i have no idea what that title means, but it was the first thing that came to mind, so i’ll roll with it.

bill
humphries

notices

that
simon willison

is getting into using spath
to mine xhtml

.

my own personal “aha” moment came when i discovered that i could
hack together an obnoxiously simple script to
convert xhtml to
rss [ which produces this site’s rss feeds ] over a cup of coffee or two. i found the xpath expressions oddly
intuitive and have always had big notions of “enriching” the
metadata of the
vast wasteland

to slice and dice things in interesting ways.

andy

points to

an interesting article on the

“mainstreaming” of the word “fuck”

:

“The decline is a matter of shifting taboos, says Jean
Aitchison, the Oxford professor of language and communication who
is married to Ayto. “In the last century, it was religious swearing
that upset people,” she says. “Then, in the mid-20th century,
sexual swearing. But these days people get far more upset about
politically incorrect language: nigger, and even mad, are quite
taboo.”

i guess one need look no further than the
fcc overlooking
bono’s use of the word

to find proof of the theory that the word that could unleash a
thousand bars of soap in the mouth is, well – you know, fscked:

“ON MONDAY, THE government agency’s Enforcement Bureau
rejected complaints by the Parents Television Council and others
that Bono’s use of the phrase “this is really, really f—ing
brilliant” failed to meet the test for indecency. The bureau ruled
that Bono’s indiscretion was so “fleeting and isolated” that it did
not run afoul of the rules.”

Sliding Doors of CSS:

“A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects. CSS2’s current state requires a separate HTML element for each background image. In many cases, typical markup for common interface components has already provided several elements for our use.

One of those cases is tabbed navigation. “

i haven’t bothered to listen to the interview
beteen terry gross and bill o’reilly, but the

response from npr’s ombudsman

is interesting:

“I believe the listeners were not well served by this
interview. It may have illustrated the “cultural wars” that seem to
be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served
to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR’s liberal media bias.

It left the impression that there was something not quite right
about the reasons behind this program: Bill O’Reilly often loves to
use NPR as his own personal political pinata; and NPR keeps helping
him by inviting him to appear.” .

what was most disturbing to me is that it was
done right before the traditional
npr

“fall fund drive” and could be interpreted as a cheap attempt at a
“sweeps week” style stunt. they don’t seem to be shy about pimping the gene simmons fiasco during the fund drives. maybe i’m just being cynical.

define:google.

“How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us” gives a glimpse into some some of the issues with “offshoring” :

“What are my options if my highly productive, 15-person software team generates only one-third the output our customers demand? I was certain that augmenting our team with offshore development was the right answer. It wasn’t, at least for a small project we recently outsourced to an Indian firm. ”

although anecdotal and difficult to generalize to all cases, it’s a good reminder that going overseas isn’t always the right answer and when it is the right answer, it’s more difficult to execute properly than you might imagine. i suspect after a year or so of the pendulum swinging in favor of offshoring, we’ll see more failures reported and the system will moderate itself a bit more than it has of late. [ via dangerousmeta ]

we just discovered that when we went to chicago to run the marathon our dog sitter left the dogs alone for two of the three nights that we were gone. i suppose some dogs can deal with being left alone, but our dogs have never, ever been alone for that long. it’s particularly traumatizing for a quintessentially pack-oriented animal like a malamute. malamutes desperately need to be with their pack and they can get very, very vocal when they aren’t, which can be hell on your neighbors. luckily, we have understanding neighbors.

one of them told us that mauja cried and howled like a very, very, very sad and lonely wolf all night long. and now he gets stressed whenever we leave since he’s probably not sure when we’ll be coming back. what’s even more aggravating is that we specifically told the dog sitter that he needed to stay the night. i guess he didn’t count on mauja letting the whole neighborhood know that he hadn’t.