Don't Back Down

"For people to go out and say my agent made a mistake is utterly ridiculous and insane."

Even if you're not a sports fan you ought to get a laugh from this one. Apparently it is not only utterly ridiculous, but actually insane, to believe that either San Francisco wide receiver Terrell Owens or his agent could make a mistake.

I don't have anything against T.O. I don't really have anything for him, either. But I do think if I wanted out of my current contract, and to quickly exit a bad situation before it becomes even worse, I'd do everything in my power to get that form filed as quickly as possible.

According to Fox Sports, Owens explains that the filing was planned exactly the way it happened. This article has Terrell Owens explaining that his agent had his best interests at heart. They apparently waited until the franchise deadline passed, and when the 49ers put the franchise tag on another player, they filed.

Tell me: If you're in a bad situation and want out so badly that you make no secret of the fact that you want to be traded at any and every opportunity, why do you wait to see if you get the franchise tag? The franchise designation means a player gets an average of the five highest player salaries at that position. If you're a marquee player entering free agency, most would think to set a new record for high salaries. Sure, the team gets draft picks - but why would T.O. care?

Yesterday, Clear Channel Radio decided to yank Howard Stern from a handful of stations (6 at last count). Which is fine. It's their company, they can do what they want. And frankly, I don't really enjoy the show much anyway. Bob and Tom are better.

But what I just don't understand is that people want the show. If no one liked the show, they wouldn't listen, advertisers wouldn't pay for their attention, and there would be no money to be made. Yet money is being made.

Read "What the People Want" »

When assigned seats on planes went the way of the dodo bird, only a select few complained loudly enough to be heard. When they started to sell food on planes, frequent flyers debated things, but there wasn't even a huge outcry there. I suspect it's because the food wasn't all that great in the first place.

But now, European low-fare carrier Ryanair is upping the ante. You want a window shade? Or perhaps a seat-back pocket with magazines (and for storing your trash)? A seat that reclines? Better try somewhere else. Apparently, they have even eliminated one bathroom on some of their planes.

Interesting developments, to be sure. Perhaps more strangely, I don't disagree, except perhaps for the window shade. I've flown enough to have been on the bad side of the plane and received a full shot of sun beaming in from the other side. But really, the rest of those things aren't too bad. Being a relatively tall person myself, the knowledge that the person behind my won't be leaning back into my lap is rather reassuring. Now if I could just afford to go to Europe to try it out...

Well, it seems that the earlier fix created to handle displays in Mozilla-based browsers didn't really take. So I took another look at it. It seems that my main content <div> wasn't being positioned correctly. I'm not entirely sure why this is, as it should have been fine. It used to be fine. In any case, I didn't like the use of the position:absolute solution, because it tended to overwrite the footer at the bottom of the page. Back to the drawing board.

Read "Moron Compliance" »

I'm sure that about everyone in the world knows it by now, but it seems that Dubya, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that we need a constitutional amendment to protect society from same-sex marriage. I don't get it. What exactly is the hang-up here?

Until very recently, same-sex marriage wasn't a possibility anywhere in this country. I'm not familiar with other countries, but I believe that it is pretty much a given elsewhere too. Only recently has there been a surge in the popularity of this topic. And that's fine. I have no problem with the surge in popularity.

What I don't understand is that the president of our country thinks that a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage is as important as, say, the right to vote. Or perhaps the right to free speech. It just doesn't compute for me.

Is this supposed to accomplish anything? I doubt if a constitutional amendment exists that it will prevent people from being interested in same-sex marriage. Perhaps the concern arises from the message that this sends - after all, if there should be some of these marriages, maybe people who might consider opposite-sex marriage will be encouraged to give it a try? That's a load of bull. After all, if it were as simple as that, wouldn't the overabundance of opposite-sex marriages have imposed that idea on everyone already?

It seems quite simple, really: Keep the government out of places they don't belong. And if they're there already, it's high time to get them out. Our government is supposed to exist for the people. Instead of all the bloat and interloping we have now, cut, cut, cut and let government serve the barest of purposes. Then we can return the real power - the money - to the people. Let the citizens of this country live free of the ongoing burden of an ever-increasing government presence that provides fewer and fewer services that anyone actually sees. It's an election year. Make a difference.

The other day we found out that our youngest had the croup. Pretty nasty sounding cough accompanies the croup, but luckily, it didn't seem that there was much damage. Mostly just dried out from the lack of humidity in the winter air. Our heat pump is badly in need of repair or else it might provide the needed humidity, but that's another story for another time.

So we're supposed to get a "humidifier". Hmm. Seems to be lots of choices. Warm mist, cool mist, humidifier, vaporizer. How to choose? How indeed. According to the helpful lady at Wal-Mart, we should get cool mist (ie, a humidifier). From what I can tell, in the beginning there were only vaporizers. But as time wore on, dainty little hands were burnt from the warm mist produced. You and I both know that warm things don't burn. That mist is downright hot. But I digress.

Read "Humidifier or Vaporizer?" »

I ran into a problem with MT-Outliner's handling of OPML files that included both carriage returns and line feeds. Until recently, I had only seen one or the other. So I updated the processing and it seems to have corrected the problem. This specifically was coming from NetNewsWire when there were carriage returns in the descriptions. Please let me know if you're seeing any issues.

It's often strange how we perceive the world around us. Most people, I think, would like to believe that they are completely unbiased when they look at most any situation. But it seems that the more I look at it, the more I realize just how one person's perception can be completely subjective.

Today I was driving. Not an unusual condition, by any means. But for whatever reason, the planets have aligned to make this an exceptionally annoying driving day. There is roadwork to be found about everywhere, accidents on many roads, and just a general sense of road rage waiting to happen.

A left turn lane was closed for repairs. I pulled up in the lane next to the left turn lane to wait on the turn arrow. Naturally, this meant that I was blocking a lane of traffic. But I needed to turn. Plus, there were five other cars behind me doing the same thing. So this moron pulls up in the lane next to me making all sorts of hand and head motions, and honking his horn, trying to figure out why we weren't moving. The light changed and we all moved.

I was in the DMV the other day. There are two lines. One is direct, and wraps around the outside of the room. The other is more indirect, and wraps back on itself, so it's roughly twice as long as the direct line. It looks something like this when both lines are full:

rrr
llr
l*r
llr
llr
llr
llr
llr

The asterisk indicates the ending position of the left hand, or inner, line. As you can tell, this is about the same place as the end of the right hand, or outer, line (which was full). Yet a lady came in and stood at the end of the right line. Just after me, in fact. She was relieved to find out she was in the wrong line and got to go stand in the other line. But she didn't actually make her wait any shorter. If anything, it got longer as the inner line moved more slowly as it was for processing lengthier transactions.

I just don't understand how people can miss things that are so obvious. Has it become such an issue that we can't be bothered to assess the entire environment, and not just that which is two feet in front of us?

Due to popular demand, I've added an opmlpath attribute to the MTOutliner tag in MT-Outliner, which allows you to pull in a file from the filesystem rather than through an HTTP request.

While I was in there, I fixed the problem with carriage returns in descriptions (they are simply removed now) and I also fixed the problem with HTML in the item description. HTML will now display as it should, provided the characters are correctly escaped.

Finally, I've added a new tag, MTOutlinerDataSource, that you can use to display the full URL or path to the file being processed. This should help you with troubleshooting your installation by making sure the correct data is being processed.

For those of you who have been trying to read my site in a Mozilla-based browser, you'll be happy to know that I'll probably be keeping up on the compliance now that I'm using one on a regular basis.

Read "Browser Compliance" »

It was bound to happen. Microsoft's Internet Explorer finally just broke. Nothing fancy, no bells, whistles or fireworks. It just died. For some unknown reason, cookies are no longer working. There are a handful that are set, and more are accepted because they keep piling up. But the ones I want to work (Observer login, Bloglines login) don't.

Read "Kicking IE to the Curb" »