Where I’m @

20010621

The Dead People Server is still one of my favorite sites, even after all these years. Dead or alive? Find out for sure. One of the best things about it is that it has never, to my knowledge, published rumor and named it Fact. Right up there is it's current-ness, too. It's like the old days of the IMDb, when I'd just go and sift through the records (without being bombarded by promotional crud, as now) and find interesting things. I had no idea, for example, that Imogene Coca died a few days ago.

20010620

Ahhh... Links to the archives are here. Or there. Or perhaps neither here nor there.

Error No. 2 from the Windoesn’t XP posts of the other day: www.scripting.com is Dave Winer’s blog, not Robert Scoble’s.

Took my drumming class, finally. See, my SO gave me a djembe for Christmas, and I’ve been meaning to take a class at the place she bought it but just haven’t gotten around to it. That, and whenever I have called they haven't been open or something similar. Should it surprise me that a shop that sells drums is like that — casual about business operation — or not? So it was really fun and I learned a whole lot that will be of use as I beat my drum. Maybe I can write it off my taxes or get reimbursed through healthcare or something, since it should count as therapy now that I am unemployed.
Speaking of which, the job boards seem to be the wastelands that everyone says they are, except for people with high-level special skills. For some reason I see lots of posts for senior Java developers. Not many for low-level generalists such as yours truly. If you see something, let me know!

20010615

Whoops. Spoke too soon. Robert Scoble mentions through the same webdesign-l list that the META tag doesn’t work for him on his Beta copy of XP.
And for those of you just tuning in, your best bet is to look at Scoble’s page for some info about the $martTag issue in general. Start with the entry from June 11th then work your way forward in time.

The best news I've had today: A META tag, from the IE6 newsgroup and posted by the IE team at M$, no less, for turning off those nasty $martTags from M$. To wit:
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
Big up to the webdesign-l list, as ever.

20010614

Oh — did I mention that I lost my job, sorta? “Sorta” because I am still at my office, doing some office-type work (a barter system for my computer and monitor and scanner, really), and don't have the time so far to just play or even learn/play. I do have some projects up my sleeve and have been unemployed before, and gosh darnit, I like being unemployed. I get to be my true scattered self (though I’m less scattered now, thanks to my trusty Palm m105) and do things when I feel like they need doing rather than on this nasty corporatized 5-on 2-off schedule. There’s a glimmer of a chance that I may start a small freelancing business with a friend of mine, and that would be pretty sweet. I think. Then again, I’ve never been much of a business man, so maybe it would just be a PITA. Sigh. Someday my prince will come?

File Under :: You Gotta See This!

20010608

Had the good fortune this evening of watching for, as it turned out, the second time, Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China. The second one is showing at Cinema Village these days, and I thought I might go see it, but wanted to see the first one for the backstory, if that was in fact necessary.
Though I’m no connoisseur of Hong Kong cinema, I find that I have become able to notice some salient differences in the directors’ work. For example, Hark’s players don’t use props in quite the same way that, say, Jackie Chan’s characters do. For Chan, the set is a bit like the DOGME95 Vow of Chastity, taken on a left turn: Chan can bring on to the set everything he wants, but he’s got to use all the items that are on the set during any given fight scene. Hark, however, seems to view props as just that, items to support the bodily efforts of the actors. Perhaps that’s a hypothesis and example drawn from too few a selection of pictures. I will say, in slight contradiction of those thoughts, that the fight on the ladders in the warehouse in Once Upon . . . rocks my world.
Did I mention that I’m no connoisseur? My suggestion is to check out some of the writings at AsianAmericanFilm.com, not coincidentally a site run by my friend Greg Pak.

20010604

Kewl — found a neat thing to do with old records. Remember them, kiddies? Records? Vinyl? Wax? [link courtesy of Geektastic]

Found out this morning that my company's future hangs on a meeting Wednesday with a firm in Lincoln, Nebraska. I’m pretty ambivalent about it, actually. Our CEO says that the acquiring company would be highly unlikely to ask us to move to Nebraska (or, as my friend Scott puts it, “The Great State of Nebraska”), which is good, because I’m highly unlikely to move to the center of the country, especially with my mother’s health in irreversible decline. And he also said that if we were acquired, the point would be, in part, to get the personnel, which includes your faithful scribe. So if the deal happens, I’m probably assured of employment for a while to come. Then again, I really enjoyed being unemployed in 1999. I’m a thrify person, so I don’t have to worry about breaking into my savings account or anything. Then again, when I was laid off from EvilPublishing Co., I had a nice severance package, owing to the unionization of lower employees since the 1940s. On the third hand, it would be nice to have a more-or-less free summer to build my coding, graphics, and development skills.

In last month's issue of The Brooklyn Rail, a decent little piece about indie rock in Billburg.

20010603

Finally saw Memento last night, and now I’m terribly anxious, because I don’t have a very good short-term memory and I think people are trying to mess with my head. Besides that, I was very pleased with the picture. Just about everything about it was done well. Perhaps it was a little antiseptic — I don’t think I came away with the impression that Christopher Nolan, the director, had a lot of feeling for his characters. Though they were basically well written, they were not very deep. Then again, this wasn’t a character study. A couple of years ago, I caught Nolan’s previous feature, Following, at the New Directors/New Films festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, and there are many similarities. Memento, despite having the same gimmick-as-plot-structure setup, was much more sophisticated and relied less on the gimmick to make things work. There are a few things I’m not sure about (partly due to my own memory problems, no doubt): Why does Leonard keep saying that the penultimate character in John G.’s license plate is I, when it's clearly 1 on the plate, and even on his tattoo? Then again, I could swear that in one shot of the car, the character is I, not 1. Somewhere along the line, I forgot what happened with Natalie to make her wig and say she was going to use Leonard — was it really just that she recognized that he was driving Jimmy’s car and wearing his suit? And in the later (that is, earlier) scenes where Natalie is seeming to be fairly genuinely nice, is she just faking, or has she gone soft on him, possibly because she finally wakes up and realizes that he’s not faking? And how does Leonard know what happened to Sammy’s wife, anyway?

20010601

See — toldja.

Permalinks and daisy-chain list coming soon, I promise.

The W3C posted the XHTML 1.1 recommendation today. It advances the spec to live in the light of Modularization of XHTML. Haven't read it, so I can't comment much, but at 27 pages, what is implied is likely to be of greater importance than what is specked. Unfortunately for me, I don't have the knowledge broad enough to discuss the implications, but there are people who do. Check out the webdesign-l mailing list or the XHTML mailing list/ Yahoo! Group.