about : Under a Blackened Sky

This is my Web log. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I wish there were more to say about this thing. I started it in the summer of 2001 as an encouragement to write on a more regular basis, and to cut down on the amount of e-mail I was sending. It gets updated whenever I find something interesting and I have time to do an update -- unfortunately, time is something of a problem these days thanks to my hellacious work schedule. When all I want to do at the end of the day is come home and fall into bed, most things in my life get ignored. Including my various Web projects.

My blogging interests include technology, politics, law, medicine, and just about anything that intersects at least one of these issues -- in other words, like so many other Webloggers, I write about life and the things that catch my eye. Sometimes things get a little confessional, but whoever said that had to be a bad thing? It's therapeutic.

What community?

A few months back, I stumbled on Joe Clark's very interesting article deconstructing Web logging, and in particular the somewhat inexplicable superstardom that some people get to experience. For a long time -- and even to this day -- I got the feeling that Web logging was a fundamentally incestuous experience ("The other people who have blogs.. read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog" -- whoopee). Liam brought this up in the early days of Under a Blackened Sky's existence; he was right then, and he's right now, even though he hasn't said anything about it lately.

Considering how quickly certain elements of the 'blogging community gathered 'round to kick the shit out of Mr. Clark, I suspect there was a grain of truth to his accusations.

Those of us who aren't "A-list" Web loggers toil in obscurity with a minuscule audience. There's a hierarchy to Web logging and from my not-so-scientific perusal of Web logs, a lot of people are scrambling to climb to the top. Me, I don't care. I'd rather toil in obscurity -- it's cheaper and I don't have to pay as much in bandwidth fees every month. I read a handfull of Web logs on a daily basis, all from exceptional people that I find interesting, funny, smart, or a combination of all three. Periodically I'll link to something they've written or, more likely, I'll steal the link and point straight at whatever.

I don't see myself as part of the Weblogging community. This is probably because I'm going at it alone, on my own server, using my own software. Readership grows slowly. Based on my logs, I have about 50-75 regular readers, which I think is astonishingly flattering (not to mention confusing) -- I'm glad you found something of value here, and although I'm slightly bewildered that anyone bothers to come back, I'm glad you're here. But I have no asperations to a larger audience.

Really. I'm happy with the state of this Weblog right now, and I don't feel left out at all. In fact, after reading Clark's article, I'm pretty happy I'm not a part of the "blogging community" at large. Maybe this is a form of alternativism: I'm so hip and cool, I don't need readers, designed to compensate for my lame design, bad jokes, and poor taste in colors. But so what?

To regular readers coming back, it's nice to see you again.
To the unwary who've just wandered in, howdy.

(in)Frequently Asked Questions

Who are you?
There's some more detail on this over here. But basically, I wander the earth fighting for truth, justice, and health care funding. Occasionally, I get to see patients. Very rarely, I actually do something useful. I live in British Columbia with a variable number of humans and four-legged animals, not all of whom are domesticated and/or house-broken. I've been eating, sleeping, and breathing emergency medicine since I was about 14 years old, and I still love it.
Once upon a time, I used to be a Unix system administrator (I was somewhere between "technical thug" and "maniac"). I've recently come to realize that this probably explains my choice of medical specialties. It also explains why people sometimes confuse me for a network hacker (or worse). I've been working on and around the Internet since the mid-1980s. Oddly, it still isn't boring.
You seem like a really cranky person. Is there anything you like?
Sure. I like movies, I like James Ellroy novels, I like my job (in spite of all the crap that comes with it). I love baseball. There's actually a great deal that I do like; unfortunately, I tend to come off crankier on-line than I do in real life, probably because it's easier to bitch than to praise.
I can't get a handle on your politics. What gives?
I'm a libertarian. I believe in free markets and small government. If it helps you conceptualize anything, I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal (it's nobody's business how you live you life unless you make things difficult for other people, and I'm not talking about keeping other people up at night worrying about your godless ways). Given that at least part of my salary comes from the provincial government, this may seem a bit hypocritical. It is. I support a lot of strange things, and not all of them are logically or internally consistent; sometimes, I've been known to argue points simply for the sake of arguments, so you should probably not take a political argument that seems wacky at face value. You've been warned.
What's up with the title of this thing?
It's a line from a Sarah McLachlan song. The context is this:

Under a blackened sky
Far beyond the glaring street lights
Sleeping on empty dreams
The vultures lie in wait

Obvious follow-up: Any particular reason you picked it?
It's an evocative line. The song is loaded with personal meaning (not all of which I'm prepared to disclose here). Even if all that weren't true, I like the images in the first verse. I spend a lot of time working at night (frequently, but by no means constantly). And anyway, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is probably my all-time favorite album.
Are there any recurrent features I should stick around for?
Why yes. Yes there are.
Wackiness Watch is an intermittently regular review of municipal politics, mostly from southwestern British Columbia but further afield at times as well. It started as a way to keep tabs on a particularly bizarro mayor in Greater Victoria who seemed hell bent on spending more money than seemed necessary over a very minor point, but has since evolved into something bigger than that. Think of it as your local metro column on crack, when it actually shows up.
Wandering About The Web is a roughly monthly feature where I pursue a particular obscure or strange topic to the end of the Web, or at least until my curiosity has been satisfied. Previous topics as of this writing have included spies on shortwave in plain sight, helium storage reserves, and the tricky problem of telling time.
Network Nostalgia is our look back at the network of old: Where we've been, what we did, where we're going. It has been technical in nature, but it may turn out to be more social as time goes on. We'll see.
Why do these pages get so freakin' big?
Well, for starters, because the month is done as one single file. I'm trying to think of a better way to do things around here that doesn't involve changing multiple files every time I update, and/or breaking links. I know it sucks, but in the absence of a real content management system, it's going to have to do. Sorry.
What are you running behind this site?
Apache. Seriously. That's it. The only other thing that gets serious use in producing this Weblog is emacs. Which is still more proof that you can do everything you need to do in emacs. One day, I'd like to see if I can manage a trauma code in emacs..
All of the design you see around you us based on a stylesheet that I borrowed and adapted from the Movable Type folks, which is why it looks similar to blogs that use a CMS. I'd like to migrate over to a CMS at some point in the future; unfortunately, I need to get the elisp implementation of XML-RPC working first, and I don't have the time I need to play with it these days.
Your site looks awful! What's going on?
It's probably because you're running a browser that doesn't understand cascading style sheets and doesn't comply with the HTML 4.01 standards -- basically, a version 4 browser from either Netscape or Microsoft. It pains me to say this because I think it's important that people use the tools they're comfortable with, but: You really should think about upgrading to a better browser. Seriously. Your Web experience will be much nicer, this site will look better, and so will countless others.
This is important because backwards bug-for-bug compatibility is a pain. Try doing this kind of layout with nested HTML tables. See how much fun you have. Me, I've debugged my last one, thanks. As more and more Web sites make use of the current standards (and they are standards), older, buggy browsers will fail to accept more and more documents.
Isn't this sort of antithetical for me, the champion of older, plainer software? Well, sort of. Asking people to upgrade their browsers smacks of the old days of "this page looks best on Netscape" or whatever. The whole point of the Web was that you could use any platform to view any document. It still is. And, indeed, you can use any platform to view this document -- but if your platform is broken, well..
Design hacks for broken software suck. So get better software.
Some suggestions:
IE 6 for Windows
IE 5.1 for Macintosh
Netscape 6.2
Opera 6
My personal choices:
Mozilla -- probably the most standards-compliant browser out there right now; get it, be happy
K-Meleon -- a stripped-down browser for Windows based on the Mozilla engine (some bugs, but blazingly fast)
Galeon -- kind of like K-Meleon for GNOME
More:
webstandards.org's browser upgrade project
ALA: To Hell With Bad Browsers
Note: While installing a new computer with IE6 over the holidays, I discovered that Internet Explorer has problems if you don't have Java installed. I don't know why this happens. Put it this way -- it was broken, I installed Sun's Java runtime libraries, and then it wasn't broken anymore. (Older versions of Netscape had issues like this, where they wouldn't parse CSS without Java and JavaScript being enabled; presumably this is fixed today, but I don't care enough to go look.) Mozilla does not seem to have this problem.
So if the site looks bad and you can't see below the link that lead you here on the front page, and you're running IE6 without Java, try installing the runtime libraries and see if it helps.
Thus ends the extent of my advice on fixing this problem.
Do these pages validate?
Kind of. Because of the way I've got things set up right now, I have to do some annoying hackery to make everything work. (Do a "view source" on the front page -- see the redundant HEAD elements? The superfluous DOCTYPE declaration?) These hacks break the formal HTML 4.01 Transitional specifications. So the short answer is no, they don't validate. However. Does it make an operational difference? Not really. I've tested these pages fairly extensively and with the exception of the version 4 browsers, I haven't found one that complains about the HTML; although they don't formally validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, they're about as close as I can get them right now, and they won't break browsers that implement the standards correctly. It won't make a difference as far as you or anyone else aside from the W3C is concerned. (Sometimes the pursuit of validation gets ridiculous, and documents fail for stupid reasons. For instance, the validator will choke if it runs into a link that contains an ampersand.)
Just to prove that I can write valid HTML 4.01 documents, this particular page will validate quite happily. The stylesheet used by the Weblog will validate as well. Which is why you see those icons in the sidebar.

"Under a Blackened Sky: A Web Log" is published on an irregular -- which is to say bizarre -- schedule (mostly daily, but sometimes not, so essentially whenever I feel like it) by Blackened Sky Media, a company that doesn't really exist but sounds kind of cool.
All content exclusive of links and quotations is copyright 2001-2003 by Blackened Sky Media. Violators will be.. um.. asked nicely to stop violating, and then asked nicely again. Have a nice day!