Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I have a great many things to be thankful for. As anyone who reads this journal knows, I have a lot to complain about (I try ration my whining ...), but there are important things to be thankful for as well.

But at the moment I'm feeling trivial and whimsical, and am going to mention only the very least (and, as it happens, last in the day) of the things it occurred to me to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving.

I am thankful that an MP3 of the theme song from the Underdog television cartoon doesn't take very long to download, even on dialup.

What, you thought I was going to list something significant and say, "and that's just the least of my blessings," or something? Well yeah, I could've, but this one really was the tiniest of the things I felt thankful for.

"If anybody tells me that having copyrights be such that material from 1976 will never again be seen until anybody who was actually alive in 1976 is DEAD is a GOOD THING, I will tell them up front they are lying knaves." -- acroyear70, 2005-09-19, regarding The Muppet Show.

[May I take this opportunity to yet again suggest that everyone read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, which is availalable as a free PDF or eBook, as well as in hardcopy?]

Sometime around 6:30 this morning, the power went out at my house. (Once I got most of the LAN happy again and logged into my ISP, that was when the earliest of the email that hadn't gotten picked up yet was from.)

When I woke up, the Debian machine in the bedroom wouldn't come back on. It won't even run POST. No beeps, no video, nuffin. Well, the LED on the CD-ROM and the hard disk access LED on the front panel come on very briefly.

I'm getting tired of this.

I'm sure several of you already know about this site, and some of you won't have any use for it, but for the rest ...

I just stumbled across a pretty damned cool sheet music site, called thesession.org. Yah, it is Yet Another Irish Session Tunes site (like there'll be any shortage of those on the web any time soon), but I like the way the tunes section is set up and the first few unfamiliar tunes I peeked at there looked interesting.

When viewing a specific tune, there are four tabs: "Details", "ABC", "Sheetmusic", and "Comments", and at least in my browser, switching between tabs happened instantly, making for a both pleasant and useful interface.

[Edited a few moments later to add:] Okay, I got curious about the implementation and played a hunch. It turns out that if I select "user style" instead of "author style" in Opera, or if I view a tune in Lynx, all four sections are visible at once (though the image of the sheet music does not, of course, display in Lynx). So they're turning a straight top-to-bottom page with a few <a name> and <a href> tags in it into this tabbed interface by way of some clever CSS trick ...

And true to the philosophy of CSS, when it fails because the user has a non-CSS browser or has said to use a different stylesheet, it breaks down in a completely useable and non-ugly fashion, even being quite reasonably Lynx-friendly.

The view is clean, without a lot of extraneous crap cluttering the screen and slowing down page loading. But it doesn't have a half-assed or amateurish look either. Somebody over there Really Understands The Web. Heh -- I wonder whether they also managed to make it look good on a cell phone or PDA.