Tuesday, April 30, 2002
[posted by jaed at 10:59 PM]
Have our British Cousins completely lost their minds?
The Times reports:
Unarmed British police and prison officers risk becoming �sitting ducks� when they take on the unprecedented role of guarding six Palestinian terrorists in a jail in Jericho
Unarmed? They're sending them into a war zone, to guard prisoners who are popular wiith a local population that's lynched people before, and these foreign guards will be unarmed? Jesus, why not just pre-kill them and send in their dead bodies to save time?
"Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons that it would be up to the Palestinian Authority to ensure their protection."
Oh, I'll just bet it will. What in hell are they thinking?
[posted by jaed at 1:52 PM]
Doctor-assisted suicide:
MEMRI brings us the chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association, homicidal lunatic.
Satire is dead. The Onion might as well pack it in and go home; reality has caught up with and surpassed its brilliance.
A few excerpts for your reading pleasure:
"[...]when a girl of 18 springs blows herself up [along with a few Jewish babies - ed], this means that her cause is right [...]"
"...The psychological structure [of the perpetrator of a suicide attack] is that of an individual who loves life."
"Remove the Apache [helicopter] from the equation, leave them one-on-one with the Palestinian people with the only weapon [for both sides] being dynamite. Then you will see all the Israelis leave, because among them there is not even one man willing to don a belt of dynamite..."
[Well, no, I can't say there's not even one Israeli who would stoop to the deliberate murder of random civilians for the sake solely of spite. Any country will have a few people with no honor, no humanity, not to mention no sense of strategy. But there are damn few, because most peoples react with horror and contempt to the animals in their midst instead of celebrating them.]
I'm getting too disgusted to go on with this. Go read it for yourself.
(link via
[posted by jaed at 12:51 PM]
Just a pointer...
...to an excellent article in the New Republic on the scandal in the Catholic church. I've read several articles and analyses of the whole matter, but this one is remarkable for a lucid and careful exploration of why it happened - why so many priests did what they did, and why the church hierarchy responded with denial and coverup - as well as how it happened.
[posted by jaed at 12:29 AM]
What the hell is wrong with Apple? Part 1,356
So my mom, who has an original iMac, has been asking me for years when Apple is going introduce one with a 17" screen that would let her crank down the resolution a bit and be easier on her eyes. Apple's just introduced such a beast: the eMac. It's got a 17" screen, a little smaller footprint than the original iMac, G4 chip, respectable clock rate, and it has a combo drive. It's perfect for her. She'd buy one in a New York minute, as soon as they start coming off the production line. There's just one catch: it's education-only. Yes, this machine that my mom (who, if I read my markets right, stands for hundreds of thousands of potential buyers) can't buy it.
There's a word for companies that look at a customer who's eager to buy with cash in hand and turn away, saying "No, we don't want to sell this to you. Nyah." Several words come to mind, actually. Morons. Incompetents. Sheer lunacy!
(It's not the first time Apple's pulled this same stunt, either. A few years ago they introduced the eMate, basically a hardened Newton on steroids in a clamshell case with built-in keyboard and software. It ran for weeks on a set of AA batteries. It was designed so you could throw it across the room without hurting it. It was lighter and smaller than almost any laptop around at the time. And if you weren't a K-12 student or teacher, you couldn't have it. (Nyah.)
Monday, April 29, 2002
[posted by jaed at 3:19 PM]
On respect for the "printable format" link
An awful lot of media websites, these days, include a link to something called "printable format" or "printer-friendly page", or simply "print". Those of us who prefer our eyeballs not to fall out while reading, and like a column width greater than 3 words, also know this as the "reader-friendly" link, because that's just what the so-called "printable" page is. It generally does not have winkenblinken ads in your peripheral vision, teensyfont syndrome, three-column layouts (columns work fine on paper, but not when you have to scroll), or others of the numerous sins against legibility so often promulgated by "web designers".
As such, they are damn useful. But it's possible to make them less so, and I'm seeing an alarming trend in this direction. Attention: if you're installing a reader-friendly option on your web site, there are certain things you should not do.
First of all, refrain from opening the reader-friendly format in a new window. If I want it in a new window, that functionality is just a Control-click away (right-click, for those of you who adhere to the Dark Side of the Force). Otherwise I don't want to have to dig around for the original window to close it. (Yes, I could just read the article and then close both windows, but I normally have ten or twenty browser windows open at once and waiting to be read, and if I weren't compulsive about tidiness I'd end up rereading three-day-old articles and wondering why they sound so familiar.) The New Republic is still doing this, although they have mercifully cleaned up their act regarding the following problem.
If you are going to indulge in the unholy practice mentioned in the previous paragraph, at least don't target all the pages to the same window. Doing this makes it impossible to open more than one page from your site at once, since the reader-friendly page for the second story will be targeted to the window I just opened for the first story, erasing it. Annoying. Especially when you don't realize what's happened, close all the redundant windows, and then find you've got one window instead of six. Wall Street Journal, this means you.
And for the love of Gopod, do not trigger a Print command automatically when the page is loaded! If I want to print the reader-friendly format, that functionality is a simple Command-P away (Control-P for the Darth Maul contingent). In particular, do not do this without some sort of warning to the user. (One site, whose name memory has mercifully blotted out, actually closed the window after I canceled the unwanted Print command. It took some fast work with the Stop button to keep the window open. Damn.)
And while I'm at it:- Do not put your whole page in bold! (John and Antonio, I'm talking to you.)
- Do not succumb to Teensy Font Syndrome on your page! (More Blogger templates than I can count.)
- Do not limit your page to a tiny column width unless you know how to set minimums in CSS! (Your two inches may look just dandy in 8-point Arial, but trying to read a two-inch-wide column in 17-point Zapf Humanist is an exercise in frustration. Particularly when you put stuff in <blockquote> and make it a one-inch column. If the user makes the window wider, your page should get wider.)
Friday, April 26, 2002
[posted by jaed at 12:17 AM]
Surely the man is mad:
This transcript of a Middle East Policy Council forum on US/Saudi Arabia relations is well worth reading for insight into the diplomatic establishment's thinking on the history and realities of the relationship. Partway through, though, I came across this (the speaker is Charles Freeman, president of the MEPC and former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia:
If we knew what Saudi women wanted in an incremental way, then perhaps, to answer the question, we could be helpful by supporting those in the kingdom who are trying to promote change of a nature that is congenial to our values. But we don�t know that. Is it that they want to give up their chauffeurs and drive around? That might be good for American automobile manufacturers. Saudi Arabia is the only society outside the United States where the American automobile still dominates. And some of us who have been thinking for years about this issue would look forward to participating in building the separate road system that would be required if women could drive.
The what? The separate ROAD SYSTEM???
(Let's not even get into the sense of priorities displayed in the comment about automobile manufacturers.)
Thursday, April 25, 2002
[posted by jaed at 5:32 PM]
I have no blog, and I must scream
Everyone's seen this picture.
But I can't stop thinking about it. I look at it, and I want to snatch that little girl away from that man before he hurts her. It puts the most terrible thoughts into my head.
The Arabs are not much militarily these days, but they've been remarkable for the past few decades for innovation in finding new ways to kill someone's grandmother and maim someone's baby without anyone suspecting. And surely no one would suspect a child, perhaps entering a school or playground, of being a suicide bomber equipped with a remote-control switch.
Lileks noted, with the special horror of a man who's the father of a daughter himself, that the man in that picture must have had to tie the dynamite around her, look into her little face, answer her questions - "What's this, Daddy?" How long will it be, I wonder, before the dynamite is for real? How long before the inventors of the human bomb introduce to us... the child bomb? What will that father tell his child as he prepares to murder her?
So this is why I started this blog. (Aside: God, I hate that word.) I need some place to talk about these feelings, these suspicions, these apprehensions of disaster. Even if I'm only talking to myself. I've always been a surprisingly late adopter on the web, despite having been on the net since 1985. (The "first-wave" webloggers are still little newbies as far as I'm concerned.) I didn't even have a website until, I think, 1995 or 1996. I first thought about starting a weblog four years ago.
But I haven't needed somewhere to babble this bad until now. I might end up talking mostly about This Present Unpleasantness. I might not. I may rant about free speech, blatantly attack the copyright-aggregation industry for the greedy and malicious fools they are, yammer about community and how it forms naturally, and/or babble about beads.
We'll just have to see.
Thursday, April 18, 2002
[posted by jaed at 10:43 PM]
A blog is born:
Tap...tap...is this thing on?
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