t 'n t luoma

Can someone explain to me what kind of a world we live in when we can avoid a baseball strike but Dennis Miller still gets cancelled from HBO?

The last show just finished, and he made almost no comment about it whatsoever except a final tribute thanking HBO and his writers, etc.

But if you listened carefully over the past few weeks, Dennis mentioned "losing" his job at HBO and tonight said that they "kicked him out"

Why?

Why would they take off a show that hadn't lost a bit of its edge after 9 years? Why would they take off one of the few intelligent voices left in an otherwise vast gaping blackhole of mediocrity?

Sounds like the same management team that came up with New Coke.

Posted by TjL at 12:01 AM | Permalink

Tonight someone forwarded me an MSNBC story about George W. Bush’s joke about 9/11. The story is by David Neiwert, who the page says is “a Seattle-based free-lance journalist. His reportage on domestic terrorism for MSNBC.com won a 2000 National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism.”

Here is how the story apparently goes... now remember, this is the man who lost the popular vote and might have lost the Electoral vote if we had ever gotten an accurate count. As every pundit said after he was awarded the presidency, there was no “mandate” no rallying point. Now anyone with a few working brain cells has realized that Dubya has made a good political case out of the national, and perhaps one could rightly even say world tragedy.

Here is what he is now telling people behind closed doors, to get laughs:

You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.

The trifecta, for those who don’t know, is something that you would want to win. It means, actually, that you won three times. So Bush’s joke (if you can call something that atrocious a joke) indicates that the war, the recession, and a national emergency are political gains for Bush.

Gee, isn’t it nice that our President has come up with a cute little saying about the deaths of 3,000 people to see how it fits into his political agenda? That’s just awful.

What is even worse is that the story is a lie, according to the article. No one can find any reference to him saying anything like that until well after he was running for president. Read the article, it’s astonishing. Here are some more quotes, all from the same source (I have saved the article locally in case it is later inaccessible):

If you aren’t outraged by this story, maybe you can explain to me how that is possible. I haven’t had that much respect for him to begin with, although his handling of the situation after 9/11 was admirable in some ways... he has now sunken even lower.

Posted by TjL at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

CNN tells me: Baseball players set Aug. 30 strike date.

My inner monologue says "Who cares?"

Really... I mean it.... is there anyone who really cares? I mean other than the money-grubbing players and the money-grubbing owners and the money-grubbing agents, does anyone care?

Now I seem to recall that Ronald Reagan stepped in to stop the traffic controller's strike. I care a great deal about air traffic controllers. It's a horribly stressful job and they don't get paid a lot.

But these are baseball players. This is not a stressful job.... this is a job where you hit and catch a ball.

I think that the Supreme Court, which isn't doing anything else other than discussing whether the Pledge of Allegiance is illegal immoral or fattening, should step in. Martial law should be declared over anyone involved in Professional Baseball. ALL of the parties ~~ and I mean everyone who is making over $100,000 a year off of baseball ~~ should be forced to work for one month at a real job making real take home pay. I want to see these people step out of their thousand dollar suits and million dollar homes and see what life is like for the rest of us.

I propose a one-year ban on baseball, starting September 1st.

The big execs ~~ the ones who sit in their offices and aren't even playing ~~ should spend 6 months in a (so-called) 3rd world country, you know the ones with the little kids that you try not to look at when the commercial comes on TV? Let's send all of the execs over there and have them eat (what they can find) sleep (if they can) and live there with the same amount of money one of the local folks has. Heck, let's even DOUBLE it for them.

Don't think the players are getting off any easier. First of all they are going to work road construction in Florida. Instead of swinging bats, let's get them swinging shovels. Next, instead of one-handing pop-flies like it was some sort of physical accomplishment, let's have them build homes for needy families.

My guess is that by Christmas all of them will be begging to come back and play their silly game .... and they will appreciate all the more actually getting paid to play a child's game.

But it's a year-long ban. The only way they can come back sooner is if they promise to split their income (their GROSS income) and donate it to charitable causes for, let's say 5 years. Their pay alone could pull several countries out of debt, and 5 years is long enough for them to think about whether or not they can't come to some reasonable agreement about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they should split for hitting and catching a little white ball.

I don't blame them, by the way.... it's us.... you and me and everyone else who pays to go see these spoiled brats play.... we're the ones who have put up with this for so long that they think they're entitled to the money that they make.

That's just my opinion, I think they're wrong.

Posted by TjL at 02:12 PM | Permalink

So I was at http://zeldman.com/ today (as I often am) and read this:

"The secret is out. Actually, of course, both 'Eric Meyer' and 'Jeffrey Zeldman' are aliases of Vicki Wong,"

"The secret" is a link to this blog entry which says that Eric Meyer (http://www.meyerweb.com) actually created Zeldman.

That made me go back through my "Outbox" and realize that I might have had something to do with the start of the rumor.

On the WD-L list (digest v02.n907 if you are curious) I wrote:

Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 21:05:10 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
From: "Timothy J. Luoma"
Subject: [WD]: Re: Web Standards Project, Phase II
Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0206132101360.3024-100000@Tim>

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Steven Champeon wrote:

> And please, if you can, try to stop confusing "The Web Standards
> Project" and "Jeffrey Zeldman". They're not equivalent. Never were.

One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Jeffrey Zeldman
doesn't exist. He never has. He's a figment of our collective
imagination. The world needed him to exist, so we invented him, sorta
like the Brad Pitt character in "Fight Club"

> And I should add, though this probably goes against what you were
> trying to do here, that the new WaSP site contains no tables for
> layout. And yet, it works in all browsers.

Son of a gun, you're absolutely right. I just fired up NN4.08 and it
looks good.

> Of course, as has been said here repeatedly, that's impossible, so
> I'm afraid the universe is going to vanish in a fit of logical
> inconsistency :)

Does that mean I don't have to finish reading my email?

TjL

and not long after that I wrote this email

Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:10:47 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
From: "Timothy J. Luoma"
To: "Yaches Tami (tsp3txy)"
cc: jeffrey zeldman , eric meyer
Subject: RE: [WD]: Re: Web Standards Project, Phase II
In-Reply-To: <B1611B1B224FD61185FA0008C75DE6AF019D3EFD@02usnjrarps15f0.win.us.ups.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0206141204550.1956-100000@Tim>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Yaches Tami (tsp3txy) wrote:

[Steve C wrote]
> > > And please, if you can, try to stop confusing "The Web Standards
> > > Project" and "Jeffrey Zeldman". They're not equivalent. Never were.

[TjL wrote]
> > One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Jeffrey Zeldman
> > doesn't exist. He never has. He's a figment of our collective
> > imagination. The world needed him to exist, so we invented him, sorta
> > like the Brad Pitt character in "Fight Club"

[Tami Yaches wrote]

> I'd be willing to bet money that someone's already forwarded this to
> him, if he's not currently reading the list.
> Personally, I found this statement *really* disconcerting, having
> met him at a WaSP meeting in NYC. I'm wondering if I just really *wanted*
> him to be there?
>
> Tami Yaches

What's even better is that the next message in my inbox was from someone
asking "He doesn't exist? Can you explain that?"

So I told them that "Zeldman" was Eric Meyer's alter-ego.

Posted by TjL at 03:19 PM | Permalink

I'm going to be impossible to deal with for at least the rest of the day... someone actually used the word "fabulous" when speaking about something I did.

See the source of Tim's ego boost

Now if they had said "fantabulous" I would have had to buy new hats (ego, swelled head, you get it, right?) but it gives me something to work towards ;-)

Add to that the fact that someone from "across the pond" called me to talk with me about a few web-related items, and it's been quite the trippy day.

Posted by TjL at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When considering the use of Cascading Style Sheets in your website, one if often asked to consult browser statistics to see which browsers most people are using.

Posted by TjL at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If first learned how to use computers on a NeXT machine.

99% of you probably don't even know what a NeXT is, but it was a great computer well ahead of its time that unfortunately cost 8-gazillion dollars, so no one ever bought any.... except Allegheny College (www.alleg.edu)

Anyway, I loved that old computer, and I even had one of my own thanks to a friend who I met on the 'net and who ended up giving me his when it was a couple years old.

NeXT was eventually bought by Apple (www.apple.com) basically so they could get the love-him-or-hate-him-or-float-back-and-forth-between-the-two-extremes Steve Jobs who has brought Apple back from the margins of obscurity to the padding of obscurity (that's a little CSS joke there).

That was around 1998 or 1999. When Y2K rolled around, Apple did the cool thing and released free patches to fix NeXT computers, even though NeXT had been a dead parrot for several years.

Since I was using NeXT at the time and also helping to maintain the PEAK archives of NeXT software, I did two things: 1) I created a web page that showed folks how to find the patches which were buried 84 levels deep in Apple's FTP site and 2) I put a copy of the patches on PEAK.

Well #2 was none too well received by the folks at Apple, and PEAK received a fax from Apple's legal department telling them to take them down (I never saw the fax but would have loved to have it for my scrapbook). So I removed the patches from PEAK and updated my web page. Someone from Apple emailed me to say that they were concerned that I wouldn't keep up with the new patches as they were released, and people coming to my site would be getting outdated information

The site, which hasn't been substantively updated in about 2-3 years, still gets a lot (relatively) of traffic from folks looking for the patches, and today I received an email from someone telling me that they had called Apple looking for the patches and Apple had directed them to my site.

Once again: irony rules my life.

I went to Google and plugged in 'nextstep y2k patches' and found that my little site is the #1 entry, and there's nothing you can find from Apple.

Link to my site for NeXTSTEP y2k information

Other good stuff:
haiku contest for Eric Meyer's new book

Posted by TjL at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)