Monkinetic Weblog

Politics, Technology, and the Future of Deafness. Text of a speech given by Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, at Gallaudet University on March 21st 2007. Still processing.

The recent TWIT was good, especially if you're a massive geek, or really really really bored. I used to listen to the Gillmor Gang fairly regularly, and frankly I just wasn't entertained. Leo and his rotating crew of miscreants are alternately hilarious, self-deferential, pompous, very occasionally crude, and even more occasionally informative. :-)

The Dan Cederholm v. LogoMaid spat has turned into an ugly mess, with the perhaps overly helpful crowd siding with Dan turning into something of a lynchmob.

Jodi and Adelina and I went to her company's family picnic on Saturday, and much fun was had. Of most interest was Jodi's participation in the company horseshoe tournament - she and her partner won their first two games but finally lost as they started to get tired. Pitching big metal horseshoes 30 feet at a time is not as easy as it looks! Ask Jodi and I, who are both nursing sore shoulders and hips! (I did not play in the tournament but I pitched my share of shoes between rounds...) I don't envy Jodi, who as the family Queen Flinger pitched way more horseshoes than I did!

Last night, we had a bit of fun at the Ivy house. Jodi and I are taking a sign class, and we've been trying to find time to practice, as well as give Adelina time to practice her sign as well. So last night after dinner, I announced that I was "deaf" for the night and that Adelina and Jodi would have to sign to me and vice versa.

I found this comment from former President Clinton quite sad:

I spent 10 minutes at the grocery store the other day looking for a loaf of whole wheat bread without enriched flour in it, and that did not have high-fructose corn syrup as the third or fourth-listed ingredient. What is high-fructose corn syrup doing in my bread?

Well, Jodi broke the news. Not that it was a secret. In fact you, dear Reader, may be the last person to know that Jodi and I have begun another adoption. :-) This time around we're working with a large well-connected agency, WACAP, and we're planning on going to Russia.

I had to uninstall my irc client at work because of security policy. Also, I needed an excuse to use a clever title derived from Jonathan Coulton's PopSci Podcast On The Moon. Thanks JoCo!

A development team here at GoDaddy (see standard disclaimer below) is looking for a web UI developer and I thought I'd post it here as a way to help out. This is a standards-based (X)HTML/CSS/Javascript developer position, working with java code on a open-source stack (linux/apache/tomcat/hibernate/struts...).

(This is the content of a short reaction paper for SLG 102, the sign language class Jodi and I are taking at Chandler-Gilbert Community College)

Jodi just updated her blog (go Jodi!) with news of our lovely daughter's recent ear piercing (she's elated), birthday (parents are exhausted), and discovery of a new way to listen to music:

Unbelievable. IE(6/7?) does not send onchange events for radio buttons correctly.

Living life in a cubicle? At work, I just moved from the cozy confines of the designer's room (khaki walls, IKEA-provided indirect lighting, ironic bank of high-school lockers) to a spot in the developer's cube-farm. So I've started looking for links to resources for improving my surroundings.

I've been working again on a tool at work that uses JQuery to dynamically load various files into the content area of a locally based web page to test css-based templates. The tool was working fine in Firefox and IE6, then I recently "upgraded" to IE7 and it went all wonky on me. After a day or so of Googling, I found this post from Xavier Hanin: IE7 support for XmlHttpRequest which details the fact that IE7's XMLHTTPRequest cannot load files from disk (file:// urls).

I whipped up an XFN test page with some XFN test data for those developing parsers or other tools. It has all the canonical cases from the 1.1 profile, as well as a variety of common-sense two-relationship combinations, and a basic set of invalid relationships (>1 friendship value, for example).

Looks like iPhone may be powered by ARM indeed: