Archive of May 2008
It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.
— Peter Smith, Phoenix mission principal investigator
Embeddedness: Robert Irwin in His Seventies [VQR]
[F]raming everything that is unframable.
04:28 PM | 0 CommentsA lot of trackers go way, waaay too overboard with the fields. We need to work on bugs, not placate a needy database.
— Steven Frank, talking about wanting a better bug tracking system, but I think the idea of having to “placate a needy database” is instructive over a wide variety of applications.
The laziest web
So, you know, I really do like the Chyrp (you’re soaking in it) but my one pet peeve is that the bookmarklet – which is very very handy for posting stuff quickly when I come across something that I want to post quickly – well, the thing is if I’m not logged in, the bookmarklet doesn’t offer me a chance to log in there. It just tells me I’m not authorized to make a post, and then I have to go open the Chyrp admin screen in another tab or window, which totally busts the whole “posting this quick thing quickly” vibe. So here’s hoping that somebody who works on Chyrp and is either smarter or at any rate a better PHP coder or who has at least more time and energy to devote to the matter than I (none of which sets the bar especially high) is like checking for mentions of Chyrp on blogs that use it and might see this and maybe fix it up for me. Eh?
11:07 PM | 0 CommentsHow Embarrassing!
Erm, there was an unclosed <em> tag in my post quoting Mark Pilgrim a day or two ago, causing everything to display w/ italics the rest of the way down the page. It’s, uh, fixed now. Sheesh.
08:35 PM | 0 CommentsYou are under no constraint other than habit and self-doubt to suffer in one part of your life for success in another part. You can succeed in all parts.
— Earl Nightingale
08:24 PM | 0 CommentsIt is incorrect to say that the elements are “out of order”; they are simply unordered. This is an important distinction that will annoy you when you want to access the elements of a dictionary in a specific, repeatable order….
I remember getting a copy of X-Men #100, actually as a party favor at some elementary school friend’s birthday party, when I was 10 years old, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. At that point I hadn’t read any X-Men before, had no idea what the book was about and had a hard time making any sense of it at all. That incomprehensibility itself was a big part of the general feeling of horrible creepiness it gave me. Also, all the faces on the cover looked really angry, and the depictions of violence on the inside were, both for the time and for my age, pretty intense.
More than anything else, though, I think what weirded me out the most was the title. To this day, I don’t know the backstory of where the name comes from, but seeing my first issue without any preparation, to my 10-year-old mind it conveyed to me that they were, you know, ex-men — that is, that they really literally had once been men, but now somehow were not, were something else, like they were undead or something. I couldn’t really get my head around it all, and that in itself was frightening. From trying to read the thing, I was able to pick up on some of the whole “mutant” thing, but of course at the time I had no concept of what that was even supposed to mean. So basically, this was as far as I could tell a book about formerly human but now non-human mutants who I not only couldn’t understand what kind of people they really were now nor how they got that way, but who also were totally pissed off and scary and completely trying to kill one another for reasons I also couldn’t fathom. Oh, and also: I couldn’t tell who were the good guys or the bad guys, which in a comic book was really disorienting.
Looking at it now, I can’t even really pick up much more than a glimpse of the really very deeply terrifying creepy vibe it gave me back then, but I can still remember the feeling itself very vividly. I still see a little of it around Cyclops’s face on the cover. But otherwise, it seems like a completely different and much more ordinary thing now, and very little like my memory of it.
10:56 PM | 0 Comments