Monitoring Dalager

BrideStuff.com - Danish Wedding Customs

Heh. Now this is really exotic! Are we Danes really so bizarre? It sounds as if the reader is supposed to go WHAT?! OH MY GOD! or something like that.
I’d prefer the Bohemian way of saying iloveyou: “here honey, take this fur cap as a symbol of our love” Yehaa!

Oh, btw: there is absolutely no excuse for stumbling upon a wedding site. Other than Gillmor –> 20six –> TankGirl –> BrideStuff.com in 15 seconds. Scary.

So you can’t hear the voice of God? You’re not alone…

The text reads “The Church of the Deaf”. Passed by on my bike today. Haven’t noticed it before. I kind of like the what-do-you-call-it-sculpture-somthing. I guess it is Jesus and a deaf child. Or just a kid who tried to stuff a piece of Lego into her ear. Can’t place the woman.

Martin Fowler’s Bliki
Well. What can I say. Other than BlikiBliki ;-)
It’s a crossover between a wiki and a weblog. Mmmm. And Hmmmm. Strange thing. In a good way.
The topics are within a rather wide range from design, agile software development, refactoring, UML and blogging culture.

– Posted with the Mozblog plugin for Mozilla. On the website it says that you should be able to edit previous posts. Can’t get that one working, though. :-(

Reason: Skin Flicks 101: What porn studies profs don’t get about sex

A column by Cathy Young:

In a way, [stating that that pornography should be treated no differently from any other genre of film or literature] is a reductio ad absurdum of the postmodernist creed that no “text” is truly superior to any other. In a 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times, Burt boldly declares that no study of film adaptations of Shakespeare can be complete without a look at hard-core porno flicks like A Midsummer Night’s Cream.

If porn studies and events like “Revolting Behavior” take intellectual content out of the academy, they also take human content out of human sexuality (and perhaps sexual content as well).

It’s quite interesting. The Brain vs. The Body in modern cultural studies.
I agree in some of the points (quite a few in fact), but it seems as if some parts of modern reality is not suited for academia. Which is really disturbing from my point of view.

[via dazereader]

Har gravet en ting frem, som jeg lavede for et par år siden, og må konstatere at den stadig er ret sjov på en utrolig barnlig måde. Synes jeg selv, altså. Og Eske synes det også, så det er ikke bare mig ;-)

Det er min Nonsensgenerator, der spytter tåbelige sætninger ud ala Mandrilaftalens programoversigter. Det er hyperbanalt, men som sagt også rimeligt underholdende…

Tjup.

Axis of Evil Wannabees - John Cleese (don’t really know if it IS the monty p. Cleese) about the concept of the Axis of Evil.

Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the “Axis of Evil,” Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the “Axis of Just as Evil,” which they said would be more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address.

Rating: ROFL :-)

[Shut Up Bitch via Pollas]

Copy Protection is a Crime against Humanity
David Weinberger delivers a good read about copyright enforcement and the importance of rule bending on Wired.

There are times when rules need to be imposed within that marketplace, whether they’re international laws against bootleg CDs or the right of someone to sue for libel. But the fact that sometimes we resort to rules shouldn’t lead us to think that they are the norm. In fact, leeway is the default and rules are the exception.

[...]

But in the digital world - the global marketplace of ideas made real - we’re on the verge of handing amorphous, context-dependent decisions to hard-coded software incapable of applying the snicker test. This is a problem, and not one that more and better programming can fix. That would just add more rules. What we really need is to recognize that the world - online and off - is necessarily imperfect, and that it’s important it stay that way.

I must say I really like his worked up style and the way he sees the world. Nice guy :-)

[via daypop.com]

Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
Lars Pind persuaded me into buying Tuftes ‘Visual Explanations’ a couple of years back. And it’s a remarkable book. A real beauty about the visualization of data. Rrrr. (where did that come from??)

I just ordered his new 24 pages full-color essay about powerpoint presentations. A phenomena I have never learned to love nor use. And the title is wonderful. ‘Cognitive’ and ‘PowerPoint’ in one sentence is something very few would dare.

And $12 shipping included is not bad these days…

Soon… (I chose the cheaper surface shipping, so I guess it won’t be here the first month or two…)
I’ll be back with a review or just a thumbs up/down.

2003-06-09 UPDATE: It’s here and I can only recommend it!
It is a bit harsh on PP, but I think it’s an important read for those who, as myself, is on the verge of a intensive PP-project (teaching materials in my case).
Bullet outlines, low info-resolution, presentation metaphors, statistical evidence and the sequentiality of the slide format are some of the subjects the paper deals with.
According to Tufte PowerPoint mimics the bureaucracy and values of the commercial heavily marketing-inflicted world of its mother, Microsoft. And that this inherited cognitive style should be taken seriously in the making of slide sets. I think I agree. I am not that ‘anti’ myself, but he does have a lot of good points and lots of wit to go with it.

Update II (2003-10-20): Via Joel I found Aaron Swartz’s bullet-version of the Tufte essay. It covers the most ;-)
Update III (2003-11-06): Tufte described as The Dispassionate Statistician by Jessica Helfand of DesignObserver.com
Update IV (2003-12-16): Peter Coffee: Presentation tools don’t skew data, people do — Counters Tufte by saying that the blame is not on the tool but on the training of people using the tool. I sort of agree, but still: the fact is that most people have not been trained and most likely never will. Which kind of throws the causal ’cause’ back to PowerPoint.

Switch campaign are hot and have been for quite some time.
Apple and Microsoft are trying to out-switch eachother. As you would expect.
The basic formulae is to let someone give a testimonial saying why he or she made the switch and saw the light and switched to WindowsXP/MacOSX.
The problem arises if it turns out that the testimonees are fake.
This story on Ad-Rag is about a stock-photography switcher, who additionally appears to be employed by a Microsoft PR-agency…

I think I’ve actually seen a variant of this theme before, where two competing companies (sorry can’t remember the details) were using the same stock-photo on the banners at a major IT-conference sometime ago. They were just trying to keep the budgets down and decided to pick the no-exclusive-right photos. Heh.

Does anyone know the details?
BTW: I hereby recommend Ad-Rag.

Slashdot | HTML Rendering Crashes IE

Make almost any IE-browser crash with plain html.
An undocumented feature of the input tag is all it takes.
Try it at your own risk!

[via unicast.org]