Finished my XHTML upgrade and link-cleaning session of fem•mass. Although it's sad to see some websites go by the webside, but how nice there's still shiney webpages out there to inspire.

12 Things to do now about corporations. Sarah asks the important question, “Why not a corporate death penalty?” [Thanks, LaDiDa]

What D&D character are you?*

And, Are you a Geek: The Polygeek Version*. Yes, I'm 33% geek liason, “which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.”

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.

You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!

Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!

You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

[*Thanks, Kia]

Rachel's Macromedia article, Best pratctices with CSS in Dreamweaver MX.

I have my own method of finding a webhost who doesn't scream at adult content. I go to stable adult-content sites, then go to WHOIS, and find the name of the domain server. From there, I go to the company's website and check out their packages. Here's what I found along the way.

This sucks: Having to pay to read the full post.

World Sex News. Find links to stories like “Japanese have increasing number of sex friends,” “Mile High Clubbers break Virgin's tables,” and “World's oldest penis discovered.”

From Adult Christianity, Adult panties with a Christian Message. Prayer panties, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?), Remember you pray with that mouth, and more. [Thanks, sex-geek]

The Deviant Quiz: 20 Questions to Test Your Perv IQ.

A 1996 webpage: John's World. He has the great fortune to be named John Holmes. Here's a little of his Idiot email. [Thanks, Memepool]

Nomansland*, an escort agency just for women who want to be with women.

When Yahoo closed down their adult groups, looks like they moved here*.

[*Thanks, femmerotic]

Okay, I think I'm ready to go to work now.

Am working on my very first style guide. Reviewing over ones I've already listed. Revisited the AT&T Style Guide. Check out their process for publishing new Web sites. So organized.

Poynter's resources for editors and writers.

Que handy! A moving checklist.

Oh no, it's Hubzilla, for even more Firewire ports. Does Toho know about this?

I like starting my mornings with a little revolution. Sets the pace for the day, don't ya know. I first heard of Howard Rheingold's new book, “Smart Mobs” through Justin's site. Today, found a link to Howard's book blog via Dan's post. From Howard's I see the link to Netscan that “provides a social accounting search engine that highlights social patterns in the mass of conversation and interaction occuring among millions of Usenet contributors”. I put in ‘macintosh’ for fun. Peeking through the hole.

Just spent Friday through Monday not being so perky, but still managed to drag my ass up to the computer long enough to install a new master hard drive, Heidi, which I got from the friendly folks at ComputerWare. Heidi's a big girl at 80G. Removed Bettie (6G) and will look around for how I can make an external out of her. Now, I have plenty of room to finish loading up my cd's to iTunes which I upgraded to 3.01.

Speaking of upgrades, now running OS 10.1.5. Considered getting Jaguar, but after reading some comments on MacInTouch, decided to hold off. Only bad thing about 10.1.5 is that I seemed to have lost the ability to drag and drop from my hard drive to the Fetch window. Bummer.

Also downloaded Mozilla 1.01 and Netscape 7.0. Nice, but similar. I'm still partial to my Mac/IE5.01 combo however.

Cleaned up my Cheap Thrills: Blogs page adding Porn Rumors and The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog who is a little more right than I go for, but she brings up interesting topics. More later.

Am in the middle of Fall link cleaning on fem•mass. Always a pleasure to revisit these women's sites. Sad too as I see some drop off the radar screen, some sell their domain name to music companies, and some just stop updating. Converting the fem•mass pages to XHTML with a little bit of table. The words “personal homepages” seem somewhat outdated, and I've changed the concept to “personal websites”. I'm excited about looking for new shining lights once the XHTML conversion finishes.

Don't seem to get enough of either at the moment.

Picked up Maya Angelou's “I Know Why Caged Birds Sing” for my banned/challenged book and have fallen immediately into it. Considered getting Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Green but B&N was out at the moment.

Although not banned, I HAD to have more of Kaye Gibbons: “Sights Unseen” and “A Cure for Dreams”.

Bit the bullet for Inside Photoshop 7. Ouch price-wise, but have already jumped forward into Daniel Will-Harris' section on Typography during lunch yesterday.

While you're checking out Daniel's site, see also yoga exercises for repetitive stress injuries (like hours and hours and hours spent at Photoshop).

Also got “Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for Windows & Macintosh” since Dreamweaver MX arrived at work. A grrl can never have too many reference books in light of the pamphlets software companies are now calling ‘user guides’.

In “Geometry of Design” (which I am taking page by page), I am relieved to see this quote by A. M. Cassandre:

“The mathematically expressed module can only act to confirm a spontaneous insight. The golden rule merely defines the ideal proporation previously intuited by the artist; it is a means of verifying, not a system (it would be doomed [if it were], like every system.”

Last word on books for now. Is it just me or there a lot of Web people writing books. You know I love books, love writers, but I would like to go to these people's sites without having to read about the book their hawking all the time. Would love to see more Web talk, Web work, Web share, instead of Web sell. But then I talk about the Web I sell (although I'm not selling it to you). Hmmm, more thought required…

Latest Bush hypocrisy: Gov. Jeb Bush calls for jail time for nonviolent drug offenders as his daughter gets sent to rehab.

And for the students, The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society.

“The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.”

Thank goodness I still have a few years to go before BillyBob starts school.

Back up on Anne Rice's The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy for my choice of banned book to read. Too submissive and a 15 year old Beauty just doesn't bake my cookies. Will look for something else.

Industry blamed for missing content-protection deadline. Which industry?

“But Brad Hunt, senior vice president and chief technology officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), attending the International Broadcasting Convention here, told EE Times that the DVD CCA's latest effort to select a watermarking technology had failed largely because 'the computer industry, at the eleventh hour, decided not to support the concept of watermarks.'

“Sources in the computer and consumer electronics industries disputed the MPAA executive's claim, stating that talks had collapsed because none of the watermarking technology proposals proved viable after months of testing.”

[Thanks, Mr. Tomalak]

From Dan, Security Online: Central Control Wins.

“The flaws are glaring, however. As Declan McCullagh noted yesterday, the plan gives a total pass to the worst violator of all, Microsoft, which has a consistent record of caring more for maintaining its monopoly and feature list than doing anything for customers' security.

“The other beneficiary may well be the control freaks in Hollywood and the music industry. The draft I saw is a love letter to the so-called "trusted computing" that is another expression for locked-down computing, the entertainment and software cartel's dream world where they tell us precisely what we may do with the technology we've purchased, all in the name of protecting copyright owners' business models. With companies like Intel serving as enablers for this regime, it's hard to see how customers' rights can possibly be preserved.”

Hep me, Jesus.

Jakob's been stirring it up again. Here's a response. [Thanks, Christina]

WooHoo! Going right along with Geometry of Design, here's Robert's Golden Mean. [Thanks, xBlog]

Fiction
Just blazed through Kaye Gibbons’ “Charms for an Easy Life.” More, please! I've read her beautiful “A Virtuous Woman” a few years ago; must look for “A Cure for Dreams” and “Sights Unseen.”

But before I read more Kaye Gibbons, next week is Banned Books Week and I have chosen to read number 55 on the 1990-1999 list of most frequently challenged books, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice (cleverly disguised as A.N. Roquelaure).

Non-fiction
Still reading Geometry of Design. I'm looking at buildings, paintings, people in a different light. Oooo the possibilities.

Music
I couldn't stand it any longer and bought a new CD: Jimmy Eat World. Okay, two good songs. Thank god I also bought Jimi Hendrix (Smash Hits), The Who (The Utlimate Collection), and Led Zeppelin (first album). Yum.

Something to make you smile: Where the smiley came from. [Thanks, Dan]

Auctioning off Enron memorabilia.

Build your own G4.

File this image under Too Cute. Yes, we all need a little help.

Touching story of Flight 81 on September 11th.

Journalism students' weblog.

From Consumer Reports, Consumer WebWatch. [Thanks, Gary]

Design a t-shirt.

Local design company. Like Pablo's lights.

Scene 360's For the Love of Design where they talk to 23 'highly influential zines and design portals' to reveal what goes on behind the scenes.

[Thanks, Christina]

Charter High School for Architecture and Design: offering underprivilged, inner-city high-school students a radical way to learn through design.

Finished Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. Although it had a good ending (but too short), it had too long of a middle. I kept wanting the main character to snap to, but attributed his uptightness to being British (excuse me Michele), which worked if the main character was a butler (Remains of the Day), but not if he's a famous detective.

Now on to Kaye Gibbons' Charms for the Easy Life.

Wonderful 50th birthday yesterday. Honey and I went to Alcatraz. Lots of smiles, sun, and new shot glasses to add to the Holi Moli Stoli collection (Michelle Spent Time in Alcatraz). You can see some of the picts I took here. Thanks to everyone for the great birthday wishes. Made my day even more special.

p.s. If you go down towards Pier 39 and are looking for parking, first check the $10/day parking lot right next to the Boudin Bakery instead of the parking lot building you first come to on the right that charges $6/hour.

Last day of being 49. I find myself in a quiet, reflective mood. Have been wide awake since 4:30 a.m. Kept myself occupied by resurrecting all my diaries from the past 38 years (must be partial to blue). Here's my first two diaries (red) and my last three (white w/pink petals is my current; blue cheetah print is the year I got Hope; small blue for the gold rush year). My main requirement in a diary at first was that it locked. My main requirement now is that it fits inside my bag/purse.

The reflective part of my mood lends itself to my one more day pict. The saying at the side—Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don't let the Bugs Bunnies bite.—is what Sherah used to say when she was a kid. Oddly comforting.

My forties were such an extreme. The first half, hopeless. The last half, hope. Sometimes, you just gotta take the bull by the horns and hang on for dear life.

One More Thing I Like About Getting Older

1. Have had time to get those lessons learned.

p.s. For my amusement and maybe yours, dug up from my September 8, 11:15 p.m. - September 9, 1992, 12:20 a.m. barely edited diary entry: Myra Marie Turns 40.

Two more days, and, voila, my two more days pict. The poem in the collage is by Alan Ginsberg, and the switchman's shack in the photo collage is the one he refers to. A couple of points of clarification. The 'railroad yard' is actually located in Santa Clara, but it's close to San Jose. The 'tank factory' was FMC, but is now a FedEx building. The 'Real' is the El Camino Real which is a block away.

Two More Things I Like About Getting Older

1. Lower car insurance rates
2. Have had the time to develop wonderful multi-faceted long-term friendships

Got that birthday glow goin on. Smile, smile, smile, smile, smile. Such a nice day yesterday. Cake was totally finished off at work, but I did save Honey the last piece.

I'm up this early to secretly plan Honey's birthday surprise while he's still sleeping. (I can talk about it here because he rarely reads Sheep.) The whippersnapper turns 46 on the 26th of next month, and I'm cookin up a little something. More details later.

Later today I'll record for posterity my 50th year hairdo that I've been growing since January with the help of the ever-lovely Tracy at L'Image in Los Altos. (I would link 'em but they don't have a website up—yet.)

Okay, that wraps it up. Let the weekend begin!

Three more days. Here's my three more days pict. Last night I baked a big-assed chocolate cake made with Scharffen Berger unsweetened chocolate (see their recipes!!). I'm taking it to work as I won't be in on Monday. There's not a low-fat bite on it. Might not make it to 51 if it stayed at home with me, which is why I'm sharing the love.

I bought my plates, forks and napkins at Party America yesterday. It was a toss-up between Cinderella and Elmo. Almost went with Cindy as she had a crown too, but ultimately chose Elmo because I love red and yellow and I thought it would be neat to eat the cake and see Elmo smile. The red and yellow balloons still have to be blown up. I know. Too much fun.

Three More Things I Like About Getting Older

1. I'm now cleverly disguised as a mature adult…mu-haha!
2. Policemen are nicer to me
3. I can sit in lawnchairs at outdoor concerts and it's okay

It's Friday and I'm off the Web Design path.

Why can't we all just get along? The kids get snarky. [Thanks, Susannah*. I like the tag line for her 'reverse cowgirl's blog: “wherein a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection”.]

A lively voice, Mimi Smartypants*. See her song about testicles sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (at the bottom of the page). Yes, she does have a lot of complicated theories.

[*Thanks, Evan]

Only four more days. Here's my four more days pict. For my birthday on Monday, Honey's lined me up with a tour of Alcatraz which I have been wanting to see for a long time. Will take lots of pictures of course.

Four More Things I Like About Getting Older

1. Don't sweat the small stuff as much
2. I now know the difference between sex and love, but still can be a fine line
3. Bullshit meter works better
4. Don't have to prove nothing to nobody

From Molly's article, Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

“American corporations aren't stupid; they know from public relations. I am indebted to Mother Jones for the following list of recent corporate name changes: Nuclear Engineering is now U.S. Ecology; Monsanto Specialty Chemicals is now Solutia; ChemLawn/ChemGreen is now Tru Green/Land Care; the Agricultural Insecticide and Fungicide Association is now CropLife America, and Benton Oil and Gas Co. has become Harvest Natural Resources.”

Joe's article on Browsers and CSS. He also reviews Dreamweaver MX, GoLive 6.0 on how they fare with CSS positioning and more.

Banned Books Week is September 21-28. Participate in the Read-Out. Here's 100 of the most frequently challenged books of 1990-2000; and here's the top 100 classics that have been banned or challenged. [Thanks, Jessamyn]

Home stretch on the road to 50. Here's my five more days pict. WooHoo!

Five Things I Like About Getting Older

1. Sex is better
2. Lots of experience
3. More freedom
4. Wiser
5. Biting sense of humor has matured quite nicely

Very tired of the greed that streams down from the top. It's making me nauseous. While grabbing for a barf bag, I check how much longer we have to endure GeeDub and company.

On a good note: Centre Daily fires Ann Coulter. Good letter, and, no, we don't need more hate spread around.

I like this clipping option. Seems like it could be handy for researching news stories. Also like the icons at the bottom of the article that allows the visitor to change the font size and column formatting. Good job.

Mr. Lemur says it's time to stop the music.

Have been feeling at a loss without my Adobe Type Manager since upgrading to OS X. Fortunately, web-graphics has pointed me in another direction: FontAgent X.

From Strange Systems, an article from February Using Wireframes.