasfunwhile@itlasted.com

Monday, 26 August

Lovely Bones, redux Alice Sebold was at UCI's writing program. The OC Register, in Alma Mater of a Bestseller, features the program that is the darling of the literary community. [link courtesy of Mom, by fone]

P.S. Saturday morning, I went and saw Alice Sebold speak at the Vroman's Saturday writer's workshops. My two-sentence recap: She talked of the messy organicness of the writing process, and of listening to characters. Reading poetry puts you in another state to listen to what your characters have to say to you.

Get out the Web, er Vote From the Slashdot thread on Tara Grubb, this post of another person in North Carolina running for congress. Tripp Helms' site has audio clips (MP3) of his speeches on various positions.

[from his DMCA page ] Rather than modify existing copyright law to incorporate changes appropriate to changes in technology, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act undermines fair use and "first sale" principles, and it has the potential to stifle academic research and learning, as well as to undermine the Internet's potential to become this millennium's greatest means of expression for those who love freedom and liberty and want to preserve them. If we can't fix the DMCA, then we need to repeal it and pass a law that respects the principles on which this country was founded.

Ouch! (backup, backup backup) Talk City.com closes, many stranded.(all sources: cnet)

Aug 8 Talk City closes shop

Aug 15 Talk City users upset by site's shuttering

Aug 20 Little hope for Talk City users

Dot-com bankruptcies seems as sudden and catastrophic as earthquakes (well, for data at least), and there's no such thing as a Data-FEMA.

Bingo! I went to a Girls Bingo Night in Pasadena on Friday night. Very fun. Lots of great people. And Bingo, well... what a hoot. Run by someone named Belle Aire (a gorgeous provocateur of a transvestite in a long black dress and shoulder-length red hair) and her cohort, Bingo-boy (whose name I've forgotten). (read up on Bingo)

Belle Aire: What are we playing?

Roomful of Girls: Bingo!

Belle Aire: How do we play it?

Roomful of Girls: Loudly!

(I'd've never want to apply the adjective "shrill" to a roomful of fabu women, a portion of whom were each glad to extend her hand, introduce herself and ask me who am I and what do, but the cackle of a roomful of 100+ shouting women is, well, shrill.)

Amazing: did you know there are special bottles of ink for marking blots on your Bingo cards? There's a whole industry surrounding this game! Plus, there's more to bingo than the straight 5-in-a-row (Virgin Bingo); there's 2-way (Two straight rows—I won that game, whee!!!), and Ring-around-the-rosey (all spaces surrounding the Free Space) and more.

Winners got to walk around the room while everyone else got to take out their frustration on the winner by tossing their crumpled bingo sheets at her. "Pelt her! Pelt her!" Having personally survived the glancing blows of 100 crumpled up sheets of tissuey newsprint, I can testify that sweet victory has its price.

Oh, and here's a tidbit straight from West Hollywood to Pasadena, home of that great pageant, the Tournament of Roses. Before you read this, you gotta picture the pageant queen in a gorgeous gown, demure pearl necklace. She waves the graceful little wave... you know, the one that's been perfected to conserve motion over a three-hour parade route while still looking regal. Subtle, graceful, hold the hand up and rotate the hand. Maybe a little side-to-side swaying of the elbow. Of this wave, Belle Aire said:

"Elbow to elbow, and wrist to wrist,

Touch the pearls and blow a kiss."
Pageant advice direct from a transvestite! ; )

over n out All right, I got my blogging fix taken care of, it's time to once again disconnect the 'puter from the net to get some work done. Toodooloo!

Unplugged

Gonna unplug my computer from the net and take it to the library and get some work done and avoid the temptation of surfing the net and being sucked into this great and wonderful maw.

So, seeing as how you're here, deep within this maw (!), may I recommend to you...

Internet and Politics: Good stuff at Doc's site and Dave W's site over the last few days. And a news story that sorta recaps it all.

and following up yesterday's spam horror story, a plan for spam.

and, of course, some of the usual suspects.

Or tune into the zeitgeist.

happy surfing, yall. See you later.

Due process

How SpamCop does the wrong thing Fighting spam the stalinist way. [via Davos Newbies]

Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist "justice" system:

conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based

not on anything the accused did but is instead based on favorable

comments about him by the "wrong" people; the evidence is withheld from

the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or

malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity

to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is

clearly innocent).

Scandal Map [via Dangerousmeta] A chart of who's related to whom does to all coporate scandals what they rule did to show connections among corporate board members.

Tuesday August 20th

Meetup tomorrow Calling any and all from the San Gabriel Valley: Register at blogs.meetup.com and sign up for tomorrow evening's meeting at Zeli's (coffeehouse near Vroman's in Pasadena, on Colorado Blvd) to meet other bloggers. Even if we don't get the required quorum (we need 1 more person!), I'll be there.

New political blog run by candidate for House of Reps Welcome to the world of weblogging, Tara Sue Grubb! Tara is the libertarian candidate running against Mr. Coble in North Carolina. Coble is the co-sponsor (along with Howard Berman) of the bill allowing Copyright Holders access to hack your PC. Ed Cone has been blogging about this (the bill, Coble, and introducing Ms. Grubb as well as writing an article about the bill for the News & Record, his local newspaper.

I'm excited to see blogging get into the sphere of politics. Can a weblog make a difference? Can people get into this? Is this a way that a group of individuals can go up against a big industry money machine? I sure do hope so.

My PHP Questions

These are my questions about PHP. I'm just learning. I come to PHP as someone with quite a bit of familiarity with HTML, and having minimally (minimally minimally) poked around with JavaScript. I am not a programmer. My entry into this sphere has been graphics. Then technical writing. Strong emphasis on usability. And now it would seem, programming.

(also: php links - for links to web sites that don't fit in with this Q n A)

1. How do I combine PHP and HTML in the same document?

• The PHP manual's beginning tutorial shows one example of interspersed HTML and PHP code.PHP-Nuke General Info FAQ
• The PHP manual's syntax section (see 6-2) shows some tricky ways to go in and out of php and html, suitable for larger blocks of HTML code. Very cool.

2. How do I generate Web-standard compliant code with PHP?

Related to previous question about spitting out good HTML. How to generate code that is:

• standards compliant
• and, while we're at it, fits accessibility guidelines,
• has the right Doctype
• is coded in XHTML
• implements good CSS and fewer (or no) tables
• and other good stuff they talk about at A List Apart

(not that I've implemented any of that yet, I'm still assessing!)

3. How do I make graceful URLs with PHP?

Graceful = http://www.place.net/address/makes/sense.php

• A List Apart: How To Succeed with URLs.
  Describes how to create PHP script to change

  www.domain.com/index.php?id=6

  to

  www.domain.com/tutorials/step1.php

4. How do I go about converting an existing plain-ol HTML site to PHP?

It will also eventually have MySQL, too.

• Is it easier to create a new site from scratch than it is to convert an old one?
• Can I convert it in stages?
• Can I implement new things later on?
• What are the most important things to begin with?

5. How do I think about the entire design process?

Is this a PHP question, a mySQL question, or both?

• (mySQL)Database design: Julie Meloni of Thickbook (books on php and mysql) has a book excerpt on the database design process.

6. Are there PHP implementations out there that are ready-to-go CMS (content management systems)?

• phpnuke. No simple "what is phpnuke" link on the home page.
• PostNuke. Same problem as PHPnuke: what is it? gotta hunt for the answer. What is postnuke?
• More CMS on the php links page

7. How much of this is about PHP and how much is about MySQL?
8. Will I have to become a full-fledged programmer?
9. Some Tutorial Resources

• to
• be
• continued

Mundane Monday

Wedding Sunday Congratulations, Andrea and André! They were married in Santa Fe by Hal Rager, and the wedding was witnessed by Garret and Sandra Vreeland.

ongoing PHP inquiry My PHP Questions is a page listing my ongoing questions about PHP and links to some of the answers I've found.

Familiarity from Manila A random observation of someone who's attepmting to learn (at least a little) programming while (attempting to learn a little) PHP: The last 2+ years of working with Manila macros and the like from this site has helped. Thanks for all the {ItemsWhichHave ("ThisStructure")}!

Calling bullshit Real Joe Affirmation Bullshit Generator "Integrate my ceaseless body"? Heck, I'm gonna manifest my ceaseless procrastination!

PHP redux

On Galen and Barbara Rowell, Nature Photographers

PhotoNet thread on the death of the Rowells (includes some personal reminiscence [via Scobelizer]

A Photographer Remembers Galen and Robert Rowell
National Geographic Mourns the Rowells

PHP redux All right, aside from asking myself, "Who are you kidding to learn this new programming stuff, what about [insert array here]?" I'm making a bit of progress.

Good PHP Tutorials Here's an excellent introductory PHP tutorial I found. PHP only, no mySQL yet. Basics of programming. Perfect for a newbie like me. (the site's code sample CSS doesn't work well with MSIE 5 Mac, but does with Mozilla)

I'm still working through it and probably over-commenting my sample code like crazy, and trying variations on what's given, but I figure if I can write down what's taking place in my own words, then it'll stick in my noggin.

I plan to also work through their PHP and mySQL intro, too. Having looked it over, it sets out the context of what's happening. Very helpful. Also refers to an Interactive on-line SQL tutorial, to get up to speed (or review) SQL commands.Practice database is set up and you see the results. Should be interesting.

The answers are out there Dave Polaschek has been doing PHP too. He links to this article about how to make pretty urls that make sense 要ersus one like this

www.domain.com/index.php?id=314

So my "how do I...?" / "is it possible to...?" questions have answers already. Cool.