blog.mignault.net

Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:

“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ’so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”

Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.

(Via novia.)

Technorati Tags:
blogging, geek

SimpleBits ~ SimpleQuiz › Part VIII › Titles:

“Q: When marking up a book title or publication, which of the following is the best choice?

<br /> A. <p>My upcoming book, <em>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</em>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>B. <p>My upcoming book, <i>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</i>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>C. <p>My upcoming book, <cite>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</cite>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>

Interesting issues, discussed in the comments to the post. Some are saying C, since it’s a title. That seems wrong to me. Some are saying B, since it’d be typeset that way, which also seems wrong (presentation vs semantic.) Choosing A wouldn’t seem to be any different from B, except that <em> is supposed to mean emphasis; it’s only a synonym for <i> because most browsers have chosen to render it that way. Very interesting discussion in any case; well worth reading the whole thing.

(Via mph.)

Technorati Tags:
geek, web, markup, semantic+web