Tony: “this guy gets to build the tallest building in the world”

Brilliant post, brilliant series of questions. I think it deserves an answer:

  • I work to understand who the visitors are of one of the biggest websites in the world. Besides this one.
  • I’m rediscovering them every day.
  • Every day. And that’s girl singular.
  • The first two months of this year have been a hell of a lot better than the last five months of last year.
  • Learning who I am.
  • Not whole CDs, but there’s some great MP3s at KEXP if you pledge.
  • When I remember to have hope.
  • Q: How many tenors does it take to change a light bulb? A: Four; one to do it and three to stand around and bitch that they could have done it just as well if they had the high notes.
  • I’m not sure but I think that’s a personal question.
  • No, but I’ve got a close eye on some folks who are trying to destroy our American way of life.
  • You tell me. I’ve at least started talking.
  • Not nearly often enough.
  • Not nearly often enough.
  • Not nearly often enough.
  • Yes. And yes.
  • As big as a move, as small as a post.
  • Not nearly often enough.
  • Yes. Downhill on and off my feet.
  • Not nearly…oh, stop it. Yes, at Trogdor.
  • Not yet, but we have crocuses.
  • At Christmas time. I’m off pie.
  • Not so much.
  • Not physically.
  • We covered that.
  • Not on the blog.
  • I think it was the cheese that did me in, actually.
  • When Lisa gets back in town.
  • Every day.

UVA: StudCo candidate assaulted because of race

Race relations at Virginia have been complicated since the beginning; after all, the school’s founder wrote the Declaration of Independence but kept slaves.

But the execrable actions of the as-yet-unidentified assailant who, in the words of the Cavalier Daily report, “allegedly grabbed Lundy by the hair and slammed her head against the steering wheel… [and] said, ‘no one wants a nigger to be president’” aren’t complicated. They’re stupid, hateful, and unworthy of the school I called home. (They’re also ignorant; I seem to remember a few black student council presidents at Virginia while I was there, and they were popularly elected.)

Esta has some strong words on this and is following the unfolding reactions; apparently Casteen has issued a statement but it’s not on his web site yet.

Update: Esta forwarded the letters that went out from the offices of the President and Vice President for student affairs. Pending online availability on the Virginia site, I’ve posted the letters here.

Librarian.net: legal civil disobedience, with RSS

Over at Librarian.net, a set of perfectly legal signs that confirm to the letter of the PATRIOT Act: they don’t tell you whether the FBI has been there investigating your reading habits, but they make it perfectly clear that it’s a real possibility that they have been. Example: “Q: How can you tell when the FBI has been in your library? A: You can’t. (The PATRIOT Act makes it illegal for us to tell you if our computers are monitored; be aware!)

Oh, and Jessamyn: your RSS feed works just fine in NetNewsWire, your concerns to the contrary.

QTN™: Not all barleywines are gold

Tonight’s tasting experiment is LaConner Brewing Company’s Olde Curmudgeon Barleywine Style Ale. I’ve been waiting about a week to try this one, but I think my wait was in vain. This is a truly disappointing barleywine.

Pour: flat, no head. Taste: heavy, syrupy, sickly sweet, with a slightly chalky aftertaste. Smells of yeast, and not in a good way. It’s possible the bottle is old or was stored improperly, I suppose, but I don’t think so. It’s just unbalanced—needs way stronger hop to compensate for the sweetness and alcohol—and not very pleasant to taste. Down the drain.

Looking at the last eight months

Last night I was talking with a friend about my progress since getting out of business school. I went from naïvely feeling on top of the world to feeling that I was lower than dog crap and worthless. Now I’ve climbed part way back. As my friend pointed out, I am now at least to the point where I acknowledge that I have feelings and can talk about them, which hasn’t always been true.

Dave and I had an off-blog dialogue a while back about male grief and male emotion. I was partly right then:

It’s a reinforcing loop. As men stay silent, the culture becomes accustomed to men not expressing their feelings. Eventually, expressing feelings becomes an exception, exceptions aren’t tolerated, and the cost of not expressing feelings becomes over time too high to bear.

But I missed one point. As time goes further by, it becomes easy to forget that you have emotions. Which is a mistake. Emotions can’t be destroyed; they just get expressed in other ways, like inexplicably lashing out at friends or convincing oneself of one’s essential worthlessness.

I’ve been fighting a Black Dog since getting to Seattle, if not before. Now at least I have lifted the crushing cycle of self doubt and understand a little of what caused it. The only question about my newly rediscovered emotions is what to do about them?

Broadening my horizons

Just got back from Jish’s very informal blogger gathering (don’t call it a meetup!) at Fadó in Seattle. In addition to meeting Jish, who’s quite a nice guy, and renewing F2F acquaintance with Anita and Jerry Kindall, I met a whole passel of new-to-me bloggers, including Jessamyn West from librarian.net and poetsagainstthewar.org. And Dan Engler from Foreword.com, also known as one of the 2/17 Diesel Sweeties guest artists. Lots of good conversations.

Update, 2/26: Anita has a better summary including links to some people whose blogs I couldn’t remember last night in my brain dead exhausted state: Dan Sanderson, Jacob fron 8BitJoystick, Tara, and others.

Ugh. More font size crap

I should just leave well enough alone. IE 5 and 6 won’t allow me to resize the font even with its size specified in pixels. Also, more seriously, Gentium looks like crap when it’s bolded, since the designer hasn’t provided a true bold. Buh-bye.

Gentium cross platform issues

Okay, maybe Gentium won’t work well as a weblog font after all. I couldn’t tell the difference when I made the change on my home Macintosh, but on my XP machine at work the font is much much too small.

Which adds insult to injury, because you can’t resize it. I now have a greater appreciation for Georgia’s design than I did before; it looked almost the same on both machines.

I will be rolling back the stylesheet change, but thinking now more seriously about making the fonts user-resizable.

Free multilingual Unicode font, anyone

Courtesy Typographi.ca, a pointer to Victor Gaultney’s Gentium project. Purpose: to build a free multilingual font to bring better typography to thousands of languages around the globe. I can think of no higher calling.

I’ve revised my stylesheets so that Gentium is the preferred font for my article text. If you don’t have the font, the site still renders in Georgia (or Times), but this is my small way of showing support for Gaultney’s project.

Eating one’s own dogfood—with the customer

Dave continues to explore the joys of getting Userland’s flagship workgroup blogging solution, Manila, up and functional at Harvard. Today’s story captures him learning about a potential conflict between Frontier’s built-in web server and Microsoft IIS, if both are running on the same box.

This is exactly the sort of thing that more software developers, and CEOs, should do—get out into the wild, outside the company IT environment, on the other coast or in another part of the world, and try to install and operate your product. Does it work like you expected? Uh oh, it doesn’t! Have you documented the problem? Is it a bug or a compatibility issue? Has anyone else had the same problem? Is your website any help? Kudos to Dave for using his new job as a way to improve Userland’s products and support.