Wood and Wire

My good friend Moses Aaron is an author and storyteller. In his spare time (which seems to be plentiful) he is a logolept, verbivore, paronomaniac, and logodaedalus. Recently he mentioned to me that he had “tested” Google by searching for several known but very obscure words, but had not received any legitimate responses.

My immediate response was “why don’t you put them in the Google index”. He had no idea how that could be done, so I offered to do it myself as a demonstration of the democracy and immediacy of the web.

So here we go:

mooftah

a man who sniffs women’s bicycle seats

quibblequork

to winge or kvetch in a pathetic manner

quibblequorkist

one who quibblequorks

While we’re on the topic, here are some web sites that might appeal to Moses and his ilk:

• The Phrontistery and in particular its Compendium of Lost Words
• Luciferous Logolepsy
• Dictionary of Difficult Words
• A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia
• Weird Words
• Curious Words and Phrases

Things I did since I last posted:

1. Got enough sleep for the first time in 2005
2. Ate too much
3. Hung out with the people I love most
4. Enjoyed air-conditioning (the temperature in Woy Woy where I was staying on xmas eve hit 41°C)
5. Saw The Chronicles of Narnia — for the most part this helped me catch up on my sleep (while enjoying air-conditioning with the people I love most), but I did wake up in time to see how hot the White Witch was. By the end of the movie I was barracking for the wrong team.
6. Marvelled at the web-standards compliant beauty of the Kutztown University Communication Design Department web site
7. Marvelled at the stupid-brilliant audacity of the Million Dollar Home Page and tried to come up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick of my own
8. Came up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick which I might get around to trying out next year
9. Had a good play with Wayfaring.com’s very slick interface to the Google Maps API, and wondered if it might actually be useful for something
10. Played the guitar
11. Played the mandolin
12. Wished I had an Irish bouzouki
13. Spent an hour pondering the Long Emergency
14. Started reading Good Morning Midnight by Reginald Hill
15. Compulsively watched every additional feature on the 2-disc 24 Hour Party People DVD
16. Decided I quite like the Happy Mondays after all
17. Tried not to think about 2006

Something I’m enjoying reading at the moment: 24 ways to impress your friends is a sort of geek’s advent calendar. Each day there’s a new tip covering some of the latest techniques in standards-based (mostly!) web design.

All of them are well thought out and well written.

Rick Eyre has posted a lucid and detailed eyewitness account of Sunday’s riots by Benjamin Amy, a Cronulla resident who was there as a bystander. As a first-hand account from someone outside the media, I think it deserves to be read far and wide.

My last post about the Cronulla riots prompted some soul searching — why was I so much more disturbed by the actions of a violent mob of 5,000 white Australians, than I had been by the violence of 4 Lebanese gang members a week earlier? (more…)

I found the news of the race riots in Cronulla depressing and alarming - yet another symptom of Australia’s slow inexorable slide towards a new kind of fascism. Like most Australians, I want to believe that “it couldn’t happen here”, but it’s getting harder to sustain that idea. (more…)

This one is really quite simple — if you’ve built a site that uses Javascript, and you care about reaching any sort of audience, you need to do the following:

• Find a browser that will let you disable Javascript (most do).
• Disable Javascript (I bet you saw that coming)
• Try using your site

If your site is well designed, you’ll still be able to access all the content without Javascript. It might not look as pretty, and some of the dancing baloney will be gone. But at least you can read everything, see the images, and move from page to page. (more…)

It’s a long time since I’ve used Internet Explorer for anything other than browser-compatibility testing, so I’ve never bothered to change its default home page setting to something more useful than http://msn.com. In any case, it’s kind of interesting to see that parallel Micro$oft universe flash by while I’m on my way to wherever it is that I actually want to go today. Well, I had a bit of a chuckle a while back when I fired up IE to do some of the aforesaid testing and was greeted with a message that told me “If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience of MSN.” (more…)

I’ve been playing with the final release of Firefox 1.5 for a few days now, and I’m really quite impressed — although it’s fair to say that most of the improvements won’t even be noticed by the average user.

Of course there are speed improvements and subtle interface tweaks, but the really important developments are Firefox’s support for emerging web standards such as CSS3, SVG and XSLT. (more…)

In my day job I often have to write accessibility / usability reports on web sites (both professionally produced and student projects). I see a lot of very well written and pretty-to-look-at sites, but I’m constantly amazed to see web developers (even the professionals) making the same usability design mistakes over and over. This the first of a series of my tips on how to avoid those mistakes. (more…)