The Infrastructure Guru

OR it sets a target for Republican cooperation.
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HOLY CRAP. PREVIEW! My friend preview is back, and in a very cool way.
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And preview tells me I still have to stick in the stupid manual graph breaks, but this is indeed progress.

Oh.
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that didn't quite work
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I don't think.
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Oh, yes it did. I just hit submit before it had time to render my unclosed ital tag.
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Hey now!

I know its customary to be pessimistic to avoid disappointment. But can we at least consider, given the serious times we now live in, raising our expectations, encouraging our leaders to put aside the juvenile games they normally play and do what they need to do to make our nation healthy again. Oh yes and JNS this means media types too -- we are setting the bar a little higher now try and keep up.

But there is some font funkiness. Sometimes.
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Roman. Sometimes a san serif font. Ah, I see, it renders the current line as san serif.
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But treats a hard manual page break as a render into roman command. Weird. But you can used to that.
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Hey, that's nifty.

Sorry about

Umm...This preview is interesting.
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I wonder how many browsers this breaks in...
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Going to look at source now...

I'm in chrome....

Source tells us that we can use these tags...
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<!--XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> -->

Markup language is just looney, isn't it, Jay?

Let's see about markup comment tags
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Ha!

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Sorry, folks not interested in how the preview works...

Sorry, that's "gravatar".

Anyway, thanks for the preview, fellow web programmers!

Question:
What's the difference between an important infrastructure improvement project and a wasteful pork boondoggle?
Answer:
Whether it's in your State or the one next door.
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I commented on an MS thread that Federal Infrastructure spending was like a lottery. Everybody pays into a large common kitty in the hopes of gaming the system and getting out more than they put in. And since the Federal government itself continues to borrow money, everyone feels like they're succeeding.
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I don't suppose that there's anything inherently wrong with the arrangment but you almost NEVER hear anyone discussing it honestly.

Obama is obviously crafting his argument for the stimulus to somehow woo both Republicans and Americans skeptical of yet more government money (taxpayer money) being thrown at the economy.

It will be a tall task to change the dynamics of the conversation over bailout/stimulus spending from a negative to simply a necessary measure.

http://www.political-buzz.com/

Markup language is just looney, isn't it, Jay?
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It complies with pretty much no collection of good programming principles. But one should really think of it as a macro language for sophisticated end users. Implementing a recursion would be tricky. And hey, you know, the whole anarchy thing has worked out well, so who am I to complain?
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Zooming off topic, I was talking in an atriot comment thread about SF writers, particularly David Gerrold and Robert Sawyer, who were active in Compuserv's science fiction SIG. In that context, somebody remarked upon the theory that the usenet was meant to be a place just for the dirty hippies, and that they didn't realize what they were letting happen by permitting the existence of a worldwide wan.

Jay- it's been a long time since I've seen anybody write "sig". Thank you. I pictured you a bit younger (you're welcome). Oh, wow, I just discovered the new preview. This is most excellent.

one should really think of it as a macro language
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You're right, aren't you.
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It's like macro substitution. Nuts.
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I don't know what "sig" is.
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Is that pre-AOL?

SIG=Special Interest Group
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Yes, it is indeed pre-AOL. I remember the first AOL release, and how laughably lame it was. It's funny, because the world pre-Berners-Lee, was proprietary and expensive. We actually had utilities we used to compose messages offline, and then upload them in batch.
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That's how it would be now, if it weren't for pioneers in the 60s who created a truly open, truly extensible, truly robust wan architecture under the radar. One of the battles we are going to face in this administration is between the open architecture unix people and the closed architecture security people. Open is good. But open is scary. And open is not in the least part of an oligopolist business plan.

Open is good. But open is scary....
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But it does prevent bad ideas from locking in......

Not really scary, of course. Scary to the authoritarians and oligopolists who have been running things lately.

Preview I don't see no stinking preview but maybe if I look down it will appear like magic.
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On to the topic at hand, maybe this is one reason why Obama won't get his 80 votes in the Senate:
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BLOCK THE STIMULUS, HELP THE GOP
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Preview good.