I didn’t finish the second draft of my novel. I didn’t even come close; the third chapter remains, unbowed, yet to be edited.

However, I’m also unwilling to abandon the whole thing.
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I’m still thinking about stuff I want to buy, specifically cameras.
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After our Sartre session this evening, Seth and I walked up Taylor, from Post to California. And along the way got caught in what I think was the heaviest hailstorm I’ve ever seen.
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In early January I wrote a post called Tools for Political Understanding, the beginning of an attempt to help others analyze the political sphere. With yesterday’s post in mind, I’m going to look at the “War on Drugs” using the tools I suggested as aids to understanding.
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One of the key problems with attempting to suppress certain behaviors in a subject population is that you end up introducing corruption into your system of government. I’m really referring to attempts to suppress behaviors that are popular in themselves (drinking alcohol being a classic example). You can’t really enforce demand, and most of the population will know that the proscribed activity goes on all the time behind closed doors.
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Monika recently mentioned that she wanted to learn HTML, and Brian has similar intentions, prompting me to wonder how I would teach HTML at this point. I’ve taught it before, but not for quite some time, and I think my approach would be different now.
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My cellphone is a Motorola Razr, and I’ve mostly been happy with it. I’m not exactly a cellphone power user, its form factor is good, it’s quad-band, and in general is mostly fine. But there are some things about it that are very irritating.
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On Saturday night I was shown a new game, Set. Played with 81 specially-desigend cards, it’s a pattern-recognition game. It hurt my brain to play it, but I also found it rather addictive, and bought it on Monday.
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In Exploring HTML form elements, I wrote about semantic elements that improve form markup and usability. Sadly, the legend element has some significant problems.
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Years back I wrote some online tutorials on how to animate circular movement in Lingo and JavaScript. While moving my older articles to this site, I realized that I could not in good conscience move this one without updating it. So, a tutorial on circular animation in JavaScript follows.
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Last month I wrote about wanting to change my reading habits, so that I would think more while reading, and read more critically. Since resolving to do this, the main difference is that I’ve been reading far less.
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Recently the Washington Times featured an editorial by Frank Gaffney (cached here) in which Gaffney called for an examination on “what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war”—after opening with a (fictitious!) quotation from Abraham Lincoln calling for the hanging of Congressmen who damage morale during wartime.
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After collaborating with me on an AJAX enhancement to our web application, my co-worker Ryan today asked me to give our engineering group an introduction to AJAX techniques. That seems like an interesting idea, so I’m going to sketch out the kind of thing such an introduction might cover.
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HTML form elements are richer than is generally understood. There are a variety of completely standard and semantically-useful elements that seem to languish in semi-obscurity, despite having been around since 1999.
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The man walked slowly along the road. He was naked, and his bare feet were swollen and blistered. He was still bleeding slightly, his wounds not completely healed.
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It’s been a little over a year since Seth and I started reading Sartre’s Essays in Existentialism. We haven’t met quite every week, but probably haven’t missed more than six or so sessions.
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My first cellphone was with an Irish provider—despite the fact that I lived in San Francisco at the time I bought it, and had no plans to move back. It was (is) still worth it to have that phone, because I use it on a pay-as-you-go basis. This has worked extremely well for several years.
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I don’t write about work too often, but I’ve really been enjoying what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I’m writing the specification for how our system should handle turning standard HTML files into files that handle the variability delivered by our backend.
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I made a Greasemonkey script that shows you more cars per reservation page than the measly 5 that Zipcar gives you.
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I created a simple anti-spam plugin for WordPress—all it does is reject comments from unregistered users which have more than some number of links in them.
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I went to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire at the Castro Theatre tonight, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
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I learned tonight that the Canvas Café and Gallery will be closing on 1 May 2007. This doesn’t make me happy.
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Looking ahead to potential candidates, I don’t see much that makes me optimistic.
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