08/26/2002

I am amazed that nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that the "debate" over Iraq that seems to be taking place in the halls of power in the US is, for the most part, taking place between George W. Bush and friends on the one side (the "hawks") and friends of his father's on the other side (the, what? "other hawks"?), and that the basic question of whether or not there should be a US-led regime change in Iraq is never questioned. Seems to me that there is far more here than meets the eye. The suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, one of our "best friends" in the region, and from Egypt, who the USG is now taking to task for imprisoning a democracy advocate. Could it be that by taking Iraq out of Saddam Hussein's hands, the Bushes are merely trying to ensure that should Saudi Arabia fall, we'll still have access to the oil from Iraq? This whole thing feels like a play for an alternate partner in the Middle East, driven by fear of violent Islamist revolution in Saudi Arabia. (It brings to mind the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s, no?) What I can't figure out is why Bush alienated Iranian moderates in that dumb "axis of evil" speech.
posted 18:24 PM

08/07/2002

May he never have to deal with another goto statement again. RIP, Edsger Dijkstra.
posted 20:00 PM

08/06/2002

Way back in another life, I used to work for a company called imonics. Their domain name, imonics.com, expired back in 1996 or thereabouts. I've been waiting for years to snatch it up, if only so I could have my old email address back. Well, NSI never released it, refused to allow anyone else to register it, and now NSI has sold it to a Korean guy named SON CHANG GYU. I only know this because I noticed yesterday that NSI has set up a new domain called LAME-DELEGATION.ORG, and imonics.com had landed in it. Today, it's gone. So, if there are any domains you've been particularly interested in, watch out! If they end up in the LAME-DELEGATION.ORG domain, they're probably likely to disappear into someone else's clutches. And quickly.
posted 12:31 PM

08/05/2002

How about before we go trying to liberate a whole country — Iraq — we first liberate just one man, one good man, who is now sitting in an Egyptian jail for pursuing the very democratic ideals that we profess to stand for. (nyt, registration required).
posted 11:36 AM

07/28/2002

There is this guy who lives around here somewhere, who I have never met, who apparently fixes air conditioning and heating units, owns a trailer, doesn't keep up with his mortgage, may live with another man, is apparently not listed in the phone book, and shares the same name as me (if you don't mind the different spellings of the last name, the different middle name, and so on).

What this means is that I get a random phone call once a month or so from some bored banker or collections agency worker or distraught, climate-controlled octogenarian, asking me to call them back so that I can pay my outstanding bills, fix their air conditioner, or otherwise aid society in its quest for a nice, cool place to count its money.

This wouldn't be at all annoying if bored collections workers, as a rule, didn't tend to doubt my heartfelt and sincere protestations of a confusion of identities, but it is very difficult to prove, over the phone at least, that you are not a trailer-dwelling air conditioner repairman with a roommate and bad credit.
posted 18:49 PM

07/27/2002

There is a Champéon in France.
posted 13:53 PM

07/24/2002

James McNally reviews the CSS book in Digital Web. I think he liked it. You might, too.
posted 12:20 PM

07/23/2002

The owner of the company whose site so curiously resembled ours has written in again, to let us know that the site was, indeed, pirated, and that they've taken it down. He says he will be pursuing the "designer" with "some gusto". I wish him luck. His company claims to recognize the importance of having a powerful and unique identity. It must have been extremely embarrassing to find that theirs was a weak, bastardized copy of a previously existing powerful, unique identity.
posted 11:02 AM

07/22/2002

Last week, this company was found to have stolen, as of sometime last fall, our site's design, copy, general layout, and various other stuff, including scripts and graphics, which we launched nearly a year prior. They then proceeded to modify it in bizarre and unexplainable ways (I love the drop shadow on their bastardized version of our logo, for example).

For those who would question whether the site was actually stolen as opposed to merely having had a great influence on some impressionable designer, feel free to view source. The DHTML menus are still composed of DIVs named "expertisemenu", "processmenu", and "proofmenu", despite their labels on the stolen site being named "products", "services", and "admin"; the footer DIV is inexplicably named "midfunk" on both sites (I'm not even sure we knew what midfunk was supposed to be when we launched ;); you can see my comments in the script that runs the menus (such as "silly browser specific values"), about which I presented at Web2001 nearly a year later; the graphics for the "case studies" section are tiny versions of the logos of the companies they originally represented, namely Sports-Expo.com, TomPaine.com, RedHat Center, McKinney and Silver, and one other I can't make out. The complex, three-way mouseover behavior on the menu buttons, icons, and so forth is exactly the same (it should be - it's the same source). And, of course, "Are you ready?" which once posed its query as the lead out from "Image is only the Beginning - Today's Web means Business". Even the three curved corner boxes in the main graphic were reused by the thief. Anyway, the site is now listed in pirated-sites.com.

They have taken the site down, claiming they bought the design from a third party, which is, I suppose, possible. You may, if you ware a Web designer, wish to check out their other site, which offers a variety of other designs for license. Not, as you might suspect, to patronize them as a customer, but rather to verify that none of the other designs they offer for sale or license were acquired under similarly lax circumstances.
posted 13:39 PM
Quite a weekend. Jeff and Leslie dropped by on Friday, on their way to the Outer Banks, and Jessamyn and Greg stayed the weekend, and a good time was had by all. A bizarre intermission was brought about by an accident in front of the house that took out a telephone pole, which CP&L had to replace, bringing down our electricity for a good three hours, which time was spent on the porch watching the show. I got pictures, and will post them as soon as I can get them downloaded off the cam. And, of course, after the three days of three square meals, copious cocktails, and general merriment, I need a good long nap.
posted 12:55 PM