April 2002

More good stuff from A List Apart: The Trouble With EM ‘n EN. My reading list ( and things to fix on my site) runneth over.

Someone commented on my mini-rant that the words “itch” and “impact” are not verbs. The reader seemed to suggest that the appearance of these words in “a dictionary” as verbs is a viable argument for them being accepted that way. My reply:

There are many words in “the dictionary” that are not words. You cannot use the fact that hundreds of thousands of people use a word incorrectly as evidence that they are using it correctly. This is a tautology. It is tantamount to saying, “There are hundreds of thousands of murders each year, so we should just accept murder as law.”

Yes, impact likely appears in dictionaries as a verb today. (It didn’t always.) And using it as a verb only displays to those of us with a respect for language and law that a person has a limited vocabulary. One last thing: An itch is a thing. To scratch an itch is to do something. To itch an itch makes no sense. Again, it just shows that the person saying it has a very poor vocabulary (or, alternatively, is extremely lazy … splitting hairs, I know …). It is true that there are a slew of words which are appropriately nouns and verbs. Hammer is a good example. You hammer a nail with a hammer. A knock is another good one. When you knock on a door you are producing a knock. Itch and scratch are not the same, though. You cannot itch an itch. A person saying that sounds about as intelligent as a person saying, “I’m hungry. Let’s go food,” or, “Can you car me to the airport?” So. While I have to admit that you are correct - itch and impact appear in the dictionary as verbs - the point of the entry on which you commented is that no self-respecting writer (or speaker) of English would use them as such.

I just heard US Poet Laureate Billy Collins read this poem on A Prairie Home Companion. I loved it so much that I decided to re-print it here.

Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins

I guess the NFL Draft was this weekend. I hadn’t even noticed. It looks like Florida players did pretty well: one first-rounder and three second-rounders ….

“I’d love a proportional-width relative-positioning design for my weblog, but I’m too afraid of cross-browser compatability issues. I don’t want to spend more than a weekend figuring out how to get two columns to work in three browsers.” - Dan Sanderson

I have to agree with Dan’s sentiment here. It’s a bear to get relative positioning to work. I’ve got a two-column layout on my main site and a three-column layout here. I know that things look great at 1024×768 on IE6/PC, but I’m not so sure about other browser/OS configurations. My pages should be CSS and (x)HTML compliant, but does that really mean they render nicely? I doubt it. I’d love to please everyone, but I just don’t know if it’s possible without spending hours (days?) making hacks for every browser/OS combination out there. My stats tell me that almost all my visitors are using IE5 or better on a PC. Is it really worth the effort to try to be Netscape / Mac-friendly? I’d like to know. Are any of my visitors using Macs or Netscape? How do my pages look to you?

Here is a short list of web sites that I really wish would ping weblogs.com so I could properly use Dan Sanderson’s blogtracker to follow their antics:
Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room, Davezilla, Lines and Splines, dooce, fishrush, Wil, microcontentnews, Fiendish Thingy, What’s New, Pussycat?, ljonn.com, dan, and bry

SEATTLE, Washington (AP): A body was found at the home of Layne Staley, lead singer and guitarist for the Seattle grunge band Alice in Chains.
The King County medical examiner’s office scheduled an autopsy Saturday but investigator[s] … could not immediately confirm the identity of the deceased late Friday night.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted unidentified law enforcement sources as saying the body was Staley’s.
The person appeared to have been dead for several days …

Oblio’s Return (narration) - Harry Nilsson

I finally finished making my Burn Baby Burn Weblogger CD Exchange mixes (previously mentioned here). I’m late. They were supposed to be in the mail on the 15th. I’ve already received CDs from three other participants: unusuallysuspect.com, cultofdarian.com, and Sophia H. I am really digging the one from unusuallysuspect.com. It’s ultra-mellow. And Sophia stuck Springsteen’s Rosalita in her mix! This was such a cool idea. I’m probably going to play the Mix of the Month exchange at crabwalk.com next month, too.

Amazon XML? Google API? Web services? You want some cool web services?

The Covers Project … building a database of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original performer) with the intention of creating cover “chains.” A cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song.

So far, we have 6,075 songs (4,188 unique) and 2,960 artists catalogued. The longest “chain” we know about contains 43 songs.

My birthday is June 26, 1973. I know. I was there. That’s also what my mom told me, and she swears that she was there, too.

This has previously never caused a problem for me. Oh, sure, it’s right in the middle of the summer, sandwiched between several other family members’ birthdays. And I never got to have a party in school - birthday skip day and all that. But all in all I like my birthday. I’m actually quite fond of it.

This year I filed my taxes with TurboTax. I used their service last year and had no problems. It’s quick and painless - even on a 56k modem on April 15th.

They handle all the little details to which I hate to pay attention. They ask all the questions that I would just blithely skip and miss much-needed deductions: “Did I install solar heating last year? Did I adopt a child? Did I use my truck to do business on an Indian reservation?” Stuff like that. They even let me file my State of California return, which is only slightly less complicated than particle physics.

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OQO: Ultrapersonal Computing. This looks really, really cool. It’s tiny. It’s wee. It’s running XP. Amazing.

(Note to OQO CEO: Find model with nicer hands and / or cleaner fingernails.)

Generally I enjoy watching Biography on A&E. I really don’t like their new tagline, though. “You’re either Biography, or you’re not.” What is that supposed to mean? Are they saying that I am not Biography? I think it’s insulting. Hmph.

I have met this blogger in person. Do you know the SprintPCS commercials with the guy in the trench coat? “Talking over the static.” That guy?

I don’t wanna freak you out or anything, but check it: same guy. I’m not kidding. Billy is the SprintPCS guy.