found_drama

• Who’s Listening To Your Shared iTunes Music?

  via Hackszine.com (via LifeHacker): perfect for those late-night shutdown routines to delay the actual shutdown until after all the connections have been closed…

  (tags: Terminal OSX iTunes hack lsof todo)

Since you asked: yes, I did finish Hesse’s Demian.

I was… It was OK. I found the novel slow to start, difficult to deliver its theme, and a bit pale in the spectrum of existentialist literature. I have a feeling that I may have enjoyed it more at age 17 but it held no new revelations for me nor did I find the style particularly captivating. That said, I was intrigued by one particular passage:

Always, you must think of these things in evolutionary, in historical terms! When the upheavals of the earth’s surface flung the creatures of the sea onto the land and the land creatures into the sea, the specimens of the various orders that were ready to follow their destiny were the ones that accomplished the new and unprecedented; by making new biological adjustments they were able to save their species from destruction. We do not know whether these were the same speciments that had previously distinguished themselves among their fellows as conservative, upholders of the status quo, or rather as eccentrics, revolutionaries; but we do know they were ready, and could therefore lead their species into new phases of evolution. That is why we want to be ready.

…Hesse as a pre-Kurzweillian proto-Singularity transhumanist? Or Hesse attempting to appeal to us that we are otherwise base, animal creatures that seem capable only of destruction? I’m uncomfortable by his use of “evolution” here because he appears to be couching it transcendentalist terms. The passage suggests that evolution is a goal-oriented process and that we need merely to make adjustments (biological, spiritual, or otherwise) to rid ourselves of these destructive tendencies that lead us to war. While he spends so much of the earlier portions of the novel dismantling Christianity (or at least dissociating it with righteousness), he does not disconnect from spirituality. And while I do not necessarily find spirituality to be incompatible with evolution, it seems dangerous to include evolution as a critical component of your spiritual belief system — after all, the agenda of your memes may ultimately be disappointed by your genes.

• Jott.com

  via kr8n (via LifeHacker?): Mobile Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

  (tags: lifehacks productivity research tools todo)

• Chernobyl-based birds avoid radioactive nests

  earth - 28 March 2007 - New Scientist Environment

  (tags: chernobyl science biology research environment evolution todo)

I’m attending a seminar on pollution (specifically water & soil; mostly water) at the local St. Mary’s College satellite branch.  The seminar is set up a lot like a kid’s science exhibit at some museum; there are transparent, interactive exhibits that we walk to as a group and our instructor (S.?) walks us through the various conditions (e.g., industrial waste, lawn run-off, etc.) that can cause these and where the particular scenarios are most common.

The final interactive exhibit is on the fourth floor in the African Studies annex.  Our group moves through clusters of African students working on their various projects and then finally we arrive at the exhibit.  It’s a cut-away of a riverbed.  The water is murky and grey; it’s cloudy and smells sour and there are mutated fish swimming in odd patterns.  Our instructor explains that this particular condition contains mostly excess “mental health” medicine (i.e., anti-psychotics) and that the situation is rampant in eastern Africa.

I accidentally drop my pencil into the water and am shocked to discover that the cut-away is not held in place by plexi-glass but by some kind of force field.  I am able to reach into the water near its bottom (it is oddly viscous and too cold) and grab my pencil.  However, when I pull it back out of the water, the pencil is limp and the graphite core has melted out.

I’m on a webdev team and there’s some kind of 3rd party slideshow app that needs to get plugged into the right-hand sidebar. Their API has a lot of neat hooks — really comprehensive stuff — but it has some of the poorest documentation we’ve ever seen. The launch deadline for the site is fast approaching and so we cobble together this brute force method. It seems to work but it’s slower than we want — and not SEO-friendly at all. I get into a fight with one of the other developers about how to do it. At the heart of the argument? We both agree that the method slated for deployment sucks. But he’d rather not deploy it at all, miss the deadline (or deliver an incomplete product) than revise it later. But neither of us can propose a good alternative or solution to the problem.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We know another way. It just needs ten hours of work a piece. And/or rearchitecting the widget system.

• You can’t have everything, where would you put it?

  via destraynor (via DF): follow-up piece to Tantek’s UI essay (the same points but without the math?)

  (tags: essay UI usability design todo)

• waffle → Now in glorious HTML5

  (tags: html essay todo)

• PTGui

  Photo stitching software 360 degree Panorama image software

  (tags: panoramic software photography todo)

• Kekus (Calico Panorama)

  Kekus photo stitching and correction software. Panoramas made easy.

  (tags: panorama photography software todo)

Killer sunset tonight, too:

Tried to catch it as a panoramic while I was at it, too. Just a nice way to conclude the weekend.

currently playing: Zero 7 “Salt Water Sound”

While A. committed herself to more work this evening, so did I…

I decided to follow up on this morning’s post and put forth a good faith effort at solving as many of the IE-specific issues in my CSS as I could re: Ortho…

The good news? It’s legible and more/less looking good (at least w/r/t/ the main content regions) in Internet Explorer 6¹, which is to say that the parts you (my dear reader) actually read look almost exactly like I’ve intended them². In a way, I feel like asking myself Well what did you accomplish? But that much should be easy. Ortho went from looking like a gothic kid’s worst regurgitation³ to looking like the (I hope) classy bit that I intended it to be. But there’s still a ways to go:

• ul.menu is missing border-bottom in IE6 (despite “standards compliance mode”)
• the last img in the Flickr badge sometimes drops down a full 75+ pixels despite (what appears to be) adequate clearance (width and height-wise) and proper overflow rules (and “standards compliance mode”)
• the paragraphs seem squashed together in IE (not sure yet if this is an issue with line-height or margin-bottom…)
• and of course there are the many issues with the #footer that don’t even need describing…

At any rate…  We’re a far-cry from where we were this morning.

1. At the moment, our Windows PC resources are quite limited. I’m reticent to put IE7 on the final remaining machine because I hear it (IE7) plays nice with min-width and max-height (etc.) and generally follows the rules. Well, most of the rules. And since I still have about 20% of my readership on IE (shame on y’all) and 87% of that on IE6… Alas, I need to do a little bending here. [↩]
2. It turned out to be the min-width and max-width bits of CSS. They really confuse the living shit out of the IE. [↩]
3. Black on black on black and wide as hell… [↩]