licentious radio

Saturday, May 24, 2003
[5:44:57 PM]

Did you even know they fired Tommy-boy White?

This is the rackateer of the Republican California energy banditry: while his cronies were raping and pillaging in the spot market, White offered the "protection" of long-term contracts at villainous rates.

There's also a billion-dollar bit of Republican fraud where White paid big-time Republican Contributor and drug company Eli Lily $50 million to set up a scam to put $1.3 billion profit on White's books -- for which he got a bonus.

When White's insider trading -- while a federal employ -- became widely known, Bush was quoted in news articles as telling White not to resign, so that reporters would focus on White's criminal insider trading, not Bush's criminal insider trading.

And now White's gone, and the media is whisper quiet.

The story is that Rumsfeld wanted to fire White immediately when the insider trading came out, but Bush people insisted on keeping White. After White went behind Rumsfeld's back to try and save the Crusader artillery program, it was just a matter of time. Time was up in the post-war lull.

It seems unlikely that White will be indicted soon, but at least we can hope that the next Secretary of the Army won't be a lying thief. Well, we can dream.

[12:33:13 PM]
I went to Chicago for a few days last weekend. Cut off from the internet, I watched cable news in my hotel room. The world disappeared. There was no mention at all, for example, of the brewing scandal of DeLay and Texas DPS using Homeland Security to track down Democrats.

Instead, there were several specials glorifying the Iraq conquest. Wow. Did you know Fox had Oliver North embedded? Amazing that he can get a job. In a democracy, he would probably have been hanged. Giving high-tech weapons to your enemies is not typically regarded as heroic behavior. I guess shredding evidence to keep Poppy out of prison counts for a lot in this country.

[12:07:01 PM]
Met up with the traveling Doug/Tantek/Todd show Thursday evening. Some of the CSS conversation was drowned out by a bluegrass band, but the cafe itself was all right.

Tantek and Todd each had a copy of Zeldman's new book. All three of them are in the book, having each made significant contributions to standards and/or use of standards.

Topics touched upon included png transparency for ie, the Zen Garden website (a site where numerous designers have contributed stylesheets to show how thoroughly the stylesheets influence the appearance), styling form fields, whether multiple posts without permalinks constitute a weblog (mostly a joke), and vigilante drones.

Someone mentioned acronyms in passing, which was a hot topic several months ago. I never got around to writing about acronyms, but I have several suggestions.... 1) Authors could indicate acronyms with all caps (IBM). 2) The CMS can insert acronym tags. 3) Less is more in formatting acronyms -- better not to underline every occurence. 3) The CMS can make a glossary of acronyms used in a page. 4) Style acronyms that are all caps to be a smaller font size, maybe .85em. That's not as good as using a real small-caps font, but it's probably better than using full-sized caps. (Better in that full-sized caps strongly emphasize, which is typically inappropriate for acronyms.) 5) You could still display a tooltip of the expanded text of the acronym, even though not everyone would know to look for it. After all, most people will already know most acronyms, and they should be defined on first use anyway. 6) A good CMS would have a dictionary of acronyms and let you set rules for how and when to use the acronym tag -- you might not want to tooltip "HyperText Markup Language" for every use of HTML, for example.

Heather T. and I were the only ones to join them. Maybe next time they'll avoid the bluegrass and give a little more notice. If you're interested in CSS, web standards, and such, take advantage of the chance to hang out with these guys.