bucketFountain

For some reason I found myself reading the US national anthem (and singing it!). The lyrics are quite powerful, and revolve largely around the flag. The anthem is also something of a charter, something that people look to for direction on their national character (land of the free, home of the brave, etc).

The NZ anthem, that I guess most kiwis only know the first verse of, also contains some stirring lines and could also act as a point of reference for national character.

The little known third verse states – “Peace, not war, shall be our boast,” and “Let our cause be just and right, God defend New Zealand.”

Other gems include “Give us plenty, give us peace”; “Preaching love and truth to man”; and:
“May our mountains ever be
Freedom’s ramparts on the sea”.

Touching the Void
A documentary set amidst a mountaineering expedition that goes tits-up. I was intrigued by the ethical situation that confronted the climbers, and the strength of their survival instinct.

Almost Famous Boring. Interesting story, on the whole well acted and filmed. I’m surprised that it won an oscar for best original screenplay. Like a cup of weak tea, bland and forgetable.

Seven Samurai Wicked. This is a fantastic action film (I’ve seen it called ‘arthouse action’). It is a riveting story of a poor village that attempt to hire samurai to protect them from bandits. The problem is that they don’t have any money, so need samurai who will do it for nothing. Dramatic and exciting, it has been a major influence on the western genre.

I didn’t know about naming rules/illegal characters for div/spans – they can’t start with a number – it has to be letter. Apart from that they can include letters, numbers, -, _, : and fullstops.

Also, and this is pretty cool, the id attribute acts as an anchor – so there’s no need to specify an “a name=”, you can just reference the id (which of course is unique).

Form the horse’s mouth:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ( A-Za-z ) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ( 0-9 ), hyphens (“-“), underscores (“_”), colons (“:”), and periods (“.”).

What’s eating Google? Kottke has this to say:

Google isn’t worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft’s search efforts…although the media’s focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world’s fastest computer running the smartest operating system?

Is this the best blog entry ever ? No, but it’s interesting. By the way, this is the best blog entry ever . And that’s a fact.

Frankly, I’m disappointed.