Timothy J. Gibbons

Friday, March 1

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting interesting stories from the week:

Csikszentmihalyi is digressing from the topic at hand, which is his explanation of why he has built a satellite-linked, Net-operated robot that he intends to send into a combat zone ASAP. Since the invasion of Grenada, he notes, the U.S. Armed Forces have limited journalists' access to areas where fighting is taking place, and he finds this troubling, to say the least.

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The House's approval of campaign finance reform earlier this month has drawn vast coverage. But the broadcast networks somehow failed to mention that high-powered television lobbyists killed an amendment that would have provided cheaper rates for candidate advertising.

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David Frum, the former Canadian journalist and speechwriter for U.S. President George W. Bush, has left the White House — but not, he said Monday, because of an imbroglio surrounding his authorship of the phrase "axis of evil."

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Which brings us back to the lawsuit. Why did Netscape fail? Because it was managed with this kind of incompetence. The last major revision of Netscape Communicator, version 6.0, which was introduced in April 2000, was a disaster.

posted at 7:51 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Thursday, February 28

My job here at Oskars has hit the point in the pre-publication cycle that I always dread the most. We're just about done with the issue we've been slaving over for the past few weeks and have all the big stuff out of the way.
Now, we're doing the little -- albeit important -- stuff: making sure the quotation marks are the correct type (the system has four varients we can chose from), triple-checking names and phone numbers, making sure lines haven't disappeared from the end of stories, that sort of thing.
Heading up the English side of a German publication has made this a little more interesting than normal; since everybody else on staff in German, I often end up having to make some sort of call on things like punctuation and wording. Since they're professional journalists as well, though, I have to have good reasons for whatever I come up with -- hence surfing the web for half an hour today to prove that the proper abbreviation for microphone is "mic," not "mike."
Oh, yeah, it's a hard life. But you don't want to hear about the fight I had as to whether full sentences after colons should begin with a capital letter. That got ugly.
OK, so, not so funny today. But, hey, all the commas are in the right place -- and if they aren't, I really don't want to hear about it.

posted at 9:43 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Wednesday, February 27

The Olympics are over, right? No, seriously -- I don't watch that much television here and when I do, it's not like I can tell when the Games o' Hercules - Winter Edition are being played. On German television, there's alway a sports show featuring people skiing. Downhill skiing. Uphill skiing. Cross-country skiing. How to grocery shop wearing skis. Anything.
And that was before the Olympics. I was afraid to turn the TV on once the Games started.
Of course I did, eventually, to find things were even more strange than I thought: I ended up watching the Bronze Medal Women's Curling match between the Canadian and American teams -- and if anybody can give me one shred of a reason as to why German television showed the entirety of the fight for third place between two North American teams in a sport that basically no one understands, I'd greatly appreciate it.
That being said, showing the match might not be as strange as the fact that I watched the thing; it was like I figured, hey, the sport's incomprehensible anyway, so why not see what it's like when you can't understand the announcers either? Very surreal -- I would have gone out and got some acid just to take it to the next level of bizareness, 'cept it was 10:30 on a Thursday night. And I'm not sure where I'd actually get acid. And, of course, I didn't want to miss the stunning conclusion, in which a frozen wasteland of a country that does nothing other than play wacky winter sports beat the home team.
Uhh, yeah, somebody ...
The game itself was actually somewhat compelling, despite the fact that I had no clue as to what was going on -- and it wasn't anywhere near compelling enough for me to, say, go and find the rules. (OK, that's not true. They're here. But I'm not going to read them.) I was particularly amused by the "chatter" during the game: Every time a stone was tossed, everybody would start screaming "hurry, hurry!" -- and since nobody was allowed to touch the stone (I guess), the only thing that was being encouraged was the stone itself. It was like a whole new level of the screaming-at-the-ball-in-bowling strategy.
I was also amused at the curler's footware. I'd always assumed they wore skates or something, but nope: the athletes seemed to glide along on one "ice shoe" while pushing off with the other foot, just like kids do when they encounter a patch of ice on the sidewalk. I just kept on waiting for someone to fall.
So I don't think my exposure to the Sport of Kings (isn't that what they call curling?) has converted me to a fan. But you know, it'd be really cool to have one of those stones. I could paint a face on it and call it Wilson or Martha or something. It'd be like a pet.

posted at 9:43 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Tuesday, February 26

I did a little dance of joy ("Numfar, do the Dance Of Joy!") upon leaving the barbershop today: I got my hair cut by somebody who spoke English! OK, that might not seem like exclamation point territory to you, but it's been something like 18 months since I've really been able to communicate with the person waving sharp pointy items around my head.
It started when I was living in New York. What's the point in living in the greatest city on earth, in a burg filled to the brim with immigrants, I figured, if you end up eating at McDonald, shopping at the Gap and getting your hair cut at Joe's House o' Hair? So I was predisposed to hunt up something more exotic. Plus, I'm cheap. The combination led me to try out a couple of Russian barbers, vist a Japanese hair stylist and pop in on a couple of peluqueros. Didn't pay much -- plus I had the fun of trying to get across what I wanted done with my hair through sign language. Getting a haircut in Berlin -- where the barbers are, I believe, not allowed to speak English -- was especially enjoyable, since I know enough German to be dangerous. I'd think I was asking for a bit off the top and some shaping around the ears, but actually be telling the guy, "Ich möchte wie eine kranke Ratte aussehen."
It doesn't help that, even in my mother tongue, I really have no idea how to answer the questions barbers ask me.
"Which number clippers should I use on the back?" Eh, if I knew that, I'd just do it myself, right?
"How do you want it styled?" Like it is now, but shorter -- I thought that was pretty much implied in the term "hair cut."
And my favorite: "You want about this much off, right?" as they hold up a lock of my hair. Well, I don't know; let me get my glasses, which you just freakin' saw me take off, and take a look. Oh, a quarter-of-an-inch? Yeah, that sounds right -- or it would, if I had any idea what that would make my head look like when you're done.
Needless to say, it's not uncommon for me to stumble out of a hair-cutting session looking remarkably like a lopsided cueball.
But I never complain. After all, it's not like they can go back and fix it, right? "Oh, let's just sweep up some of this hair on the floor. We have some superglue in the back." And I can't say much when the scalping is going on, considering that, not only am I blind without my glasses, but I'm loath to tick off the guy with the shears. It's too easy for barbers to get revenge on persnickety customers.
Today, though, to my shock and amazement, I got a lovely young lass who'd been an exchange student in America for a year, spoke English better than I do and seemed quite able to deal with nothing more than "I'd like it shorter, but not too much shorter."
Thus, the dance of joy.

posted at 8:38 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Monday, February 25

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting interesting stories from the week:

British troops temporarily invaded Spain when a landing exercise on Gibraltar went wrong.

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A male sexuality class at The University of California at Berkeley has been suspended after the campus newspaper published allegations that students watched their instructor have sex at a strip club and participated in an orgy at an extracurricular party.

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The Vatican said Tuesday it would neither confirm nor deny a report that Pope John Paul II has now carried out three exorcisms during his papacy, the latest in September. The Rev. Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist for the Rome diocese, told La Stampa newspaper, that the most recent exorcism involved a young woman who appeared to be possessed during the pope's general audience.
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A Filipino man was killed and his friend seriously wounded after they sarcastically applauded a student for singing Frank Sinatra's classic "My Way" off-key, according to a newspaper report.
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Their lawsuit in Johnson County District Court alleges that the previous homeowners and the real estate professionals had a duty to disclose that a "gruesome murder" had occurred in the house they were buying just north of 95th Street on High Drive.
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posted at 10:52 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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