Mark goes crazy again. I love it when Mark goes crazy, it usually results in some sort of useful insight. Now, to address the XHTML thing, and what’s-with-XML part of it. I author in XHTML, which is XML. At some point (in theory) the tools will come along to make use of this, you know, because it’s XML. That’s what they say, right? Well, today I use jEdit, a text editor. It’s got some tools for dealing with XML. These can be useful tools. It can tell me when I’m writing crappy XML. It doesn’t care when I write crappy HTML. It is because everyone writes crappy HTML? No, it’s because it knows how to deal with XML and what the rules of XML are. Sure HTML has some rules, it’s just that almost no one seems to follow these rules. I have more confidence in new useful tools supporting XML/XHTML than I do for useful tools supporting HTML. but maybe that’s just me…

So I’ll be out in the D.C. area next week. The last time I was in D.C. was about 10 years ago. I saw Pat Grahm, I changed the tire on the van, I upset the guitarist from Verbal Assault (well, he wasn’t in Verbal Assault at that time) played a show with Born Against, used food stamps, and spent some quality time folding J-cards. Oh, and I managed to watch a 6 hour video on the subject of 7 Seconds being on tour. When I told the locals I watched the whole thing, they we’re quite amazed, as even though they owned the video tape in question, none of them seemed to be able to claim they watched the whole thing. I saw no landmarks of great significance while there. The only history I learned concerned Kevin Seconds and his acquaintances.

Oh, and I got a Rain Like the Sound of Trains demo… That was probably the highlight.

I stayed up much too late last night, as I heard that Dashboard Confessional was going to be on Last Call with Carson Daly. Now, I hate that show, and I always switch channels after Conan is done, but had to try to see Scott Schoenbeck on national television, even it if was 1 A.M. (and I figured it was making up for missing Davey and his Ring band not once, but twice on Late Night…)

I’ll say this of Dashboard Confessional, I didn’t like them. I mean sure, the kids seemed to dig it, the boys swayed, the girls swooned, and some even sung along, but really, it had none of the raw power or sensibility of Self Denial, none of the grace or character of the original Cleveland Bound Death Sentence… Scott, where’s that Sears employee we once knew? Where will Blood, Guts, Death Inc. shop for those much needed dismemberment tools?

“Stop by Sears, I’ll sell you some hardware” indeed…

(For the 99.999998% of the readership that has no idea what I’m talking about, just ignore this one…)

I had to share this. This is a reply to an email, that uh, someone I know, got from their previous boss. (The boss has been replaced.)

it sounds like ur contradicting urself - u say it is possible to use back
button… then u say its not “This will not work:

Fill in Page 1, Submit, get to Page 2″

im confused

who said u needed good commun skillz 2 b in mngmnt!?

Whew, missed this last week, as I was out, but it seems people think that email is broken, or at least email is somehow having some sort of problem. I wouldn’t really know it if it wasn’t for the hype from everyone else. I’ve had no problem getting my mail. I don’t have a huge increase in spam. I seem to be getting my mail fine, and sending it fine. What’s the problem?

Yeah, I know, I don’t use Windows, and if I did, I’d be using Mozilla products rather than IE and Outlook anyway, but I think the real trick is, I don’t really know people who use those things. Ok, I know people, but obviously I’m not their friend. By that I mean, I don’t seem to be in their Outlook address book, or in their IE cache, or whatever is required by the latest MS flaw-ware that allows Windows to go nuts like a disgruntled postal worker on speed.

I remember a few years back when there was some virus that emailed everyone in your Outlook address book, and at work everyone was getting it except me, due to the fact that either I’m a loser with no friends, or my friends use good software.

Happy Birthday Blogger. For those of you who might think Blogger started weblogging (or blogging) it’s their 4th birthday. This site is now over 6 years old, and I’m not even considered one of the ‘earlier starters’ by many. I was looking at sites like Scripting News or CamWorld as inspiration back in 1997, cuz there wasn’t much around at that time… Oh how times have changed…

For those of you who have drunken the MT Kool-Aid, read this entry at SixLog (well, skip the NetNewsWire part) and you can rest assured for a bit longer. Those SixApart folks just always come across as nice, smart people…

Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll use their software…

More of that Atkins stuff, from Duncan:

I was talking with Rael and he remarked that its interesting watching people on Atkins eat out as they have a more restrictive diet than even vegetarians.

Try existing on a diet of certified organic foods. You won’t eat out very much. Well, if you do, you might only get a choice of one, or possibly two, restarants. If you’re willing to drive. Far.

Ahhh, someday perhaps we’ll all be able to easily and affordably get to eat the foods we want…

DEAR SIR/MADAM:

I AM MR DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP…

See YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE REQUIRED at Netcraft…

Well, one of those virus thingies knocked me out. No, not a Windows virus, what kind of irresponsible person would be running Windows? I’m talking about one of those real viruses. The kind that gets inside of you, the influenza kind. I ended up leaving work last Wednesday and didn’t make it back until Monday. Between that time, I did a lot of lying around groaning in pain, and used a lot of toilet paper. I went a few days without eating. I saw way too much Nickelodeon, I got very little work done, and I’m glad to be back. I really hate being sick. I suppose it might be my body’s way of telling me to slow it down a bit, but can’t it find another way?

Oh, the highlight was seeing Old School, which was freakin’ hilarious. I had heard I was funny, but that’s an understatement. It’s probably the funniest movie I’ve seen in years. Of course part of it could be due to being cooped up in the house 5 days straight doing little more that using the bathroom and not eating… Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit…

Oooh, Yves Piguet has carbonized GifBuilder!

Many were the hours I spent circa 1996 using the old version of GifBuilder under the old Mac OS…

Well, we spent the weekend in Iowa, and I’d love to recount the adventure, but I just don’t have the time right now…

In related news, it seems I’ll be going out east, towards College Park, Maryland in the near future. So if you’ve got anything to say about that particular location, let me know…

Recently I used the word ‘pundit’ and was asked to define the term. Upon reflection, I think the proper definition might be know it all jackass. Doubt me? Next time you encounter the word pundit, just use the phrase know it all jackass and see if it still makes sense.

Of course it all depends on the pundit being mentioned, but it seems to work with most pundits I’ve encountered so far…

So Microsoft is killing off Outlook Express. (via gemal.dk) Honestly, does this surprise anyone? (I mean anyone not familiar with Microsoft’s history and tactics.)

I’ve known a few people who have used Outlook Express under Mac OS 9. The first one switched from Eudora, and thought Outlook Express was really cool. It seemed to have all these cool features, and looked real nice. I told him that I preferred Eudora, if only because it stored email in text (mbox) files. Soon after his switch to Outlook Express, things went south. His mail got corrupted in some way, and he couldn’t access it anymore. Oddly enough I just helped someone else troubleshoot some problems with Outlook Express being able to send but not recieve mail. I suggested he try another mail application. He eventually reinstalled Outlook Express and that seemed to fix things, but for how long?

As far as mail clients I’d recommend? Well, under Mac OS X I’d say Mail.app will work quite well for most people, it’s got it’s issues, but it does an excellent job of filtering spam. I also use Thunderbird, though only for IMAP access. Still, it works quite well, and I’d recommend it to people using Outlook Express. Especially since there’s much less chance of Thunderbird development stopping. That seems to be the problem with Microsoft lately, they only thing you can rely on them to keep producing is bugs…

So they plan on screwing with the zip format? That just seems silly. Well, as long as they don’t mess with tar or gzip I think I’ll be ok. Right now I don’t use zip very often. On occasion I have to send files to novice Windows users, and in such a case, I choose zip. If I’m sending something to someone using the old Mac OS (pre OS X) I’ll usually stuffit and then binhex it. For Mac OS X users, you can create a disk image (dmg) file, and you can always gzip that if you want to, but for the majority of things I do, the old fashioned tarball suits me just fine. tar and gzip, can’t live without them…