Tuesday, August 13, 2002

While I was driving home today, NPR was interviewing some Bush economic flunkie. He was talking about the economic 'summit' from today. According to him, the most important issue on these 'normal Americans' minds was support for Bush's tax cuts. Uh-huh. Oh, and it gets better - we've done all we can possibly due to legislate corporate responsibility at this point. Argh. I so did not vote for these people.

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NetworkWorld: "Are Weblogs a legitimate business tool, or merely the Internet's latest vehicle for personal indulgence?" [Scripting News] My first reaction to that question is to say that yes, blogs are personal indulgence, and that's good enough for me. After reading the article, I'm still not sure I'd say blogs are a 'legitimate business tool'. But it's a good read...
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Godzilla Getting Ready to Stomp Mozilla? [Slashdot] So the owners of the Godzilla trademark are taking Davezilla - this has been percolating for a while. The fun here is that Slashdot theorizes that this is just a preliminary attack - the real target is Mozilla. Winning a case against Davezilla would give them a leg up when they go after Mozilla - Mozilla has a similar domain name and logo to those being targetted at Davezilla. Considering Mozilla ended inspiring countless '(insert word here)zilla' imitators, this could get really, really ugly.

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Yahoo! News - Amtrak Halts Most High-Speed Trains Conveniently, I happened to cancel a trip I had scheduled for Friday this morning - I was going to be taking the Acela Express from Boston to New Jersey. Looks like I cancelled at exactly the right time...good thing Rachel's gas is not on.
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Woohoo! My domain name and web-forwarding are at least beginning to propagate out - I'm able to go to http://www.dreamingofchina.com and get here. Same thing with just http://dreamingofchina.com as well. Now I've got to play with the email settings - I need to figure out where email sent to andrew@dreamingofchina.com goes. Wish me luck...
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That was fun - I just broke Radio and then fixed it. Lesson learned: be careful mucking about in Radio.root. I'm still trying to figure out how to write a CDDB-type macro for Radio...I need to be able to get the CD id for the disc in my drive, query some CDDB-style server (freedb would work) over HTTP, and then process that and return some html. I want to automate my 'now listening' bit I had going for a while there. While trying to find macros and scripts in Radio that I could cannabalize for this, I managed to move a table and break everything. Fun. I'm going to do my job now instead of this - I'm less likely to break stuff. =)

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Internet drug warning [BBC Science & Nature] My first thought at seeing this headline - "Shit! Snow Crash! Don't look at any static!" Then I read the story and see it's just about selling prescription drugs online without a prescription. Phew - I got nervous for a minute there.
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your muppet of the day: The Singing Food I always thought that the cabbage was kind of cute. I wanted one as a pet. as always, image taken from www.kermitage.com
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A Russian City Digs Up Its Past and Finds Germany [New York Times: International News] Kaliningrad is that tiny little divot of Russia, stuck between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. I've always been fascinated with it; when I was a kid, I had an atlas that featured a really detailed map of the then-USSR, with each 'republic' a different color. I couldn't figure out why this little chunk of the RSFSR was disconnected from the rest of the 'Russian' republic. As I began to get more familiar with the history of Europe, I eventually figured it out - it looked a lot like half of old Prussia. Aha! And yes, I was right. The Russians and Poles divided the old Duchy of Prussia in two and forced out the German populace after World War II. Stalin wanted a second Baltic Sea port for Russia, and didn't want to give anything to the Lithuanians - after all, he'd just conquered them five years earlier - so Konigsberg, the old seat of the Prussian nobility, was renamed Kaliningrad and made part of the Russian republic. Fast-forward to now. Kaliningrad is seperated from Russia by an independent Lithuania now. In fact, one of the issues regarding Lithuania's attempt to join the EU is Kaliningrad - since Lithuania broke away from the USSR, Kaliningrad residents have been allowed to travel across Lithuania without a visa, but if Lithuania joins the EU, they'll have to conform to EU visa standards, requiring Kaliningraders to have a visa to get to the main body of Russia. It's still a Russian city, but as this article describes, they're in the process of accepting the old German history of the city and area. Good for them. There's a great quote in the article, from a man who participated in the demolition of the city's 13th century castle in 1957: "Many years have passed, and I am different," said Mr. Ovsyanov, who is now 65. "Now I protect old ruins. This is my penance for the misdeeds of my youth." That just makes me feel a little better about the world.

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