Circadian Shift

Just in time for Chinese New Year comes this link to Chinese horoscopes (thanks, Josie!).

Unlike Accordion Guy, I have no quibble with referring to my Chinese zodiac sign as "sheep" (Joey prefers the more manly term "ram"); I do agree that being called a "goat" is less than ideal.

If I had to pick a favourite song about sheep, I'd go with, well, "Sheep" by The Housemartins.

Went slightly insane at BMV Books yesterday, and acquired the following:

• What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier by James Gleick (I read and really enjoyed Gleick's last book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything)


• Philosophy Through Film by Mary M. Litch (a very nifty-looking book which uses examples from movies like The Matrix, Memento, and Total Recall to explore and illustrate basic questions in philosophy)


• Film: An Introduction, First Edition by William H. Phillips (there's now a second edition available for the super-keen; however, the first edition is going way cheap at BMV)

Brett has taken me to task for not mentioning Saturday's Dufferin Mall Experience. It wasn't a conscious omission on my part; just that, somewhere between Saturday and Tuesday, I forgot to blog about it, and then by Tuesday, I had other stuff in my head.

Indeed, as is evidenced by the photo gallery, I did attend, and had a swell time. I rather took a liking to Alice, who stars in Brett's pictorial of the event. Hopefully Johnny O will forgive me for razzing him over being creeped out by her ("Aw. Is Johnny afwaid of the wittle dolly???").

Anyway, I was sufficiently amused by Dufferin Mall ("Toys 'r' Us! Walmart! No Frills!") that I will probably go back at some point in the near future. Maybe I'll pick up that book we saw called How Much Joy Can You Stand? (I dunno -- try me. I think I can take a lot of it.) Or not.

Meanwhile, Kim has kindly provided a link to instructions on converting your old T-shirts to underwear. I'm not that desperate yet, but hey, you never know....

Lastly, there are new 'toonz up at explodingdog and toothpastefordinner.

Well, have downloaded and installed Opera 7.

The good news:

• Opera 7 plays nicely with Blogger

• none of my settings from Opera 6 were preserved (which means, among other things, that I have to go and dredge up all my site passwords again)


• all sorts of wierdness ensued when I tried importing my bookmarks from other browsers; initial attempts at importing bookmarks from Opera 6 only transferred the "default" bookmarks (useful. not.) and none of the ones I made; importing Internet Explorer "Favourites" did work, but managed to somehow break the "Bookmarks" drop-down menu in Opera, which means that to access my bookmarks I have to open up the bloody "Hotlist" (which gobbles up valuable screen space) instead

Incidentally, InformIT (free registration required) has added an article on The Value of Technical Leadership; much of it is applicable outside the realm of IT.

Well, Opera has gone and released version 7 for Windows, and I will probably download it later tonight. It's been a little over a month since I made the switch, and I've stuck with it. I like Opera -- it's fast, and I like the way it handles multiple browser windows. However, I still have the same complaints as I did a month ago.

BTW, I've had to open up Internet Explorer to make this and other posts today. I'd been using Phoenix for posting, since it doesn't munge the Blogger interface up as much as Opera does. However, today, the "Post" button kept disappearing when I was writing up my blurbage about Geoff Dyer. No such trouble in IE. With any luck Opera 7 will cooperate with Blogger and I can go back to using just one browser.

Blogwhore is back, and Liz is playing. Yay, Liz! Go, Liz, go!

Just because, a link from the Circadian Shift archives:

How to say "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head!" in 102 different languages.

Was browsing in David Mirvish Books this afternoon, and discovered that Geoff Dyer has a new book out called Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.

I read Dyer's book But Beautiful last summer, and was absolutely blown away by it. A series of portraits of various jazz legends, But Beautiful's prose was flowing, chaotic, spontaneous, lyrical, stunning -- just like good jazz itself. Dyer made it look so easy, but I can't imagine how hard it was to get the words down, just so.

I've also been meaning to read his book Paris Trance (one of the reviews on Amazon calls it stylistically similar to the writing of Nick Hornby and Alain de Botton, two other authors I enjoy), so now, with Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, I have another Geoff Dyer book on my "to read" list.

One of my less frequent sources for retro MP3s is About.com's 80s Music site. It's less frequent because I find it tends to be updated in fits and starts, and their lists of links to other MP3 sites needs to be updated.

But anyway, it was through them that I learned that there are several live Squeeze tracks available for download on MP3.com, including a few of my favourite songs from them, "Pulling Mussels from the Shell", "Another Nail in My Heart", and "Tempted". Enjoy.

Some music linkage.....

I quite enjoyed Slant magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Music Videos (via blogdex).

UK-based Rare 80s MP3 has a new selection of tunes up, including the 12" mix of The Lotus Eaters' "It Hurts (There Must Be A Taste Of Murder In It)". Download it! Download it! Download it!

I realize I forgot to go outside today while it was still daylight. Oops.

Speaking of outside, I'm not sure if the weather is going to get warmer any time soon. Yesterday's minus 30 windchill was not fun. I noticed that, according to the Chinese calendar, we are in that part of the year known as the "Great Cold". No shit. (Thanks to Richard for the calendar link.)

Well, The Hovel is looking much better ("Floor! I can see floor!"), but there's still a ways to go yet. And I still need to tend to my online space.

Some linkage for my "to read" list:

• 100 XML Acronyms -- everything from BEEP to XUL (via Column Two, which also has a couple presentations that I should look through)


• Introduction to XFML -- I notice this is not on the aforementioned list of 100 acronyms (eek); anyway, XFML (eXtensible Faceted Metadata Language) is being touted as a lightweight alternative to RDF and Topic Maps for indexing and classification work


• Content as Services -- "Most of the content management challenges facing businesses today have to do with content that is inflexible. To provide this missing flexibility, companies must add a layer of abstraction on top of enterprise content in order to isolate the content consumer from the content producer to give consumers the flexibility they require to locate content and producers the agility they need to change it as needed."

And just because I can, I thought I'd give a plug to Anecdotage.com. A few months ago, I was walking along Bloor St. when I was approached by an enterprising young man trying to drum up readership for a new website and mailing list. We chatted, and I wound up giving him my e-mail address (entering it into the Handspring Visor with keyboard that he was toting about), and didn't hear anything about it again until last week.

Anecdotage provides interesting/funny/memorable quotes and stories from and about the famous and not-so-famous (more on the site's About page), and is worth a look if you like that sort of thing.

Lastly, congratulations to my brother are in order for the new addition to his household: a Sony Clie PEG-SL10.

So, we're back. At least for now.

For those of you in the viewing audience who have been wondering what Blogger has been doing to my template, it's been stripping the attributes out of many of my tags, thereby rendering javascripts, hyperlinks, and image tags useless. When I pasted a "good" copy of the code back into the template, only some of the changes "stuck" (hence the return of blogrolls and archives), while many of the tags were stripped out again. Useful. Not.

Meanwhile, have been tending to offline life, as The Hovel requires some serious excavation work. Online, will be working on procuring a domain name and server space for an eventual move from the present Blogspot digs. And making the switch to Movable Type, with all the configuration hilarity that it entails.

Some linkage for you while I get my house(s) in order:

• Dancing with Systems: What to do when systems resist change (via MetaFilter from a few days ago)


• Conversational Terrorism -- sneaky rhetorical tricks that people use to win arguments (also via MeFi)


• Omniglot -- very neat site about written language (via memepool)


• February issue of Fast Company


• February issue of New Architect

Looks like others are experiencing Blogger woes today.

Right. Template woes continue on Blogger. 'Twould appear that I got my blogrolls and archive links back. Additional sidebar images, weather widgets, etc. are still AWOL.

Blogging might be sparse over the next week or so, while I consider my options.

If anyone has any suggestions/recommendations re: good cheap web hosting that can accomodate a web-based blogging tool of some kind, I'm all ears (so to speak).

Regards,
jv

Funnily enough, I made an offline copy of this site just a few days ago. Have scavenged the sidebar markup from that and pasted it into my Blogger template in place of the munged sidebar code. Hopefully, this will work.

Goddamit!

Blogger has gone and messed up my template something fierce, which means that you won't see any of my blogrolls, links to the archives, or any images on the sidebar. Isn't it interesting that it did this right after I posted links to other blogging tools? Perhaps that was a sign.

I'll see what I can do to fix it later this evening, after dinner, when I hopefully find myself of better disposition.

Grrrrrr.........

Ran across two directory pages to various blogging tools:

• Weblogs Compendium (via Follow Me Here)


• Open Directory Project's list of blog publishing tools (via KIPLOG)

I'm surprised that the Weather Network's Toronto forecast is two hours behind current conditions. As of 4pm, it was a bracing minus 15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) outside; minus 23 with the wind chill. At least the sky was clear and sunny, which made walking about this afternoon almost enjoyable.

The cheese meme spreads a little more.

Think you erased all that data off your hard drive before getting rid of it? Think again. (Via Slashdot.)

Then, once you've got your data disposal problem under control, why not brush up on your propaganda techniques? (Via abuddhas memes.)

And remember, you should always fall to your knees and worship a librarian (via The Shifted Librarian). As Michael Moore can attest, you want them on your side.

Damn, it's cold outside. Such are the joys of January.

The news came out yesterday that Toronto moron mayor Mel Lastman will not be inflicting his cheesy-ass self on the city's electorate for a third time. The ever-erudite GAK has kindly assembled a list of lowlights of Mel Lastman's mayorship of Toronto.

Meanwhile, over on JOHO: The Blog, David Weinberger poses a series of questions relating to morality and the architecture of the web. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.

Other linkage of interest:

• Designing for the Multiple Personalities of Users (via InfoDesign)


• XHTML 2 and all that (via blogdex)


• When self-image takes a blow, many turn to television as a distraction (via Moon Farmer)

And, lastly, might as well share with you news of my two latest acquisitions (thanks to a Chapters gift card I received for X-mas):

• The second edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, aka "Polar Bear II" -- I already have "Polar Bear I", and waffled between getting this and Bob Boiko's Content Management Bible; I eventually settled on "PB-II" as I had read good things about it (it also happens to be twice as long as the first edition), and figured I'd better get my head back into IA space


• A very neat little book called Platonic & Archimedean Solids -- I think I might break out my big container of K'NEX later on and build a few of these babies

  [Addendum 16 January 2002: Well, the limitations of the K'NEX set were quickly revealed -- the angle variations offered by the joining widgets were best suited to constructing things resembling a truncated cube; even that requires a bottomless box of joining widgets and a greater variety of struts in different lengths]

Seeing as Jeremy has been on a cheese kick, here's another link for your dining enjoyment:

Pikachu-shaped cheese snacks

And, just because, two photographs:

• ironic


• scary (via digital ed)

Sneezing with a mouth-full of Lean Cuisine's "Creamy Chicken Alfredo" is not a pretty sight. Trust me on this.

Why don't you go and read about cheese? (Gracias, Jeremy.)

Because I know that many of you in the viewing audience have actual lives, and therefore don't surf the web as much as I do, I'm going to regurgitate some linkage:

• All Consuming -- this is very cool; it keeps track of books that people mention in their blogs (except for people like me, who are not set up to ping Weblogs.com and/or can't be bothered to do it manually) (thanks to Richard for the link)


• Another metablog site: Memeufacture -- sort of like blogdex, but going one step further and breaking down the links by topic, and other criteria (via, er, blogdex)


• And why don't you go read about someone else's adventures in unemployment for a change (found this site via a blogdex backlink) (?)

Misc. linkage:

• The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It) [Addendum 14 January 2003: if the direct link doesn't work, try accessing the article via the HBS Working Knowledge home page]


• Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle? (via Brent Ashley)


• Spears & Daggers: The Seven Deadly Sins of Free Content (via WebWord)

[Addendum 14 January 2002: No phone call this morning. Let's hope it's a trend.]

Other users of Blogger have been expressing their frustrations of late.

I sympathize. Blogger's archiving and template functions have been messed up since September, with no word of a fix in sight.

I'm really not about to kvetch too much, since I'm using it for free, and my site is hosted on Blogspot for free. I think Ev has done a great service to the web community by making this available to the unwashed masses. (The total number of Blogger users recently passed the one million mark.)

I'd love to give something back by upgrading to Blogger Pro and Blogspot Plus if I could be assured of increased reliability. However, even paying customers are having difficulty.

sigh I really hate to see a good thing go bad.

Link for today: Extreme Cinema: The 25 Most Dangerous Movies Ever Made (via Moon Farmer).

New acquisitions:

• Sorted! 40 Madchester Baggy Anthems


• The Elements of User Experience

Stumbled across a very cool looking resource called Meme Central (via this blog).

Meanwhile, Lactose Incompetent reports on yet another blogger in a big pile of goo after his employer discovered his blog.

sigh

(Started to write more, and then deleted it. Might post again later.)

BTW, are my parents reading this? Your ISP has been showing up in my site stats.

[Addendum 12 January 2003: Received a single-word e-mail from the parental address: "YES"]

Hmmmmm.

• Cory Doctorow's new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is available as a free download in various formats, including Palm e-book (yay!) (via blogdex)


• interesting 'blawg": Tech Law Advisor (via the Blogger home page)


• As seen on tonight's broadcast of the CTV News: Doctors rate the 15 top-selling diet books


• And just because: the lyrics to "Destination Unknown" by Missing Persons

Couple anthropology links:

• a chimp develops a simple vocal vocabulary (via Slashdot from a few days ago


• cultural transmission among orangutans (thanks to His GAKness for the link)

Two other Slashdot discussions of interest:

• best fonts for Linux browsers


• advice for surviving a buyout

Been reading bits of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which I bought just before Christmas. Very informative. I have to admit, though, that I was listening trance and techno on the radio at the time. May the ghosts of Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders have mercy on me.

Buncha linkage:

• New on First Monday:
  • The Usability of Open Source Software
  
  
  • The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming: Implications for Addressing Complex Public Policy and Management Problems
  
  
  • Combat Power and Enterprise Competitiveness


• CIO Magazine's list of Big (and Not So Big) Ideas for 2003


• More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will -- "We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling ? "merely a feeling," as he puts it ? of control over our actions. I think, "I'm going to get up now," and when I do a moment later, I credit that feeling with having been the instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation." (NYT article -- free registration required) (via Complexity Digest)

Looks like a couple of my regular sources for retro MP3s have taken the week off. (Another is officially taking a few months off, whereas a fourth hasn't updated in nearly a month.)

Speaking of which, it was about a month ago that I rambled on about posting my own retro MP3s on a monthly basis. Despite the rather underwhelming response (ie. none), I'm pretty sure there are at least a couple of you out there who dig the retro thing.

So, here's January's addition to Circadian Shift: The Outpost:

"Destination Unknown" by Missing Persons (3,392 KB)

In my mind, Missing Persons was pretty typical of early 80s California New Wave/Synthpop -- bright, cheery, quirky, and undeniably hook-laden. There's a profile of them here.

Here's a fun fact: guitarist Warren Cuccurullo went on to join Duran Duran in the 90s.

Right. Let's see if I can go a few days without rambling on about other people's pets, shall we?

There was a post and discussion thread on Slashdot a few days back which asks Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet?. Much of the discussion centres on the full version of Adobe Acrobat and the many info-wrangling features it offers.

Acrobat does totally rock (my favourite feature: 'web capture'), but there are a couple other tools which may be of interest to the digital information junkie.

Treepad has been around for years, getting its start as freeware, and since expanding into many different versions (the Lite version is still free). It organizes data (text, and other formats) into a tree-like structure, and is great for storing little bits and pieces of information that don't quite fit anywhere else. There's also now a long-awaited Linux version of the Lite package.

A similar application is something called Milenix MyInfo. There used to be a free version -- which I liked -- but no more.

Also useful, if you happen to have a PDA, are programs for making your own e-books. I like using Microsoft Reader on my Jornada PocketPC (there are also versions for the desktop and tablet PCs), as it lets me highlight add notes to the text. There's a plug-in for Microsoft Word that converts documents to Reader format. eBook Express is a free online app that will also convert text or html files (it seems to be down right now, but hopefully will come back).

For Palm users, TechTV offers a quick guide to making Palm e-books. There's also an extensive list of e-book creation tools at Memoware.

More cute 'n furry animal pix and stories from GAK and Graig.

I don't have any pets of my own. My apartment, however, does resemble a hamster cage.

Given that I found these two links on Mookie's site, I get the impression he doesn't like cats ('sup wi' dat?):

• My Cat Hates You -- a rather surly assortment of puddy-tats


• P.S. Your Cat is Dead -- promo site for new film co-produced, co-written, directed by, and starring (yikes) Steve Guttenberg (BTW, who's the 10-year-old that Guttenberg recruited to design the site?)

More misc. linkage:

• An interesting Survival Guide for 2003 from the Guardian, which mentions some neat concepts, like "interaction anxiety" (props to Richard for the link)


• Some new stuff via my InformIT newsletter (free registration to view)
  • The 24/7 Lifestyle: Time Management in the Home Office
  
  
  • Agile Modeling
  The newsletter also mentions an article titled "Should I Be Interested in MPLS Traffic Engineering?" My off-the-cuff response: "No."


• A few handy Hints To Hiding Your Boredom At Work from ph8


• And just because: DailyZen

Misc. linkage:

• a non-technical article in Time on data mining (via Slashdot)


• How to Write Like A Wanker (via diveintomark) (note to self: stop abusing the ellipsis)


• Most Overrated and Underreported Stories of the Year (via MemeMachineGo!)


• Got a question? Ask the Magic Coffee Mug. (via Badgett's Coffee eJournal)


• new 'toonz at toothpastefordinner -- unfortunately, this one is all too often true

Given my recent rambling about Fast Company, I figured I might as well check in on a few other business publications....

Business 2.0 is highlighting a few of their better articles from the past year. Two that I liked are:

• 101 Dumbest Business Moments


• Office Behavior: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

strategy + business (free registration required) still has their Fourth Quarter 2002 issue online, but just in case you missed it before, check out their roundup of Best Business Books for 2002.

I'll admit, I don't really like Red Herring as much as the other "New Economy" business mags, but for the sake of completeness, I might as well mention their list of Top 10 Technology Trends for 2003.

Also, in the interest of completeness, if you've got the cash or can find it at the library, Harvard Business Review always provides a good read. Individual articles can be purchased online.

Or you can glean highlights from HBR and other Harvard Business School publications for free via HBS Working Knowledge. (I'll admit I haven't found the offerings at HBSWK very interesting lately, but you can always register to plunder through the archives.)

If that's not enough for you, you might want to give Darwin magazine a look. The quality is sometimes hit or miss, but I like the attitude. I do usually enjoy "Swift Kick", the column written by David Weinberger (of JOHO and Cluetrain fame).

I'm still awake. Why am I still awake?

Those of you who don't have cats of your own may wish to indulge in the following:

• Mr. GAK writes about his family's two cats, Peikko and Famke. Awwwww.


• Kim provides this link to a virtual kitty for you to play with.

slugabed \SLUHG-uh-bed\, noun:
One who stays in bed until a late hour; a sluggard.
Slugabed is from slug, "sluggard" + abed, "in bed."

We've still got a few weeks to go until Chinese New Year, but the forecast has already been made for the upcoming Year of the Black Sheep.

If you happen to know your Chinese zodiac sign, you can get detailed Chinese horoscopes here.

(Thanks to Richard and to Donna for the links in the first paragraph of this post.)

Misc. linkage:

• The Coffee Science Information Center (via MeFi)


• new e-book on Blackmask: The Social Cancer by Philippine national hero Jose Rizal


• and a link from the Circadian Shift archives: "When life gives you lemons..."

Been a while since I bothered to check up on any of my IA links....

xBlog pointed me to this very neat looking Humane Web Text Generator. Admittedly, I wouldn't be entirely thrilled about having to learn yet another markup syntax; however, having these sorts of features incorporated into a blogging tool would be very convenient.

Meanwhile, elegant hack provides linkage to The History of Visualization, as well as a blurb on a surprising Apple Print Center feature.

Here's another delightful bit of light reading:

The Internet Modern History Sourcebook

I'm pretty happy with the more up-beat tone that Fast Company has been taking with the latest issue, as well as the one from December.

I remember back in the spring (cf. the June or July issues), the tone was a lot more dour. Now the articles seem to project more optimism, albeit of the "bloodied-but-unbowed" variety. Works for me.

Hey, folks....

Long time, no post. And no, I was not kidnapped by elves.

Uh, I really should throw something else together, but in the meantime, why don't you amuse yourselves with some math geekery:

Teaching with Original Historical Sources in Mathematics
Kickin' it, old school with the likes of Euclid and Archimedes. (PDFs available for download.)