Random weblog of the day: Brilliant Corners

I’ve started clicking my own Blogtree link–not to be vain, but to browse Blogtree for other blogs that might be interesting reading. A lot of them are familiar, but every now and then I run into a cool weblog that engages my attention.

Accordingly, the first “random weblog of the day” here at JHN is Brilliant Corners. And not just because he’s namechecking Monk. Bill Turner discusses Barthelme and postmodern fiction intelligently one post away from linking to two contrasting articles about making movie trailers. Plus he wrote his own blogging system using Perl and MySQL. Check him out.
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Too Southern for Atlanta?

Latest radio asinine moment: Country DJ fired for sounding too Southern — in Atlanta! Greg nails this one:

Like much of the rest of the industry country music has taken a nosedive — but that has nothing to do, so we’re told, with playlists programmed by committee, managers so out of touch that a quintuple-platinum Grammy-winning sleeper hit still can’t get airplay, or artists that aim to sound less like Johnny Cash than Rick Dees. Nope, the problem is that the DJ — on a country station — in Dixie! — sounds too Southern.

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Don Box: “Tolerance is great, but…”

“…vocal tolerance is even better. Keeping your tolerance to yourself only exacerbates the problem.”

Marriage counseling? Nope, he’s talking about the longstanding practice on the web that emphasizes generation of correct outgoing code but acceptance of incorrect incoming code. He points out, rightly I think, that unless you find a way to tell the source that generates the broken code that it’s broken, that no progress will ever be made.

Don’s story is in the context of the new RSS feed on his site at GotDotNet, which I highly recommend subscribing to if you’re a developer or interested in XML web services.
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Back from the weekend

I never got back to working on IM and weblogs on Saturday. We spent the morning at Pike Place Market. In the afternoon Lisa and I finally installed Roman blinds on the roof panels of our “solarium” — a little bay next to the kitchen and dining room, it’s constructed from six patio window panes, three slanting up from the floor meeting three slanting down with the roof line. Unfortunately we also found out that there are serious leaks around all the panes when I tried to wash them. More contractors, more $.

Sunday we took Lisa’s dad to Mass and did some gardening. The soil in the bed next to the driveway is packed like concrete and very sandy, so we are concluding sadly that we’re going to lose one or two of the rhododendron bushes that the previous owners left. (They weren’t planted in shade anyway, so they were pretty much doomed.) I dug out a couple 1.5 foot holes for some Tuscan rosemary–besides being tasty, the plant also gets really cool blue flowers which should look nice. Hopefully they’ll do better than the rhododendron. I finished the day by washing both our cars for the first time since we’ve moved. Then finally I rolled Lisa’s car INTO THE GARAGE–yes, we’ve finally unpacked or moved enough stuff to make that possible, though you can’t open any doors on the passenger side when it’s in. A red letter day by any measure.