I feared by now we would have mobs of angry citizens hunting down those deemed “un-american”. What has happened frightens me just as much. We as a people are handing over our rights with an ease and speed that leaves me speechless. All I can do is paraphrase Ben Franklin.
“Those who give up a little liberty, in order to gain some security, deserve neither liberty, nor security.”
Perhaps the witch hunts are yet to come.
It can’t handle CSS. Period. I mean, it shouldn’t be too hard to make a WYSIWYG program that can handle a simple SPAN tag, should it? Everyone else has been able to do it. But not, apparently, Fusion. People complain about having to hack dreamweaver so it’ll produce compliant code, but you have to hack fusion just so it’ll produce code that looks like it was written in the year 2000.
The only thing it’s decent at is producing absolutely positioned pages that work without a hitch everywhere. It’s a combination of CSS-P divs and LAYER tags on top of one another that I haven’t been able to reliably reproduce by hand.
And it’s fast. It lets me crank shit out way faster than anything else. Because of the speed and ease, my boss is in love with it. So much so that even though the company got de-listed from NASDAQ, we have no plans to even train on any other software, much less migrate any sites. But it produces code that’s so god awful embarrassing that I don’t even want to own up to producing most of it.
End rant. I feel better now.
Americans Must Fight For Peace
Read this. Please. Everyone.
From a recent speech by U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio: “We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases. We did not authorize war without end. We did not authorize a permanent war economy. We did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on Sept. 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.”
This is important. This needs to be remembered. Please, even as you are being besieged by ads for more war movies and the president is on the TV talking about “evil” as if god actually talks to him, please remember that killing innocents in a village half a world away will never bring back your lost loved ones.
And for the love of anything and *everything* stop being so f***ing suprised when you see another GI’s picture on the news and an anchor talking somberly about how he died. We are letting our govrnment send our brothers, husbands, sons, fathers, mothers, wives, and daughters out to die and more of them *will* die. That’s what happens in combat! It is not just the “other side” who dies, and you will not see the body bags coming home on TV like our parents saw 30 years ago. Government and the media have learned from the past. All we’ll see are heroic, ernest graduation pictures of young men and women cut down. A clean scrubbed face behind an anchor, with no messy corpse to make us question why in the *hell* this is happening.
An eye for an eye makes *nothing* better and it won’t bring back one damm person. I say this now and I’m going to keep saying it until somebody listens.
Word to the wise - do not read depressing fic first thing in the morning. Have the coffee first, at least. But this is a good one. I need to know. Buffy fic - Anya’s POV shortly after “The Body”. I really should have known better. Like the thought of loosing a family member isn’t enough to wig me out as it is.
It’s 6:00 and I’m still at work. Yeerg. Very much looking foward to the B5 tape waiting for me. Not looking foward to the pile of dishes also waiting for me.
Just read Fresh Styles For Web Designers. I seem to be about 2/3 Htminialist and 1/3 Gothic Organic. Yeesh. And here I just thought I was me.
A lot of designers seem to be focused on overcoming the web’s shortcomings. Hence the large selection of books purporting to teach designers how to work with the web, how to teach non-designers to work with the web; hell, how to teach cats to design for the web. But the web only has shortcomings if you insist of looking at its properties as shortcomings. For someone trained in oils, watercolors have a lot of shortcomings. The same thing applies to print folks who get thrown into the web. They want a level of control that it still isn’t always rational or possible.
For someone who first learned design by working with the web, print has a lot of restrictions. A smaller color space. More color costs more. Changing content requires a re-run. Trapping. Overprinting. Spot colors. Ink viscosisity. Dot gain. Varnishes. Die cuts. Thermography. Finish processes. Spiral binding versus saddle stitching versus folding. Lots of very technical stuff that one needs to be familiar with for one’s work to well, work.
So I think that most of the folks who bewail the restrictions of the web aren’t really looking at it correctly. They’re looking at the web like it’s supposed to be print, and shame on it for not behaving correctly! I think we still don’t know what the web is. Maybe in ten years we’ll have a better handle on it.
Been running across a lot of metablogging and eaasys about journalling lately. Seems to be the meme of the moment. One such essay had a lot of good advice on the questions on should ask oneself before self publishing something like this. Questions like “what is my intended audience?”, “why do I want to do this?”, “do I want my friends/family/dog to read this?” and so on. Good things to think about. This is stuff I thought about, not just before I started this incarnation of my site, but back in ‘98 when I first put up the ‘Lair. I’d actually wanted a web page since I went online in ‘95, but back then I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. So I held off.
A lot of the advice was very common sense-ish. Well DUH, of course anyone can read your journal. It’s on the WEB. If you are writitng something your mom shouldn’t read, don’t put it out there. Or accept that mother is going to find out more about you than you were willing to share with her directly.
Some of the advice was suprising. Seems a lot of people write journals and get obsessive if they don’t think anyone reads them. Or they get upset if not *enough* people read them. I have no idea how many people read this. I don’t check my log files at all. (And I’m sitting *three feet* from my server, so this is not because I can’t) This project is for me. But every now and then I get an email from someone who got a smile ’cause they stopped by. And hey, that’s enough to make me smile.