Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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Friday, June 27, 2003
The Zen Garfield takes random panels from published Garfield strips and reassembles them into a strip that makes about as much sense as the originals and is equally funny (if not funnier.) You could do it 17,888 times if you so desired. Maybe even more. (via J-Walk)Back in February, I linked to the Harvard Dialect Survey. The survey is now over, and the results are in. With regards to the question Zusty and I quoted, most people had no term for rain falling on a sunny day, "sunshower" took second place, "the devil is beating his wife" an unsurprisingly distant (but surprisingly nationwide) third.
As someone who's been de facto HR manager for a couple months, I would like to wholeheartedly agree with Clippy's advice to job seekers. Of course, he ought to know, as he's looking for work himself (though I doubt he'll find a gig as a singer.)
I've been incredibly happy with the drop in telemarketing calls I've received since the Wisconsin Do Not Call List went active last fall. Now you can sign up for the national version, which the FTC will begin enforcing October 1.
(Note that the first link, to the FTC's website, appears to be swamped today by people signing up. You might want to just read the story behind the second link for now and sign up sometime next week. Alternately, if you live west of the Mississippi you could try signing up by phone at 1-888-382-1222.)
UPDATE: It's being reported that 1000 people per second are signing up for the list. Which explains why the website is still generally unavailable. Perhaps they should just change it to a "Please Call" list. I think they'd be better able to handle the 1 call per day they'd be getting
Thursday, June 26, 2003
See, this is the difference between blogs and traditional media; when the traditional media writes a story on the IRS and taxes, they link to three stories saying the same thing, three editorials that are only slightly relevant, and two backgrounders. Yet they don't link to the report, which I had to go find myself.
Traditional journalism may go wide, but online it often fails to go deep.
UPDATE: Perhaps I should clarify--I'm not saying the sixty word post above is as deep as, say, a Making Light post on nearly any topic, or the insightful coverage of news and politics you can find on many other blogs I read. I just wish that the web's largest news providers weren't relying quite so much on bots to do their background collecting and posted more of their primary sources instead (as the Madison Isthmus does on the Document Feed section of their website.) Finding the IRS report really only took about two minutes after arriving at the IRS site.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Thanks to Becca, I'm finally up and running on Friendster. So now I feel that terrifying and exhilarating feeling I always feel in the pit of my stomach when I realize I've fallen in among some very sharp and cool people.
In a lot of ways, I'll always be the quiet kid reading a book in the back row of class...
"Let's do a few more takes and see how much pain you've got left in you."*
Actors started coming in to work today for recording sessions, performing the script I've spent the last few months hacking away at with the team (and 20 pages of single-spaced random dialogue that I hammered in during a 16-hour marathon yesterday.)
I love seeing my work in print, even when it's just a manuscript rolling out of the printer. But it's a whole 'nother thrill to hear it performed by professionals. The story might be compromised with flaws that will bother me for years, but at least every line is going to sound fantastic.
* Not one of my lines, just something amusing said during a session today.
I got pinged by the same spammer last night (via boingboing.) Good to hear somebody is on their trail.
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Among other "anything but work" discussions and debates we had this evening, Craddick and I wondered why the tilde is on keyboards. Certainly uses have been found for it, but why was it there originally? A bit of Googling into the history of the tilde and we (well, Craddick first, curse his speedy fingers) had the answer.Hey! Another fun feature of BloggerNew: the Drafts section, where I keep notes for potential posts...missing. I'm starting to get irked, especially as there appears to be no way to access my blog via the old interface. Grrr.
I apologize for the lack of content posting. People are getting married, I've written forty pages of dialogue in the last two days, and it just keeps getting hotter. There's an excuse in there somewhere.
UPDATE: Kevin points out that posting comments no longer seems to be ticking up the "X comments" counter on this front page--something that Blogger shouldn't be interfering with, as it is powered by phpComments, a completely different system. Looking for help shows that yes, apparently it is Blogger interfering--but happily, there's already a potential solution in place (and one I'll implement shortly.)
Meanwhile, others are having even worse problems.
Someday this'll be over. Someday this'll be over...
UPDATE 2: Fix implemented, and commenting seems to be working properly once again, although all comments made during the broken period (since Saturday) appear to be lost. Apparently even the victories in this transition period are bittersweet.
Monday, June 23, 2003
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