Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I confess: I’ve been playing on Orkut. So far there appear to be three differences between this latest social networking app and its predecessors, Friendster, Ryze, etc.:

Lots more blogerati are on Orkut.
Slightly faster and easier to use.
Did I mention it was backed by Google?

But I have been inviting friends on anyway, and in the process [...]

After last year’s time with the Cascadian Chorale, I took the fall off from singing. I had started to realize during my therapy last year that part of the reason I kept looking to singing groups was to feel needed, and I had to break myself of that cycle.

But this fall I really missed [...]

True to their word, the folks at the Guardian sent me the paper copy of the story they did about the mobile phone art exhibition. To my delight, not only did they use the picture from the Tacoma art museum exhibit, but it was the keynote graphic for the article. It’s too bad they didn’t [...]

A quick follow up to yesterday’s report about the Mydoom virus: You can stay informed of security updates from Microsoft via the security mailing lists available on the Microsoft Security web site. There are two lists, one for general users and one for technical folks, so you can choose the level of information you want [...]

Anita was kind enough to point out that I hadn’t bothered to set background or text colors in my new lean mean stylesheet, which makes the page look kind of funny in Netscape 4 or in any browser where you can set your own background color.
This is an easy mistake to make when you’re [...]

Interesting article at StopDesign describing real work experience in getting CSS layouts to work across platforms. As those who have been reading the Web Design department through my last redesign will attest, this is a non-trivial challenge; some apparently easy CSS styles will work well in one browser while not working at all in another.
But [...]

Caught yesterday, but not posted as I couldn’t see over the creeping crud in my system: Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional. US District Judge Audrey Collins ruled that a portion of the act, which criminalized providing “expert advice or assistance” to terrorist groups, was “impermissibly vague.”
(I’m not clear what part of the Constitution [...]

Ironic timing… As I’m working from home today between vigorous attempts to clear the sinus infection from my head, I get a new virus alert in my mail about Mydoom.

Microsoft Consumer Virus Alert
Why We Are Issuing This Alert
W32/Mydoom@MM spreads through e-mail. This worm can disguise the sender’s address, a tactic known as spoofing, and may [...]

Radiohead
Hail to the Thief
Capitol, 2003
I sucked
The moon
I spoke
Too soon
And how much did
it cost?
I was dropped from
Moonbeams
And sailed
On shooting stars

Maybe you’ll
be president
But know
right from wrong
Or in the flood you’ll
build an Ark
And sail us to the moon

I wanted to fix the new design so that it read well in Lynx (and by extension in other non-graphical browsers, for instance screen readers). After all, Day 10 of Dive Into Accessibility is to present your main content first, and one of the virtues of my previous design was that it did just that. [...]

We had a surprise yesterday: our little girl puppy, Joy, is now too big to fit comfortably inside her fashionista doggie bag. Our little guys are growing up…
We decided that it’s time to take down some of the gates that we’ve used to keep them out of parts of the house, in the process opening [...]

Unanticipated side effect of feeds.scripting.com: my subscription list went from 124 feeds to 164 in about two weeks. (And the number of folks subscribing to my feeds went from 10 to 20. Thanks, all!)
I finally got around to replacing my feed list, which I had previously done as a static upload, with a link to [...]

I made some minor changes to the main stylesheet today to improve the readability of the site. In keeping with some of my recent reading, I kept the changes simple and almost entirely typographical. I had already increased the leading between text lines; to break up the flow and call out the post titles a [...]

Geez. I did a Google News search that turned up a two week old story in the Nation that cites the GOP snooping, and indicates that it’s been public knowledge since the Wall Street Journal published the leaked memos in November. (And the article quotes Orrin Hatch as saying, “there is no excuse that can [...]

Via Josh Marshall and the Boston Globe, “Senate’s GOP staff pried on Democrats.” Sounds eerily familiar, except this time (thirty years later) it’s the Senate, not the White House staff, being accused of illegally eavesdropping on the other party. Apparently, for almost a year, GOP staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee were accessing what the [...]