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Picture 040126_0028~01.jpg “Attention Customers:
In order to prevent skipping out on a restaurant bill.
We strictly prohibit leaving before paying the bill.
Manager”

See. Now I’m not convinced that this sign would be considered much of a walk-out deterrent in a US restaurant.

The beauty of Japan is that telling people it’s forbidden to shoplift or a very naughty thing to kill people and steal their money, is still considered the ultimate argument to freeze halt any dishonest plan in the making.

Update: Bigger version here

by ·Comments Off on Remodeling

As you can tell, I’m having a lot of fun playing with colors and my page template…

I eventually came to terms with reality, depressing though it might be: black-all-over, with hues of neon blue here and there, is only really cool for insecure teenagers who like to listen to depressingly bad goth music and took for the safest route in terms of noncommittal fashion decisions. Furthermore, it made it literally painful to read my already laborious ranting.

Beside, white is the new black.

It was high time for a change.

Hence, the current “experimental” aspect of my site… I’m in the process of finalizing a palette of subtle pastel tones that accurately reflect my impeccable tastes and preferably match my delicate complexion. Lots need to be done in terms of harmonizing the code, so bear with me and the many weird visual glitches in the meantime.

And by the way, since I was at it, I decided to try and give a crap about how bad the css looked on certain browsers and platforms that we won’t name so as not to bring any more shame on Microsoft. Thanks to some research and the experience of other users dealing with MS inept support of common Web Standards. I was able to topically disable unsupported css depending on browsers.

Now the page looks ok (or not any worse) on every platforms and browsers I could put my hands on (which means IE, Mozilla and Safari on Windoze and OS X: I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna go check if his page supports Opera, WebTV and Hitachi Microwaves Oven)… Need I say it definitely looks its best on real browsers.

by ·Comments Off on Journalistic Bias

This interesting text points out the increasingly frequent habit with major media outlets of turning provable facts into mere “quotations” coming from the mouth of political opponents… For example, the fact that the US budget has gone from massively in excess less than four years ago to one of the biggest deficit in US history, is no longer a fact backed by hard cold official numbers: It is a “charge” made by political opponents:

The forecast comes as Democrats campaigning to run against President Bush charge that he has turned a surplus into a deficit.

USA today quoted by Slacktivist

The all too common story of how newspapers can distort objective information under the dubious pretense of “keeping viewpoints balanced”.