Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

My desktop is a mess, so I’m cleaning it up with another link dump.

• I wanted to set up an Atom feed, but the Four Easy Steps involved downloading MT 2.65, which happens to include its own Atom template, so gee, you’d think that would be one hard step, not four easy ones.
• If you thought installing a new version of MT was bad, try Step 3, getting your webserver to serve Atom files with a new mime-type. Any step that suggests getting a better web hosting service is not an “easy” step.
• So I thought I’d try Mark Pilgrim’s Atom 0.3 template, but that requires two plugins. I don’t even know if they’re installed here, and I don’t care enough about Atom to harass my host over it.
• Atom: it’s not just a feed, it’s a way of life. If you have an Atom 0.3 template that works with MT 2.63 out of the box, please share it with me. Otherwise, I’m going to start saying nice things about Dave Winer.
• Skia is a lovely font owned by Apple - it’s a shame more people can’t use it. Abstract fonts lists it as free, but that may not be the genuine Skia. To be safe, you should get a Mac.
• Visibone has a nice browsershare survey, in case you’re curious about who can see what fonts.
• Sean Wilson has some more nice bookmarklets, which Windows people tend to call favelets.
• Although Stargate SG-1 is headed into a record-breaking eighth season, other shows are busy doing the Firefly. As everyone knows by now, the WB kicked Joss out on his Buffy-neglecting behind. If you ask me, a show can get only so far when the lead actor can’t act his way out of a paper bag.
• Speaking of which, UPN is still threatening to give Enterprise the old heave-ho.
• And while we’re on the topic of dogs (I mean Porthos, of course), the Canine Genome Project has distinguished ten families of man’s best friend.
• Scientists have been sphere-packing with M&M’s - mmm-mmm, math!
• A white dwarf star gives a whole new meaning to like a diamond in the sky.
• Did you know the Hubble recently spotted the most distant known object in the entire universe? It used gravitational lensing to see the ancient cluster of stars. But that’s not the point.
• The point is that the Hubble is going to be left to rot up there and will stop working in just a few years. Why? Because NASA has new safety regulations forbidding the astronauts from doing a space walk to the Hubble. How many times, I ask you, has a shuttle blown up because someone went on a spacewalk? Tooling around in space is the least deadly of all shuttle endeavors. If they ever launch another one of those aging behemoths again, the only thing they should be doing with it is fixing the Hubble. (If crazy people want to travel to and from the International Space Station, let them use rockets.)
• But then again, I remember the debacle at the beginning of the Hubble’s tour of duty; maybe this death-by-too-scared-to-fix-it is a fitting end to its star-crossed career.
• Speaking of star-crossed spaceships, someone found the wrong Beagle.
• Apparently, Mars really is red. Who knew?
• Which scifi writer are you? I was Heinlein, which is odd since the only thing I ever got out of him was grok.
• There’s a Speculative Literature Foundation, with nice links to resources for writers.
• Greg Egan has a home page, but only the bibliography is up-to-date.
• Barbie and Ken play Arwen and Aragorn - and I thought the movies were wonky…
• A List Apart lists cool custom css underlines.
• Speaking of lists, learn about the little-known but versatile tags for HTML definition lists
• Robert Wade lists the rules according to guys.
• Silence is for sale again at the iTunes Store.
• A nifty little app called Wiretap will let you record your own silence (OSX 10.2+).
• Dinner time: TastyBite InstantIndia, available at a Trader Joe’s near me. (Shaw’s has them way overpriced.)
• TastyBite’s store locator for Massachusetts is an entertaining example of the perils of off-shore database entry. Who knew that Massachusetts had cities like Malibu, Mamaroneck, Mayland (Wayland, Maynard, or a combination of the two?), Mlt, Mit (perhaps an indication that MIT has seceded from Cambridge), Morrissey Boulevard, Hyannis Mall, Lexington Street, Newport (RI), Narragansett (RI), Pawtucket (RI), Providence (the capital of RI), Norwalk (CT), Old Saybrook (CT), Stamford (CT), Meriden (CT), Middletown (CT), Vernon (CT), Allston Plus (is that anywhere near Lower Allston?), Franklin Plus, Mt. Auburn Plus (seceded from Cambridge and supersized), Brighton Mills (a step up for Brighton?), Porter Square (presumably named after the world-famous T stop), Newburgh, Hedley (with a Mountain Farm Mell), and “Salem, Mass” (scare quotes in original)? All out-of-state towns are listed with a genuine MA after them.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2004 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.