An Internet Presence

Another piece of news to reach my eyes and ears belatedly is this speech by Arundhati Roy, the brilliant woman who wrote the equally brilliant novel The God of Small Things. The Come September speech was given in September 2002, and my goodness was it bold and unexpected. Or perhaps it was indeed expected seeing how Arundhati Roy is quite the liberal. A teacher at Evergreen State University has posted a transcript of this speech (PDF | HTML) on their webspace. Thank you Arun Chandra!

This came as a total shock to me. Netscape died at this beginning of this month. The announcement mentions that we may still browse in the spirit of Netscape by switching to Mozilla Firefox or Flock, which I've not heard of. I suppose SeaMonkey would get you in the original Mozilla/Netscape feel.

It seems like quite a gamble China's political leaders are running. It is odd that there is an assumption there that onlookers will just believe them when they say everything is alright in Tibet, even though it's clearly not. A report from the AFP gives us a little insight...

Not everyone sees the Dalai Lama as peace-loving. China's Prime and Foreign Ministers have claimed that he's helping to orchestrate the recent violent resistence in Tibet, skewing the possibility of a flawless scandolous 2008 Olympics.

The Three Little Pigs is a very cute little moral-sharing story that has been part of English storytelling for hundreds of years. But did you know that it reeks of racist, classist stereotypes? You might think that this is quite a stretch, but not UK's educational technology agency Becta, who turned down Anne Curtis's modern adaptation of the classic abominable story from their annual awards. Someone's mind is in the gutter.

This is a truly terrible event. Benazir Bhutto, who was on the path to become Pakistan's next prime minister was assassinated today. CNN covers this event and provides a short biography of her life and the events surrounding her death.

Problem solved. Always be sure to specify the unit of measurement in CSS when adjusting the dimensions of elements. By the way html.net and xhtml.com are great sites for full (X)HTML and CSS references.

Say goodbye to index.html and hello to index.php! Did you know that today is May 12, 2008? Now if I could only get CSS to make all the table cell widths the same!

I found this to be hilarious:

Hopefully. This once-useful adverb meaning "with hope" has been distorted and is now widely used to mean "I hope" or "it is to be hoped." Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.

It's crazy to think that a language can be eroded! This excerpt is from the infamous "Strunk and White" praised by many. The crazy part is that you can read the entire text online! Both the original text William Strunk, Jr. wrote in 1918 and one of E. B. White's revised editions are available. For some reason, the site providing the revised one calls the original author Oliver Strunk.

Clearly not at Clarance Thomas's reception for his new book in Atlanta. But thanks to the Internet, you totally can be! Unless it's no longer 7pm EST.

I take it some of you are listeing to this:

Or perhaps this:

Aung San Suu Kyi is yet another person that I have heard various things about but never learned about too extensively. I found yet another article from the BBC, this time about her life in particular. There are various links on their site where you can follow what's going on in Burma as far as those good people can ascertain. There is also an informative article from USA Today talking about how the military junta controlling Burma just may finally give an ear to her and the peoples' basic demands.

If you know any other good sources (websites, books, what-have-you) that are good biographies of this fantastic person and the history of Burma, let me know! Also, if anyone out there knows why I can't seem to get IE or Firefox to remember that I set the width for tables at 1000 pixels in a style sheet, definitely let me know!

There seems to be no real positive developement to this story. I'm becoming increasingly more interested in events occuring in this country I've heard of numerous times but have known little about. I'm sure you would all agree that there's so much to learn about!

The political turmoil and violence there has not subsided, but dissention has been silenced in a greatly disturbing way. There is an article from the BBC from an anonymous "correspondant". There's another good article describing the significance of Aung San Suu Kyi's public appearance and the far more violent protests in 1988.

In lighter news, I'm sure some of you are anticipating the release of Half Life 2: Episode 2? Or perhaps Radiohead's new album? (Which you can download from them for free by the way!) Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune shares his thoughts on all of this. You can offer however much or little you want for the album, including $0.00 (though you will be charged at least 45p, which is about a dollar, as a processing fee). I offered ten pounds. I wholly support those gentlemen and their art. How about all of you?

I have a feeling this site will turn into some kind of blog. It will more than likely be other things as well as time goes on. I am sure that you have all been hearing about the protests in Burma. If you haven't, I highly recommend this article. Once again, I found it through the ever so omnipresent Drudge Report.

This is one of several photos taken in Rangoon by a photographer named Htein Win who works for a company called BMC.

CSU makes the Drudge Report!

At least since September 22, 2007 or so. Read the article they linked to.