2004-11-28 00:37 UTC Elation
I finally managed the City Slicking lesson. 0 damage in 109 seconds, 86%.
I finally managed the City Slicking lesson. 0 damage in 109 seconds, 86%.
Wired News has an article that discusses a hearing a US Senate committee held in which it was put forward that Internet pornography is more harmful than crack.
The part of the article that I think is particularly worth paying attention to is this paragraph, which comes after many paragraphs explaining how scientists were saying what a terrible addictive effect pornography had on people:
When Brownback asked the panelists for suggestions about what should be done, the responses were mild, considering their earlier indictment of pornography. Several suggested that federal money be allocated to fund brain-mapping studies into the physical effects of pornography.
Allow me to summarise the article.
I can't tell whether this is evidence that the scientists are right about it being addictive, or if it is actually harmless but they are experts at manipulating funding committees into paying them to watch porn.
I bought a new PlayStation 2 today. I had to, since as mentioned earlier, my old one died, and thus I had been cut off from San Andreas, which is clearly unacceptable.
It's the size of a DVD case. It's quite amazing.
I bought the PS2 with a bank card. This may not seem like a very significant point, but when you consider that I've been using only cash for about a year and six months, it takes on more importance. Yep, today I finally got a bank card from my bank, after two earlier attempts failed due to unspecified incompetence. I still don't have a credit card, but that will have to wait a bit longer. The lack of credit card forced me to pay for my DreamHost hosting by International Wire Transfer. Slight problems with that and the eagerness that DreamHost's automated billing scripts exhibited resulted in the downtime of whatwg.org, spreadfirefox.com, VoidWars, and another two dozen or so sites, and caused me to get bounced from the public SVG list just before some sort of flamewar errupted. Hint: If you're going to send last call comments on a spec, don't follow my example, send some actual technical comments. ☺
I also bought a DVD remote control for the PS2 and Munchkin Bites, the latest in the Munchkin line of card games.
And Kam bought a golden box. The fool.
Oslo switched to Winter Mode yesteday, going from autumn weather (cold with sunny skies and leaves everywhere) to winter weather (11cm of snow) between when I got to work and when I left for Salsa lessons. The snow apparently caught Sporveien (the bus company) off-guard, which rather surprised me. I mean, hello? This is Norway? It snows every winter? Still, I ran down to town and made it to the lesson at 20:00, just in time. Except apparently we start at 19:30 now. I guess I missed that announcement.
Two more weeks left of "Salsakurs I", then we break for the new year. I'm planning on continuing with Salsakurs II next year; I really enjoyed this course, much more than I had expected.
Today I sent last call comments on a couple of other specs: xml:id and Assigning Media Types to Binary Data in XML.
The former is something XML has needed for a while, I think. One more step along the way to being able to remove DTDs altogether from XML 2.0. I had quite a few comments on xml:id, given that it was such a small spec. In my experience, the XML Core group handle comments well, though, so I'm looking forward to their formal replies. (I sent them comments on XInclude back when that was in last call, and they took all of them into account, I was quite impressed.)
The second spec isn't on the Recommendation track, it's just going to become a Note. My comment was just a query regarding why one part of the spec is needed at all; I'm expecting their reply will be something like "well it isn't really but it would be convenient for some of the other work we're doing", which is probably quite reasonable. Since this spec isn't going to become a REC, I'm not too worried either way (I doubt I'll ever have to work with an implementation, for example).
I was also going to send last call comments on Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, but I couldn't understand the abstract, so I gave up.
In other news, my PlayStation 2 died. I will have to purchase a second unit. I hope they have those slim ones in stock in Oslo! I can't go without playing San Andreas for much longer!
Pingbacks: 1
Played Monopoly and, of course, lots of San Andreas.
Saw The Incredibles again. In fact a good dozen or so Opera people went to see it at the same time, it was quite amusing. Then we went to the pub for a while.
Went to an installasjonsfest organised by the OLUG people, and subscribed to their mailing list and joined their IRC channel.
Been spending most meals recently eating out with my parents, who are visiting for a week.
Am reading Quicksilver. (What is with Neal's sites using so much Flash!)
Am attending Salsa lessons. Great fun.
Responding to mail on the WHATWG list, and, in tandem, editing the WHATWG specs (which we're half-seriously collectively calling "HTML5"). Some interesting problems are coming up here, like how to handle headers when you nest the new section elements. Lots of discussion on the list about that one.
Still taking part in the SVG 1.2 Last Call comment threads. Last Call is your opportunity to help the SVG working group make the spec perfect. If you don't send your comments now, then you will have no right to complain if you don't like the spec later! This includes if you agree with comments people have already sent to the list — it isn't rude to send redundant comments, indeed when the CSS working group was going through CSS2.1 Last Call, we found it very useful to know which issues were issues that just one person was worried about, and which issues multiple people felt strongly about.
Generally, keeping busy.
Pingbacks: 1