Well, I haven't entirely figured out this RSS thing -- I almost understand what it is. At any rate, Nick Bradbury, the genius behind my favorite program, TopStyle (a great CSS editor plus), has beta released FeedDemon, which is interesting. You can download the beta here: FeedDemon. I managed to add my RSS feed (http://www.leefleming.com/neurotwitch/index.xml) without much trouble at all. The beta works for a month, sez Nick, but he doesn't know yet what the pricing will be.

I thought I'd be pretty much finished with most of the website I'm working on by end of day Friday. Hah! But really, it's almost done -- the home page is tricky and it's taking me longer to build it than I anticipated. But it'll be done as far as we can make it done by Sunday evening, maybe 12 more hours of work between us (Stanley & me, I mean). I'm just glad he found a new used van so he isn't fretting so much about not having his box to haul around his work stuff. It's a pretty good deal, too, from Dan Perkins Used Cars in Milford. Our sales guy was Mike Cap(etc.)

So this weekend I have to finish the website stuff, finish an ebook I've been working on and have been anxious to finish because I like it, do a little work on barbaraschaeferart.com, and, since the weather is FINALLY going to be nice, finish planting stuff -- they stuff that hasn't gotten root rot, anyway. Oh, and figure out how to install MT on our new server. And play with the dog.

Anyway--time to go to sleep. Almost.

But the worst of it should be over by end of day Friday. I promised to post more pictures of Stanley's encounter with an SUV suckmobile driving by a Greenwich jerk for Ben. I will. But probably not today.

The Clocks That Shaped Einstein's Leap in Time, New York Times, by Dennis Overbye, 6/24/03

What does it mean, Albert Einstein asked in 1905, to say that a train arrives someplace--in Paris, say--at 7 o'clock?

You might not think you need to know something as deep as relativity to answer such a question. But Einstein needed to answer the question to invent his theory of relativity, the breakthrough that wrenched science into a new century and enshrined the equivalence of matter and energy.
In his last step, after a decade of pondering the mysteries of light and motion, Einstein concluded that there was no such thing as absolute time, envisioned by scientists since Newton, ticking uniformly through the cosmos. Rather there were only the times measured by individual clocks. To talk about times and measurements at different places, the clocks have to be synchronized, he said. And the way to do that is to flash light signals between them, correcting for the time it takes for the signal to travel from one clock to another.

A simple prescription. Yet when Einstein followed it, he found that clocks moving with respect to one another would not run at the same speed. The modern age was born.

So begins a fascinating article.

Bullfighter: Stripping The Bull Out Of Business || A consulting jargon fighter from Deloitte Consulting. Yep. If I had XP or W2K, I would download this software and use it on yesterday's example of bullcrap. This is free from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu -- perhaps as their way of atoning for years of crimes against the language committed by consultants and other "writers" there.

Craig Roth wrote this for ZDNet: Web Technology / Web Site Redesign Primer - Tech Update - ZDNet, June 8, 2003

By 2004, portal frameworks will become the centerpiece of a presentation infrastructure that acts as a fulcrum to aggregate reusable application, content, analytical, and collaboration components for highly dynamic user interfaces. By 2005, organizations will exploit portal frameworks to deliver contextual business workspaces, enabled via maturing XML and Web service standards. Through 2007, portal vendors will increasingly leverage enterprise infrastructure services.

He then proceeds to state what should be the obvious but isn't because he throws so much bullshit babblespeak in it you need to translate it into English before it even begins to make sense.

Now, I know Roth is an IT analyst for Meta Group and I know analysts tend to write in pompous, inflated language in order to justify the obscene amounts their companies charge for basic research (I know several Gartner Gods) or for a single research report, but this article takes it to a whole new level.

It's no wonder companies like Meta Group aren't doing so well--if I were an executive looking for some answers and saw babblecrap like this, I'd realize that not only would it cost me a bundle to hire Meta Group or Gartner to write up a report and come up with a PowerPoint or two, but I would also have to hire someone to translate it all.

There are better resources for figuring out what to do with your corporate website and / or intranet. How you proceed depends on your audience. Here are a couple of places to start: from Webmonkey, a fairly comprehensive how-to written in English. Clickz, which provides tons of useful information. Or ask any competent independent web designer firm. If you avoid the agencies, you avoid the bloat (both in process and in fees).

Barbara Schaefer Art was born on June 11. Take a look at "Window from a Fairy Tale."

Michael Savage is a talk radio bsmonger, with a show syndicated by Talk Radio Network. Apparently, he's a particularly virulent shrieker against gay rights (and women and people of color and ... ) GLAAD organized a boycott against Savage's advertisers. And some smaller websites, such as TakeBacktheMedia.com and SavageStupidity.com have picked up on the story and have reported on Savage's nastiness as well as supporting the boycotts.

So TNR radio and Savage are suing not GLAAD, which is well-funded and not about to take any crap from idiots like Savage, but three small websites that don't have the deep pockets to defend themselves against this type of spurious lawsuit. Read about it here: Michael Savage Weiner Lawsuit. Apparently, TNR blames these three, pretty obscure websites for the loss of an advertiser: Culligan. As in water. And is asking for damages of up to $100,000 to compensate.

What I would like to see happen is for GLAAD to take up this cause and pay for the legal defense of the sites being named in this suit. If TNR wins this suit because the defendants don't have to resources to mount an adequate defense, GLAAD will be the next group in TNR's site.

This is a suit that should be tossed out.

amorphoscapes by stanza. I can't explain what it is--a fusion of images and noise?

And here is Einstein Archives Online. If he wrote it, it's probably here somewhere.

Now I just wish I had the time to poke around in these places now. But I seriously have too much to do. Among the things on my list is moving this site to our new server, which means figuring out how to install MT properly in a different setup.

But not tonight.

I stumbled upon this site: Answers That Work - Computer Solutions, Helpdesk, PC Troubleshooting while looking for an explanation of one of the programs running on my W98SE system. What a useful site, tons of stuff there. For a reasonable fee of $35 per year, you can register to ask as many pc-related questions as you want to for a year. But you don't have to register to use the library or the useful downloads. Definitely worth poking around, especially if you're working on optimizing your system or trying to figure out what the heck is draining off your system resources.

The Baby Boomer Generation is my kinda content. I like the URL: Aging Hipsters. Yep, I can relate.

Now where the hell did I put those reading glasses ...