March 31, 2003
Evil Upheaval
This article has a John Cleese - Monty Python flavor and style, which is probably why it was attributed to him, even though he didn't really write it. I feel like I'm coming late to the dance on this one, but it made me laugh enough that I still want to pass it on to those who may not have seen it. The Axis of Just as Evil by Andrew Marlatt of the now defunct SatireWire.com.
Posted by Ben at March 31, 2003 09:27 AM
March 28, 2003
March 23, 2003
Salam Pax
I discovered this website just a few days before the invasion started, and was intrigued, even fixated on the perspective and inside gossip it displayed. I didn't think much about whether it was a real person or a propaganda tool until I read some other blogs posting that question. With a little research, I'm inclined to think it's real. This entry in Letter from Gotham seems to sum it up pretty well. She also has another little blurb that speaks well to the way the internet has changed the perspective of this war and the perpetual problems with governments.
"I cannot not not not get over the irony of this war and how we are all communicating with one another. I am a sort-of-hawk (at least, conditionally pro-war), and I am communicating with a Baghdadi from New York City; an Israeli puts up a mirror site for this Iraqi; the guy in Baghdad wishes an Israeli woman and her family well while he is about to be shocked and awed by my country's unparalleled ability to wage war; she puts up a website from the IDF Home Command for him to download a PDF survival guide in Arabic.
The wrong people are running the world but that's nothing new, is it?"
Anyway, all the graphics disappeared and there hasn't been a new posting since the shock and awe thing started. I don't know the guy except from his blog, but I find myself worried for him and admiring his efforts.
"Shock and awe" - how relieving to know we now have an official buzz word for this event, to follow Y2K, dot com, millenium and hanging chad into the annals of the English language, mutated to carry as their definition a micro-summary of a point in our history.
March 06, 2003
Another Diversion
As if anyone has trouble finding diversions on the web. This isn't much different than any other paint program, but it is fun and shows some cool Flash work. I probably wouldn't have posted this except my self-portrait is so artistic.
Posted by Ben at March 6, 2003 03:47 PM
March 01, 2003
O. J. T.
The last ten days at work have really given me some on the job training in the real life web world. With the legislature going full tilt and the organization's use of the web site as one avenue of member communications, I'm getting good experience in ongoing content management while undertaking a site upgrade.
I realize the proper way to do this would be to develop the new pages offline and try them out before putting them up in place of the old stuff, but the real life facts are that my boss doesn't comprehend the reasons to upgrade to standards compliancy, and as such there is just no time at all allotted to such work. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and in her eyes, if a site designed four years ago with bloated FrontPage over-coding and infinite nested tables still manages to work, it's not broken. So, I sneak in the conversion as I can when working on pages.
Last Friday brought a ?good news, bad news? scenario to my work at this point. I had completed a new style sheet for the first page of the site and implemented it along with the re-coding of the page, and the result looked like the original. That was good news. On Friday, I was given new content to post to the home page. The source copy for this content was a newspaper advertisement that was appearing around the state which I was to ?webify? and have up immediately in conjunction with a statewide radio campaign that was encouraging listeners to ?go to mtvoters.org for more information?. How serendipitous to be blind-sided by our first radio advertising campaign of the year driving the public to our web site to check out my brand new, re-invented home page.
It was only about twenty minutes after I completed layout of the new content that the first phone call came. The advertising agency that had done the newspaper ads and provided me with content informed me that in checking the site, there seemed to be a problem. My layout worked perfectly in Netscape, Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 on a PC, and in Netscape on a Macintosh, but there was a problem in IE 5.1 on the Mac platform. A little trial and error along with some reversion to the old table layout gave me an immediately workable although unsatisfying fix, and a lesson in the minefield of working live without a net. I fully accept this as a sign that I should immediately purchase a new PowerBook so I can test my pages on the Apple platform!
After all of that, the page was only up for 5 days, then the legislature voted and the world moved on, which means the page had to be replaced with something more relevant. I hope this keeps up. It really is great to be learning under fire.
Posted by Ben at March 1, 2003 09:13 AM