Today is “Blog Against Heteronormativity Day,” so I’m doing my part to blog against heteronormativity.
I guess I’ll say that heteronormativity sucks, even for straight white dudes like me. Heteronormativity places constraining gender expectations on everyone. I’m going to stop blogging before I really sound like an ass.
According to a study from the University of London, men and women have different tastes in literature. This shouldn’t be too surprising, except that most men apparently have no taste in literature at all. A Sydney Morning Herald story (via Tim O’Reilly) says most men have little interest in reading fiction between the ages of 20 and 50, and the books they cite as influences tend to be brooding stories of alienation associated with the teenage years. At first, this struck me as a little wacky, since I’m a man and I was an English major, but I realized I more or less quite reading fiction when I finished college. My tastes quickly turned to computer magazines (of course, I had a job at a computer magazine) and later blogs. I do try to read fiction during school breaks, but I wonder if the Don DeLillo books I enjoy still fall into the category of adolescent lit.
Following Nigel, I had to participate in the Wikipedia what-happened-on-your-birthday meme. Here’s a selection of events…
Well, a few important moments in media history took place on my birthday, and I share birthdays with my congressman, as well as Le Corbusier and Thor Heyerdahl.
I’ve been getting laughs lately referring to the internet as “teh Internets” in PowerPoint slides and the like. Of course, it’s a common typographical error, combined with President Bush’s assertion that “There are rumors on the Internets.” I just shot off an email, and I was tempted to end it with the common typo “-Chirs.” I got a little too excited, thinking “Chirs” would be my new online identity, and I started to change the “from” field in mail.app. I realized that I send enough email to people who don’t know me or my sense of humor that this would be a dumb idea.
Wow, I never would have guessed there was an HTML entity for ☠or the skull-and-crossbones. The entity is “☠.”I learned this through the Wikipedia entry for “Skull and Crossbones.” With all of the publicity surrounding Talk Like a Pirate Day, I’m surprised I haven’t run across ☠ before. Arrrrrrgh!
Update: I apologize to anyone who got a zillion updates via their RSS readers. The Ajaxamacated posting interface in WordPress makes it difficult to represent HTML entities with other HTML entities. Sigh. After a quick search, I found a Wikipedia page with all kinds of wacky HTML entities.
This week, I finally got frustrated enough with Safari hanging and failing to render plug-in heavy pages that I’m using Firefox as my primary browser. One major problem I’ve encountered is that I have a difficult time accessing the admin screens for my WordPress install in Firefox. When I go to ./post.php, I am redirected to the main infobong.com page. Yesterday, I wound up cutting and pasting links from Firefox and posting in Safari. This post describes the same problem, but the fix didn’t work for me. Does anyone know the fix for OS X? I’m not having the same problem accessing the admin screens for the Semantic Web class blog.
Right now, I’m trying out Deepest Sender, a Firefox plugin that uses the RPC extensions on a variety of blog platforms. When I was able to access my admin screens yesterday, it has a nice Ajax interface for formatting, so I would like to use Firefox to post. It’s a pity no one has an Ajaxamacated button for inserting footnotes. Deepest Sender also seems to be pretty strict about inserting HTML in its WYSIWYG window; angle brackets are converted to HTML entities, which is frustrating for someone who thinks in HTML.
Since I’m messing around with plugins, I also downloaded the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, and I must say that the bookmarklet has more functionality. The plugin doesn’t offer users del.icio.us’ tag suggestion interface, which I appreciate when I’m quickly publishing links. OK, now that I’ve alienated all of my media-studies colleagues with geeky browser kvetching, I’ll go back to posting media links and anecdotes about coffeeshops.
Don pointed to this piece from the NYU journalism program ranking newspapers on their blog efforts. I’m ambivalent about non-professional blogs integrated into newspaper sites - if the content is that compelling why not have a blog on your own, rather than make money for the paper. It’s interesting to see Houston and San Antonio paper make the top ten, since Austin and Dallas seem to have a “tech city” reputation in Texas. Perhaps Austin and Dallas already have entrenched local blogging cultures, so newspaper efforts go ignored by potential bloggers.
I was particularly intrigued to see the Daily Disappointment Oklahoman on the list with an honorable mention, since it is a truly awful newspaper that makes not effort to mask its conservative bias. Regardless of the paper’s quality, the authors of the piece note “One [blogger] writes on what makes Oklahoma City surprisingly interesting, another on what passes for fashion there.” Has this writer spent much time in OKC to be making snide judgments about Oklahoman’s clothes? Or are they just working off of stereotypes about “the heartland.” This seems unforgivably elitist coming from a J-School professor or student. OKC is probably my least favorite of the places I’ve lived, but this kind of dismissive attitude toward a poor mid-sized city is really ugly and undemocratic. Shame on you NYU!
My host is apparently having problems with its MySQL installation, so this blog has been going down intermittently for the past few days. It’s embarrassing to have an error message pop up on my front page - it looks like I can’t edit a config file - and it’s frustrating to submit trouble tickets about the problem, only to get a terse reply from a tech support staffer telling me the site is back up. Is the problem being worked on, or are they just letting me know when the MySQL load is lighter? Can anyone recommend a cheap host for a modest blog? I’d like about 500MB of space and a minimum of 1GB of transfer. (I guess the bandwidth really does reveal how few people read my site.) If you read this before you see another “Database connection error” message, you’ll know what’s going on. If not, this post is pretty much useless.
Oh rad, Siva Vaidhyanathan linked to one of my blog posts! Too bad it was on the blog for Don’s class, rather than my personal blog.
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