Linux revisited

About 12 years ago, I got my first taste of Linux Slackware. I was amazed at how robust it was, at how it could offer so much while using so little resources. I was also frustrated as heck, trying to get X Windows up and running.

Since that time, I've had to work with various incarnations of Windows (NT/2K/XP), FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

But for some reason, I seem to feel the need to revisit Linux. Maybe it's the popularity of Ubuntu? I don't know, to be honest.

I have been kicking around the idea of buying one of those new Dell laptops with Ubuntu on it. $700 is kind of pricey for what might turn out to be a whim, though.

So, instead, I've opted to use VMWare player with Damn Small Linux's most recent ISO. I was delighted to see that it automagically supports my wireless card.

Coffee Drinks Illustrated | Lokesh Dhakar

Coffee Drinks Illustrated | Lokesh Dhakar

Have "coffee variant drinks" become just as complex and cumbersome as wine in the past decade?

Personally, I just prefer plain espresso-- it's the strongest ratio of caffeine to calories I can get.

A List Apart: Articles: CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

A List Apart: Articles: CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing: "CSS is ten years old this year."

CSS is ten years old, and I still have to argue with and educate the majority of colleagues at my work place NOT to use presentation tags in their HTML.

(Sigh)

Still, it's an excellent article about CSS and web fonts. Web designers in the audience should read.

168 Hours, Part II?!

The most obvious answer, of course, is to run two blogs in parallel. One blog would be the standards-compliant, minimalistic blog, while the other blog has all the polls, lists and assorted gimmicks of the new Blogger Layout.

Too bad I can't seem to generate enough content to fill one blog on a semi-regular basis, let alone two of them. :(

168 hours?!

I'm sitting here, looking at my blog, wondering how on earth it is even remotely possible that nearly an entire week has gone by since I last made an entry.

There was a time, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, when I blogged compulsively nearly every day. I think part of it was that I had gone through a very nasty breakup and lost many people in my so-called "circle of friends." I wound up spending a lot of time blogging/journaling as a form of nepenthe. (If you don't know what that means, look it up, kid! :P)

But, time has passed. And, either I've got nothing left to say or I'm less willing to put just anything up on the wire.

I did, I should mention, spend several hours re-adjusting this blog so that it actually validates as proper HTML again. I know, I know-- unless you happen to be a serious web dweeb, that's no consolation for the lack of new content.

It's somewhat frustrating, actually. I'm a web development professional, so I try to advocate web standards wherever I go . . . and yet, popular tools such as Blogger almost never generate valid HTML. You literally have to use classic templates, turn off all but the most basic of features (using comments, for example, introduces links with un-encoded ampersands in the URLs, which fail to validate), in order to get your page successfully through a validator.

I'm of two minds on this. One says, screw all the bells and whistles and stick with a bare bones blog that validates. Campaign for the folks at Blogger to re-tool their features until they can be included in valid HTML. The other says, sell out and use all the sexy features like polls and YouTube includes and more, and just get as many eyeballs as you can on the web site.

Hmm. Stick to your guns and live in pretty much total web obscurity, or sell out and be popular.

Shit. I'm back in f*cking high school again, aren't I?

Adding Insult to Injury

Go figure.

I go through a shit day at work, and when I come home, I discover that I have no cable television and no Internet service. I'm out of action until Saturday morning, at the earliest-- barring what I can grab at the coffee shop, etc.

Comments and Corporate Culture

So, I'm reading Wikinomics, and I notice one of those "praise quotes" on the jacket from the CIO of Disney. I don't have the book in front of me, so I am forced to paraphrase it, but it was essentially comparing the book to Mapquest as a useful guide for the technology and culture changes brought about by Web 2.0's collaborative tools.

I've got to wonder-- did the Disney rep even bother to read the book? I ask because Mapquest is an example of the "old school" type of web site, pre-Web 2.0 read/write/collaborate sites. If he'd compared it to something like Google Maps, that would make more sense.

Prediction: Disney doesn't get the new Web phenomenon and will miss the boat.