Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Fire Next Time (Via UrbanGuru)

Beautiful.

For multiple reasons (too much time to fill, for one) repeated exposure to the same story is the prevailing style in most 24/7 reportage. And so it goes, a tautological symphony of regurgitated images — ever expanding, never silent, feeding an incessant public appetite for tangible evidence. It’s the new manifest destiny, greedy and territorial: this is truth by reiteration, not so much a reinforcement of fact as an annexation by conjecture.

Via Design Observer

I thought the above quote from DO’s post was fantastic and the entirety of the post is well worth a read - a juxtaposition of last week’s tragedy at Virginia Tech placed against the psychology of how we read/interpret/absorb news (with some backup from eye-tracking studies). I tend to disagree about the author’s conclusions but I think it’s good for us to have a debate about such things. Given how the painful transformation that news media has had to make in a blog-filled world it’s understandable that our notions of impropriety and taste might change (for better or worse). In my mind I find it interesting that raw displays of visual media as a backdrop for delivering hard news seems to be the standard across the globe while in the US we seem to cling to prudish principles of decorum when it comes to such things.

If there’s anything wrong with the way our media handles death, especially in this case, is the seeming willingness of the media to, for a lack of a better word, “glamorize” the murderer and given our culture (this is where I agree with DO) risks the possibility that some other completely mental person will want to find themselves the “darling” of 24/7 news networks in their afterlife regardless of the means to get there. This is a problem of news networks in general and not our culture (hopefully that’s not wishful thinking). I would say that most people tire of the incessant “blah, blah, blah” of news networks and their ability to “annex by conjecture” - they tire the soul with incessant crawlers about stories that runs through multiple news cycles that deserve less than the batter of an eye. (I kept banging my head against the wall at the amount of coverage Anna Nicole got in her death. Is there nothing else going on of more import in our world?)

Death is a controversial subject despite the very fact of it. Perhaps this is why the Bush administration doesn’t let us look at flag draped-coffins coming back from Iraq. Or why our media doesn’t show the worst of the videos coming back from crises-ridden regions of Africa and the Middle East.

The verdict that limbo could now rest in peace had been expected for years. The document was seen as most likely the final word since limbo was never part of Church doctrine, even though it was taught to Catholics well into the 20th century.

“The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation,” it said.

Via Reuters

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have….

Via AmericaBlog

Lee Iacocca has a new book coming out entitled Where Have All The Leaders Gone. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need but I wonder if it’s just more preaching to the choir. I often wonder, despite the polls, what the true American sentiment is right now. Everything seems to lead to “not happy” and “ready for change in direction in Iraq”, so how is it that the administration still gets away with things? Regardless, Iacocca’s got the creds and he also seems to have the cajones so I’ll be curious to see the reaction to the book.

Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch.

He had no trouble remembering complaints from his bosses and Republican lawmakers about federal prosecutors who were not playing ball with the Republican Party’s efforts to drum up election fraud charges against Democratic politicians and Democratic voters. But he had no idea whether any of the 93 United States attorneys working for him — let alone the ones he fired — were doing a good job prosecuting real crimes.

NY Times Op-Ed

But the president says “heckuva a job, brownie!”

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses. The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

Ok, either the President is just unwilling to admit to the mistake and rescue main justice by firing the AG or he has been hiding and needs to keep hidden some things that are really damning. Remember, the entire play of this administration requires that the courts and the entirety of the judicial system be at their disposal. Given all the resignations - if Bush were to have Gonzales resign my guess is that it’d be pretty tough to find someone loyal enough to keep his mess under wraps. Really though, the entire house of cards is falling, as damn well it should be.

Can I also add that the assholes in the back of the room singing “na-na-na-na hey, hey, good bye” were complete morons. No better way to show your crass immaturity at a senate judiciary committee than to do something like that. The AG is incompetent and should resign, but he is still human being - and he and the committee and the process deserve some amount of respect, especially after that marathon.

So I’ve got the new Digital Phone from Time Warner installed finally. During the process they also upgraded me to RoadRunner Turbo - which was a nice addition for only $10/mo more (ah, the joys of bundling). The tech that came from TW was definitely in the geek category so we were able to communicate clearly and effectively to one another (turns out the guy is working on his EE, pretty cool). Anyhow, I’ve been bitching internally about upload speeds from my house because I’d really like to start backing up some things from my drives at the house to somewhere on the internets just for safe keeping. (I lost a drive once so now have dual 250GB externals copying out via super duper - don’t ask.) RR Turbo is certainly better and doubles the effective upload speed but it’s still gonna suck to do the first rsync to wherever. I guess I should just be glad that TW serves Kyle and that I’m able to even achieve these speeds. Given that I’m running HD, Digital Phone and RR Turbo on the same pipe is actually pretty impressive given where we started not just five years ago. I can’t imagine what the next five will bring.

Speed Test was through speakeasy using these newfangled flash front-ends. I’m honestly not sure how much they can be trusted but seem to reflect what I get when transferring files to/from servers fairly well. The ability to choose datacenter/carrier to perform the test is a nice addition.

So who is your broadband provider and what are your speeds like?

I finally decided that I’d devote a couple of solid hours to updating the blog a bit. It’d be nice to get the new face on before the baby boy makes his appearance so I’ve made a few of major shifts.

The first is that I’m using Eric Meyer’s “Reset” CSS which basically undoes the damage the browsers do in their default stylesheets. There are a couple of implementations but I saw Eric’s come through the other day and thought I’d give it a go. The only change I’ve made to it is that I’ve made images display: block - they default to inline which can cause some weird margins to show up in certain cases (if I have time I’ll try to show up with the test case for that).

The second major change is that I’m using the Holy Grail Layout (One True Layout?) from A List Apart. The implementation I did on my own was close but not terribly clean and theirs is certainly a lot better. I went ahead and changed to left/center/right columns instead of the center/right/right columns that I had. I’m not convinced yet but it’s growing on me.

And I’m trying my best to clean up the CSS - it was near a mess when I left it and I’ve still got some rearranging to do. I updated the typography a bit based on some key tips from the Web Typography Sucks panel that was at south-by. I think it feels a little better now. The front page is still fairly heavy on copy. It may be that I’ll make the home page run excerpts or push the top stories down to 2 or 3 just to keep people from gouging their eyes out. I don’t want to do too much on the home page.

The last change I’ve starting on is adding a nav at the top that breaks stories down into three specific categories. These areas cover a broad range of things and I made add a couple more just to keep things clean but this should represent most of the posts on this site fairly well. This means that I’ll have a lot of category cleanup to do moving forward but I like this separation. Handling multiple blogs sucks so I’m going to keep everything in one spot and segment by category. It’s just easier that way.

And then when it’s all nice, neat, semantically clean, and validates I’ll start pimping it out
Which means to say this damn thing will never be done…

Preview »

If you were a font then which font would you be? I twittered this tonight and thought I should at least answer my own question.

A lot of the times I think I’m Apple LiGothic…

Then there are some times where I’m just totally Zapfino…

Yeah, that’s about right…

Is all of this true? Pretty well put together - but I think just trying to scare the shift out of us…

Via Lonely Lion. Brilliant!