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New user? Friday, December 1, 2000
Announcing: Becoming Conversant
Mark Morgan announces "Becoming Conversant"... a site for new Conversant users.
"The goal is threefold: help newcomers by explaining Conversant from the user's viewpoint; organize, point to, mirror, and provide examples of documentation for Conversant; and share some of the really neat stuff users and others have done with Conversant."
Joe Average has his say
Regarding pro athlete salaries...
"Mr. Taylor:
I'm presently working my 14-hour night shift while my family is at home.
Twelve years as a firefighter and I have many incidents that would turn the heads of a crowd of 16,000 and make them want to go home.
[snip]
I will budget and work it out over time, knowing I have a secure job and 10 days from now I will get another cheque.
I would like more, but I can't tell my employer that I am holding out this season for more.
I wish he would offer me $6.4 million, even for the next 20 years. I wouldn't even go home.
At my present salary, I would only have to work my day and night shifts for the next 106 years to make that amount."
Thursday, November 30, 2000
Rookie slays a Dragon
Rookie slays a Dragon -- "After a nine-year battle, most of it uphill, his movie Dungeons & Dragons is about to be released in theatres."
Cool, the director is Canadian! I'm not really sure about this movie, from the trailers... I mean, the characters were too "clean" looking, they didn't look rough enough. But of course I'll go see it! :-)
Aqua look
Back due to popular demand (cough), the Aqua version of this weblog.
Made possible by the new WeblogView page type in Conversant which allows a webmaster to set up as many different versions (looks/formats) of their weblogs as they want.
Becker doesn't want son to be a tennis player
Becker doesn't want son to be a tennis player
"I will, in any case, find a way to see that he never becomes a tennis player. He would always be measured against me and the pressure would be far too big. If he wants to become a basketball or soccer player, then fine."
When I was young, my dad owned a very large, very successful concrete business. I would tell him I would take over that business when I grew up. He always told me he'd sell the business before letting me take it over.
Must be a German thing. ;-)
Honestly though, I don't think it's fair to his son, he should be allowed to do what he wants. But he's not my son so too bad for me!
Hypocrites
The GOP's New Mexico Switcheroo -- "Mickey Barnett, a Republican national committeeman for New Mexico, said he found it 'highly unusual' that 10 percent of the voters in the southeastern New Mexico county chose not to vote for president. That's of course the same argument Republicans ridicule when it's made in Florida by the Gore forces. "
Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites. All of em.
My HBWT
Ever wished this weblog looked different? Is it slow in your browser, or the wrong colour? Think you can come up with a better design?
If so, go for it! Send me working Conversant weblog templates*, and I'll install them so you can have your very own version of this site! (as long as it's reasonable and doesn't offend me)
The documentation for the new WeblogView page type has links to all the applicable documentation to help you make the templates.
I'll post the templates for this version and the aqua version later to help people get started.
*a page template, a day template, and an item template
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
Salon.com Politics | Miami's rent-a-riot
Salon.com Politics: Miami's rent-a-riot
"GOP spokespeople have said that at least 750 Republican activists have been sent into South Florida from around the country to oppose the recount, with the party picking up the tab for a number of them."
Dear Rebuplican,
How proud are you to read that senior Republicans are responsible for causing riots?
This is absolutely pathetic.
Unbreakable
Last night I saw the movie Unbreakable. Go see it.
Wow. That movie was right up my alley. I want to say so much about that movie, but telling you my story now would spoil the movie for those of you who haven't seen the movie yet.
Perhaps I'll write the story up on a separate page, and put a big spoiler alert on the top of that page.
BTW, don't read ANYTHING about the movie anywhere until you've seen it. I had the movie half-spoiled for me by a news-site that didn't announce it was giving information about the movie when talking about next year's Oscars, I'd hate to see others fall into that trap.
Unbreakable is now my #2 all time favourite movie, right behind The Matrix. #3 is Fight Club, #4 is ... I think, Gladiator.
Lindros is facing a lot more than just 'risks
Lindros is facing a lot more than just 'risks
Hold on a second, read this paragraph about a former NFL'er with post-concussion problems:
"Some days I have good days, other days I don't. I might have a headache all day long. I might have blurred vision. I might have involuntary muscle twitches in my leg or with my eyelid. Sometimes when I am trying to communicate, I have trouble with word retrieval. Other times, my speech slows."
Umm..
Sometimes I have blurred vision (not too bad though). I have involuntary muscle twitches in my leg, very infrequently, but very often with my eyelid. Lately (since I burned myself out in October working over 250 hours in less than 3 weeks) I've had trouble with word retrieval, and other times, my speech slows.
What the fuck? I knew things weren't quite normal but could I be suffering from something close to post-concussion syndrome as a result of my burnout?
Internet Wasteland
Holy crap. Even At Home (-87.3%), Earthlink (-82.0%), Inktomi (-88.2%), RedHat (-95.5%), Vignette (-82.2%), Walt Disney Internet Group (-85.0%) and Yahoo! (-84.7%) are on this list of 211 companies that have lost 80% or more of their value from their 52 week high.
Good thing I didn't invest in any stocks directly. (Sorry to those who did)
My mutual funds were up big time thanks to SciTech funds earlier this year... that growth is likely gone by now. Good thing I'm diversified.
Templates in Conversant
Today I read about Jason Levine's new Manila plug-in, altTemplate. Finally, Manila sites can have more than one template (okay, two with the home page template)!
Not to suggest Jason's work isn't valuable or appreciated, because it is, but I'm sure Jason would agree that allowing multiple templates in a CMS is hardly a thriller of a feature. More like, why the hell did it take so long, and why did a 3rd party have to do it?
A flexible templating scheme is something Conversant, which this site is based on, has had since the beginning. Not as many people know about Conversant, so to the power users who find multiple templates appealing, here's how it's done in Conversant.
Some pictures to illustrate...
Each conversation (ie: DG, web-site, sub-site) has a list of templates that are editable in the administration interface. Here's a listing of the templates in the this conversation.
Here's what you get when you click on the "weblogs2" link to edit that template... (note these images are all cropped, this is only the important parg of the page)
In Conversant's Structure Editor (where you define the pages and folders in your site), you can choose a default template at the root level of your site that will apply to all pages in the site unless a different template is specifically chosen for a sub-folder or page.
In this conversation, the default2 template is applied to the root folder (not shown), but I've chosen the weblogs2 template for the home page since it has special elements like the "last updated" line and the weblog archive calendar.
When you don't want to specify a custom template for a particular page, you leave the "Template" option of the page to its default setting: "use parent folder template".
I'm glad Manila site operators can now have multiple templates per site too... it's a great feature for any respectable CMS to have.
