Alamut Roundup
At first I thought he said “Deleuze’s bath as an event”.

Deleuze’s bath was not announced on French TV during the late evening news. Yitzahk Rabin’s assassination was announced shortly before the non-announcement of Deleuze’s bath. In spite of their great differences, both events appeared with an immediate and simultaneous power on two levels: as an event on the historical level as well as an incorporeal event in thought. After each historical event had occurred, everything was the same but everything had changed: two parallel events had also taken place in thought. As Deleuze demonstrated in Logique du sens, events are always double-sided, on each side of the constantly moving fissure separating states of affairs and propositions.

Then later, he is talking (Deleuze-filtered) Spinoza on my birthday. It's almost like a present. And it gives me the opportunity once again to post one of the most amazing hypertexts on the internet: yesselman.com's Spinoza Electronic Texts. Amazing. (And later, if I can find it, a quotation from the great summary of his work by Ruth Lydia Saw found in her little known classic, The Vindication of Metaphysics.
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“I realize that this bill basically says you can tap someone's phone for jaywalking, and normally I would say, 'No way,' ” said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery). “But after what happened on September 11th, I say screw 'em.”*
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Oh crumbs! There is no way to write the the SRC attribute of the SCRIPT element in Mac IE5. You can read it any ol' way (document.scripts[n].src or scriptElementId.src) but you can't write to it either with a plan ol' ="example.js" or even when you DOM-create the SCRIPT element from scratch and use setAttribute or put the whole <script type="text/javascript" src="example.js"> as a parameter in createElement.

And that was the geekiest thing I ever said on this site.

(It is also really bad: if anyone comes up with a workaround, please let me know.)

Also geeky: Emory get the prize for finding the author of the moving clock.
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I'm running Trillian with AIM, YahooIM, ICQ and MSN connections open and every single contact is asleep. But I'm not only awake, I am still in the office. This sucks.
Update: after one hour of sleep I managed to get up for the weekly dev meeting, which was cancelled for the long weekend. Not that anyone told me.
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Canadian history through the backs of $5 notes.
Present day.
Special bonus: $25 bill
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Phones numbers that appear in my mobile's address book (from me walking around with the phone turned on but the keylock off):

6
#00#0*#
078#5
222222222222222222222
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Wow, have I learned a lot about javascript and the DOM and faking sockets and other things like that in the last few months (and especially last few days). I almost wish I had six months off to play and learn a “real” programming language, SQL, proper data modelling, some PHP, and a few other things. Then I could build this thing that I really want to build. (As an aside, anyone have about US$350k that they just can't find an investment for? It's good.)

Maybe DHTML isn't actually dead (Is DHTML Dead?). All my ol' time javascript heros (people like Milo Vermeulen, Chris Nott, Scott Andrew, Eric Costello, etc.) are part of a whole world of people doing kick-*ss remote scripting and DHTML (in the DOM-iest way). I'm just starting to learn about that world. Here are some things I'm finding (thanks for the starter links, Derek):

• Brent Ashley's Remote Scripting Resources (Brent built a BlogChat contraption which I asked him about inside of the contraption itself)
• Tim Morgan's JUDE ("JavaScript Universal Document Element" or "JavaScript Uncommon Development Endeavors") blog (and check out his nice chat app here)
• The incredible DomAPI site
• And, it had been a while since I visited youngpup (for extra Zoing!, click on “works” and then “Three.OH News”) and it's now even better

Also, Roland Tanglao (of VanEats) has his own site, which is “good for developers,” says a developer. Ditto Skipping Dot Net.

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This works again?

Some of the things I have been meaning to post about:

• Complete text of the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica is online (!). Via Calamondin. And, further Calamondinly, there's more! New 20 Things site!
• I have been educated about the works of Conlon Nancarrow, composer of impossible-to-play-by-humans compositions for the player piano (some real files on this page)
• The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford.
• 37signals: 37BetterFedEx and 37signals' Jason Fried's Singlefile online book-organizing app.
• Anyone know who made this moving clock.htm (I got if via email forward and left it exactly as it was).

And there was quite a bit more, but I have no recollection anymore. What was it?
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In case you were thinking of "messing" with me, I should let you know what I do, from time to time, get email like the following (from an old friend):

I have an interesting question for you. have you any clue on how to sell jewels? Certain precious and certain semi-precious have come across someone's lap to deliver to someone who has disappeared.

(I had no idea how to “move the goods”.)
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Something I learned while reading Continental, Continental Airlines' inflight magazine, March 2002 issue. Walmart's top 10 grossing items:

Product	Sales in Millions
Videotapes and DVDs	$1,556
Diapers	$1,132
Cigarettes	$1,032
Toilet Paper	$957
Milk	$918
Dog food (dry)	$868
Batteries	$849
Breakfast Cereal	$736
Film	$705
Pet supplies	$664

In the same issue, I saw what must be one of the worst all-time testimonials. Just as it was printed (missed space, bolding and all):

Patrick (Canada) "I want to order another of the Athena 10X. It has gone over well with my wife; and that's all I care about. It's been good actually.I think it's very subliminal. It just really kind of — I don't know, it works on a very subconscious level. It's like a greeting card. It does work. I know it does. It works for me."

In an ad for "Athena Pheromone 10X: (unscented afershave additive for MEN)" headlined BIOLOGIST'S PHEROMONE FORMULAS INCREASE ROMANCE IN YOUR LIFE.
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Forget Magazine: "The Beginning of Canadian History"

Nice. Polite. A little better, in some ways, maybe. It's a joke, sure. We don't have guns. It's meant to be self-effacing. We're smaller — in population — but did you know that Canada is the second largest country in the world after Russia? Yes, it's cold! Ha ha! We apologize. Trudeau was friends with Castro! And once we burned the White House down!

By me.
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Yes! Let's go to SXSW. And specifically, let's go talk to Jasons Fried and Kottke and me about Simplicity and Web Design (3:30-5:00pm Monday March 11) — you can talk now, so to speak, by using the comments mechanisms you'll find via the comment-mechanism-owner-operators linked from their respective names above. I'm tired.

Also, let's go to the So New Media Party on Saturday night because we were specifically asked to, and since a list of my top five, all time, desert island books (I don't even remember what they were anymore) is featured in the upcoming issue of their publication Words! Words! Words! Why not buy something from their catalog in the meantime?
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Have you heard of Caterina.net? More Flores.
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I filter MetaFilter. Two great links (1, 2) which take you to, respectively, mounds of new-to-me Turner paintings and sketchs from the Tate (here's a particular favorite after one short browse: Composition Study: Caernarvon Castle, Sunset 1798) as well as '20s and '30s Travel Ephemera including this great promo for Aeroput Yugoslavia, 1935 and a bunch of Vienna-Budapest road trips ads.
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Happy three years of existence to Strange Brew, the first blog I ever saw. Good anniversary links too: Eunoia by Christian Bök (where you'll find this piece for Georges Perec).
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Action, Interaction, Reaction is a very Nico Macdonald-ish article (by none other than Nico Macdonald) for the magazine Blueprint (which I can't find online —new?) extolling the virtues of interaction design. (Via 040FREQ list.)

Update: Nico himself writes it to tell me that Blueprint is in fact 20 years old (oops) and though they don't publish online, their publisher does maintain Design4Design (he also reminds me that Eye, with its oddball browsing interface is online — good deal, considering the $35 cover price in Canada).
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