Soapbox

As this screen shot from the Huffington Post demonstrates. On my MacBook Air (1280×800) I can’t even see the complete headline (highlighted in red). On my office PC (1280×1024) I can see the headline and a smidgen of text. All in all, the content occupies barely 5% of the browser window…

Advertising is not to blame, as it only takes up 12% of the real estate. The rest is hypertrophied navigation, chartjunk, wasted space, blegs and other come-hithers. Horrors like these are what make the Aardvark extension/bookmarklet essential. A few seconds with it yield this much improved result:

An even better option in this case is the Readability bookmarklet, which requires zero work, but may not work in all cases.

On a completely unrelated note, I highly recommend Andy Odlyzko’s paper (PDF) of the same title.

Benjamin Franklin is the most significant of America’s Founding Fathers. During his stay in Paris as ambassador of sorts for the fledgling United States, he was the 18th century equivalent of a rock star, complete with female groupies throwing themselves at him. They clearly had superior taste to our own century, obsessed as it is with reality show nobodies and pop-music histrions who can’t sing for the life of them, but I digress. Franklin convinced the French public and king Louis XVI to financially support the US, bankrupting the kingdom and ultimately leading to the French Revolution. The revolutionary Assembly granted honorary citizenship to Franklin (along with others like Tom Paine and George Washington) and even a seat in the assembly itself.

My opinion of Franklin was lowered when I learned that he was the one who first proposed the abomination that is Daylight Saving Time. I only recently found out that An Economical Project was in fact a satire much like his notorious opus Fart Proudly, a point that seems to have been completely escaped the proponents of DST.

It could have been worse, I suppose. They could have adopted Swift’s A Modest Proposal instead.

I have SPF verification enabled on my mail server. While SPF is no panacea for the problem of spam, it is quite effective at ensuring spammers do not forge the sending address to impersonate someone else, and cause some poor innocent soul to receive in a boomerang effect the torrent of complaints hurled at them.

Unfortunately far too many lame organizations (cough, Google) qualify their SPF record using a too permissive ?all or ~all clause, which means they have servers other than those listed, and thus their SPF record is useless for filtering purposes.

In the last month, I noticed the opposite problem: I did not receive emails from Eurostar and BookMooch because their SPF records did not list the mail servers they actually use. If they are not clueful enough to manage a simple list of IP addresses, or have basic change management discipline, they should do us all a favor and ditch the SPF record they clearly are incapable of maintaining.

They recently introduced a policy whereby you cannot obtain seat assignments ahead of time unless you are prepared to pay an extortionate $30 per leg. Either you cave to their strong-arming, or wait until 24 hours prior to the flight when online check-in, at the risk of being stuck in a middle seat or in non-contiguous seats even if you booked months in advance.

Even by BA’s deplorable standard of service, this is a despicable new low.

The US is currently in a frenzy over the TV series Mad Men. People seem to be discovering that Americans once were articulate and knew how not dress as slobs, when snappy dressers like Barack Obama or former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (below) were the rule rather than the exception.

As I watched the French period action movie Le Bossu, I could not help but admiring the elaborate 18th Century Régence costumes.

In most animal species the male is the most flamboyant of the sexes, from the peacock to birds and beyond. If you look at Mughal miniatures, you will find their Emperors (like Shah Jahan below) were clad in finery and jewels far outstripping the women in their court.

The rich silks and brocades European aristocracy wore well into the 19th century did not fear from comparison with the ladies. Yet somehow since then men’s wear has devolved to subdued dark colors once worn only by priests, undertakers and school teachers (Péguy’s Black hussars of the Republic).