Hotornot.com A dating service site that lets you post "hot" pictures so that visitors can rate them from 1 to 10. This is a good idea. A new twist on dating sites. And it's addictive. It could rope you in. Post a pic and see how you're rated by losers like me who have nothing better to do than to impose their warped sense of what's hot onto your fragile, attention-starved mind. Ever have a song stuck in your head that you can't get rid of? Remember 'bone fones' in the seventies? This is the next logical extension. Dental implants. Listen to the radio, make phone calls, surf the Net--from inside your mouth! What's next? Iris TV?
FREEWARE Link Sleuth 1.01 (180Kb). Check your site for broken links, on or off line. It generates an html report that displays all bad links. (Offline, all links to other sites show up as bad. But that's to be expected.) Works fast. Works well. Works too well. The first report I got had at least 200 bad links. And I thought I was doing such a good job too. Can't fool around here writing. Gotta lotta work to do fixing links.
cyberatlas. "A study of 1,649 online users, primarily from the United States and Finland, revealed that little things, such as misspellings, could be detrimental to a site's credibility. . ." Good info here concerning what makes a good site. It has a long list of items that people want to see from a website, and misspelling, although it's mentioned in the intro, doesn't seem to rank very highly. (I suspect that many people wouldn't know the difference.) The reason I surfed to this site in the first place was because of the blurb that promised info on misspelling, which ranks rather high with me. A site is very unprofessional if it has misspellings or bad grammar. But that doesn't turn me off to it, because I appreciate unprofessional sites--for what they are, whatever they are. I'll disregard most of what this article says. A site is good, to me if I like what it says. If I don't, then grammar, spelling, and other mistakes can become a big deal.
FREEWARE Wave Squeezer 1.0 For a while now I've been looking for a program that would convert wav files to mp3s without screwing up everything and causing my system to crash. This is it. Works perfectly and simply by dragging and dropping. And no registry entries. Now, in combination with Audacity and Musicmatch , I can edit and repair mp3 files, combine DLd samples into longer songs, fade in/fade out, cut out pops and scratches, adjust volume levels, apply filters and echo, in general cut and paste anything anywhere, and even record my own mp3s from vinyl or from scratch. I know there's probably one freeware program somewhere that will do it all, but I'm tired of looking for it.
MP3s Storm and Her Dirty Mouth "Stronger Than You" is a powerful piece of social criticism. DL it. You won't be sorry. Most of the other songs are samples, I think, except "Thank God," which I didn't find so interesting. But listen to the samples. There are some great lyrics among them. Listen to "Crazy Love" especially. Hot. I've been looking for a while now for the lyrics for Chris Isaac's song "Wicked Games." I wanted to know what the singers were singing almost inaudibly in the background. Usually, after listening to a song over and over several hundred or thousand times, very slowly I'll interpret the lyrics, word by word. But this one has eluded me. Finally, I found the lyrics at NuneWorld: "That little girl will only break your heart." It's so obvious after you know what it is. Another mystery solved.
Stop Internet Plagarism A resource page and action center by Phenomenal Women of the Web. State's Rights v. The Feds SC Gov Hodges says he'll send state troopers to the border to block plutonium shipments from Colorado. FREEWARE Nonags A great freeware site. Lots and lots of DLs, very well organized and easy to find. FREEWARE e-book 2.2.0.5 An e-book reader that's supposed to be "well-behaved." (We'll see.) And a few e-book DLs. Pretty cool. I'm trying to think of a use for it. It reads .rtf and .doc files (and probably others. I haven't checked it out fully yet) and it's customizable re backgrounds, text color, etc. etc. Very versatile. FREEWARE Blog 6.0 Beta 2 Upgrade of Blog 5.0 (see which). Read the notes (Jun 10 & 11) before deciding if you want this version. Maybe you want to go with v 5.0
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything Confused by the jargon of postmodernism? Read this, a clever piece of writing by a clever techie. It separates the smoke and mirrors from reality--although, I have to admit that I kind of like the practices he debunks. I like to use postmodernism as a metaphor for the illusion (a la Zen) of the world. In postmodern studies (if that is not a contradiction in terms), mankind has achieved a state whereby formalized procedure mimics the fog of a post-probability world, where structural elements of 'language' [any symbol system; not necessarily restricted to words] cannot be exactly determined, a concept akin to the idea that the position and velocity of a sub-atomic particle cannot both be determined at the same time. We live in a post-literary world which is not unlike an electron cloud. [The science may be a bit bad here; I'm being metaphorical.] We can no longer be so literal (read 'naive') as we once were. This is a new millennium. We must leave the past behind. If the term postliteralism has not yet been coined, I hereby claim it, applying it as a tag to the mess developing out of the postmodern dialectic taken as whole. I'm arriving at a point here where I realize that I don't really know what I'm talking about. And this is a good thing! This is why I do it this stuff (write, and think) in the first place. You've got to short-circuit the rational brain if you want to glimpse the real truth of nature (or is that the nature of truth?) This is the whole point: Everything is everything else, in another form. If you don't know this, how can you ever hope to arrive at a true definition of identity? There is no separation, at the core of being. Any science (or literary study) that pretends that there is, even in the name of creating convenience of simplicity for the purpose of elucidation, is not only being deceptive, it is just plain wrong. Life, and the universe that supports it, is so complex that we can never actually understand it. You can't get there from here. You have to be here already. Then, you find that you really have nowhere else to go.
urlizer ---------- tinyurl ---------- makeshorterlink These sites are a good idea. They make long URLs short. I tried it with my URL. "https://jaijack.tripod.com/jai/A__frame.html" became "http://tinyurl.com/buc". Pretty cool. But then I got to thinking: Why bother? It'd be great if you wanted to link to a site with one of those long, long, URLs filled with lots of letters, numbers, and symbols, but... And it'd be great to have a short URL anyway, but not if it replaces my identity (jaijack) with a standard non-descript "tinyurl." [If it was "http://tinypenis.com" or something like that, it'd be a whole different thing. (Talk about making long URLs short.)] I guess if I really wanted a descriptive URL I could always pay for one. I used to own jaijackson.com, but I let it expire. Why pay for it when you get something almost as good for free?
Blogging as Publishing - "...this [class at Berkeley on blogging as journalism] is going to be the Altamont of the blogging movement," (Sean Kirby on the Daily Pundit blog). He's writing about how blogging is being taught as a valid form of journalism. "He added in an e-mail, 'Teaching of blogging in journalism school signals an end of an era, a movement from blogging being separate from the old media, to it being appropriated by the media establishment.' " [article at HotWired]. It's not journalism... Well, maybe it's a kind of journalism, reporting on the Internet on the state and content of the Internet. Is what I'm doing now journalism? I don't really think so, but I'd like to pretend it is. Okay, so I will. I'm reporting, but I'm too much caught up in personal opinion and not at all objective. But then, now that I think about it, the mainstream media is the same way these days. If Bill O'Reilly is a journalist, then bloggers are too. O'Reilly is a mainstream media blogger. He pretends to be objective, and he researches his subjects off the top of his head, like bloggers do. (To be fair, he probably has a large professional staff to do his research for him, on subjects off the top of O'Reilly's head. He's a professional by proxy, and a blogger at heart.) Yeah, the mainstream media has already taken over blogging. They just call it something else. In fact, all bloggers are doing is imitating what's been going on for years in the mainstream media. [Update] Read This First This is hilarious. Installation instructions for people who appreciate wit and parody. John Coltrane Music for cool cats. Full-length streaming audio and one of the best-done flash intros I've seen. MP3s Lots of DLs here . I DLd "Desafinado" by Kevin Fanning. [I'll get some bio notes and add them here later.] Good stuff, precisely because it's not so professional as a studio production--and yet, it sounds nice. I'm really starting to get into "non-professional" recordings and writings. I've been into them in theory for a long time, but now I'm getting into them in practice. Professionalism may not be dying, but it's less and less accepted by the masses, and more and more restricted to "academic," mainstream practitioners. Postmodernism rules (real postmodernism, not the stuff that MTV, Hollywood, and the academics try to pass off as pm, which is a lot of superficial tripe. But isn't that the whole point of pm? Superficiality? No. That's only a very small part of it). Have you noticed how the mainstream pundits are increasingly trying to defend their domain. They're worried. It's a sure sign that an alternative practice is having an impact when the mainstream practitioners begin to circle the wagons.
Cross-browser CSS reference resource I've been to this site and used this chart a number of times, but it's only now dawning on me while looking at this chart again that to continue to try to code for old Netscape browsers is just plain foolishness. Opera, IE5, and N6 are all mostly standardized. And free. I don't care how many people are using N4.7. (I've seen figures ranging from 1 to 5%.) It's not worth all the extra time trying to make my site look good in it. If surfers have to deal with non-compliant code on my site, okay, that's my fault, but if my site looks bad because they're using an outdated browser that wasn't good even when it was new, then that's their problem. |
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