“Hormones” and “whore moans” are suspiciously homophonous.
Archive for September, 2005
Accountability
Since working at the University, I’ve developed a slight theory of accountability. Pockets of ineptitude (such as disorganized welcome desks, no napkins at a dinner, typos on a chart, um… one disastrous hurricane?) usually points to those lower level people directly in charge. When you have an organization that can’t get their shit together over the course of five years or more is when you blame the top.
I know Michael Brown is everyone’s favorite villian right now (especially with questions of cronyism and his resumé), but I’m not fully convinced we need to publicly eviscerate him . Didn’t Florida have an absurd hurricane season in 2004? Was FEMA not involved in every incident over there?
Yahoo! terms of service
A couple weeks ago, at work, LDF asked how we could improve our site search. The old Ultraseek way causes a jump to the University branding and a jarring user experience. I whipped up something using Yahoo!’s (does the exclamation point go before apostrophe? do they have a style guide? ) web search APIs. It’s neat stuff. If you’re curious about the demo, feel free to shoot a message.
Anyway, in my due diligence of the Terms of Use, I found this nugget:
iii) [You may not] use the Yahoo! APIs to operate nuclear facilities, life support, or other mission critical application where human life or property may be at stake. You understand that the Yahoo! APIs are not designed for such purposes and that their failure in such cases could lead to death, personal injury, or severe property or environmental damage for which Yahoo! is not responsible;
Some writinig that found its way on the personal statement editing room floor:
I am fascinated by the legal changes incurred by technology and by the unsteady footwork now found on the dance floor of our cultural society.
The problem: it’s in passive tense.
bitch bitch moan moan
At work, I finally manged to cobble secure the deck long enough to release secret project Interwoven to the clients for approval. I can’t figure out why it always feel like I am under the gun at work. Poor time management? Poor management of expectations (“Sure, I can get that done by Monday”)? Maybe I’m just slow.
It’s been hard to find time to work on the ol’ applications. I promised my admissions consultant (Val) that whenever I felt like picking up the blog, I would instead write my personal statement.
I don’t think the admission process is sympathetic to us pensive, thoughtful types. I don’t have striking anecdotes that launched a thousand accomplishments. The process always makes me feel inadequate (the undergraduate porcess left me in tatters!). How am I going to reduce my personality and soul into a nonfictious anecdote?
Anyway, so far I have two ideas for my personal statement. One’s a narrative of my experiences with racial tensions while living in New York City. The other one’s about how I like to keep shit like a pack rat. Hard to say how it’ll all turn out. One can never discount the blue dot story.
Wordpress templates suck
If anyone was wondering, Wordpress templates suck. The application itself isn’t half bad. It has an active developer community and strong momentum, and it probably has the best designed graphical user interface of any open source web application I’ve used (which I know isn’t saying much, but it is good).
The problem is, again, the templates. The templates are, in essense, php scripts. Here’s a sample:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?> <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <h2>< ?php the_date('l, F j, Y'); ?></h2> <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"> <h3><a xhref="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"> < ?php the_title(); ?></a></h3> <div class="entry"> < ?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?> ....
It's all the complexity of PHP syntax, but with none of its power. You can only call php functions that echo() HTML. I can't get strings or arrays of data to manipulate myself in PHP. I suppose this is becausee the design is stuck in a "template tag" paradigm, and thus no API mindset.
The template-tag paradigm causes bigger problems. In general, template tags tend to carry attributes, some required, some optional (e.g. <table cellspacing="2">.) The closest approximation to optional attributes in PHP is optional function arguments. This results in function signatures that look like this (the following is a function call to print a list of categories):
<?php list_cats (optionall, 'all', 'sort_column', 'sort_order', 'file', list, optiondates, optioncount, hide_empty, use_desc_for_title, children, child_of, 'categories', recurse, 'feed', 'feed_img', 'exclude', hierarchical); ?>
i shit you not. I know what you're thinking: how does a person just specify a single one of those attributes in the middle and leave everything else as default? Well, the makers of Wordpress thought of this, and the solution is to create a new function, except this one takes in a single string of parametrs in query string format. So now the template tag looks like:
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=id&optioncount=0&use_desc_for_title=0&child_of=8'); ?>
It's a thing of beauty, isn't it? And yes, this still echo()'s straight out to standard output.
More experimentation with the blog layout. I tweaked the template to allow me to not have to think of a damn title for each blog post. Can’t a guy just spurt out some writing once in a while? The change was given courage by Mr. Kottke’s thoughts on his remaindered links format change.
Anyway, I think it’s funny to spend all day fighting web browser compatibility issues in top secret project Interwoven
and then go home to play with blog templates.
Back from Los Angeles
Just got back from a great weekend trip to LA. It was a ½ romantic getaway, ½ timeshare pitch (“Move out here! look how nice the weather is; look at our great fast food and groceries”). It was all great nonetheless. And yes, I had In-N-Out (within 2 hours of landing and once again 2 hours before departing; my first meal and last meal there).
I must say, I have had an epiphany of sorts regarding Los Angleles. There always seemed to be a rivalry between Los Angeles and New York, the twin pillars of American urban life. I’m always hearing comparision between the two, what one has that the other does not. Having putted around Los Angeles for a bit, I realized the experience is nothing alike.
In LA, you pull out your car, head over to your favorite store/bar/restaurant, find parking, try to coordinate a caravan of friends’ cars, try to decide where to drive to next, repeat. In all, LA is a sprawling suburban yawn with snarling traffic and urban tendencies. My god, don’t you see? Los Angeles is New Jersey. Just add celebrities, glamour, smog, mountains, and In-N-Out; then subtract public transportation, beach fees, highway tolls, autumn, and winter. LA even has their own version of Atlantic City (Las Vegas).
If I’m considering settling in the depths of New Jersey later in my life anyway, Los Angeles won’t be much more of a stretch.
strip it down
I’m in the mood for some change. I’m stripping out all the styles from this stupid blog and building again. We’ll see how it goes.
Update: Well, that turned out okay. I stripped out all the drop shadows (ugh), and picked out some colors from this colour chooser/community palette. Do these colors look crabby? Maybe I should hookup a “style chooser”, so you can choose between “Blue Crab” and “Cooked Crab”.
September 11, 2005
I suppose I should say something today of all days. I noticed a number of 9/11 documentaries on TV. Watched a little bit of it. The footage they use is overwhelming; can people really watch this stuff? Has it been long enough?
… [I wrote some other stuff, but I deleted it cuz it was a bunch of self-centered phooey. I hate this day.]
baby got back: refined
jennyface told me my new Favorite Word (it has beaten out both ’shiftless” and “pickles”): callipygian.
Katrina Seen Through the Eyes of an Educational IT Defender
On Thursday, I stumbled on the Tulane University website, or what’s left of it. It’s pretty much gone. The servers that used to run it are powerless and possibly water-damaged. In its place, for a while, all it displayed was a blog. An emergency blog that had been running off-site for two weeks. Pre-flood, it listed out announcements and details that now seem quaintly anachronistic:
Classes
In light of the projected severity of Hurricane Katrina, we have decided classes at Tulane University will not resume until Wednesday, September 7.
Now it serves as the place at which Tulane President Scott Cowen can reach out to all University employees, students, faculty, and affiliates.
Dear friends of Tulane,
Since my relocation to Houston, I have had more access to information about the situation in New Orleans. I was hopeful that recovery would soon progress. However, given the ongoing situation in the city, I am forced to make an extremely difficult decision – Tulane University cannot hold a fall semester on its campus.
They’re slowly re-buillding the main website, providing FAQs for students and faculty. They even threw up an on-site Wordpress blog. Judging from the onslaught of comments, it sounds like they need to put up a discussion board or something. Everyone seems to yearn with something to say, a story to tell, a hand to extend.
It’s difficult for me, really, to watch something as regimented and time-sensitive as the school calendar be completely pulverized. As a one-time student and sometimes educational IT defender, I sympathize with their efforts to re-establish contact with students (their e-mail system is completely hosed), to provide course alternatives on other school campuses, and to otherwise minimize disruption to people’s lives. Bossman was right. Everyone needs a Disaster Recovery Plan™,even collegiate IT.
I suppose sometimes in order to absorb and understand the enormity of any tragedy, one needs to focus it through the crystallis of a singular story, an individual point of view. That’s my melodramatic way of saying this Hurricane Katrina v. New Orleans matter seemed so distant and far away until I stumbled upon this, that which made me give pause and swear silently.