Rich Editing in BlogThis!

With Rich Editing in BlogThis!, Google has taken a good step towards the slicker editing UIs recently available from WordPress (in 2.0) and MovableType, and longer from the various third party blog writing apps like Ecto and w.bloggar.

The one significant criticism I have is that the text field opens with the underlying page hyperlinked in it but any text one types (before or after it) is included in the hyperlinked text. The cursor should absolutely be outside the hyperlinked page title. A second problem is that sometimes the edit field appears to lose its place and I need to use the mouse to click somewhere to get back to work.

Overall, nice job Blogger team! Now where are those categories, trackbacks, and export and import 😉

Placing the Day

[Continuing my New Year’s Day tradition (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)…]

Where did the past turn to reach today?
The rain taps an erratic drumbeat on the balcony
Blocking tendrils of answers held deep inside
Losing track on once-bright deadened paths

Sound bites on your ear
Epidemiology
Rash silver black rust

Singer asks the bus driver “Where does this bus stop?”
Bus driver says “Man, we ain’t going there.
No routes today, no maps, no passes, no blues.
You got to get off on getting on, you dig?”
“I got your message, amigo, bright and blue.”

Use the leap second
Fatten your ravening beast
Getting things done right

Where will you twist on the green plastic?
Out in the sharp vastness of the Icy Cold
The precision cannot be passed along though
The father uses the edge of his strength,
Substituting the illusion of the real
For a frail reality waiting on the horizon.

2006: The year in sports

Here’re my audacious prognostications for 2006, drafted for SportsFilter (explaining some of the inexplicable comments), in some sequencesemblance of occurence:

USC will beat Texas, though by less than 10 points, and Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart and Vince Young will all be taken within the first six or eight picks of the April draft.

Chicago will shock Seattle but lose the Super Bowl, but Indy will not be the AFC team.

USA will surprise with its medal count but not come close in hockey where one of the Eastern European squads not named Russia will gold.

Cuba will play in the WBC and beat the US on the field. This will not be the championshp game, though, and I’m not predicting the winner.

Chelsea will run the EPL again, Liverpool and ManU will be in a dogfight for second and Arsenal will struggle but ultimately take the last CL slot. Kaka2002 will make a late run to win our fantasy league; StarFucker will climb out of the basement but never reach higher than 15th.

Barcelona will win La Liga and Champions League, beating one of the English sides in the Final. I will repeat as fantasy champion.

Some team will win the NHL; I’ll go out on a limb and say Rangers will surprise everyone, suffering the least after-effects of the Olympic tournament.

Pistons will stay healthy, finish the regular season with less than 10 losses and win the Finals in six games.

Italy will make a surprise run to the title match of the World Cup but lose out to a team that is not named Brazil, USA or Germany.

Yankees will justify the huge payroll and win the World Series. Bonds will be healthy and come close to 715 despite breaking (or coming close to breaking) his own walks in a season mark. Most comments on SpoFi will denigrate the accomplishments of both the Yankees and Bonds. Goddam will win the fantasy league and in a continuing run of luck will be hired by the NY Times to do graphics for the sports section of the website.

MLS, playing through the World Cup weeks, will end up losing several star players to injury in August and September. FC Dallas will break through and win the MLS Cup. The entire executive suite at AEG will vanish in a mystery that is never explained during the May board meeting.

USC and Texas, despite losing many players to graduation, will both rank in the pre-season Top 10 but LSU, mainly on the basis of destroying Miami yesterday, will start at #1. They will not go wire to wire but may still get to the BCS title bowl.

Poker as a popular sport will implode when scandals hit in both the real and virtual tournament worlds.

Books: Manna

One science fiction book I remembered fondly from years ago, but haven’t seen in stores for some time, is Lee Correy’s 1983 novel Manna. The reason the book had such an effect on me is that Stine posed the core conflict, set in 2050, as between the centuries-old Western financial community, mired in pre-industrial scarcity thinking, and a mythical East African country called the United Mitanni Commonwealth, lead by a group who realized that technology (including exploitation of space resources) meant there was no longer a reason for traditional economic competition.

Founded at the turn of the Millenium, the Commonwealth is organized as a libertarian wet dream where the state has about the lightest touch on life one might imagine. Citizens carry a dagger on their hip for personal protection and serve in the citizen’s reserve, business leaders make decisions that the armed forces carry out and accept a new leader when push comes to shove on the word of one of them.

Those financiers have had about enough guff from the upstarts and initiate a series of events which should wind up with the old order restored. Besides theit own people and resources, the Commonwealth has a wildcard in the form of new citizen Sandy Baldwin. Coincidentally arriving to interview for a job as a spaceship pilot at the same time as the founder’s grandson is returning from a failed diplomatic conference, the disaffected former US Aeroforce captain is able to stop an assassination attempt and winds up invited to the family compound. Where the next, even bigger assault takes place though again without serious casualties. Baldwin is immediately a part of the ruling clique by his actions.

The story isn’t told as boldly as its underlying premise; Baldwin especially, too easily predicts the next action and frankly decisions are made too easily by the UMC leadership. Stine has his point of view and the plot and characters are just costumed automatons on which he can drape it. The writing’s okay but no better and Baldwin is the bastard child of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. Still, at around 225 pages, Manna isn’t bloated like more recent novels and worth the time to read.

Note: Lee Correy was the pen name used by the late G. Harry Stine for his fiction.

recommended

Books: No Way to Treat a First Lady

Christopher Buckley writes intelligent, funny books and No Way to Treat a First Lady is no exception. Imagine if Bill Clinton had died one night in the White House under mysterious circumstances, after an intimate conference with the lovely wife of a major contributor in the Lincoln Bedroom and returning to sleep next to Hillary. Plenty oof complications and the mock-Ms. Clinton engages the nation’s leading, sleaziest criminal defense attorney who just happens to be the man she dumped to marry the future President. One pleasure in reading this is that the more aware you are of American politics the more you get out of this.

recommended

761 minutes

Well, all sports streaks eventually end and the Reds’ EPL shutout streak is no exception. Congratulations to Pepe Reina, Jamie Carragher, Sammy Hyppia and the changing assortment of fullbacks and holding midfielders who kept the ball out of our net for nearly 12 1/2 hours of English football. Despite allowing crosstown rivals Everton to score in the 42nd minute of today’s match, Liverpool did continue the more important streak and won for the ninth straight time, 3-1, on goals from Peter Crouch (check out this great photo of Crouch taking keeper Nigel Martyn completely out of his shoes to score), Stevie G and Djibrille Cisse (who did get the start I was hoping for).

Balls

Dawn asked for a recipe involving balls of some type for her upcoming carnival. I haven’t done much cooking lately, TS1 claims she gets too much pleasure from doing for me and I’m willing to believe her ;), but here’s something veggie I do enjoy: Spaghetti and Mock Meatballs.

Get yourself some good quality straight pasta, preferably made without ‘enriched’ flour and chemicals, and cook per instructions and have some of your favorite marinara sauce on hand. You’ll also need some garlic (one clove per eater) and whole brown or white mushrooms. You can make the meatballs from a recipe like this one from the Healthy Living Supper Club or buy a pack of Trader Joe’s Meatless Meatballs. Get out a pan big enough to hold the meatballs and mushrooms. Here’s the final prep:

  • slice the fresh mushrooms, thin or quartered as you prefer
  • mince garlic
  • warm three tablespoons of olive oil in your pan
  • add in garlic, sautee for a couple of minutes until they’re soft and translucent
  • add mushrooms and stir to coat, cook through for five minutes
  • add in sauce, stir for two minutes
  • add in meatballs to warm
  • toss in pasta, stir to coat and serve

Enjoy!

New feature: Last 5

If you look over in the sidebar (if you’re reading this from the RSS feed, click through to the real page) you can see that both bill:politics and bill:moviereviews have Last 5 links. Clicking opens up a block on the main page containing titles of the five latest entries in that blog and, just to keep things tidy, clicking the other Last 5 with one already open simply replaces rather than adding. Of course you need to allow JavaScript for this to work…

Eight on the trot

One of the things I enjoy about watching English Premier League matches is the different jargon and language usage from over here. Phrases like on the trot and treating a club as plural. Another is seeing my beloved Liverpool win, which they did today, and not only was it their eighth straight league win but also the eighth without allowing the other team to score. Adding to the holiday joy of the Reds’ 250th EPL victory was our defenders’ total frustration of Michael Owen on his first visit to Anfield since joining Newcastle in August, not allowing Alan Shearer his 200th club goal and the continued improvement of Peter Crouch as the front man. Next up is the away derby to staggering Everton, in which I hope Rafa Benitez gives Djibrille Cisse a start over Fernando Morientes and/or Florent Sinema-Pongolle over Luis Garcia.

Holiday Cheers

I brought these gifts for you
They’re up in my bum
Bum bum.

  — Peter Griffin, Family Guy, Xmas 2005

Double Feature Finder, so you can find an enjoyable way to extend your movie going dollars. Handy.

President Bush Addressing a Group of Vets – cartoon by Mr Fish

Generate your own laughs with Carl Tashian’s Lost in Translation. Been around for awhile but can still tickle.

Deidre’s Year in Brief, for the list of purchased music.

RawSugar: fun, holiday, RubyOnRails.

RadRails 0.5.2 0.5.2.1 is out. Gets better with each release.

You are going to tell me what I want to know. It’s just a question of how much you want it to hurt.

  –Jack Bauer, 24: Day 5

kritX review aggregator

I added Bill’s Movie Reviews to the new kritX review aggregator, will be interesting to see if any traffic flows from it. To do it I had to add a custom field (I used Jonathon’s RhymedCode Custom Field GUI to add a Ratings field) and use the hReview microformat in the WordPress template, which wasn’t too hard except that the instructions for getting custom fields is weird. Since I don’t want to show this extra info, I used CSS to set their display attribute to none. Very clever, I know. I tried out the new Structured Blogging plugin but it’s not what I need, too heavy and to hard to control the output. I wonder if any other crews are scanning for hReview formatted material…

Buzzingo = Yahoo’s Buzz Index + Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky”

Guy is like on fire or something. Working full time for RawSugar is not enough for Mr. Ambition, no, so yesterday he whipped up Buzzingo, Your daily buzz dosage. A web 2.0 mashup of the Yahoo! Buzz index, web search and Google Images. You can also see the list for music, movies, sports, games TV and what’s moving up. It was written with Ruby On Rails and the Yahoo! API, “which proved sooo much easier to use than Google’s API.” Befriending Guy has been one of the major perks of working where I do.

My dotcom predictions for 2006

[via] Last year I made several predctions that now seem ridiculously sleazy. But a few ideas were pretty close. I’ve got a feeling that 2006 will be a big year, and here are some of the reasons why:

  1. A Mt View startup is going to open our eyes to some new ways that Ruby on Rails can influence culture. Analog SF will pick up on this and run several cover stories on the founders.
  2. Larry Ellison will be in the spotlight for his decision to support CSS. This will upset Adam Kalsey, and the blogosphere will react baldly. The noise will quiet before the end of the year and it will all be forgotten soon after the shock.
  3. Excite@Home will see their stock skyrocket after their eyeballs business starts taking off. We’ve seen it coming for a while now, but 2006 will be the year it really kicks into gear.
  4. Either eBay or Chemdex will seek to expand their mashup business by acquiring RawSugar. NetDynamics will be overlooked in the process, and they will see a management shakeout later in the year.
  5. One of the big leaders in the Newspaper industry will wake up to the opportunity in the Internet and the Web 2.0 trends. After months of speculation, they will make a key acquisition that will shake up the landscape for years to come.

Note: I clearly misunderstood the intended use of some of the fields in Mike’s post generator.

Performancing for Firefox

I used Jed Brown‘s Performancing for Firefox to write the last post and have to say that it doesn’t suck. There was another reason for me to update Firefox to 1.5 so I got over my fears of extension incompatibility and did it. Thanks to MR Tech’s Local Install extension’s ability to force plugins (or Firefox, not sure which) to ignore the max compatible version ‘feature’ I still have everything I need. Very cool tool, Performancing connected to Blogger and WordPress with no errors which I cannot say about (the latest stable build of) Flock though I continue to use and enjoy it anyway.

Cliches: Often true

I noticed that Coldplay were going to be on this past weekend’s Austin City Limits and figured this to be an opportunity to find out why this English band is a critical darling and commercial success. The only Coldplay songs I can really recall hearing more than once previously are Yellow and the latest single, Speed of Sound. So fire up the Tivo, no problem. Last night, deep into December repeat hell, hit play. Watch all the way through, even the two songs with Michael Stipe joining in, but no cigar. The appeal does not penetrate my musical shield. I’ve read that some people consider the group Radiohead-lite but then that’s another one you can keep for yourself.

The cliche of this post’s title is that the music we like in high school is what stays with us forever after. So all you early ’80s hair band junkies, guess what? Thinking about the show this morning Dave Matthews Band also came to mind as an even more popular band which I’ve never enjoyed. Coldplay at least I can point to too much of Chris Martin’s falsetto vocals and incomprehensible lyrics but DMB is harder to say. The lack of electric guitars is no problem, some of my favorite music (Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, for instance) are largely acoustic.

Honestly I have yet to find a band whose first (commercial) release was after 1980 who have made a whole album I really enjoy, much less a career’s worth. What year did I graduate high school? 1979. U2 are the last group to make my personal pantheon. Until about ten years ago my answer was U2 and REM but Stipe and Co. fell off about the time Losing My Religion became the single most aired song on any medium, when Peter Buck decided to stop playing the jangly electric guitar grooves I loved so much. Say what you want about Bono’s ego or politics but those guys know how to rock and have kept their music fresh.

Please send your hate mail to kissmyass@yourmusicsucks.org.

Books: Star Trek: Federation

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens have written quite a few Star Trek novels, including partnering with William Shatner on all nine of his Kirk novels, though two stand out as personal favorites among the hundreds I’ve read over the lasr 25 years: Memory Prime and Prime Directive. I had no hesitation when I saw their 1994 effort STAR TREK: Federation on the shelves at MV Public Library. An aside to any of you readers: the local public library is a great place to get free reading material, you don’t (always) have to pay $7.99 for a paperback or $24.99 for a hardcover!

Federation, written before the movie First Contact and published soon after, focuses on a different Zephram Cochrane than we see in the film so don’t be thrown by that; Paramount has always maintained that while the books must treat the TV episodes and movies as canonical, “the real history,” the reverse is explicitly not true. So when we meet the warp drive inventor, just prior to his first interstellar test drive, he isn’t a 60 year old rock and roll misogynist living in the wilds of Montana but an early 30s respected scientist funded by one of the Solar System’s richest men.

The conflict driving this story is between Cochrane and Col. Adrik Thorsen across three eras: 2061, as Thorsen and his leader, the notorious Col. Green, are attempting to make the Earth over based on their Optimum movement; 2267, in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s transport of Sarek and other ambassadors to the Babel Conference (TOS episodes: Journey to Babel plus Metamorphosis and Requiem for Methuselah); and, 2366, just days after Picard and the Enterprise-D crew completed the Legara IV mission, in which Picard had to provide Sarek with mental support to hold off the effects of Bendii Syndrome and from which Picard’s mind is still a bit overwhelmed by Sarek’s mentality (TNG episode: Sarek). The conflict is simple: Thorsen is convinced that Zephram Cochrane’s superimpellor, the forerunner of the warp engine, can be used as the most devestating, yet controlled, weapon ever deployed but beyond the incredible distaste the scientist has for the concept he knows that such a bomb is physically impossible.

As with most Star Trek novels, the authors must fit their science fiction concepts and character conflict ideas onto the starship platform and novels like Federation, where more than one crew is used, more than double the difficulty IMO. Throwing in the third era, in this instance the earliest chronologically, actually simplifies things since we have very little ‘knowledge’ of them. The Reeves-Stevens do a very good job, even managing to use the The Guardian of Forever as a framing device and insinuating that one of the 2061 era characters, Cochrane’s benefactor Micah Brach, is in fact the same man Kirk and Spock meet as Flint in Requiem for Methuselah.

recommended