Monthly Archives: July 2004

CSS for Speech

By | July 29, 2004

Tuesday, the CSS working group at the W3C releasd a working draft for a CSS3 Speech Module. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. CSS define aural properties that give control over rendering XML to speech. This draft describes… Read More »

Putting the Pain Back in Paintball

By | July 28, 2004

The company I work for had an offsite meeting today, followed by an afternoon of fun at Sunol Paintball, and I use the word fun loosely. Actually, it was fun at times. But, now, I have bruises on my right arm and left leg from paintball impacts, a swollen knuckle on my right pinkie finger… Read More »

Tractor Brewing

By | July 28, 2004

My cousin’s husband is a part-owner in Tractor Brewing, which has the truly awesome domain name, getplowed.com. Tractor Brewing is a microbrewery (surprise – what, you thought they fermented tractors?) in Los Lunas, NM. A documentary on Tractor Brewing will air this Sunday night, though I’m afraid it’s probably just going to be on local… Read More »

Credit Report Three-fers

By | July 27, 2004

It’s been awhile since I posted about my credit report travails that were caused by an evildoer opening up nine credit card accounts using my social security number. After that experience, I compiled some useful info about identity theft prevention, as well as how to deal with it if it happens to you. My mom… Read More »

Crustacean

By | July 26, 2004

My wife and I joined some relatives for dinner tonight in San Francisco at Crustacean, the alleged birthplace of fusion cuisine in the US. Although the garlic noodles don’t exactly qualify as fusion fare, they were quite possibly the best noodles I’ve ever had. I also had the Asian crab cake, which was a very… Read More »

MoinMoin 1.2.3

By | July 25, 2004

After a fellow DreamHoster posted on the DreamHost discussion forums about troubles getting MoinMoin 1.2.3 to work, I decided to upgrade from 1.1 to 1.2.3. Things went relatively smoothly, at least compared to when I installed 1.1. I did discover a mistake in my instructions for installing MoinMoin on a DreamHost website, though. I fixed… Read More »

Chow Mein Chow

By | July 23, 2004

The largest of my two cats, Alexi, has always been a big fan of human food. His absolute favorite food is boiled corn, but he is more than happy to dine on bread, roasted chicken, ham, or rice. While he will eat most any type of bread, he is especially partial to sourdough baguettes from… Read More »

Apologetic Interfaces

By | July 21, 2004

Polite computers win users’ hearts and minds [New Scientist] A study by Jeng-Yi Tzeng at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan suggests that computer users would be more tolerant of software programs if the programs were more apologetic, or at the very least, less likely to always blame the user. This is especially relevant… Read More »

TiVo Update

By | July 20, 2004

WeaKnees says that our factory drive failed their diagnostics. Although I was hoping it was the new drive, which would have been under warranty, I was already fearing it was the factory drive. If it was just the second drive, I would have expected that programs recorded on the original drive would have been fine.… Read More »

Blogger Dinner in Berkeley

By | July 20, 2004

If you’re going to be around Berkeley this Friday night and are into the blogging scene, you should sign up for the blogger dinner at Pyramid Brewery. The event is part of BlogOn 2004, which will be held at Cal later this week. In case you’re going to be there, I’ll be the person looking… Read More »