goatee

auld lang syne

°2003.01.31.fr | The Ne° Photography

boston sky line One of my favorite things about digital photography and the Web is the ease with which one can take photographs and be inspired by others. Before, I had to mess with expensive film and development. I tried to justify the cost and inculcate a love of the dark room, but I always considered it an expensive nuisance. My 35mm SLR has been in its box at the top of my closet for years — and I've repeatedly tried to give it away. Before, when I felt the pull to see beauty crossed with craft I'd have to visit MIT's Rotch Library and browse the expensive, fancy magazines.

Now, photography is accessible and inexpensive, and inspiration is a click away (e.g., photo.net, quarlo, and halftone).

°2003.01.30.th | Gangsta

I noted an idiot board is poking fun at a "gangsta" photo of me from a few years ago. Of course, the photo is supposed to be funny — my macho exterior cracks in the next photo — but as is the case with most idiot boards this one starts out as some sort of teenage homophobic joke and never gets beyond that. Maybe that's because when they found this image on google, it appears on the same page as gay pride photographs.

Still, a google image search for "gangsta" does provide a very amusing bevy of pose-striking photos.

[Update 03.03.20: Someone has even created a fictional blog around that photo!]

°2003.01.29.we | Sleeping on the Side

sleeping dogGood health demands that one sleep on one's back. I've never been able to acquire the habit, except when napping in the grass, and I fear being laid up in one of those hospital beds because of it. Yes, if I have a cause to be in the hospital I'm sure I'd have more things to worry about than my sleeping position, but it'd drive me nuts I'm sure.

I blame all of this on the monsters of my childhood. For twenty-five years I slept with a sheet regardless of how the sweat soaked flannel was pressed upon me by hot, humid air. I simply could not leave my body exposed to those scaly arms from underneath. My poor feet, lonely bastions on the borders of the bed, might even merit an additional blanket in the hottest summer night.

Indeed, the safest position was to secure my vital organs completely by laying in a half-twist fetal position: feet pulled up, stomach on the mattress, arms under my pillow, and my head facing to the right, towards the closet. This is how I slept for years, to turn away from the closet invited chills to gather and tickle along my back as I sensed the contents of the closet stirring behind me and approaching.

I no longer worry about monsters in the closet and under the bed, but I still sleep as if I do.

°2003.01.21.tu | Quakers, Mennonites, Anarchists, and Us

mass aveI just finished making copies of two chapters out of a book: I sent one copy to a colleague via the mail, I placed one next to a keyboard, I slid another under a door, and posted the last one by the coffee machine. The ten pages of paper were excerpts from "No Decisions without Unity" and "Quaker Leadership" from Michael Sheeran's Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Religious Society of Friends (see my notes). The Quaker Hill site describes it as:

"A Jesuit priest examines voteless decision making in the Religious Society of Friends in fascinating depth. Although it focuses on the experience of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, all Friends and others will benefit from the insights."

While a book from a Jesuit priest about Quakers sounds fascinating as is, this one was about consensus! (I'm serious! On slow days at a summer job I passed many good hours reading at the customer service counter of a Jesuit university's book store.) A few months ago, at a weekly meeting I noted my informal study of Quaker decision making and the Mennonites' concept of community — if they exceed roughly 150 members the community typically splits; interestingly, sociological research has shown that's the natural spanning distance of non-hierarchical communities. A Quaker colleague recommended this book and at a subsequent face-to-face meeting we had a small discussion on alternative approaches to decision making that included a Buddhist and Jewish participant/perspective as well.

A lot of geeks take the informal, meritocratic, and consensus based culture many of us participate in for granted. So I'm always pleased to find another area of likeness, particularly if it has its own body of analysis. (I liken interdisciplinary studies to open source code development: finding objects of analysis and theory and applying them to a new application). In Why the Internet is Good: Community Governance That Works Well, I examined the geek culture in depth and drew parallels with anarchistic theory. Sheeran's book on Quaker practice is even more appropriate as it contains reports of actual, pragmatic, experience versus the overly theoretical nature of most anarchist tracts. An obvious source of difference between these approaches to decision is the spiritual aspect of Quaker "unity."

Actually, the most compelling aspect of collaborating with my peers is the realization of a new idea that we could not have achieved on our own. While I would not consider that resulting decision or proposal to be divinely inspired, nor the meeting to be "covered" in Quaker terminology, it is a thrilling and rewarding experience even to this atheist. Fortunately, Sheeran spends time on this topic as well as there is a variation in the approach of different Quakers to their faith. He also mentions management theory and the effects of American's conceptualization of democratic individualism on communitarian practice!

°2003.01.21.tu | Confirmation Bias

You are your own worst anecdote. Why? Because of confirmation bias wherein you remember the facts that confirm a belief but ignore or forget those that contradict it. I've used this term before, and given a recent example I want to quickly explain. In response to Joe Clark's posited "A-list" velvet rope phenomena by which newbies never ascend to prominent heights, Mark offered his own success as a counter-proof. Granted, Mark does demonstrate a flaw in the theory if it is stated in the absolute terms of no up-wards mobility, but it's not evidence of a generality.

When one states, "I succeed because of X, and anyone else with X could've succeed too," this is often a subterfuge for a cognitive blind-spot. This is particularly common in the context of America's Dream: work hard, believe in God, and you will prosper. Many folks will offer themselves as examples of working hard and prospering so consequently if you have failed to prosper you must've not had enough gumption. Not quite. The American Dream is a good thing, as is mobility, but one can not presume it is the only force in effect. For every person that has succeeded with X, there may be countless who have not; no one bothers to ask them why they failed.

A most poignant example of this was the victor of the TV show Survivor a few seasons ago. After winning, she could not stop crawling on the ground and thanking Jesus. A viewer might think, "Wow, see, this Jesus thing really pays off!" Of course, besides the ethical ramifications of praying for victory on a reality-TV show, we don't see those who also called on Jesus but failed to win.

(Not all prayers are the same — and many sound like voodoo to me. Faith, to me, is a matter of your own attitude towards life, including the ability to overcome troubles, not an invocation for my team to beat the other in a video game death-match.)

°2003.01.15.we | The Rush and Slash Effect

The concept of hyper-democracy was introduced in a Time article in 1994, and I learned of it the following year as a potential harbinger of things to come. But is my concern about hyper-democracy and these flashes of gaseous news and rants over dramatic itself? I don't think so. First, I don't think I'm prone to exaggeration; it's something that is interesting and we must add an awareness of this phenomena to our over-growing toolkit of media literacy. (Or create tools to mitigate it.) Second, one can see direct evidence of it in effect.

On the popular Slashdot news site stories are submitted and, if accepted, receive a huge amount of attention and commentary. The substantive content of a submission is frequently incorrect, premature, redundant, ungrammatical, and the small editorial comment accompanying it is often worse. But the readership, in some sense, has gotten used to this and expects these errors to be documented and corrected in the reader comments. Unfortunately, many of the reader comments can be just as bad! To mitigate this problem a moderation system allows other readers to rate (i.e., "mod up" or "mod down") comments with respect to their quality.

I'm a fan of distributed/collaborative communities that use ratings and reputations, but as I noted in Web Communities they too have their problems. In the case of Slashdot, because its readership are bored slackers — myself included — constantly checking for the newest distraction or hoping to boost their own reputation, the comments tend to be of a poor quality as well. Those impatient readers are quick to post their joke or uninformed opinion and their peers are just as quick to spend their precious moderator points on that posting. Those that know the most about the news story (e.g., those that are the subject of the story!) probably only learn of Slashdot after their Web server has been pummeled with millions of requests from its readership. If the person in-the-know were to post an informative response the next day (or maybe when they've awoken in a time zone elsewhere in the world), that topic is already old news and most of the moderation points have been spent. Not only does the moderation system fail to select the best comments in the short term, but also for long term posterity. Furthermore, I suspect the present moderation system actually rewards those most quick to dash off a comment.

The best that can be said for the Slashdot system is that it selects the most popular comments within the period most readers are likely to spend their moderator credits, which is probably within a few hours. For example, if I examine the Slashdot thread I mentioned yesterday about Apple using the Konqueror rendered instead of Mozilla, there a total of 603 comments. An analysis [data,script] of this thread shows:

Score with Mean, Minimum, and Maximum Elapsed Time in Hours
score    mean                   minimum maximum
+5       0.81                   0.08    5.59
+4       1.62                   0.08    8.13
+3       2.30                   0.08    8.59
+2       7.04                   0.13    33.80
+1       5.86                   0.10    34.31
+0       7.68                   0.07    34.25
-1       1.03                   0.05    7.62

Given that I read Slashdot with a threshold of "4 or higher" this means that the average elapsed time of comments I read is just over an hour, and I can not see a comment that is more than 8 hours old! (To say nothing of whether I would go back and read old threads for stories I already noted.) One redeeming result is that the most inane comments are also quickly posted but are successfully identified with a score of '-1'. Of course, this analysis does not account for the possibility that the best comments only arrive in the first 8 hours. (That would require an orthogonal content quality analysis of each comment.)

I've seen this "rush and slash" effect numerous times on topics which I care about and expect that some idle readers constantly refresh Slashdot in their browsers and post a comment on a new topic as quickly as possible, just for exposure. And this effect won't be limited to Slashdot. For instance, I already noted that Mark Pilgrim provides link-backs to anyone that has linked to an entry. My curiosity for his system led me to try to stupidly cheat it, which failed, but he does now explain how his automatic link-back works. I fully expect that people will, if they aren't already, trying to respond to his latest entry as quickly as possible so as to get the maximum number of Pilgrim's readers to investigate their own site. This applies to the disenchanted and decafbad link-back systems as well. As the flow of dis-intermediated content and their reputation systems increases, so will the rush and slash effect.

08-nora-garrote-by-dog-leash.jpg[BTW: This is a photograph of a friend's neck which got its own rush and slash effect: she was riding her bike on the dark and icy northwest corridor and someone with a white dog, on the white snow, and a long thin black retractable leash managed to raise the leash only in time to clothes-line her off the bike. Ouch. We're not safe on the street, sidewalk, nor even the bike paths evidently.]

°2003.01.14.tu | Oh, The Drama

The Web community has been in a tizzy about XHTML 2.0 and Apple's adoption of Konqueror's open source HTML renderer. Oh dear.

But, the media loves drama — the motifs of gods, devils and wars — and they'll invent a conflict out of peaceful co-existence if need be. Why? Because people love drama, and they often can't help themselves.

When I took Mitch Kapor's course on The Political Economy of the Digital Infrastructure back in 1995, the concept that I thought would be most descriptive of this new (back then) Web media-phenomena was that of hyper-democracy, "Washington isn't dangerously disconnected from the people; the trouble may be it's too plugged in." Not only is democracy never what it used to be, not only can it be bettered, but constant and immediate churn/feedback is problematic. Gone are the days of careful consideration, principled stands, and measured words.

When reporters and media analysts reminisce about the golden days of journalism, they are remembering an "anti-democratic" time. A period when persons of principle might not run a news story because while it was salacious, and consequently would attract attention, it didn't contribute to the discourse of civil society. Who's to say that the Lewinsky scandal wasn't important, that the Osbournes shouldn't be watched, and that these gaseous belches that flash across the Web aren't important? Not me, or at least not in quite that way, right now.

But, if we don't want gate keepers, if we want a maximum of freedom, we also need self-discipline. As I note in the Anarchist's Punk Ethic, Gandhi captured this relationship well when he said, "Civil disobedience presupposes willing obedience of our self-imposed rules, and without it civil disobedience would be cruel joke." In order to maximize freedom and liberty, one must also inculcate a culture of discipline. It seems counter-intuitive, but it's true. Otherwise, we'll race head-first into that sludge at the bottom.

Which brings me to an explanation for my repeated and insufferable lists of principles and guidelines. Once, when I said how I'd love to lash out at a jerk in a rather cruel way my bemused friend asked, "but isn't that counter to your ethic? I'm surprise you feel that way." I responded, "You've misunderstood me, I don't come up with all of my tiresome ethics, guidelines, and exhortations for trying to be diplomatic and sympathetic because those things are in my nature, I do it because they are not!"

°2003.01.13.mo | The Politics of Science and Vice Versa

An unexpected result of my cheating experiment was to be exposed to some blogs I would not usually encounter. I wonder if one such blog is indicative of the unfortunate level to which science policy is falling. For instance, when I noted entries against "the Greenies" and global warming, I referred the author to the IPCC reports on climate change as a good source of information. He wrote back granting that the Arctic ice is thickening, but asked (conspiratorially) why no one speaks about the Antarctic ice? He argued that I, "need to get out more." If, in fact, I did "get out more" I would not be aware of the debate regarding the measuring of ice flows in the Western Antarctic. He responded that I had been conned. I responded:

... [I have] not much time to get into this, but global warming trends (which even the Bush administration admits to) do not necessarily mean uniform global warming. Regardless, the most significant risk of water rise is thermal expansion which can happen independent of the ice sheets — and while there is debate about the outflows of the Western Antarctic ice streams, the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf this year (the most substantive collapse in an ongoing trend (i.e., Larsen A in '95)) was rather instructive. Regardless, the IPCC has not "conned" me, they have quite a nice assessment of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the full report. In fact, they state, "the likelihood of a major sea level rise by the year 2100 due to a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is considered low."

His response was short and dismissive, "whichever way you cut it, it's local warming, not global." What's disturbing about this conversation is that this person has committed so much of his ego to his own beliefs and so much derision upon those with which he disagrees. It's difficult to imagine such a person giving careful consideration to a topic. In a recent entry he equates the "Greenies" interest in restricting pesticides with Hitler because of environmentalists' callous (if not purposeful) disregard for the decimation by malaria of "surplus" third-world humans. Clearly, Godwin's Law indicates that the utility of discussion with such a person is low, but I undertook the exercise with an eye towards the larger question of the science and politics.

For fifteen years I've been debating fundamentalists and Scientologists, reading skeptic literature (e.g., the Skeptical Enquirer, the Skeptic, and last month, the Borderlands of Science) and on the philosophy of science. I want to understand to what degree, if any, something can be commonly known. This is what I've learned:

Consequently, the IPCC is an authority to which I'm willing to generally defer, though I'll consider criticism. On those issues which I've looked into I've found their analysis to be credible. My confidence is further augmented from the relative authority of the participants, their lack of self-interested prejudice and the frank and careful way in which they designate their own varying level of confidence.

When I consider the Bush Administration's earlier efforts to remove the chair of the IPCC, its removal last month of reproductive health information from government sites, and their development of energy policy solely on the basis of incumbent oil interests, I'm frightened about the quality of US science policy and the condition of our democracy.

°2003.01.09.th | Metaphor for Change

Larry Lessig is looking (via the LazyWeb?) for an analogy to help describe the scenario of a small change having a wide-reaching effect. The intent is to convey, "how the reach of copyright has changed for totally unintended reasons. Because the Internet is a digital network, every action on the network is a copy; because copyright law gets triggered whenever there is a copy, it follows that every action on the network is potentially subject to copyright law."

Since I'm a big fan of metaphors it seemed like an interesting challenge and the first thing to pop into my head was my clumsily named Paradox of Good Technology:

I'm not sure if these are good because these examples are as technical as the scenario Lessig is trying to describe. My mind offers a few other examples (e.g., transactions or materials that used to be regulated but our now commonplace) but I can't think of a good instance or they are ultimately unsatisfactory. However, I do begin to build up a profile of what I think the essence of the metaphor should be:

  1. Some control has been placed on an artifact (i.e., copying).
  2. That artifact has now exceeded its original function or scope and become integral to the contemporary context (i.e., "copying" is an intrinsic computer process),
  3. and the control has followed as well, and we're not sure if that's appropriate (i.e., much early copyright case law concerned itself with the question whether even having something in computer memory constituted infringement).

One less than satisfactory example is the body of regulation requiring the licensing of TV and radio channels because of interference. With new technology, interference is less of a concern and we wonder if those regulations and licensing requirements are relevant to new wireless services? Unfortunately, wireless spectrum allocation is even more technical and its policy issues are worthy of their own book! In the end, a potential offering is the (alleged) law that required early motorists to walk ahead and warn of the arrival of their contraption into a horse trodden town: a law governed the use of a new mechanism in a horse-based infrastructure, but eventually the car displaced the horse and shaped the very nature of this country. Now, that law seems less than relevant.

°2003.01.08.we | Time

The invention of the digital clock created time without place. Previously, the hands of time could not arrange nor worry themselves without a corresponding moment in the day. But a broken LED hints of tea times and sleepy eyes in universes far away. In every hour there are 39 minutes left standing on the 13th floor, and every day the aliens have an extra 75 hours in which to perfect their flying saucers and orgasmo rays.

° 2003.01.05.su | Python Is So Cool

I edit these entries in Amaya and the remaining nuisance of that editor is that it sometimes rewrites my id attribute values. It's heart is in the right place: a value such as "_05su-a" uniquely identifies this entry, and Amaya enforces this uniqueness by appending a "1"to the value if it finds a collision. Good idea, but sometimes it does it for reasons I don't understand. Consequently, when I create a new entry, I typically cut-and-paste the previous entry in a text editor (away from Amaya's meddling) and start editing it:

<h2 class="entry"><a class="hint" href="#_05su" title="link to me">&deg;</a><a id="_05su" name="_05su">03.01.05.su | Web Communities</a></h2>

Somehow, I can still find entries identified as "#_05su111", which breaks links.

I've tired of manually tweaking these things and still finding errors, so now I just hit Ctrl-2 to create a <h2> heading and start typing. I let my publishing script find <h2>s and expand them out into their full form with this nifty Python regular expression:

newcontent = re.sub('<h2>(.*)</h2>', '<h2 class="entry"><a class="hint" href="#%s" title="link to me">&deg;</a><a id="%s" name="%s"> %s | \\1</a></h2>' % (date_id, date_id, date_id, date_token), content )

I know to non-geeks this looks complicated, but trust me, it's freaking beautiful and could look much worse (i.e., in Perl); I'm doing variable substitution and backward references in the same very readable expression! Python is so very cool.

°2003.01.05.su | Web Communities

The display:none cheating experiment of last month in which I linked to lots of blogs without displaying the links yielded some interesting results. Since page ranking mostly focuses on those who are linked to, instead of those who link, the utilization of this site was largely untouched. However, my links to others did trigger some automated communities, a few of which I was not even aware of, that then reciprocated, weaving this site a bit more tightly into that web of connections. The interesting, and perhaps detrimental, consequent of this is that as cheating becomes more common, communities will likely develop methods of deterring these cheaters by drawing their circle even closer. How is this detrimental? As a recluse and a snob I'm most interested in quality content free of circle jerking.

Some content is of relatively good quality, but it is handed down from on high (e.g., New York Times). Absent a controlled hierarchy one can use dis-intermediated sources within a social/reputation network. (e.g., Google Page Ranking and blogospheres). Those of prominence in this newer content model seem to congratulate themselves on bettering the traditional structures. Granted, they are more flexible but one needs to distinguish between a new aristocracy (or old boy/gal network) and a genuinely new form of peerage. (A prominent blogger's rants on blogs as journalism strikes me as a means of including himself into a sphere of the traditional power more than anything else.)

How do you find quality content absent the clique? This is the puzzle that really interests me. Snobs are like mavens, which are described in The Tipping Point,that undergo a significant search cost to find quality content. Typically snobs aren't keen to expose their new found information (beyond that they have it and you don't!) for two reasons. The first, easily enough, is because of what micro-economists call the snob effect: "The desire to purchase something only because it is extremely expensive or extremely rare." The second, and one snobs are more likely to claim themselves, is the sell-out effect. Once something becomes popular, it's becomes more prone to sucking.

As a skeptic I must of course warn that the sell-out effect is dangerously anecdotal. When people take a phony herbal remedy and feel a better a few days later they were bound to feel better. People tend to take such remedies a few days prior to the illness running it's natural course. Maybe a site was bound to get sucky anyway, and it just happens it was recognized at its peak. But the anecdotes can be so telling.

This month, one can not read a blog without encountering an allusion that the 2003 blog nominations are now open. The crassness is disguised as humor with striken comments about accepting bribes for nominations or soliciting votes. This reminded me of three years ago when I noted the arrival of the diarist.net awards as a source of new high quality content to peruse. For a year I was pleased with the results and carefully noted their nomination and selection process. However, I began to lose interest and suspected this was because their process relied upon "seasoned on-line journalers". Yes, this helps provide for quality but raises the level of inbred cliquishness: it was the same writers winning every quarter.

Yesterday, I was wondering whether that community still existed despite now being over-taken by the blog hype. Indeed they do and they still give out awards, though I haven't investigated to what degree they still consider themselves distinct from the blogging community. When reading last quarter's awards I laughed when I read this year's Hall of Fame (Legacy) recipient describe the cliquishness of the community, disappointment in not being accepted for so many years, and now, "All kidding, snottiness, and residual sour grapes aside, I would like to thank the current Diarist.Net Awards panel for selecting my site as a finalist." Sasha is grappling with the concerns of privacy resulting from wider exposure with a rather odd requirement:

Important: If I know you in real life or if you know Travis in real life, please email me and let me know that you're reading this journal. Hiding isn't necessary so please don't sneak around, it will only shed a bad light on you. This, I believe, is the least respected rule of any on-line journal and unfortunately, I know this from experience. I'm including this caveat out of weary persistence and the hope that someday in the future, someone I know will not choose to ignore this rule (again) at the risk of causing me a great deal of angst. (I'm an optimist at heart) ... Oh and there's one more thing that I've learned. Some people won't even read the rules let alone follow them no matter how thorough or insistent you are. If you've read this far, agree to my rules (or even if you don't) and you're still interested in reading my journal, you can relax now.

As I wrote before, no one said it's easy to achieve a massive readership that preserves the privacy betweens the spheres of one's life and invites praise without pillory. (Bernadette, publisher of one of the first genuine amateur erotic sites eventually had to block her whole continent from accessing her site; she is now a mythic mystery.) But Sasha's rule was unknown to me and makes little sense. What is a rule without some consequent, be it a punishment or level of expectation? (For example, I try not to gossip and to preserve the roles I play in life and if someone wants to go digging and finds things they are uncomfortable with, my expectation is that their discomfort is their problem.)

Regardless, my point, before I digressed, was that as a site becomes prominent it can fall to the sell-out effect: lost in self-referential navel gazing with reciprocated smooching. How do I avoid this behavior in myself? I've collected some guidelines that I generally°try to adhere to though there are plenty of worthwhile exceptions:

  1. I try not to gossip; I write about myself or try to generalize so as to derive a more abstract, and hopefully more insightful, comment.
  2. I try to write as if I have no audience, or that the audience is a few light years out in space.
  3. Beware of ego, I don't need to link to someone just because they linked to me, and I should try to link to the lesser known than the prominent.
  4. I try to write so that each entry stands on its own and I limit the self-referential lint picking.

For example, I will try to resist temptations to write other entries discussing blogging this month. And I want to conclude my experiment with another quick cheating experiment. I noted that Mark Pilgrim includes an extensive set of excerpted links to anyone that cites one of his entries. It's so extensive I wonder if it's automated and can be gamed. Consequently, "Mark is a SILLY boy." (We'll see if that shows up in the "Further reading on today's post" section — unfortunately he's rather prominent so I'm abusing a rule!)

[Update 030424: Also note 7 Habits of an AntiBlogger]

° 2003.01.02.th | Figaro, Figaro

It's strange to think how little things can affect one's life. For instance, I'm not known for being a terribly gregarious person: I'm not the life of the party. While a couple of personality traits tend to keep my from being a social butterfly the simple fact is that I lose my voice. A long conversation, a 30 minutes lecture/talk, or simply saying hello to folks in a smoky dance club can cause discomfort.

Seven years ago I started computer voice dictation as a way of addressing my Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI). After a month my voice was blown. The office in which I was doing the dictation was also shared by blind users who used sound as their sole medium of interaction; my theory was that out of concern for their experience I was hushing my voice, and I had furthered trained myself to speak poorly. Doctors confirmed I had no physiological problems (e.g., polyps) and assessed I'm not the most efficient speaker. But my health insurance wouldn't cover voice therapy and I was finding other ways to manage my RSI.

In the subsequent years my weak voice has always been present but in the back of my mind. While I like presenting/teaching, I never had a demanding schedule. I have many reasons for not liking cigarette smoke. And I prefer dancing to socializing at the clubs. I'd come to build or reinforce a conception of my own personality as an apologist for my voice.

Recently, I've been getting hoarse more easily and I've been considering options in which I'd be doing more public speaking in my future. Monday I saw a doctor and after sticking a fiber-optic camera down my nose/throat he asked if I had heart burn, did I burp much? I have a mild case of heartburn every few months, no biggie. And I don't figure I burp more than ordinary! While I said I haven't been speaking recently he said my larynx was still slightly irritated and recommend I try some anti-acids, try not to unnecessarily cough or clear my throat, and try another voice evaluation. In my mind, I scoffed, I'm not a over-weight steak chugging, burping, golluming, couch potato!

But I recalled that after laughing I get phlegmy. Over the holidays my ReplayTV picked up a few hours of Trigger Happy and after watching a few episodes that evening I realized how phlegmy I am, and how I was coughing and clearing my throat for the next few hours. The doctor said that laughing is strenuous on the chords and you can have acid reflux without many heartburn symptoms. Maybe its hypochondria kicking in, but now that I think about it, that slightly stingy feeling in my throat or a "burning burp" after I eat — gross, I know — maybe that's heartburn? (I originally interrupted it as that tightness in the chest which I have only rarely.)

I don't know where this will go, I'm definitely recalling the many times my mom told me to eat slowly. When I searched on the Web, most of the sites were from crappy pharmaceutical companies but ironically enough the most interesting result was a blog entry that sounds akin to this one. Hopefully it'll work out, and who would've thought that one of the things I'd most come to envy are the strong clear voices ringing out over the hub-bub.

° 2003.01.01.we | Transparency

Mass Ave Transparent design elements look cool. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the PNG specification, which supports alpha transparency (i.e., variable levels of opaqueness), was published six years ago, one still has to play tricks to effect a veil.

This and last months' designs use two tricks I read about in the book Eric Meyer on CSS. Last month, the page used a blue Nixon background and the sidebar used a checkerboard of black and transparent pixels: some of Nixon image underneath shows through the dark grill.

html,body   { 
  background: url("./images/goatee-nixon.jpg") 
              0 0 fixed no-repeat;
div#sidebar {
  background: transparent url(./images/halfscreen-black.png)
              0 0 repeat scroll;}

This month, I'm using two images, a light olive Nixon as the background of the page and a brown Nixon as the background of the sidebar. Because we are using fixedbackgrounds each image is anchored at the same position (0,0) relative to the browser window and each section, #content and #sidebar, are two view-ports on their respective background images. The illusion is that of a single image with a partially opaque layer in the sidebar.

body        { 
  background :url("./images/goatee-nixon.jpg") 
              0 0 fixed no-repeat; }
div#sidebar {
  background: url("./images/goatee-nixon-back.jpg") 
              0 0 fixed no-repeat; }

The first trick works, but I noted text on top of the half-screen grill can look bad in certain conditions on IE (Internet Explorer); I've also heard that scrolling an image behind a half-screen can be rather slow on old computers.

This month's trick works on most browsers except IE which mistakenly positions the brown Nixon relative to its container element div#sidebar, not the browser window, causing the two images to be misaligned and breaking the illusion. I've included a link to a JavaScript written by Andy Clover that should fix this for IE. You can turn off JavaScript in order to see the result of the IE bug, and given the security holes and pop-nuisances in IE, I would not recommend that anyone have it turned on regardless, but I know most do. And, in what has become a motif of this essay, much of this could be avoided if Microsoft had implemented proper PNG support in the last six years!

Interestingly enough, this month A List Apart published an article by Michael Lovitt with yet another JavaScript hack that can get IE to do the right thing with respect to transparent PNGs. Unfortunately, the associated examples don't work in my favorite browser Konqueror — which otherwise does support transparent PNG. The difference between Konqueror and IE is that I filed a Konqueror bug report and expect it to be fixed within a reasonable period of time. With Microsoft, who knows? Maybe we'll have to wait a decade and until then clever people have to try to write clever hacks to fix Microsoft's bugs.

My New Year's treat last year was to upgrade my "base-line" supported browser from the abomination that was Netscape 4. Last year, if my pages looked decent on IE5, Opera6, Konqueror3, and Mozilla, then I was happy. With Netscape out of the way, IE5 was the albatross around my neck; I'll still have to grapple with it in 2003 but I might not worry if pages appear a little broken on it. I'm now designing for the future and that appears to be open source browsers.

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