thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Not to be totally ripping off Evan, but Googlism has some tasty nuggets about me, too:

• moira is my puppy
• moira is the newest and most efficient of any available synthetic materials featuring a unique weave and construction
• moira is a system developed and deployed at mit
• moira is an alternate spelling for moera
• moira is also historic for being the site for the bloodiest battle in early irish history
• moira is on the road with work
• moira is constantly tempted to take whatever happiness she can have with addis
• moira is sexually attracted to
• moira is in a box seat
• moira is a three
• moira is the gut physical attraction between two larger than life souls
• moira is the daughter of two irish immigrants who run a successful pub in boston
• moira is always on time
• moira is dedicated to her art above all else
• moira is 14 years old and just started dancing in july of last year
• moira is quite an oddball for an irish wolfhound
• moira is used to living in some style
• moira is that boys r icky
• moira is running quickly
• moira is a real person who just happens to act for a living
• moira is less dependent on her medications

A female friend describing Amelie: "Yeah, she's beautiful. If I were gay I'd be all, like, boink."

My life is a brat pack movie. You know that scene where Eric Stoltz is confiding to tomboy Mary Stuart Masterson his love for the popular Lea Thompson, completely oblivious to the fact that beneath her tough shell Masterson completely digs him and is rather sensitive to his probes for advice? Yeah, that was my Saturday night.

For those of you with your heads under a blogging rock all weekend (or at least ensconced in snipers and senators), Blogger was hacked on Friday. Someone exploited a Linux networking flaw and changed users' publishing passwords to "hacx0redbyme". Thus, for about an hour on Friday morning, if you knew someone's Blogger username, you could post to his or her site using that password. The Blogger engineers (all one or two of them) quickly brought the servers down, repaired the problem, and apologized. While it turns out people's server usernames and passwords were never in jeopardy, the fear and anger caused by the hack led to some furious discussions, such as the one at Anil Dash.

Much more interesting to me than the hack itself is the articulate and passionate debate at Anil's site by various well-knowns in the blogging community. In particular, Evan Williams, Blogger's C.E.O., defended his product thoughtfully and concisely, even, given the tremendous pressure he must have been feeling. With dozens of Blogger users questioning and complaining, he explained the problem and later even laughed at his own "publicity stunt." Jason Kottke and Dave Winer, both technocenti themselves, made fervent arguments against Blogger and its engineers' seeming shoddiness at security, given the software's popularity with the lemur-like masses who trust their passwords in a centralized server. Their contributions were less cogent than Evan's because their anger clearly overpowered their argument. The entire debate was a litany of fucks ("fuck cool new features, how about some security," "most third-party weblog setups are fuct," "we fucked up."), but I think Blogger will still come out ahead, for its leader's competence and rationality in a time of crisis. Anil also deserves praise for diligent and intelligent moderation throughout.

Ken doll clothing for sale at Ebay: "Pants are slightly stained." The seller privately admitted it was from Barbie dreams.

Alan on Andy: "The boy's from Wyoming. We can't expect him to be totally cool."

Leftovers that are wrapped too cutely to eat:

At the party prior to the G. Love concert last night, Karren had a little trouble with the chorus to Cold Beverages. For you G. Love neophytes in the crowd, the refrain is a funky repeated "I like cold beverages." She, with a little help from the inebriated wordsmiths in the room, decided the chorus was actually "I like porn better than jail." Needless to say, we sang our revised version at the concert.

Portland Community College should know better than to establish community-ed classrooms a block from the indie movie theatre. Deciding that our dinner at Elephants was enough French for one evening, Karren and I opted to be bad. We saw a naughty movie. Secretary proves that typos, a worm, and a red sharpie can be smolderingly sexy.

Igby Goes Down is Catcher in the Rye without the smarmy pretention. Yes, New Yorkers are phony, but Igby doesn't bore the audience repeating that opinion. Instead, he galivants between parties in the Hamptons, dingy diners, and the apartment of a kept woman who never wears pants. We live vicariously in his world of pocketed Vicodin, boozy sex, performance artists' lofts, and misplaced military school hazing. Susan Sarandon and (the surprisingly un-neurotic) Jeff Goldblum pull off old money with depth, and Bill Pullman's cameo schitzophrenic is haunting. Claire Danes does her usual puckered-shaky-chin-in-lieu-of-real-dramatic-acting thing. An intelligent movie; Aaron Sorkin might've composed something equal on a good shroom trip in college. Nic Harcourt, of Sounds Eclectic fame, interweaves a thoughtful soundtrack, managing to include Coldplay without being hackneyed, even in a "I'm walking through the park and reevaluating my life choices" scene. Best movie I've seen since Amelie.

I was invited to a theme party this weekend. Excerpt from the invitation:

YAY, it's a THEME PARTY!!!!
*******
We've decided after many closed meetings and hushed, tense conversations, that the theme of the party will be: "ALCOHOL." So be sure to wear "NORMAL CLOTHES," act like your favourite "PERSON, MAYBE SLIGHTLY TOASTED," and bring some "ALCOHOL," perhaps also some "ALCOHOL." We'll decorate the house like "NORMAL," and there will be lots of "NORMAL THINGS" to do, as well as some "ALCOHOL." So come on over and cheer on your favourite "PERSON, MAYBE SLIGHTLY TOASTED."

Here are the names of five celebrities. It's up to you to figure out their significance.

• Matt Damon
• Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
• Jake Gyllenhall
• Robert Downey Jr., sober and witty like on Ally McBeal
• Anthony Rapp
• Ewan McGregor (think Velvet Goldmine and try to forget Star Wars)
• John Mayer

There's a massive catharsis of unhipness going on over at Dooce today. Samples from Heather and various others:

• I don't have to spell-check Christina Aguilera's name
• I've never missed an episode of Dawson's Creek
• I totally downloaded that Michael Jackson song from Free Willy
• I dress my basset hound like Batman for Halloween
• I've been to a Star Trek convention. With my family.

My contribution?

• I read pages from my Dilbert calendar to my coworkers
• I watch The Wiz and Fame several times a year

Picket sign discarded on a Burnside streetcorner this morning:

Tonya also believed in preemptive strikes

I held an autographed copy of Dave Eggers's new book today. Drooled a little on the cover, where the first paragraph is ingrained. I also slathered over Zadie Smith's new book, The Autograph Man, for which I'm on the waiting list at the public library. Powell's has learned to bring out the mops when I make my Sunday pilgrimage. I found out that Zadie will be speaking at the Portland City Arts and Lectures series in November. So, my goal for the next few days is to convince one of my friends that he or she should spend the $23 to listen to the lecture. I actually don't think I'll have a lot of trouble.

Collapsing some old server boxes at work today, I unearthed a trove of pink styrofoam. Scattered around my work area were the following items: (a) four silver milagro charms, (b) a rubber aligator from New Orleans, and (c) a snippet of junk mail with a man in a tutu. So I made a shrine.

Speaking of the word "aberrant," Dictionary.com has the following usage note:

Traditionally aberrant has been pronounced with stress on the second syllable. In recent years, however, a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable has become equally common and may eventually supplant the older pronunciation. This change is owing perhaps to the influence of the words aberration and aberrated, which are stressed on the first syllable. The Usage Panel was divided almost evenly on the subject: 45 percent preferred the older pronunciation and 50 percent preferred the newer one. The remaining 5 percent of the Panelists said they use both pronunciations.

Who knew they had panels for these sorts of things?  Steve probably knew.

Great article at A List Apart this week -- how to tame those gnarly lists with CSS, something I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks. Many elements, such as nav bars and breadcrumbs, should be marked up as lists, but rarely are, because of the bullets, vertical alignment, and pesky indentation issues traditionally associated with lists. Between ALA and the css-discuss list, I'm finding there are people devoted to investigating every CSS nuance, and doing so with a smile. Special props to list chaperone Eric A. Meyer who has made sure that newbies and veterans alike get their questions answered sufficiently.

Now that I've spent months properly marking up my future redesign of this site, I'm beginning to wonder if I should scrap it all and move to a database-driven model. I'm sick of retyping content (such as book lists and reviews) every time I redesign. But there's the old tradeoff between ease of maintenance and download speed of simple, static pages. Blogger has made it wickedly fast to post content to this site, and I've gone to the trouble to create separate blogs for books and music (buggy previews here and here). But now my content is trapped in that database, over which I have limited control. For example, I have no idea how I'd do a global search and replace for a URL in my two-year-old blog. Perhaps I need to investigate the Blogger API more thoroughly, or roll my own with MySQL and PHP. If you're a visiting web smartypants and have some suggestions for me, please do send them my way.