November 26, 2002

Breaking People's Wrists
Whoa. That was a really satisfying headline to write. Unfortunately, they are just words. But the reason I wrote them was to direct people to the Broken Wrist Project, a collective of artists who are collaborating to revive old-school illustrated stories in print and online. The latest issue has sensitive but savage illustrations by the Strokes drummer. Who knew? Also cool is some of the writing by El-P's Definitive Jinx crew.

Raging at the spectacle of a chewed-up dupe
At the stroke of six AM a drooling red-eyed beast arises and lifts himself gently from his tender slumber pocket. Having bathed himself of the impurities of the last 24 hours, he flips open the black plastic racket machine and tries to focus himself on another hundred hours of work. These are the holidays. There is a lot of work to be done. Pilling it on, I accepted a last minute gig from the mayors office of Saint Paul to construct them a site by next Wednesday. My closest advisors have told me that this was an unwise decision. To make matters worse, and completely impossible, the mayor has decided that he personally will launch this site. At a press conference Wednesday he will symbolically 'cut the ribbon' by using the functionality of the site in front of a large crowd of reporters that will watch his every move on a large LCD screen. Ah...the nightmares...nightmares I tell you. I awake in cold ugly sweats picturing the whole thing exploding; there are surrealist droopy 404 errors streaming everywhere like acid rain; the mayor looks sinister as he is howling obscenities at his unpopular staff; I am receiving an email with the subject: "You Will Never Work in This Town Again". I am preparing for the worst. I must get back to work.

November 25, 2002

The Real Iron Chef
Saturday night was a celebration for Joy's birthday. We gathered at Ichiban's Japanese Steak House. Joy drank booze out of a ceramic Budda with a straw in his belly. The food was damn good. My belly was full of shrimp. In between sips of Jameson's whisky, I took a few pictures of our meals being prepared (warning: do not look at these if your hungry).

November 23, 2002

A Romance in Lower Mathematics
It's days like today that I am so happy to have cable. 99% of the time I spin through the channels and find very little that grips my attention for more than a few fleeting moments. But Saturday mornings I can always rely on the Cartoon Network and old Looney Tunes episodes to amuse and delight while I coerce the coffee machine to pump out its warm black love. Today things went to a new level. Sandwiched between some classic Bugs Bunny and another short featuring those two aristocratic yet devilishly brilliant chipmunks, who, I think may be lovers as well, was the most amazing piece of minimalist animation I have seen in many moons. It was Chuck Jones' "The Dot and The Line". This synopsis form geocities tells all:

"A straight line is in love with a dot; however, the dot finds the line too plain, unimaginative, and rigid. She would rather spend her time with an undisciplined squiggle who is much more fun. The dejected line later realizes that he doesn't have to be unbending. With a little concentration, he forms angles and various shapes. They are two-dimensional at first, but after much practice, he can form many-sided solids, and even curved figures. When the line demonstrates his abilities to the dot, she realizes that true beauty comes from discipline and that the squiggle is not for her."

The animated cartoon is an interpretation of the book, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. There are a few of Chuck Jones' animation cells for this film that are for sale online too. Alone, they are brilliant examples of artistic discipline. I want them all!!

November 22, 2002

Afrotech update
To the best of my knowledge, I think I toppled the CSS problem that was rendering afrojet with IE 6.0/Windows browsers a bit on the funky side. So all should be on the up and up now. If not, let me know. I raise my glass to everyone who helped in troubleshooting the cause and workaround. Know your !Doctypes friends. IE6 will make you work a little harder to make your site standards compliant.

Quality Control
Uffda. Late night barnstorming with the troops over on the North Side. I fell in love all over again with my dear old friend from the left coast - Olympia Beer in the can. It has been too long. Where have you been olde thymer? For good or ill, the reunion was intense and we threw caution to the wind and got down to business fast. Something about the gargantuan work load right now demands that my precious off hours are spent in the most entertaining and debauched positions approachable.

I had to get out of the apartment too because things were getting heavy with the neighbors. The caretaker of my building finally had it out with the ruffian British Soccer Jew. Angry people. He gave her a weeks notice that he had to get out of the country, and she lost it, "I work two jobs. How am I supposed to find time to rent this place?" Everybody swearing up and down the hallways for like 15 minutes. Small humans. Hell. I'm glad he's gone.

Complementing the Olympians, I made this sweet vegan chili recipe to feed the troops. Yum. And now I am searching for medicines for my morning condition. I see a new product called The Chaser, which promises "freedom from hangovers" or for those who prefer their poison form the vine, there is: "New Chaser for Wine Headaches". Ahhh modern medicine - what a thing, eh? Currently, I'm experimenting with Bextra. A pill for arthritis pain that I have dubbed the "hangover eraser". But as happy as I am that I'm not totally dented from last nights drunk, there's just something off balance in the world when you can take your night to the brink of alcoholic wonder and wake up the next morning feeling okaydokee. The hangover is the great equalizer and punisher - the sweet server of justice, that, if left impotent to rendered her judgment, will surely lead to a world of chaos and drinking with pure impunity.

November 20, 2002

The Celebrity Power 12
To my great satisfaction, I have enlisted into the ranks of lo-fi technologies, the super heavy weight mechanics of the durable Sears Celebrity Power 12 Electric Typewriter into my growing arsenal of old world devices. It helps me get work done around HQ and excites the tactile senses long left dormant from too much time behind the pulsing rays of the PowerBook. The experience of ruminating on the type-setter is one of pure weight. Weight of work and weight of thought. The Power 12 demands a skillful and physical assault when putting down the word. It moves ferociously against you and is unforgiving in it's placement of type. My first creed looked like the work of a mad writer on a week long bender. My epileptic type rendered odd sentences born from a place without grammar. Which really isn't any different than what this post your reading might look like, except that I have the benefit of a very passive machine, a delete key, and an application schooled in the ways of Spell Check. What discipline it takes to put together a coherent neat missive that doesn't look like abstract typeset artwork!?!

The permanence of the typewriter dictates that the weight of your thoughts must force your brain to get it right the first time. I must write over 50 emails a day and engage in myriad other forms of online communication that are typed in a fast and frenetic manner and depend heavily on the help of modern technologies to clean up my sloppy messes. But the typewriter, with its unbending permanent glyphs, reduces me to an illiterate child of the word in minute. My mother gave me a manila envelope when I was in college with some of the papers she had written when she was a nun at Saint Catherine's College. Each 20 page epic about some esoteric religious movement of the late 1700's was perfectly typed out on yellowing parchment. She told me that half the paper's grade was based on how well it was typed. There was no room for personal interpretations of type standards. You either got all the spacing and punctuation right or you were cast down a well and given grades lower in the alphabet. Plus, when you got your rough draft back you had to type the whole thing over again. Damn. However, having spent some time at the machine now I can see what a privilege it must have been for her (right mom?). The trance like machine gun rhythms that crack in the night air call out your friends Mr. Cigarette and Mr. Danials to come join you for a literary adventure - "Where do you want to go boys? Where should we take this mystery machine tonight." The mechanical rhythmic talkback of the Power 12 actually helps focus the mind. It's more of a conversation with the typewriter - a conversation you can't pay only half a mind to. The only problem is that this conversation is a loud one that upsets the neighbors a good deal. It's hella loud.

The Sears Power 12 also demands the use of a complimentary lo-fi technology that I can't rave about enough. It's a little thing called the U.S. Post Office. Ha. What a joy it is to prepare letters and packages containing a days worth of punching at the parchment and deliver it to the hard working men and women who are always happy to take your letters and rap endlessly about new postal technologies, requirements and the newest stamp designs. After a day of grazing through the email and pushing pixels, It's a good trick to leave the office with something physical in your hands - something that smells like ink and paper - something you can seal with wax and put a piece of yourself into.

November 19, 2002

Your own DMC
Kid Robot is featuring Run DMC figures. I have a feeling these are going to move fast. It doesn't look like they are selling an individual Jam Master Jay figure but you can get him in the whole set (group). The new Jason Siu figures are pretty sweet too.

On board I'm the captain
OK. Styx. Come Sail Away. I never really appreciated the full epic proportions of that song until today. What an anthem. Dennis De Young singing way too overconfidently about angels, childhood and UFO's - weird shit. It starts out all mellow and classical and then gets super heavy and then descends into weird electronic psychedelic Who-like pinball wizardry. I have a sneaky suspicion this is another one of those odd "Classic Rock" songs inspired by The Lord of the Rings. But it's a huge song for the early morning automotive commute.

It's also a good recession era song. A song for the times. I want to console my work neighbors, this cool boutique architecture shop that's fallen on hard times and is going to have to give up their sweet office space and move into their Presidents home, with the song. Carry on my friends.

But really. This economy sucks. Can someone please do something. Quick, before Dennis De Young decides that a Styx comeback tour is the key to jump starting it all.

November 18, 2002

Illuminated Lamb...Holidazzles your lawn
A trip to Menards revealed to me what everyone will be receiving for the holidays. They had other animals to complete your nativity scene but I think just The Lamb will do fine thanks. After receiving his in the mail, The Good Doctor decided that the best way to enjoy his Illuminated Lamb was to, "pack some lunch meat into the light hole of the animal and let the dogs at it in the backyard while documenting the carnage on the Polaroid". Poor little Illuminated Lamb.

November 17, 2002

Not in my backyard
Special odd fallacies in the dim light of the morning, make me question the intentions of my neighbors. I rose exceptionally early yesterday, with a hangover and a desire to settle down with black coffee and a copy of Harper's. Maybe I could repel the morning cold with the tight arguments of the decent gentry. I didn't own the magazine so I needed to hunt one down. It's not a far walk to the the local book and periodical pusher, so i decided to hoof it. I had barely breached the front door when I ran into that damn british kid, my neighbor, obnoxiously darting about on our lawn. He was wearing his usual uniform of a Union Jack Football (Soccer) jersey and soccer shorts. Shorts. God Damn Short! It's 13 degrees outside, I got my thermals on and this joker is fusing about in shorts. People in Minnesota who defiantly wear shorts way too long into the autumn months are subject to be voted off my little island. It's just foolish. There isn't even a glimmer of hipness about this fashion blunder.

I thought he was practicing dirty soccer moves on the lawn but it turns out he's having a Fire Sale. He had moved all his furniture and possessions onto the the street and had erected these flimsy yellow 'For Sale' signs that declared 'everything must go'. Oh if only this means that he must go too. Could it be true? Has he been deported? Evicted? Both? I can only hope so. This is the same guy who leaves hateful kindergarten scratch notes around the apartment and turns the joint into an Israeli nightclub with the worst Jerusalem techno music I have ever heard. Did you know that there is an israeli music version of The Police? Well there is and they suck. And they suck 50% more when I am trying to sleep or cook or do anything in the quiet sanctity of my own dwelling.

So it was that I was giggling gleefully about the Soccer Brit leaving my dwelling when just up the street I noticed a most peculiar sight for eight o'clock Saturday morning. Two grown men, bundled up hovering over a Weber, grilling burgers, beers in hand. On their steps were four turned over empty cases of Budweiser and smattered around the yard were empty lawn chairs laid out in a stonehenge pattern. Everywhere empty cans. Clearly, something no good had occurred here. Was occurring here. What the hell? This was the kind of scene that one expects to find at the trailer park or outside the Metrodome before a Vikings game. But what the heck was it doing in this little neighborhood at eight in the morning? Did the neighbors have to put up with this all night. Scratching my head and continuing on my journey I thought that, it's really moments like these that I can almost begin to relate to that Soundgarden line "feeling minnesota."

November 15, 2002

Too much working
Damn deadlines keeping me from posting proper. Frantically coding to the finish line of another Friday. Listening to the frenetic The Streets "Original Pirate Material". Great record.

Got all my hair whacked off at the Aveda School today. That place is nuts. 400 white lab coat wearing girls running around spraying each other with product. I almost fell asleep in the chair while getting my hair washed.

November 14, 2002

Daily design for the avant garde soul
For the budding typographer on your holiday shopping list, might I recommend this sleek calendar designed by Kit Hinrichs. Each month highlights a classic type with a brief description. It's more of an art piece really then a calendar that you would want to write all over, but that's what ical is for huh?

A new moma site is featuring the collected works of Howard Gilman's collection of some seriously utopian (science fiction) architectural drawings. The site is a wonderful flash site with an interesting navigation. Definitely worth checking out is Cedric Price's vision for a 'Potteries Thinkbelt'. The Thinkbelt is a system of old trains that operate as transportation in addition to classrooms, that move around in a network connected to a typical university system. Now that would just be straight up dope. Some of the drawings remind me of the elaborate schemas and plans we all made as kids. You remember - the ones we made when we didn't know anything about zoning laws, building codes, or developer control - the one's that featured 14 level dream homes connected by a circuit of underground tunnels and Logan's Run style trams.

Speaking of inventive designs, Brian has alerted me to an amazing new design for a device that is totally 100% piracy proof. It's black, dusty and has tiny little grooves in it.

November 13, 2002

Googlisms
Check out the googlism for John Skelton.

My favorites are:

john skelton is making you dream
john skelton is also a member of the house band
john skelton is moving south
john skelton is included in luminarium
john skelton is ellen skelton

Wobegon strikes back
Another great rebuttal from Garrison Keillor. Who would have thought that this little Prairie Home Companion had so much venom and bite? I can't wait to listen to Conservative talk radio on my way home from work (my new favorite hobby btw). They were tearing their hair out and shouting like monkeys after Kiellor's last missive in Salon.

Then they came for your libraries.
It looks very real that there is going to be a 'round two' in the battle over The Children's Internet Protection Act - the law which sought to impose private filtering software on library computers. The aim of course is to steer young viewers away from sexual content on the internet. But it's a rotten law that would have terrible results not to mention it's just plain 100% unconstitutional. But I'm not really sure that argument holds much weight anymore.

I've gotten the node from my local representatives that they'll be fighting the CIPA Act on my behalf, when it comes up again. Although, I did receive one letter back from a representative (who will remain anonymous) that he didn't know 'very much' about the Act and 'could I send him some materials'. It seemed like a sincere reply so I sent him about 30 links.

When I used to do some computer/tech teaching at the high school level awhile back both students and teachers giggled at the laughable filtering software the school was coned into purchasing. Students were unable to access the Star Tribune site and other "News" sites but were somehow still always able to get to the Cash Money Millionaires website. This always resulted in the printer belching forth pages and pages of Juvenile, C-Murder, and Lil-Kim lyrics. Some lyrics were so disturbing that I made it a point to read them aloud to the class. I remember a fellow teacher asking her students to do a a report on 'Hate' and the different types of 'Hate Crimes'. Her whole class descended on the lab, took their seats, and then proceeded to swear at their computers as they learned that the word 'hate' met the qualifications of the filter. The research came to an abrupt stop and the teacher was going to have to reevaluate her choice of research topic. An unfortunate consequence of the dreaded "filter".

November 11, 2002

css face lift
OK. Things look a little different over here at Afrojet. You dig? I wanted to create a design that abandoned html and the ubiquitous spacer.gif forever while converting everything to standards compliant css and xhtml. With this new design I have left behind the antiquated Netscape (4.X) and Explorer (4.X) browsers in favor of taking advantage of some of the cool tricks that CSS2 compliant browsers are capable of turning. If you still have one of those browsers and are hard fast in your resolve not to upgrade, fear not, as all of the content is still available to you through those platforms they just wont be graphically formated. That is the beauty of standards compliant xhtml pages. I wanted to beef some of the functionality up a bit too with some dynamic php pages that control what appears on the right as well as giving you the reader the opportunity to pick your own style and type dimensions for how you want this page to look and read. Unfortunately my host is being very slow in installing all the right components on my server and therefore I wasn't able to implement them at this time. But I plan to just as soon as they get their act together.

Although this page checks out (most of the time) with a xhtml and css validator there are a few known and unknown errors that are being cleaned up by the help. There is a still a minor error that appears on IE 5.5 for Windows (it doesn't effect the design tho) and the positioning of the daily postings are aligned towards the bottom in IE 6 for Windows. Both of those I will be able to find a workaround to soon. Also of note is that in IE 5.5/6 for Windows the cool little dotted line separators appear as really ugly Frankenstien-like stitch work. Unfortunately, this is a bug of the browser and how it renders css and I can do nothing to right the wrong. These pages looked good (to me) in Mozilla and Netscape for Windows. And they look just damn swell on all the browsers I've checked on a Mac. The anti-aliasing with OSX compatible browsers makes me overjoyed.

Anyhoo, slight adjustments will be made over the next couple of days, so if you see anything that looks really out of whack please let me know. Otherwise enjoy.

November 09, 2002

capsized dancers make jennifer dark and raw
Why do we do this to ourselves? Knowing full well that Bjork's movie Dancer in the Dark was going to bury both the missis and me in a deep and dark funk-hole, one that we would need to hire an excavating crew to rescue us from, we nevertheless decided that after a nice meal out on the town that we would retire to the cosy crib and have a good cry. Hell, the week has been depressing enough with the amount of money and dignity lost on the elections, why not just keep it up? Pile it on - listen to Morissey and John Lee Hooker records. Get low.

Well Dancer in the Dark was even more than I bargained for. Holy-spending-christmas-alone, is that a sad movie. Damn good. But seriously sad. I couldn't even begin to predict how sad the movie was going to turn out. I'd be like, "oh this one bad thing is going to happen here", and then something would happen that was like 20 times worse than I had imagined. I don't know where Bjork found the inspiration for her galactic performance but frankly I don't want to know because it was probably something painfully horrible. How do you even recommend a movie like Dancer in the Dark? You really have to get ready to go to "that" place before watching this one. I wonder if Lars Von Trier will ever make a comedy? I remember I was dating this women who, how can I say this, tipped the scales of sensitivity, when Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves came out and she wouldn't speak to me for a week after we watched the movie. I think that film permanently broke her.

The daydreaming aspect of the movie was something I could relate to well. For me its been coming on stronger as I've increased my time behind the wheel again. As scary as that sounds, it's true. My head just goes to a whole different place when I'm driving. It's probably one of the reasons that I don't like to drive very much. I know that I am a terrible danger on the road.

Yesterday I was driving to work and I was busy reading all the signs and advertisements along Lyndale Avenue, when my eyes came upon a new billboard for the restaurant Chino-Latino that simply said, "Think Jennifer Lopez - Only Raw." Well shit, that was it. Game over. My head was lost until I found myself pulling into my parking place at work. I mean, I'm...still...puzzled! What the hell is that supposed to mean? It's so irreverent that it's a kissing cousin of stupid and misogyny. I spent a good amount of head time just imagining the agency sitting around the walnut table coming up with that line and the possible ideas that failed - "Think Anna Nicole Smith - Only Deep Fried" or "Think Kevin Bacon - Only Not as Bacon but Something More Like Tuna". What an odd world.

November 08, 2002

remembering Jay
A tribute site for Jam Master Jay has been launched.

cruising salon
I seem to be getting a bounty of emails about this wonderful Garrison Keillor article on Salon about Norm Colman's vapidness. As salon mentions, it's "premium content" but it's worth the price. In the article, Keillor calls Minnesota voters decision to go the Norm "one of those dumb low-rent mistakes". I love the sentiment and the line. Especially, "low-rent". What a stinging depression driven heart punch. Low-rent....hmmm...perfect. It reminded me of a similar, sometimes political writer, Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76: Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendevous." for Rolling Stone back in 1976.

Also, poking around Salon this morning, a fine article about Moby attempting to get people to boycott Butterball turkeys this holiday season. Which means Moby is probably talking about it on his own site...lets see here...ok, go here, and click on Moby journal, then "Rotterdamn - Humane".

November 07, 2002

it's a mac world baby
Apparently stoned out Apple switch girl Ellen Feiss has made it into the collective conscious enough to be featured in a FoxTrot cartoon. Pretty risky, cause if you don't know who she is then the joke doesn't make a lick of sense. Also switching it up on the ones and twos is, DJ Qbert. Qbert's ad features him cutting it up on a tiny Columbia portable record player. This guy switched to the dark side.

Chimera has released a new version (0.6) of their wonderful Mozilla powered browser for Macs. Web sites using CSS jump, dance and sing in this browser. Leave Microsoft and IE far behind and get on the Chimera train. Choo Choo. MacHints describes a useful piece of code for the broadband blessed with a continual elimination of your cache in the Chimera Preferences.

ipod lounge offers awesome pictures of people and their ipods representing globally. This Che Guevara one is my favorite.

royalty free photos of supermarkets
Veer gives up some really nice royalty free photos for you and yours to use on your next great big project. Royalty free, it's the only way to travel.

Also, I got hooked reading about old supermarket histories and the markets that no longer exist.

dave grohl is a N.E.R.D
What's the deal with Dave Grohl and the Neptunes? I can't drive five miles without hearing a song on the radio from one of these two artists. Man those guys must be getting P.A.I.D. Grohl has no less than four projects running around the billboard top 100 right now. You got the new foo fighters record, his drumming on the single for the amazing Queens of the Stone Age, you got your newly released Nirvana record and then you got all the old Nirvana songs that pepper the airwaves continuously. That's nutz. Then you got The Neptunes (a.k.a N.E.R.D), who besides getting some mediocre rotation for their N.E.R.D album have the production credits for just about every artist on the airwaves right now. The Justin Timberlack song with the sweet drum break in towards the end? That's the Neptunes. My favorite part of that song is when the sensitive Justin whispers something like, "Don't worry, I ain't going to hurt you baby, it's just me - Justin." That's classic. I also really like the "You know, I used to dream about this when I was a little boy..." bit too. That song got it all, including the call out "Now, everybody dance" commanded with about as much soul as Al Gore. The 'tunes are also responsible for the new Nelly song, the new No Doubt song, Mystikle, Jay-Z, N'SYNC, Ludacris, Busta Rhymes. Chances are, if your groovin' to it, then The Neptunes produced it. So It only makes sense that if I was some head commercial radio guy, it would be a forgone conclusion that the only logical step to secure the airwaves from anything new getting through would be to have The Neptunes and Dave Grohl just start writing songs together and only those songs would make it on to the radio. Radio entropy - it's only a matter of time.

November 06, 2002

in defeat...a victory.
Oh cruel country. Defeat is a horse pill to large to swallow this morning. Last night, when all the cards were shown, and our opponents arm swept across the table to pocket all the chips, it appears, we democrats were bluffing. And now, we've handed over the keys to our home AND our lake cabin to the great elephant. Painfully, we must live in the shit piles our giant guest will leave around our home.

So what does 2004 look like and how do we get there? Can we find a new breed of candidate? The old school democrats, our pasty white big names and family name successors, lost big yesterday. Mondale, Humphrey, both down in a blaze of glory. Will we settle for old names (H. Clinton or A. Gore) in 2004 or can we breath some new raw energy into this mess?

Can we organize better? Can we come correct with a clear and poignant message? Can the message have new ideas? New fashions? New hats?!? Can we start today? We've won with optimism before we need to stick with optimism today. You can be the record or you can be the DJ.

Technology laws and the lawmakers who support them.

November 05, 2002

glorious mac mods
Some great new Macintosh modifications floating around. Unfortunately, this guys ode the movie Brazil with a stunning modification of a Remmington typewriter hooked up to a 1988 Macintosh was so popular over the last couple of days, that his site has been closed by earthlink. But there are still some great one's out there. Like this Japanese styled Black IMac. Also on that same page if you let all the photos load you will see an amazing set up for converting 45 RPM records to mp3. Here are some great laptop mods. The same site offers the original kleenex cube. The japanese know how to do it right. The Hallie Mac is still my favorite. How could you not win a freelance project if you walked into your first meeting carrying one of these?

voting for Columbine and Jam Master Jay
Take the whole day off and go get your vote on. Shuck all that Republican intimidation, get to the polls early and help others get there too. The Packers won last night and I think that's a good sign for a "November Surprise" today.

Denver. I had no idea that Marilyn Manson was such an articulate gentleman. After watching his interview in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, I thought that guy should be on an election ticket. I bet he could debate the pants off people. Marilyn Manson for President in 2004! He really missed his calling. I think he'd be a much better politician than musician. The South Park cartoon, available for viewing here, will go down as a classic. Brilliant!

Salon has a nice tribute write up on Jam Master Jay.

November 04, 2002

crazy computers (p3p policies)
Web developers beware. I was all ready for a client launch today, when I began getting strange reports from the 5% of the client users who were using Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows. Apparently, some of the pages that we were serving for client A were not being loaded properly in the (naughty) frameset of client B due to the fact that IE6 was eradicating cookies due to insufficient privacy policy statements as needed by this newer version of IE. Everything worked solid in IE 5.5. The glitch as it turns out was the lack of a Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) file document served from our side of the fence. The work around is a headache but looks to be a worthwhile activity as it standardizes and automatically compares users preferences to that of the pages you are serving. The thinking here is that people don't read privacy statements anyway so just have them set a preference once that will check the privacy policy of any site the user is on and will then alert them when it's out of synch with their own prefernces. To pull this off you will need to get your very own p3p editor. Just what you've always wanted. This will generate an xml file and a reference file that you will need to save to your root directory and serve to all the good people of the world.

sign of the times
Catch up on the new sign language floating around the streets. The "Turntabalist" and "Tweeker" are good as is the traditional "bitch slap".

November 03, 2002

I have a swanky wedding coming up in New York in a couple of weeks and I have nothing to wear. Hee. No really. It's true. The gig is a black tie optional affair and sadly my closets lack the essential "Big Boy" clothes required by the codes that rule over occasions like these. My Plushy Puma track suit wont cut the cheddar and my elbow padded professorial corduroy digs don't make the grade neither. So it was that I set out today to right my fashion wrongs and add to my coffers the cool cut of a new suit. One that would make me the classiest of cats and the coolest of county men.

In a trek that spanned three vast corners of our ever expanding sprawl of a metropolis, I combed countless racks and enlisted the fancy help of the gentlemen crowd, to spin me a suit, cut form the finest silks in all the land. But the tailors were not please, "your body is misshapen and your proportions are not normal", or "we don't carry your size" or simply "you might want to try one of our other stores".

And so I did! But alas, the victory was not in the cards today. Nothing synched. A three button jacket fit just right but the pants were all wrong. The pants made my butt look like a firm peach, ready to be picked from the tree, but the jacket made me out to be an evil David Byrne impostor -- or worse...a David Spade impostor. Oh no you did-ent...Oh yes I did!

It was all an exhausting process that made me want to cry into the lapels of the nearest Prada parka. Angry conclusions were thrown about that basically, the worst fashion atrocity ever pushed on the gentleman crowd has to be the invention and proliferation of the pleated pant. What an abomination. What an ill-fitted construction on the holy proportions once laid out so clearly for all designers by the late great da Vinci. Who looks good in pleated pants? No one. They're awful. They make as if one has apples and large foreign currency floating around in ones pockets. Make them go away.

So my search continues. 44 long, three button jacket with pants that have no pleats. I will settle for nothing less. Stay close to this story as it develops...