…on your engagement!
Graig’s entries:
Emma’s entry: Engaged
(Yes, it’s been known nearly a week, but I seem to be falling behind on my GTABloggers gossip.)
What separates the blog Cooking for Engineers from any other collection of
recipes I’ve ever seen is the unique way in which the recipes are
presented. Consider this basic recipe for one of my favourite desserts, tiramisu. You get the standard “do this, then do this” instructions, but you also get this chart:
Back in April, I wrote about Avenue Victor Hugo books, which I stumbled into while walking along Boston’s Newbury Street with The Redhead. In that article, I republished The Crepuscule, a document which describes itself as “Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores”.
In Wednesday’s and yesterday’s editions of his webcomic, Something Positive, Randy Mulholland shows the main character “Davan” in a bookstore that bears a striking resemblance to Avenue Victor Hugo…
Update (Friday, Sept 10 13:26 EDT): Added a couple of links to Colby Cosh and Ace of Spades HQ.
A question that’s been bouncing around the more political areas of the
blogosphere is “were those memos that 60 Minutes showed about Bush
receiving special treatment during his service faked or not?”.
It seems that the proportional spacing of the type (in which skinnier
letters like “i” get let space than wide letters like “m” or “w”,
common in the era of today’s computers and printers, but rare in the
days of the typewriter) and the superscripted “th” in the word “187th”
suggest that the memos weren’t typed on a typewriter in 1973, but in
Microsoft Word in 2004 and then photocopied repeatedly to produce the
effect of age.
Here’s a graphic that morphs the purported 1973 memo and a version created in Word. It is eerily similar.
As much as I disagree with the Bush Camp in general, I disagree with
cheesy tactics like this (if these memos turn out to be forgeries) even
more. There’s enough truth to nail the Bush administration without
having to resort to “noble lies” in the Straussian (Leo, not Gideon) tradition. Even my rather-quite-to-the-right-of-me friend David Janes, a Bushie, will
readily admit that he considers Bush a dud on most issues; he only agrees with the war footing.
coming from the right-wing side of the blogosphere. Most of the “blogs
as journalism” reports tend to come from the left-leaning sectors.
More on this “man bites dog” stuff at Ace of Spades HQ.
David points to this funny comic on the whole forgery kerfuffle:
10. How not to behave at a women’s residence party.
9. How to apologize to an entire wing at a women’s residence the next day.
8. A number of good essay-writing techniques.
7. How to get a cube van to “take air”.
6. The fine art of telling politicos to “eat the corn from my shit”.
5. That brevity is the soul of wit.
4. That once in a while, you must do something you know you’ll regret later, because you’ll regret it more if you don’t.
3. That about half the time, the right-wing option is the correct one and the left-wing one is dead wrong, and vice versa.
2. How to think critically.
1. That in the hands of an expert, the esophagus can be one helluva projectile launcher.
I thought that this blog entry by Colby Cosh on Accordion City was
worthy of note in case you hadn’t seen it. He wrote it after a recent
visit here:
I suppose the couple that put me up for
the weekend didn’t realize they were making such a wonderful black joke
by having a paperback copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation lying
on the coffee table when I arrived. I was thumbing through the book and
was reminded that, at the outset of Asimov’s space epic, the galactic
capital–a vast, crowded, barren planet frantically maintaining a
tenuous grip on empire–is called “Trantor”. Coincidence or prophecy?
I kid. We provincials are fond of
complaining that Toronto regards itself as the “centre of the
universe“. But, honestly, what else can we reasonably expect? I’m not
certain any other city so closely resembles what the actual metropolitan centre of the universe
were to look like if such a thing existed. And I mean this in both bad
ways and good. Listen to the polyglot hum emerging from the television
and the street; consider the historical layering and the Herculean
churn of the city’s architectural scene, which runs the gamut from
ruins-in-progress to outrageous new confections;
ponder the way Toronto tries (oh so very hard) to assert a proprietary
interest in universal mass culture by obsessing over its movie shoots
and semi-notable part-time residents.
Gertrude Stein said of Oakland that “there’s no there there”; in
Toronto’s case the genius and the calamity may, equally, be that
there’s an everywhere there, trying to fit into a somewhat narrow
geographical space.
(The bold links are his; the non-bold links are my own additional “link-a-torial”.)
I’m a little too busy to explain it right now (working on a big new
project here) so, I’m going to point you to the words of others.
First, Cory’s quick summary on Boing Boing:
with an escape hatch to ensure that the former holders of the expired
domains don’t get scr0d.
(Yes, Cory is a customer of ours and a buddy and former boss of mine. But he liked Tucows long before I joined the company.)
He points to a CanadaIT.com article on our new service and quotes:
because even if a URL enters the auction, the old registrant still has
a window of opportunity to retain the name under the system. Noss said
Tucows plans to “hold the name in escrow for another 30 days” on top of
a period of “anywhere from one to 45 days” that a former registrant has
to reclaim their domain name after expiry, depending on which registrar
they’re dealing with.
…Tucows is the kind
of company that would enter the lapsed-domain business in a way that
shows particular respect for the former owners of domain names. As any
number of sordid stories will attest — many of them associated with Verisign — lapsed domains offer a perfect situation for sleazy opportunism.
I tend to be skeptical and suspicious about large corporations; in
fact, some readers will scornfully characterize my attitude with even
less flattering words (less flattering both to me and to the
corporations I mistrust). All the more reason, then, to repeat that I
have for years been deeply impressed with the probity and business
style of the folks at Tucows.
I try to stay on Reverend AKMA’s good side. His boss can smite my boss’ ass.
Speaking of my boss, here’s are pointers to Boss Ross’ articles on the new service.
Perfect Information: Involving Registrants in the Expiring Names Market
I’ll explain the whole thing in even more layperson-friendly terms — with cartoons even! — if there’s a demand for it.