Category: Personal

Dear President (______): Appropriate for Halloween, the government economics of the next few years are scary no matter which candidate wins.

Unable to connect on passes through the midfield most of the night, the Earthquakes playoff run ended tonight with a 3-0 loss at Kansas City; San Jose lost the home and home round by a 3-2 aggregate score. Sad result for us fans, still not knowing who will control the franchise next season or if it will even continue in the South Bay. Almost certainly this was Landon Donovan’s last game wearing our shirt as Bayern Leverkusen, the German club that owns his rights (and has loaned him to MLS the last three years), needs his proven ability to control the ball to push them into the top four in the Bundesliga and possibly Champions League as well.

Referee Terry Vaughn made a number of questionable calls. Not the least of which was the non-issuance of a yellow card to Wizard midfielder Kerry Zavagnin in the 42nd minute that so outraged Donovan that our star screamed enough at Vaughn to get himself shown the yellow instead. All Zavagnin, LD’s USA teammate, did was nearly rip his jersey off to prevent him from getting free in the offensive zone.

In the end I go back to bad passing as the core reason for the loss. All night the ball was not hit properly–I’m talking to you Richard Mulrooney, Brian Mullan, Ramiro Corrales and Todd Dunivant–allowing the Kansas City players to disrupt nearly every forward move. Their three goals were mostly the fair reward to well-struck balls though the second was a gift from bad defending by Brian Ching.

Next year? One can only wonder about the fate of our Quakes.

Go to Guerrilla News Network and watch Eminem’s new video Mosh. Doesn’t matter if you are into rap or not, this is one of those songs that cuts across simplistic labels. The lyrics are clear and clean, the nusic is a basic beat and pulsing synth, and the message is straightforward: Bush must go. I really am beginning to wonder if get out the vote actions like this video, Rock the Vote and Puff Daddy’s Vote or Die will get out a substantial number of younger voters, exactly the people who don’t get counted in all those polls quoted in the news every day and probably more than enough to push the election to John Kerry. Take heart! [via Adam Rifkin’s Relax]

Once again Joe responded to my CSS issues–what a helpful, friendly guy–and gave me the push needed to find a useful answer to displaying a positive link to this website in the RSS feed. I did use the display: none CSS trick but in line with the daily Date headings, which do get picked up properly. Nice.

Just sending some love to my wonderful TS1 on the third anniversary of the first night we went out together. Boing boing boing, Baby V! Got to say thanks to my old NetD buddy Joel Henderson because if he hadn’t invited me up for a little Halloween Peanuts viewing I’d probaly never have met her. We went for dinner at Cha Cha Cha’s in The Haight early, a little stroll in the drizzle under a shared umbrella and then over to Joel’s apartment where we sat on the couch and held hands. To commemorate the day, she gave me a really lovely handmade photobook with some highlights of our time together.

When Joe helped me debug the CSS issue over at JHTC, he also mentioned “BTW — when one visits an individual post on your site, you have no navigation to your main page — the user has to literally edit the location to navigate — poor usability.” And he’s right. Uggh.

So I’ve been working this afternoon on correcting Joe’s heads up about the individual posts here and almost had the answer using a simple template fix until I found out that Blogger insists on sticking a trailing slash on whatever value one enters in the Archive URL field of the Archive Settings page. Which breaks my scheme.

I next thought I would use a CSS trick with <a class=”x” href=”http://www.blogger.com/app/full blown link”>text</a> where the class is simply display: none and URL is the one you would get as the item’s permalink on my page. That hides the text on the public web page as intended. But doesn’t help the RSS feed since, seemingly, Blogger only includes the text from the post body in the RSS item despite this extra template text falling inside the RSS div. Still no luck, sad to say.

Switched the feed from RSS 2.0 to Atom 0.3. Not sure why I thought this would help but seemed, somehow, that it would. No luck at all.

I guess this is a limitation of Blogger, at least as it exists now. Me and my zillion-plus readers will have to suffer.

Due to issues with Blogger, I’m repeating my endorsement of John Kerry to participate in Lessig and Winer’s Presidential Enblogments 2004. Every day more information comes out that strengthens my belief that a second Bush term would be disastrous for America.

Added a few more scanned in photos to the Family2 gallery: my Grandma Weiner, Dad with his antlers, Mom, Michael and Dad, and one of the few (maybe the only?) surviving photos from my Bar Mitzvah party.

You know, sometimes, even when the trailer gives up a key moment of the movie or episode, if the creatives do their jobs right the punch is still delivered.

Garret: Quack-quack, Mr Bush.

Not every movie is made so that people can sit in their seats and get 90 minutes of mindless enjoyment. Not that mindless enjoyment is a bad thing, just not what some people want every time. 21 Grams is not mindless entertainment, not even close.

The three leads–Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro–do outstanding work as do several of the supporting cast (Melissa Leo, Eddie Marsan). The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto does some great things with light and contrast. The underlying concept, connecting three people who have no obvious connections, is smart.

But what really takes this movie out of the ordinary and out of the mainstream is the almost random sequencing. I was completely confused until about half way in because director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was determined to strain the limits of comprehension. This will turn many people off but in the end leaving early will be their loss. To me the sequence is logical if you consider the emotional development instead of just plot.

recommended

Much appreciation to the proprietor of jenett.radio for his help with my little CSS problem.

Props to Landon Donovan! He’s been nominated for the Honda Player of the Year Award for the third straight year. DaMarcus Beasley and Carlos Bocanegra are the other two nominees and one wonders if one of them will knock Landon off his two year hold–he’s the only player to win this twice in a row so a threepeat would set a great precedent.

I’m too biased to give a real prediction but I will say Bocanegra is playing 90 minutes consistently for Fullham in the English Premier League while Beasley is mainly coming on as a second half sub for Dutch Eredivise frontrunners PSV Eindhoven. Both of the challengers are US National Team starters as well but Donovan is once again leading the American side with five goals so far this year.

My heart says Donovan is too easy for the voters, the sentimental choice will be to give him the hat trick before he leaves for Germany. Beasley, Bocanegra or perhaps someone else can drive the car home in 2005.

Hell is a half hour to kill and MetaFilter returning a Could not connect to JRun Server error instead of the latest links and comments.

I recently started using Firefox. Now that I have I can see that the Jewish High Tech Community website that I built doesn’t display properly and doesn’t validate (honestly, I didn’t check this out when it came out fine in IE, mea culpa). I could use some help, if you care to take a look.

Some details:

• If I leave out the doctype declaration, everything looks good in IE; if I include it, strict or transitional, IE displays the same bad stuff as Firefox.
• The CSS validator gives me hassles for the use of a width attribute.

Uggh!

Sweet. Really sweet. Taking full advantage of the odd MLS first round playoff structure giving the lesser team of the pair the home game first, San Jose came out running and ran the entire 90. Dwayne Derosario opened in the 40th minute with a beautiful drive dribbling the ball the length of the offensive half and then lofting a hard angled ball over two defenders and keeper Bo Oshiniyi; our other score came from a long corner Jeff Agoos that landed on Craig Waibel’s leg before going past an out of position Oshiniyi.

Though thanks go to ESPN for giving this match a national showing, I was thoroughly sick of announcer Rob Stone’s constant mention that “this might just be Landon Donovan’s last game at Spartan Stadium.” He’s right to the extent that even if the Quakes win the series with KC that they wouldn’t have a chance for hosting the second round matchup against Colorado or Los Angeles (Colorado won the opener in that series 1-0). Will LD be called over to play for the German team that owns his contract rights, Bayern Leverkusen? No one knows because no one who could know is talking. Uggh.

Speaking of the poor playoff round setup: three of the four opening games were won by the lower ranking home clubs. New England and San Jose, two teams that squeezed into the post-season with the results of the last regular season match, both beat teams that finished the season with long undefeated streaks and there were no draws. So where is the reward for doing well? Mark it down as another change MLS needs to make to get in synch with the world game.

Meanwhile, props to the Earthquakes for winning when they had to, and not dropping back into a defensive block after the first goal. Because they kept on for the second score, next Saturday’s game in Kansas City will see all the pressure on Western Conference champion Wizards. Three rings for Landon would see him off well.

Boy was this Ashlee Simpson screwup last night on SNL fun to watch.

Who would have thought that even the Santa Clara County Democratic Party would have a blog (and an official blogger)!

In homage to Pam’s Pumpkin Stew (also known as Carbonada en Zapallo), I’m making this Atkins-provided Lamb and Vegetable Stew tonight. After the eating, I will note that the recipe could benefit from the addition of a bit more seasoning and also that I only used 1.5 pounds of meat.

Props to Dawn for a month without the ‘rettes!