Fiat Oops

An interesting article about Web standards compliance? Yep. At W3C, few practice what they preach: "[A] vast majority of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) member home pages do not pass the standards body's own test for compliance with W3C recommendations." Wonders study author Marko Karppinen in an IM interview with CNET staff writer Paul Festa, "The authoring companies...are pouring millions into the development of (Adobe's) GoLive and (Macromedia's) DreamWeaver—why are these tools producing invalid markup by default?"

Diversions

Kim Garretson's pulp fiction art, and tribute to "Doc and Dr," are good fun. Also, if you've been waiting to see The Hours I'd suggest you do it while it's still in theaters. It's a film that deserves a big screen.

Blawgy Business

Some thoughtful comments about cautionary blawging have appeared in response to my "Crash Course" post, and you can check them out or add to them at this link (add more of your "getting started" resource suggestions too, by all means). The commenters include lawyer/writer David Maizenberg ("If Bork Had Blogged"). Ernie Svenson, Sam Heldman, The Academy and Jerry Lawson have posted related thoughts.

[Update] Howard weighs in.

Other legal bloggers who have come my way recently include Rotsam Marzban, a "cosmopolitan Iranian" and Harvard law student, and the Harvard 2003 LLM class, blogging at llm2003. [both via Weblogs at Harvard] Check in with the CaffMonster for "the buzz in law and literature," and see if you can tell me what language (other than English) is happening at Cyberlawnews.

Linguistic Alchemy

"In the white foliated earth, transmute fear into trust. Defense into welcome. As it turns out, this is harder than it looks." [The EGR Weblog]

In one fell send (and no doubt by other insidious means), Christopher Locke, aka RageBoy®—more here, from the Guardian—pulled me and over two dozen other souls into the whitewater of weblogging, leaving most of us sputtering but enjoying the ride. The devil in the machine was EGR, which, if you were not ducking the shrapnel of these email grenades in real-time, is archived for posterity. (I think to get the full dose you would start here, pick things up here, then mosey on over here to make sure you haven't missed anything. Or, if you prefer your reading in a neat, handheld package, many comprise The Bombast Transcripts.)

If EGR is receding—and I hope it merely has been recouping in the Yucatan—there is no pain as long as Chris keeps blogging. And fear not, there remains ample opportunity to become one of the many, the iniquitous, the Valued Readers. One never knows what the wee hours of the morning may yet engender.

Good Times Weekend

There have been so many tidbits, columns and big, whopping features that have captured my attention from this weekend's editions of the L.A. Times I thought I'd point 'em out.

• The Points West column by Steve Lopez consistently is some of the best the paper has to offer. Today, it examines weather-independent atmospheric differences between L.A. and D.C.: "[I]t's quite tense here. Cabbies listen to NPR. That's how tense."
• The weekend's L.A. Times Magazine is a special Silicon Valley Issue. Lots about Buck's and bucks, Five Reasons to Hope (interesting, but too narrow), an unreformed sock puppet and a mostly reformed hacker. (The tirading lawyer might be my favorite: "There were all these 20-year-olds all over the place, going on about 'eyeballs' and 'mindshare' and riding their stupid scooters back and forth to their offices, and I was simultaneously wanting to puke and jealous as hell.") There's also some propitious news for Dave, as the Times reports that "Boston comes closest to matching Silicon Valley in terms of its breadth of technology and ability to reinvent itself."
• From today's Business section, an article on automotive manufacturers following in the footsteps of Dell.
• From today's Travel section, an article about mistakenly low Web-advertised fares or rates. (Ouch—$850/night, over-water Bora Bora bungalows, listed for $85/night; people tried to book them for two months at a stretch.)
• From yesterday's Business section, an article about the Navy and Marines sending troops to the Middle East with "a weapon of mass information: a high-definition digital camera" (to generate digital Movietone newsreels).
• From yesterday's Business section, an article about a lawsuit over the "Survivor Yell" (see track 9). (See also the Yahoo yodel.)