Circadian Shift

Indeed, we are back after a brief outage yesterday afternoon/evening.

• here we go again with Listamatic2: nested list options (via paranoidfish)
• Web Reference is running an excerpt from the book Core CSS: 2nd Edition
• David Crow links to a bunch of CSS-driven layout examples, as well as to some site which "still" use tables
• InformIT writes about The Next Generation of Portals
• IDblog links to, and comments on, another New York Times article about the soul-deadening nature of PowerPoint (free registration required), and wonders what the deal is with out-dented bullets (besides the fact that they just look frigging ugly)
• The Guardian runs a piece on Why blogs could be bad for business, namely that the information-sharing nature of blogs runs counter to what's rewarded in most business cultures (so shouldn't that really be "Why business is bad for blogs"?) (via plasticbag)
• another up-'n'-at-'em article for the unemployed: Managing Your Career With Style and Grace (via Bostonworks: The Job Blog)

This week's selection of Gaping Void cartoons is online at Circadian Shift: The Outpost.

Courtesy of Gaping Void: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards."

View the gallery for 29 September 2003.

Slate has published a selection of quotes from George W. Bush:

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" -- Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." -- Reuters, May 5, 2000

"I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss cheese -- that meant that they weren't very effective." -- White House press conference, Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2001

(Via Technorati.)

Addendum: In the interest of equal time for Canuckian stupidity, here are some quotes from current Prime Minister Jean Chretien

Spongebob Graigpants reports that Mina the Hamster has gone to that big hamster-wheel in the sky.

I only had the pleasure of meeting Mina once. She was a very cheerful little ball of fur who immediately knew what the treat-box contained before I even had a chance to open it and feed one to her. Very cute.

Rest in peace, Mina.

(And I think I need to add a blog category called "Other People's Pets", or something like that.)

Cats are supposed to be relatively low-maintenance pets (compared to dogs) are they not? Apparently, some people feel it's important to take time out and shave their cat's nose. Poor kitty-kat.

(Via Darren Barefoot.)

We now have Layoutomatic -- just select your page layout criteria (number of columns, width, spacing, etc.) and click the button. Voila -- basic CSS churned out and ready to beautify.

(Thank you, Brainstorms & Raves.)

Spent most of last night with the TV on (season premieres of CSI and ER), but wasn't really watching. Instead, I was adding a bunch of links to my Bloki -- all stuff that I've posted here already, but organized a little more coherently.

This afternoon, I have to put my frigging work portfolio (such as it is) online, if it bloody well kills me. And it just might.

...

Addendum: ARRRRRRRRGH!!

Origins of Writing is a compilation of research papers by anthropology students at Utah State University. (Via InfoDesign.)

In a similar vein is Omniglot, which documents various writing systems. (Spotted in a recent post from Information Nation; a quick search through the archives reveals that I'd linked to it before, back in January.)

• ideas for planning an 80s theme party (spotted on the artsentertainmentportalthing)
• a guide to film blogs (ditto)
• a Guardian piece on the rising influence of music blogs (via DJ Martian)

A bevy of teeny tiny glyphs, symbols, and icons -- ideal for use in bulleted lists or dynamic menus -- are available for download at Mini-Image-Box. The site's in German, but don't let that frighten you.

(Via The Cartoonist.)

Been running behind on posting the weekly assortment of cartoons from Gaping Void to Circadian Shift: The Outpost.

Courtesy of Gaping Void: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards."

The following cartoon galleries are online:

• week of 22 September 2003
• week of 15 September 2003

And I did intend to post a retro MP3 for September as well. I recorded a track from an old 7" single of mine, but wasn't happy with the recording quality. I think my turntable needs a new cartridge. Will see what else I can come up with in the meantime.

• bunch of IA tools -- document templates, process maps, etc. (spotted on IA Slash and InfoDesign)
• CSS examples -- rollovers, 3-column layouts, rounded corners (via Zeldman)
• extremely shitty way to lay someone off

Get out those platform boots and gold lamé clothing, then take a wander through Glam Rock Central. (Gracias, Mookie.)

Uh, yeah. Been undergoing another blogging drought. Perhaps the receding daylight hours are getting to me. Or not. Anyway, here's a bunch of linkage.

• two recent goodies from How to Save the World: a write-up on a Fast Company article about competing with the big guys in the marketplace, and another post which outlines the qualities that make a great speech
• Blog from the Loft writes about using a Wiki at work
• MBA Jungle enumerates things that corporate strivers do in an attempt to impress, but instead just annoy the boss
• Darwin Magazine is running excerpts from a book titled Business Driven Information Technology: Answers to 100 Critical Questions for Every Manager
• the latest HBS Working Knowledge runs a piece that wonders if robots can take on some managerial functions
• also on HBSWK from last week is an article on using the power of persuasion when you lack authority at work (if I remember correctly, free registration is required to view articles that are more than two weeks old)
• paranoidfish pointed me to this handy Interaction Architect Job Title Generator
• also via paranoidfish is this link to yet another article on simple CSS tabs
• from the same site as the CSS tabs article comes this useful generic web style guide that you can adapt for documenting your own website's styles
• BusinessWeek provides a little chin-up spiel for the unemployed: Don't Let Downtime Get You Down (via Working Wounded)
• and I know everyone and their grandmother has already linked to this, but should you somehow have missed it, here's Jeffrey Veen's article on The Business Value of Web Standards

Hopefully that'll keep you busy for now. I'm also overdue with updates to Circadian Shift: The Outpost, so I'll have to tackle that later today.

Both links via Kurcula.com:

• List-o-matic (not to be confused with Listamatic) does most of the nasty code-wrangling for you; just enter your link text and URLs, select a menu style, and off you go
• Complex Spiral Consulting walks you through rounding tab corners on your navbar

Thanks to Morag for sending this along:

The Washington Post publishes a yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. The following were some recent winning entries

1. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavoured mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanour assumed by a
proctologist immediately before he examines you.

13. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

14. Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Pokemon (n), A Jamaican proctologist.

The Post also invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are some recent winners:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

3. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid (e.g.: "I'm a doctor...").

4. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (this one got extra credit.

9. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

10. Glibido: All talk and no action.

11. Doppler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

12. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Been an awfully long time since I posted anything to The Big List. Wound up mining an old notebook entry, wherein I had written a bunch of discarded taglines for my blog.

It could have been worse.

Howzabout a bunch of gamelan linkage, courtesy of MeFi?

Punk77! provides:

A history of UK Punk Rock from 1976-79: Featuring an A-Z of punk bands from Adam and The Ants to The Sex Pistols to X Ray Spex, fanzines, punk girls, rare record sleeves, audio clips, fashion, punk rock lyrics, interviews and loads of pictures.

(via MetaFilter)

Power up that VCR or DVD player and check out this selection of Punk on Film.

Don't forget to move the coffee table out of the way before you start slam-dancing.

The Worst Jobs in Science

(via MemeMachineGo!)

Yeah, I've just been really off this week. Hopefully, I'll get my shit together soon.

Meanwhile, B-list blog wannabes may want to check out these fine pointers on getting a link to your blog from InstaPundit. Of course that would require reading InstaPundit himself, and my blog-reading list already runneth over. However, the same concepts apply if you want to suck up to any A-list blogger.

(Via Modulator.)

Even monkeys can recognize when they're getting a bum deal, and speak up about it.

Ah, well, so much for posting something yesterday.

Meanwhile, you can download the slides (in PDF) from a presentation that Michael Angeles made yesterday, on Blogging in Corporate America, to the NYC chapter of the Usability Professionals Association.

(Via IA Slash.)

Had a busy weekend, then was just really lethargic yesterday and didn't feel like posting. Will see what I can do later today.

In the meantime, there are plenty of places to visit listed on the sidebar.

Food Network Canada publishes its list of bottles worth bringing (and presumably drinking) for September.

Following my post on Listamatic last week, just thought I'd highlight Russ Weakley's comments that he's added a few new things of interest to his site:

• the Listamatic home page now has links additional resources and information
• Listutorial offers step-by-step instructions for wrangling your own CSS lists

Thanks, Russ, for stopping by to let us know.

Modulator links to this overview of the history of Rome and its relevance to the U.S.

The Guardian also mused on American-Roman similarities about a year ago, with its piece "Rome, AD ... Rome, DC?".

Action figure fans may want to check out Jesus Christ Superstore, which caters not only to Christians, but also Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. This is the place to go to get that articulated, buff, plastic replica (with accessories) of your favourite supreme being -- Dalai Lama (with AK-12 automatic machine pistol) anyone?

(Thanks to John for the link.)

Thanks to tbit for pointing me to a site called Compilation Nation, wherein I found these wise words about compiling the ideal mix tape:

MAKING THE PERFECT COMPILATION

According to John Cusack's character Rob in the film High Fidelity :

"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch but you don't want to blow your wad. So then you gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules."

Sound advice. Here are some more tips:

• Start with a track that will grab the listener's attention. Save your best track for later.
• Use songs that mean something to you. It's not about showing off how cool/intellectual/snobbish you are. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with trying to include tracks that a lot of people will not have heard before. I have discovered some of my favourite artists through hearing about them from friends.
• Listen to your mix a couple of times. Don't just slap a track listing together.
• Don't use the same tracks over and over again on every compilation. You'll wear them out! Compilations are not about including your favourite songs (unless the challenge is "My Favourite Songs... Ever!" of course). The challenges are about selecting tracks that convey a certain feeling.

One of these days, I going to sit my ass down and finish doing all those mix CDs that I've been piecing together in my mind.

More tech links:

• Eight C's of KM Success -- I feel like I've blogged this before, for some reason
• IT Toolbox's 2003 Outsourcing Survey -- worried that your job might be shipped elsewhere?
• an XML & Web Services Magazine feature on Enterprise Portal Development
• IDblog muses on page weights (and, yes, I still have to clean up the sidebar)

  Addendum: WebWord also posts on page load times

• lastly, three articles from Computer Weekly on data mining

Note to self: any benefits accrued from taking a blogging-break pretty much go out the window if all you do is sleep instead.

• Linking Blogs and Wikis: Part 1 and Part 2
• What's Your Take on Launching New Windows? -- good discussion on deciding what the browser should do when a user clicks a link (via paranoidfish)
• The Input Bias: How Managers Misuse Information When Making Decisions
• Applying Process to the Art of the Deal -- a blueprint for negotiation
• thanks to "N" for sending along this handy list of what to do when; for instance, the best time to seduce someone is just before lunch, while mid-afternoon is the best time to fire someone

I've been watching too much TV lately. And I surfed and blogged yesterday a bit more than I should have. At least I've also been getting some reading done.

The Hovel is in dire need of excavation. And I need to do laundry and take care of some other stuff I've been neglecting.

If I blog again today, will someone please slap me.

Web-authoring geeks can't get enough of this stuff:

• here's a technique for making the max-width property work in Internet Explorer
• and here are some amusing (although not particularly user-friendly) link roll-over effects

(via paranoidfish)

I'll admit to being mildly surprised to learn that Joey has a copy of Negotiating for Dummies as part of his office bookshelf. It's not the sort of title that would strike me as being a necessity for Mr. Suave Accordion Guy.

Anyway, thought I'd link to this page on the MIT OpenCourseWare site for a class in Power and Negotiation. There are lecture notes to download in PDF, a list of readings, as well as a list of movies(!) that contain instructive depictions of the negotiation process.

(Thanks to Richard for the link to the OpenCourseWare site, and to "N" for locating the 'Power and Negotation' course in particular.)

E-mail software client diehard Eudora has released version 6 of its software. According to this internetnews.com write-up:

Version 6.0 of the program for Windows and Macintosh users now features automatic spam protection, an e-mail thread condenser, automated type formatting tools, and mailbox organizational shortcuts.

I've been using Eudora since version whatever-ran-on-Windows-3.1-back-in-1996, and I like it just fine. Will download the new version tonight and give it a spin.

Addendum: Ew. The first sentence of this post blows. Completely blows, I tell you. No wonder I'm not getting paid to blog.

Like Josie said, quizzes are fun, right?

I took this Autism Spectrum Quotient quiz, designed to measure autistic traits in adults. The score rankings are:

0 - 10: Low
11 - 22: Average (most women score about 15, most men score about 17)
23 - 31: Above Average
32 - 50: Very High (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism score about 35)
50: Maximum

My score: 23. Which means I'm a borderline geek, I guess.

Read more about 'Girls, Boys and Autism' here.

(Linkage via Sleeve Notes.)

(BTW, you need Macromedia Flash Player, version 6 or higher, to take the quiz.)

I'm going to blame sixdifferentways for these links, 'K?

• Moscow Cat Museum
• leopard kitten

Well, I just got my clock cleaned on this alternative music trivia quiz -- 7 out of 15. Not at all like the 80s rampage from a few weeks ago.

Two online widgets to help you devise website colour palettes:

• Color Scheme
• Color Toy

(via blogdex)

Jeez, why don't I just saw off the top of my skull, and grab a shovel, already...

• Transform Magazine -- "Reinventing Business with Content and Collaboration Technologies"
• Semantic Blogging Demonstrator -- "A blog supporting HP Labs' semantic blogging research programme"

• Cory Doctorow has released several short stories as free downloads (via Simon Willison's Weblog)
• The Morning News has an interview with Douglas Coupland (via living can kill you)

Like you have nothing else to do with your day:

• Crafting a Powerful Executive Summary
• Making the Absolute, Relative -- more CSS fun; this time it's about nesting an absolute-positioned element within a relative-positioned element
• What's a Wiki explains, well, what a wiki is, and provide additional linkage concerning same
• The front-page dilemma -- does anyone use their ISP's portal page anymore (via blackbelt jones)

Meanwhile, Column Two provides this:

Fubini's Law

1. People initially use technology to do what they do now -- but faster.
2. Then they gradually begin to use technology to do new things.
3. The new things change life-styles and work-styles.
4. The new life-styles and work-styles change society,

... and eventually change technology.

Via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog, I found another blog called AgileManagement, wherein the author intends to cover "software development management, agile processes, the Theory of Constraints, Lean Software Development and Feature Driven Development".

From there came two links related to business analysis and requirements modelling:

• Business Rules Come First -- an excerpt from the book Principles of the Business Rule Approach
• BRCommunity.com -- billed as "the Internet's only vertical community for business rule professsionals" and home of Business Rules Journal

Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

(via blogdex)

In my seemingly never-ending quest to link to examples wherein a plain ol' bulleted list gets transformed into something not quite-so-plain using Cascading Style Sheets, I now present Listamatic.

The site basically gathers up CSS presentation techniques devised elsewhere, and displays the examples in a consistent format so that you can compare the code easily.

Superkeen web authors may also wish to peruse this CSS blogwank rant (with bonus Mozilla bug tip). Or not. It's a nice day outside, after all.

(Links spotted on plasticbag's sidebar.)

Spotted on blogdex a few days ago:

What a Half-Smile Really Means
Misreading facial expressions and the emotions underlying them results in a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Often the failure comes from an inability to recognize minute expressions -- micro-expressions that flash across a face for less than a 15th of a second -- that reveal the true emotions a person may be uncomfortable expressing or is simply trying to conceal.

The Library Web Manager's Reference Center is not just for librarians. It has links to resources on web page authoring and site management, internet software, web portals and directories, plus other stuff.

(Via Neat New Stuff on the Net.)

There were two articles that I spotted on my biztechportalthing a while back, that I meant to read and didn't get around to it:

• The Document is the Database
• Whither (wither) the Relational Database

Right. So I've still done little more than scan them, but at least I've now "bookmarked" them for later perusal.

For you clipart and stock photo afficionados, Wikipedia has a list of public domain image resources. (Via xBlog.)

• the September issue of Fast Company is now available online in its entirety
• the Fall 2003 issue of strategy+business is also available online; free registration required

I have been meaning to add a bunch of things to my Bloki. It's not likely to happen any time before next week, at the earliest. Oh, well.

Anyway, Brainstorms & Raves has a brief article on Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure, which functions largely as a style guide for some of the more commonly used tags.

While I've been habitually using closing tags for the last few years now, I still haven't weaned myself off the bold and italics tags in favour of <em> and <strong>. Really must work on that. Among other things.

Brainstorms & Raves also has a bunch of linkage about semantics, markup, and standards, some of which I've mentioned already.

Got an extra batch of Gaping Void cartoons this week.

Courtesy of Gaping Void: "Cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards"

View the gallery for 04 September 2003.

Apparently, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the UK, is running a contest to find the scariest-looking mouldy coffee cup. Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin.

RSC spokesman James McNish said: "The culture that developed on Fleming's laboratory dish has much in common with those ageing, ownerless coffee cups languishing on shelves and workstations in British offices and in factories."

As for the contest, which closes on September 10th: "The most spectacularly rancid example will win the owner a night of culture in, hopefully, cleaner surroundings."

(Link via MetaFilter, which presumably does not have mould growing on it.)

Phil Wolff has a nice write-up on Usenet as Prelude to Blog, noting that each features(d) a sense of:

• place
• immediacy
• finality
• conversation
• affiliation
• focus

... among other things.

Two other similarities that crossed my mind were the varying signal-to-noise ratio of each "channel", as well as the increasing sense of information overload that I got from Usenet, and am getting from the blogosphere.

Back in my Usenet days, I enthusiastically subscribed to several groups and was quickly overwhelmed by the number of messages coming in. "Scan and sample" became the way to get through it -- first downloading message headers with my newsreader, running through the list and marking the ones that looked promising, then re-connecting and download the full text of the selected messages.

I find much the same thing going on now with my use of RSS feeds and the like (cf. my portal thing pages and online aggregator). It's all I can do to just scan the headlines quickly and select only a few to read. The rest, I have to let pass me by.

IT Toolbox has published its 2003 Salary Survey, which breaks down average salaries by region, by skill set, and by experience. It also looks average annual salary increases (hah).

Is it just me, or do the numbers for Canada seem anemic compared to those for the US, the UK, or Europe?

Here's a very nifty little entry on Wikipedia about Canadian English. From there came this other page on Canadian English.

Wikipedia also has information on other major dialects of English.

Introducing Jenny Everywhere, a.k.a. The Shifter. She's an Open Source comic book superhero.

More about her from the FAQ:

She has short, dark hair. She usually wears aviation goggles on top of her head and a scarf around her neck. Otherwise, she dresses in comfortable clothes. She is average size and has a good body image. She has loads of confidence and charisma. She appears to be Asian or Native American. She has a ready smile.

Well, I happen to prefer wearing my hair long, and I absolutely loathe being called "Jenny". But the goggles and scarf thing? Yeah, I could get into that.

I wouldn't say no to having superpowers, either.

Big thank you to Get, Give, Take & Have for this link:

The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings is a multi-media database which, when completed, will provide a detailed picture of the 78-rpm era in Canada....
Each record in the database provides detailed information about an original recording, such as its title and performer, relevant dates, and information about the label and disc. Also accompanying selected entries are links to digitally scanned images of the label, to biographies of Canadian artists featured on the recordings, and to digital audio reproductions of recordings with Canadian content. Please note that RealAudio's RealPlayer version 5.0 or higher must be installed on your computer in order to hear the digital reproductions of 78-rpm discs on this site.

Hiya, folks.

Sorry, I'm going to be busy for the next few days, which means that posting will be minimal. In the meantime, there are plenty of interesting places to visit listed in the sidebar.

(BTW, I know the sidebar is a goddam mess, and takes way too long to load. A cleanup is on my list of things to do.)

Have fun. Play nice. And don't worry -- I'll be back.

Been busy. However, the latest Gaping Void Gallery is online at Circadian Shift: The Outpost.

Courtesy of Gaping Void: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

View the gallery for the week of 01 September 2003.

And, there are still previous weeks' galleries available for viewing:

• week of 25 August 2003
• week of 22 August 2003
• week of 12 August 2003
• week of 04 August 2003
• week of 28 July 2003
• week of 21 July 2003