I’ve been unwilling to read the Washington Post for some time as it seems to have gone far downhill in recent years, but every now and then a real gem of an article, story, or opinion piece shows up that drags my attention back to the Post again…
This is one such story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495_pf.html (sorry for any pop-under advertisements)
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Rodrigo y Gabriela are in Baltimore on October 24th, and in Philadelphia and New York City this fall as well. I highly recommend going to see them, and think we may be going to the show in Baltimore.
Search YouTube to get some samples, or just check out this track:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FXOd97CtnQ
I love this generalization: “Democrats protest the use of taxes to kill people, Republicans protest the use of taxes to save people.”
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/8140/leftvsconservatards.png
Hat tip to Waldo.
Thermostats say 93F in the shade here, and humid… Summer is definitely here at last. We got nearly a bushel of cucumbers and summer squash from the garden today; and I lost about a gallon of sweat whilst bringing in the harvest, some tomatoes, and staking up the tomato vines that had sagged to the ground….
Been jumping in and out of the pool to stay cool, but it is hardly helping – the pool water is not really refreshing at 85F (at least not to me), though evaporating dry on the hammock (now moved to the shade of the cherry tree) does help a lot.
I created a “sirens” playlist with female vocalists from several genres and have been enjoying that last night and today… Kate Bush, Nina Simone, Dido, BoA, Eva Cassidy, Norah Jones, Heart, Pat Benetar, Joan Osbourne, Poe, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Suzanne Vega, No Doubt, etc, etc, etc…
I got asked last night as a political junkie what I thought of the Healthcare Bill tying up our congress-critters and the news cycle… I had to confess I did not know much about it as I was focused on other issues I considered to be more critical to our great nation. I still feel that way, but the question and my inability to answer identified a gap in my own knowledge – so I’ll be sharing what I find on the issue as I find it for a bit…
A good explanation of some of the issues has been wonderfully summed up for us by Paul Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opinion/31krugman.html
It’s a start….
This is probably old news for web propellor heads out there; but if you are diagnosing website problems you should be using Firebug for Firefox and Web Inspector for Safari. They are amazing tools for measuring download times for every object on a page, analyzing the objects on that page, figuring out where the objects are coming from, and getting much smarter about your website design.
Firebug is a simple Firefox plugin; download and install can be done inside Firefox; you then restart Firefox and click the little bug icon down in the lower right corner to activate the debugging tool.
Web Inspector is integrated in every recent copy of Safari, you run a command line to enable the tool:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
Once enabled, you can mouse over any web object in your browser and right click or hover to get a drop down menu, from which you select “Inspect Element” and then dig around in the Inspector for your tools.
I am sure there are similar tools for OmniWeb, Opera, Chrome, and even Internet Explorer; but I have no experience with them yet…
Tagged Firebug, Firefox, Safari, web, Web DesignFor those who have been wondering what I have been up to since I got laid off at Project Playlist, some of the results are public now. This morning we launched a new, interim, corporate website for Neustar. I am not responsible for the content, just part of a team that deployed it to production as part of Neustar’s new corporate branding. Now we are working towards re-deploying that branding and content but with a Content Management System (CMS) called eZ Publish (open source, but with optional commercial support). I am pretty impressed with eZ Publish so far, it looks like a very modular set of Apache, MySQL, and PHP components with an impressive set of features that allow your designers and word smiths and editors to all have different work flows that can be merged to produce a common website with revision controls and previews before deployments. Nice. No need to spend your life maintaining Drupal anymore. Drupal is a fine first stab, but the never ending maintenance will kill your support staff.
Tagged drupal, ez publish, lamp, web cms, Web Design, workI have been listening to old The Babylon Podcast episodes on my commute to work, slowly catching up and through them I discovered a really good fan-fiction audiodrama set in the Babylon5 universe during the succession of Earth colonies and Babylon5 from Earth Alliance. The audio drama is called “Three Edged Sword” in honor of a famous Ambassador Kosh quote, and you can find it in iTunes and at Voices of Babylon. Highly entertaining.
