Semaine(s): ICC International Court of Arbitration

Fin de semaine: La Clusaz

[màj: lien corrigé. Oui, peut-être que je travaille un peu beaucoup.]

Given the way the US Constitution has been interpreted/repurposed/redefined/stretched recently, isn’t it a cruel joke be awarded ex aequo the distinction of being World’s Most Enduring Government Institution? Apparently not.

The New York Review of Books: On War.

Chris Hedges reviews Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright and The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson. Many excellent thoughts and observations, and this moment of lucidity taken from Generation Kill:

One of the Marines in the book returns to California and is invited to be the guest of honor in a gated community in Malibu, a place where he could never afford to live. The residents want to toast him as a war hero.

« I’m not a hero, » he tells the guests. « Guys like me are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go out and drop a bomb on somebody’s house.

I don’t know if I’ll ever read the books, but the review itself is worth 5 minutes of your time.

[Via MeFi.]

C’est la Journée mondiale de la normalisation aujourd’hui.

Blurb de l’UIT à ce propos.

The Shadow Rising, tome 4 de la série The Wheel of Time de Robert Jordan. Fini hier soir. Il va falloir que je fasse un échange postal pour le 5e: c’est pas si mal en fin de compte et son style de misogynie passive la misandrie acharnée de ses personnages féminins commence à être divertissante.

Il a été remplacé immédiatement par Technology Patent Licensing: an International Reference on 21st Century Patent Pools and Patent Platforms, de Larry M. Goldstein et Brian N. Kearsey. Deux genres de littérature qui font travailler l’imagination peut-être?

Ils ont été précédés de L’Abyssin, de Jean-Christophe Ruffin et de Justine, de Lawrence Durrell; au moins là il y avait un thème commun: l’Égypte et les expatriés.

Alors, vous le savez probablement tous.
C’est le week-end de compétition tant attendu à Vancouver.
Pour ceux qui veulent plus de renseignement allez voir ce site

Souhaitez nous bonne chance !

Eh oui, cette entrée de pressepapiers se retrouve en première position sur Google avec cette recherche. Je ne sais pas combien de temps ça va durer, mais faut en profiter pendant que ça passe !
Continuer la lecture →

Tu sais que tu pédales trop tard à la maison quand tu croises une paire de ratons-laveurs sur Van Horne…

Douze Lunes points to « Scourge of Arial« . It tells a little bit of type history. I like those things, as you might have noticed.

Speaking of fonts, these days, I’m trying to use Gentium, « a typeface for the nations » as an alternative to my old favourite, Minon. It’s free-as-in-beer (and I’m not convinced the open source model would work well for fonts) and the goal of the project is interesting. I stumbled upon it looking for fonts with the required accents to write pinyin.

I’ve been learning about blogosphere related tools for a while now. For a change, last week, Omar at Alternatives showed me a couple tools by Richard Rogers. I think those are nice uses of technology and I’m curious to see if anyone has other similar applications to share.

They focus on the modelization of social issues and trends in the media.

Check out this Election Issue tracker (Click on the Issuetracker button in the right navigation column, the one with the colored graph.

The flash app first shows you the issues that political parties campaigned on. You’ll see scrolling at top the issues that were part of an election platform, the grey zones underneath indicate whether or not the issue was part of the platform for the party listed on the left side.

Click on an issue and you’ll see at the bottom the number of times that issue was mentionned in a number of news sources in the recent days, therefore giving you a metric of the mindshare a party is getting my focusing on a given issue, without regard to the actual content (positive or negative) of the articles or the position of the party.

Infoid.org offers the Web Issue Index of Civil Society . The site is in English and largely self explanatory: The Web Issue Index of Civil Society may be likened to a consumer price index. A consumer price index watches price fluctuations in a stable set of goods for indications of inflation. The Web Issue Index watches the campaigning behaviour of stable sets of non-governmental organisations for indications of attention to social issues.

Richard Rogers maintains govcom.com with links to more goodies.

This makes me feel much better about my typing skills:

occdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The comment Joi adds about not being able to correct titles because of the way permalinks are set up is also very true for me. I’ve had to set up permanent redirects on some posts that had accented letters in the titles when I changed the character encoding of my pages: apparently MT re-encoded the titles differently, which left me with duplicate individual archive pages..

[Joi Ito → Jerry]

Yahoo news item seen through NetNewsWire with the HTMLDiff feature turned on.

Reuters – A respected and moderate Canadian leading Canadian Muslim cleric was said on Saturday he had been detained and interrogated in Florida by U.S. immigration officials for 16 hours without any charges being filed, when they tried to visit Florida and the Toronto Star newspaper reported on Saturday.
experience had put him off ever going to the United States again.

I really like to see how stories are modified, it’s usually way more telling on big media feeds than on weblogs.

The answer to life, the universe and everything

The Google calculator: learned about it from Aaron (or was it MeFi?) and got some useful (and less useful but very creative) ideas from Jason Kottke and Andrew Baio.

J’ai eu une excellente expérience de magasinage chez Zellers à la Plaza Côte-des-Neiges dimanche après-midi.

Prix raisonnables, bonne sélection de produits, étalages en ordre et, ce qui m’a désarçonné, personnel courtois, super serviable et disponible.

J’admets que je suis surpris, je m’attendais pas à grand chose.