June 2003

The blogs they are a-changing

30 June 2003
Long dark teatime of the soul

19:08 Very sobering - and ultimately encouraging - article on the darkness that Mother Teresa faced. Serve God, and you won't be comforted with warm fuzzies all the time, if at all. A genuine recognition of something that she had, that is, these days, much-misunderstood; lifelong fidelity should not be confused with a Stoic determination to keep going in the face of defeat. It was something else entirely: objective Christian joy.

30 June 2003
Baby Brroom

19:04 We've just sent off a copy of the Haynes Baby Manual to the parents of our God-bump. Brilliant, wish I'd had a copy six years ago.

30 June 2003
Bandwidth? We got no steenking bandwidth

19:03 I'm not sure how useful it is, but it looks damned clever. And look! Development on OS X!

30 June 2003
Shagged out

19:00 Pity the poor male orb-weaving spider. 'Is this your first time?' 'Well, duh! Eek!'

25 June 2003
We HATESSSSSS it #2

19:59 Nuts. I decided to try the iewin fudge to fix the horizontal scroll bars:

#subcontent {
	float: left;
	top: 100px;
	margin: 10px;
	padding: 5px;
	background-color:#CCFFFF;
	color: inherit;
	border: 1px solid #ccc;
	width: 97%; /* ie5win fudge begins */
	voice-family: "\"}\"";
	voice-family:inherit;
	width: 95%;
}
html>body #content {
	width: 68%; /* ie5win fudge ends */
}

Well, it works, but now in real browsers it's off-centre. Grr.

Guess which Exploder 5 manages to screw up so that you can't see the text? Guess which I've been running at http://www.allsaintslittleshelford.org/more.html? Well, I've had enough. The horizontal scroll bars can also go hang.

25 June 2003
We HATESSSSSS it

19:13 Damn and blast Internet Explorer, the words coming easily through habit. Consider:

.centrecontlarge	{
	float: left;
	width: 68%;
	margin-top: 1%;
	margin-bottom: 1%;
	margin-left: 16%;
	margin-right: 16%;
	text-align: left
}

.centrecontlargenofloat	{
	float: none;
	width: 68%;
	margin-top: 1%;
	margin-bottom: 1%;
	margin-left: 16%;
	margin-right: 16%;
	text-align: left
}

20 June 2003
Damned Republicans

13:58 One of the reasons intelligent Americans will claim that their republicanism is better than European democracy is the fear that 'pure' democracy ultimately leads to mob rule - 'mobocracy' - in which the basest motives win out. They'll cite the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in support. (And this is where the 'right to keep and arm bears' tosh ultimately comes from - but that's a different rant.)

This is so much marsh gas of course. Germany in 1933 was a very different place to Europe (or anywhere else) seventy years later. Despite its American slant, Guarding Liberty from Democracy is a readable and thought-provoking review, and hopefully the book will stimulate those with the appropriate power to put in those safeguards (in, e.g., Iraq) which are as much a mainstay of our society as is democracy itself.

And anyway, all Civ players know that Democracy is superior in everyway to the Republic.

20 June 2003
Muggs

13:55 Wordy or 'creedy' religion kills the living beauty of God - Malcom Muggeridge.

19 June 2003
DIY

21:34 Fancy making your own H-Bomb? Easy to understand, step-by-step instructions. It's actually very, very funny and worth reading all five pages.

Making and owning an H-bomb is the kind of challenge real Americans seek. Who wants to be a passive victim of nuclear war when, with a little effort, you can be an active participant? Bomb shelters are for losers. Who wants to huddle together underground eating canned Spam? Winners want to push the button themselves. Making your own H-bomb is a big step in nuclear assertiveness training -- it's called Taking Charge. We're sure you'll enjoy the risks and the heady thrill of playing nuclear chicken.

19 June 2003
Come on, guys

21:31 Do you use Safari? Then please find all the sites with javascript that it chokes on (such as City Creator and send in those bug reports. With the demise of Internet Exploder and the general dunderheidedness of the interweb, it's our last, best hope for peace.

18 June 2003
<Whatever> City!

09:22 This must be the coolest website ever! Build your own city! I'm sure the BioLOGlettes will have great fun with it. Oh, and here's an encouraging line form their FAQ, It's because the people who made IE6 were on crack.

16 June 2003
Meow

14:15 Recognition for a great artist. But you have to go elsewhere for his best work.

16 June 2003
Liver puddle

14:06 Nige writes,
Tony Blair has just announced that he is sending the people that chose Liverpool to be the European City of Culture, out to Iraq. The theory is that if they can find culture in Liverpool then weapons of mass destruction should be a piece of piss.

16 June 2003
Everything is bad for you

14:03 Wah hah hah. How to turn just about anything into a bomb.

16 June 2003
Write me

13:58 Of course, it's in every author's interest to degrade potential competition. But it set me thinking: maybe there's something we can use there in terms of self-publishing. If you could say to a publisher, two thousand people have read this on the web, then surely they're going to look more favourably at you (if you can verify that claim)?

And he's wrong about the Blog world. It's had zero impact on the real world. See below.

03 June 2003
Rolling my own

14:57 So I'm not as revolutionary as I thought. After a flurry on uk.comp.sys.mac, Jonas pointed me at a piece by Tantek Çelik on hand-crafted blogging. There's a link to Jeffrey Zeldman's take on the matter, too. Now, I'd be the first to admit not pushing the envelope in any sense; I like to feel that I am creating, however.

So I'm in good company. Not that that bothers me, of course: There's been a bit of flak flying around recently basically saying that the whole blogging scene is a pile of wank. And so it is - which is why I stay clear of the in-crowds and bloglists and what have you. Regular visitors to this place (both of you) will know that I only write when I think I've come across something interesting. I'm no teenage blogger.

Hell, but that was meta. Catch me going to a blogging conference or such like and you may shoot me.

03 June 2003
God matters

12:37 Interesting critique of modern social studies of religion. Essentially saying that faith is not a control mechanism, and rituals - for monotheistic religions at least - do not matter:

So then, let us finally be done with the claim that religion is all about ritual. Gods are the fundamental feature of religions. That holds even for Godless religions, their lack of Gods explaining the inability of such faiths to attract substantial followings. Moreover, it was not the "wisdom of the East" that gave rise to science, nor did Zen meditation turn people's hearts against slavery. By the same token, science was not the work of Western secularists or even deists; it was entirely the work of devout believers in an active, conscious, creator God. And it was faith in the goodness of that same God and in the mission of Jesus that led other devout Christians to end slavery, first in medieval Europe and then again in the New World.

In those ways at least, Western civilization really was God-given.