Defend yourself against the coming robot rebellion

[diversions]

I must procure this book when it comes out. I must.

(I found it via Slashdot.)

Alberta Gives Kazakhstan to China, Russia Denied

[diversions]

Russia's Lukoil company lost its bid for PetroKazakhstan to China National Petroleum when an Alberta court approved the China National takeover this morning.

I suppose these sorts of things can be quite common, with the criss-crossing foreign ownership of oil companies and assets, but man, that's still a strange story.

No More Backlinks

[meta]

Okay, then. I'm not sure what's wrong with my blog, or my code, or my links, or my posts, or what, but backlinks don't seem to be working for me. I am therefore casting them out. Away with you!

And Now, Testing Backlinks!

[meta]

I'm going to try making a link back to a previous post called "And Now, Backlinks!", to test if it will appear as a backlink in the other post.

If it doesn't, I shall conclude that the backlink feature is teh suck, and probably disable it.

Bible Not Literal Truth: Catholic Church

[philosophy]

I'm very very pleased to read that the Catholic Church has moved towards a less literal interpretation of the Bible. I've lost track of how I reached the article originally, but it's a UK Times article here. It's the more remarkable that it comes when the new pope was being characterized as one of the more conservative candidates.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure it will have an effect on the near-vitriolic debate going on south of the border over evolution vs. intelligent design in the classroom. That issue is a flash point of what I feel to be a larger problem of distrust towards scientists, which troubles me greatly. There is such thing as healthy skepticism, but I'm feeling like it's moved on to "blind distrust."

One thing that did surprise me is that they are also refuting the apocalypse of Revelations. I would agree with this, myself; whether you believe in it or not, apocalyptic prophecies are dangerous things that can easily be abused. But it did raise my eyebrows.

Tricky Backlink Code

[meta]

Ah, now I see what's going on with the weird "bug" with Blogger's backlinks. It's not a bug. I thought that a bunch of Blogger-specific non-HTML code was incorrectly being published into the post page. Looks like it's correctly being published into the page - 'cuz there's javascript code that sucks the non-HTML stuff in and turns it into proper HTML that contains all the backlinks and stuff.

I sent a help message to Blogger about this. I must have sounded pretty clueless.

I'm not sure how I feel of this method of publishing though... I'll have to think about it. Backlinks are not that important to me; I might just disable them. I'm not overly fond of javascript.

On a related note, I've put a flickr badge on my main page. That uses javascript too, so don't be too surprised if, one day, I smack them both away with great fury.

Serenity

[movies]

On the weekend, I saw the new movie called Serenity. It's based on the short-lived television series called "Firefly."

I enjoyed it a lot. It's well written and very "tight." The intro is very quick, but the story is well set-up and doesn't require any knowledge of the series. Which is good, because I never saw the tv show.

It has the humour you'd expect from Joss Whedon:

Mal: We're going to have a bit of a bumpy ride and... maybe explode.

Jayne: We're gonna explode? I don't wanna explode.

And Now, Backlinks!

[meta]

Blogger has just introduced backlinks. They're something like trackbacks. Actually, I'm not too familiar with trackbacks, so I'm not clear on how backlinks differ. I've read people saying backlinks are not "true" trackbacks, and I don't know what they mean... yet.

Anyways, I was finding, at first, that backlinks took a really long time to load, and it also had a bug with my Mozilla browser that caused text to become unselectable. The issues were a bit too annoying, so I waited. Well, now, it looks like they've resolved those issues, so look! Right beside the "comments" link, there's a "backlinks" link!

Now, the XHTML 1.0 validation I worked so hard to achieve has gone to hell in a handbasket in my post pages, because of another small bug: a bogus backlink entry is produced even if a post has no backlinks. *sigh* I hope they fix that issue soon. I was quite proud of my XHTML-compliant site.

XHTML 1.0 Strict!

[meta]

Okay, it's looking like Blogger is now producing XHTML 1.0 compliant code, or something very, very close. So, I'm going to try and update the entire site to conform. This will cause me some pain, but the geek in me is insisting it will be worth it. The other half of me has his doubts.

If you're subscribed to my atom feed, you'll see a huge number of changes (actually you've probably already been seeing huge changes as I spruced up the site over the last few days). I'll be editing old posts, but only in terms of the markup of course, not content. So, here goes. Wish me luck.

Updated 5:54 PM: Whew. That was a bit more pain than I was expecting, but I suppose I should not be surprised. I haven't run a validator on every single page, so there might be small errors lurking about, but I should now be damn close to XHTML 1.0 compliance here.

Cool New Look!

[meta]

I have added some much-needed pizzazz to this site. I will probably do a bit more work over the next couple of weeks, but this alone is a big improvement, no?

What's happening to me??

[personal]

All who know me know that I love my coffee. If I could be sure that I would not turn into a total nervous wreck, I would have a cup of coffee for every waking hour in my life. And decaffeination just seems like such a tremendous expenditure of energy for a such a small benefit that I just don't agree with it on a philosophical level.

So I keep my intake at one, sometimes, two, cups per day.

But yesterday! I just realized right now that yesterday! I forgot to drink my usual cup of coffee! What's wrong with me?

And I'm not even suffering withdrawal symptoms. I think something is messing with my brain. Where's my tin foil hat?

Weather Is Great, But I'm Under

[personal]

For the last week, I've had a very frustrating illness that has been teasing me by pretending to go away and then returning a day later, in a slightly different form. Never quite enough to really make me miserable, but just enough that it intrudes on my peace of mind.

First, it was a sore throat and sneezing. That went away. Then, it was some light-headedness with more sneezing and nasal congestion. That went away too. Now the nasal congestion is back again.

I am... displeased.