Outgrowing the Viewpoint…
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that life is complex, that there is no black and white, that things are forever gray and mixed. There is a lot of truth to this viewpoint, and I still like, the song from Live’s first album Beauty of Gray. It’s a good reminder to check as many factors as you can, and that the factors involved in weighing choices are rarely simple, especially when there exists a conflict between several held values. It’s also a good reminder that you may have caught someone on a bad day. And yet… Eventually choices must be made. One must decide how to act, or decide whether or not to act. Lif

Things I No Longer Use…
Once upon a time I had a killer program from an outfit called Cultured Code called Xyle Scope that made it as painless as possible to see what style sheet settings affected what text and blocks on a web page, making it far, far easier to make web pages look consistent, and figure out what bit of .css code you needed to adjust. I realized today, when troubleshooting some display issues in Safari, that I hadn’t used Xyle in a while. The problem is that there are other options that have improved. Not only does Firefox have a killer javascript debugger that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but has a few decent css debugging tools as well (though not as good as Xy

Two apostrophes and a diff later…
Hooookay. Again the geekery, and also dabbing a toe into a subject that if anything, gets geeks even more fired up than the platform wars (Unix/Mac/Windows/Whatever). Editors. One is left wondering how they got themselves into this. The long and the short is that I saw an article where someone was discussing the power of an ancient, and highly honed text editor in the *nix world called emacs, and how it was again becoming the cool kid on the block. It didn’t hurt that a few days before that I saw one of the guys from Digital Domain at my son’s High School (he was an alumnus there) showing off some of his work – and using a customized emacs editor.

The Cruxshadows: Quicksilver
There are songs that settle me. Make me happy. There are songs that make me want to dance.There are songs that pick me up and carry me, pump me up, feed me with energy and determination. Fuel me. Alongside songs such as Bring me to Life by Evanescence, and Stand my Ground by Within Temptation, The Cruxshadows have contributed more than their fair share in the latter category. Citadel. Winterborn (my Sacrifice). Sophia. Rarer is the song that not only lifts me, but straps wings on, lights the fuel and takes off into the clouds, the audible sensation of flight at the edge of a hypersonic flight envelope. Red Sector A by Rush is one such son