New posts will go here, then get moved over when I get the real server up and running again. Thanks to my brother for letting me use this machine. Hopefully the DNS will update soon (DNS provided by ZoneEdit, who I recommend).

One of the things that makes tennis such a great game is its scoring system, which can be considered apart from the rest of the rules of the game, concerned as they are with valid ways of scoring points and procedural issues.
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It’s still down, but some temporary measure should be up by the time you read this, hopefully tomorrow (Saturday). My email is working, although next week that too will be down (but I shouldn’t miss any emails, they’ll just stack up in the queue). When I get back, I need to get my old serer working, repair the new server, and then get offsite hosting going, and move to that.

Yes, it’s down again. I hope to have a temporary blog up and running tomorrow, but for the moment, it’s not functioning and will be out of service until about 5 July. Sigh. After that, hopefully I’ll finally get my digital infrastructure properly set up again—since January, most of my machines have died in one way or another, and I think I’m going to have to accept that at the very least I need to have a backup at some hosting facility, if not the primary site.

Why have there been so few good ones? I noticed this a while back, and having discussed the matter with some friends, it appears to be the case that the first decade of this millennium is really bad for cinematic science fiction.
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When I posted some of my favorite clips of his last week, he was apparently fine.
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For anyone who wanted to be there but couldn’t make it, here’s the speech I gave at my father’s funeral yesterday.
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A distraction of an entirely different kind, taking my mind off things by being deeply reprehensible, creepy, and disturbing:

I’ve been playing quite a lot of pool recently. Some chance factors led to this, primarily some Irish friends taking the game up shortly before I visited. I used to play a lot (it could be argued that pool was effectively one of my undergrad minors), but have never been particularly good.
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Funeral Arrangements

Removal from Quinn’s Funeral Home approximately 12:50–13:10, to Mount Jerome Crematorium at 14:00 on Saturday 21 June.

Reception from about 15:30 onwards, location TBD.

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Edward O’Higgins, may he rest in peace. He lived a good and full life.

I loved him and will miss him greatly.

To those of you who knew him: please spare some time to think of him, remembering the times you met him or spent time with him. Thank you.

Recently I’ve been noticing once again how useful jQuery is, and wondering how I ever did DOM manipulation without it. It’s been a while since I’ve really looked at the release notes, but the latest version (1.2.6) has some significant improvements in it.
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I do pluralize in the header, partly because I don’t believe that this story about upper limits on a police IQ test is an isolated case. Partly because, despite my lack of faith in IQ tests, it just seems like a poetic explanation of rather a lot…
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I noticed earlier this year that Wells Fargo ATMs had a new user interface. I was quite skeptical of it at first, partly because it was quite different and I’d gotten used to the old interface, and partly because I tend to believe that many redesign efforts end up providing worse usability than the prior design (I’m an optimist, clearly).
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This morning, via A Tiny Revolution, I came across a wire news story from Bloomberg that has the form of informational content but contains almost no useful information.
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Imagine that you are the best tennis player of your time, perhaps the best tennis player of all time. You’ve been number one in the world for an unprecedented 228 consecutive weeks. You’ve reached the semifinals or better of the last sixteen Grand Slams. You’ve won three slams in a year three times, two of those in consecutive years, and in those consecutive years you were in all eight Grand Slam finals. Unlike other historic greats with prodigious talent and great success on grass, you’re excellent on clay and have been improving on that surface. Only one Slam trophy is missing from your cabinet: the French. As possibly the greatest player of all time, what could stop you from winning it?
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A fantastic video report: conspiracy theorist and Al Qaeda spokesperson debate the truth behind 9/11 (Lev, you in particular might like this one).

A truly outrageous crime spree places the Liberty City Police under scrutiny.

It turns out that the White House thought the best response to the emergency in New Orleans during/after Katrina was to blame Democrats.

Wait, that last one isn’t actually from The Onion. Have this one instead.

I love this. I’m sorry that it appears to be fraud—I’d be perfectly happy if he had found a legal as well as technical loophole and exploited it. I’m curious about whether or not it would have been fraud if he’d used his real name and details every time. Lastly, it’s quite interesting that he was caught due to government snooping on bogus accounts, and not by financial security systems.

Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary who produce Magic: The Gathering, announced on Monday that they’re making some significant changes to the way they publish the game. I’m indifferent to some of these, strongly dislike others, and absolutely despise the way in which the changes were presented.
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There’s plenty to find disturbing in this story about the interference of the Pentagon with their own judges in their “military tribunal” kangaroo courts, but one thing that caught my eye was the following:

Khadr, now 21, faces up to life in prison if convicted at Guantanamo on charges of murder, conspiracy and supporting terrorism. He is accused of lobbing a grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher J. Speer during the firefight in which he was captured.

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Jay Rosen has a good article covering the Scott McClellan brouhaha from a historical perspective. The gist of it is that the Bush administration’s approach to handling the media is a total reversal of Theodore Roosevelt’s initial creation of a White House press room. This might well be the case, although in many respects I think that’s fairly minor in comparison to the institutional problems of the American media (highlighted here by Glenn Greenwald, just to choose a recent example, but really exposed years ago, most systematically by Chomksy and Herman).
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