raleighnet.org

Hmmm…since adding the search, it looks like the remainder of my right side div and leftside divs have vanished in Mozilla.

I’m sure I must have impropperly closed a tag or something. I’ll probably figure it out eventually, but if any HTML/CSS Shaolin Masters happen by, and know what the problem is, drop me a comment OK?

Update: Fixed it. I needed a closing tag for my select form element.

I added MT-Search to my Blog. This, like all things on this blog, is mostly for my own benefit. People kept leaving comments in long archived posts, and I couldn’t always figure out what they were talking about without finding the comment it was in (does anybody else think it’s weird that the MT 5 most recent comment edit box doesn’t tell you want post the comment is in?). Anyway, if you have a wild urge to find that post where I talked about Amelie are something crazy like that, just look over in the right side nav bar. I know it’s tempting, but please resist using these new powers for evil.

I finished Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels. If I can get a hold of some of the ideas that are flitting around my head with respect to it, I’ll try to crank out a review sometime this weekend. The short version - I like the thoughts it made me think. I didn’t so much like it.

I am now beginning Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. It was actually tough selecting my next book. I have a backlog of books I want to get through including:

1. Mary Doria Russle, Children of God - a follow up to the remarkable The Sparrow. I was really tempted to start this one, but it seemed like a little to much religious philosophy on the heels of The Rebel Angels.
2. Brian Greene, The Elegant universe - This one has been on my shelf for a while, and it seemed like a perfect breath of cleansing sherbet after the philosophy I still haven’t fully digested. But, I suspect it won’t be a quick read, and I need a quick read next.
3. Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere - This is almost certainly the book that I should be reading next. But, I so enjoyed American Gods, I want to delay the gratification of reading another Gaiman book for just a little while longer.
4. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin - I’ve recently become fascinated with Ben Franklin, but the biography feels a little dense, and I’m not quite ready to try to trudge my way through it just yet.

I used to believe the childhood nationalistic hype that had me believing the US was the greatest country ever to grace the earth. Maybe it was naive. Well, OK, it was almost certainly naive, but for a while there it really seemed like I was lucky to have been born on the good guys’ team.

More and more, Australia is looking like a much better country to live in than what the US is becoming.

Just in case I want to find this again.

So, I’m watching MTV2. OK, I wasn’t really watching it. It was just kind of making noise in the background. Anway this band, Ok Go, comes on, and they have this song, “Get Over It”. This song completely rocks.

And, I have to say, I was getting really tired of rock there. I know everybody’s on about how wonderful The Hives and The Vines are, but everybody is just plain wrong. They’re wrong about The Hives anyway with their annoying little Mick Jaggoff wanna be of a front man. I guess The Vines are actually kinda OK. They’re OK, but they aren’t OK Go.

By the way, I also saw the video for Puddle of Mudd, “She Hates Me”. Yeah, has anything ever blown harder than that song blows?

I’ve never known how to play those arcade fighters. I understand that different button combinations are supposed to give me combinations, but mostly I just randomly pound on buttons trying to get the guy to do something cool and kick the other guy’s ass. Capoeira Figher 2 is a flash arcade fighter that seems well done. I keep winning though, and I shouldn’t be able to win, so it must be pretty easy to beat.

I totally suck at this game. I don’t care. It’s the greatest thing. EVER!

IFC was running a short film called Blind Light. If you can find it, it’s very much worth seeing. It has this slow, languid pacing. It almost seems to border on the introspective - a feeling which is helped along a great deal by the reminiscing narrator.

They keep shooting still images, or moving images in which the subject remains so still that it feels like a still image. There’s something about the technique of it that is mesmerizing. It reminds me a bit of La Jette, a short film that I saw in college. They later remade it for an American audience and called it 12 Monkeys. Well, I guess not a remake so much as 12 Monkeys got A LOT of inspiration from La Jette.

It looks like La Jette is included on the DVD Short 2 - Dreams. I may have to pick that up. I might as well get 12 Monkeys while I’m at it.

Anyway, if you have the IFC channel, be on the look out for Blind Light. It’s totally worth seeing. It is very slow though, so be prepared to be calm when you watch it.

Should I be concerned that, even after reading this 4 times:

STEP #3: OPT FOR TRUE RESPONSE LISTS WHEN YOU CAN
Just as traditional mailers know that response lists normally outpull compiled lists significantly, smart marketers use true response lists in their e-mail campaigns. That’s why the cost of the mass opt-in files has dropped precipitously — they are just not performing. In the b-t-b arena, controlled circ publication e-mail files (not just traditional files with e-mail appends) are working very well. Obviously, as a consumer marketer, if you can rent online respondents to magazine or catalog offers, or even to insurance and financial lead-generation offers, you’ll want to test them.

I still have absolutely know idea what a True Response List is. Time to hit google. link