Displaying post 1 to 50 of 104
Blind Muslims with guide dogs.
Dogs are usually considered unclean, but one U.K. imam carried out research and determined that a dog in service to, or trained by, a person could be allowed in a mosque.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 6:46 AM on October 10, 2008
(42 comments)
Too much steampunk?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark
at 1:41 PM on July 23, 2008
(127 comments)
Captioning Sucks!
“Captioning
Sucks! Because it
does.” A garish new Web site about lousy (closed-)captioning quality – from me, the man behind the
Open & Closed Project, a research project that’s taking forever to get off the ground.
posted to Projects by joeclark
at 9:22 PM on March 31, 2008
Hezbollah-Tofu
Renegades systematically vegetarianize recipes from antiveganist chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote (in
Kitchen Confidential): “Vegetarians, and their Hezobollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 11:57 AM on March 25, 2008
(181 comments)
An arborist in a helicopter
Arborist Todd Irvine gets a ride in a news chopper, photographing and annotating Toronto’s tree canopy – still largely in place and vibrantly colourful due to winter’s late arrival.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 1:36 PM on November 16, 2007
(23 comments)
Bike tights with Gore-Tex (or equivalent) on top, Lycra on bottom?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 7:41 PM on November 8, 2007
(4 comments)
“Blue Monday” Owners’ Club
Photos of actual original “Blue Monday” sleeves (Peter Saville die-cut design) as brandished by their owners. Also
You Are There! photos of searching for “Blue Monday” in the wild and finding it.
(Creaky old frame-based site)
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 2:51 PM on October 8, 2007
(37 comments)
I’m MetaFilter user 250, which makes me officially oldschool, but: I very rarely post on any branch; all my old posts are terrible (I checked); my recent posts on the blue are extremely conservative to avoid being terrible like the old ones (many are obituaries); and I pretty much live for AskMe.
I write a ton of things on my own sites, but I never really manage to write very much of use on the various Metas. This at least is my feeling.
I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by asking “Is it really OK just to
read MetaFilter?” Of course it is. I am just wondering how many other early members really, truth be told, never got the hang of front-page posts and other high-profile “content.”
I’m saying this after reading through the archived contributions from some new people (with userIDs 40 times higher than mine), who are way the hell better at it. “We can’t all good at everything”? Or what? What is the right way to react to this?
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark
at 9:39 PM on August 4, 2007
(128 comments)
Second Life attractive to media people, hence the preponderance of media coverage compared to World of Warcraft
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 1:27 PM on July 10, 2007
(14 comments)
WCAG Samurai: Fixing Web accessibility
A secret cadre of friends and I have produced a set of corrections for the main international Web-accessibility guidelines, WCAG 1.0. These WCAG Samurai Errata were released last week and will be updated to a final version in about two more weeks.
posted to Projects by joeclark
at 3:16 PM on June 13, 2007
“Why the hell the train?” and other questions answered
“The real terror is the Three+ Sheltered Old Men, because they don’t sleep and they don’t have normal conversations. They’re completely sporadic: An observation is made, perhaps it is agreed on, then anywhere from two to 45 minutes pass before the next one. That’s the random non-rhythm your brain will feed on... and you’re never going to relax or get any sleep.” As for “train love”? “Ask yourself, do you really want this? Your potential train buddy is travelling
by train. What the hell is wrong with this person? After two days on the train... [y]ou’re not at your Personal Best™”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 9:52 AM on May 13, 2007
(20 comments)
Dead hard drive in PowerBook; multiple backups; colour lasers
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 1:06 PM on April 23, 2007
(15 comments)
Anyone actually heard “Music for Airports” in an airport?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 1:10 PM on March 23, 2007
(16 comments)
Wikipedia/Essjay/‘New Yorker’ updates
The
New Yorker denies ever offering to pay the expenses of “Essjay” (“Ryan Jordan”), the Wikipedia administrator with the fraudulent credentials. The
Wikipedia Weekly podcast, Episode 14 (
not transcribed yet), at about 12:30, reports:
I actually did correspond with the deputy editor of the New Yorker... and I asked them specifically: Did Miss Schiff ever ask Essjay for his real full name during the course of reporting? [...] They came out with this, which I don’t think has been published anywhere yet...: “I think that between our Editors’ Note and the Times story, it’s clear what happened. The only thing that hasn’t come up before is the question of expenses. So, for the record, Stacy Schiff never offered to reimburse Essjay for his telephone expenses or anything else. [And] Essjay did tell her that if she wanted to cover them, she could send a cheque to the Wikipedia Foundation, which she did not.”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 11:53 AM on March 17, 2007
(43 comments)
Another stab at micropatronage
I’ve started a
micropatronage drive that, I hope, combines features of several of the previous drives. In this case, the proposition is to subsidize me while I fundraise for an accessibility research project. Supporters also have numerous zero-cost options, including the use of clever
ad banners.
posted to Projects by joeclark
at 10:29 PM on November 8, 2006
Why is it so hard to find a podcast or MP3 of Ben Hammersley’s presentation “How to Be a Renaissance Person” at Reboot8 (2006)?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 2:57 PM on September 30, 2006
(3 comments)
CBC Blogging Manifesto
Tired of waiting for CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, to come up with a blogging policy, CBC bloggers – including the infamous pseudonymous blogger
A. Ouimet – charge ahead and write one themselves.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 10:18 PM on August 13, 2006
(12 comments)
Slightly better CSS: Could the CSS for useful elements like blockquote be improved so that quoted text from previous posts does not have to be faked with
? A now-common style of changed font, larger left indent, and line down the left side might work.
posted to MetaTalk by joeclark
at 12:02 PM on April 21, 2006
(64 comments)
The Free City of Leslieville
Finally, an actual "hobby" site, something unrelated to work. It's about my neighbourhood of Leslieville in the South Riverdale district of Toronto. I'll have some articles up, but the big thing I'm proud of here is my friend's and my critiques of social-housing architecture. People complain about the presence of the buildings, but they, and their residents, aren't going away; why not talk about the buildings themselves?
posted to Projects by joeclark
at 10:11 PM on January 9, 2006
AnnMagnusonFilter: Sometime in the ’90s I heard Ann Magnuson on the radio delivering a kind of doggerel using J.G. Ballard–style bland newspaper-reporter phrasing...
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 6:45 AM on December 5, 2005
(6 comments)
Sofa cushions with seriously broken and slightly protruding vinyl or naugahyde upholstery. Fixable, or at least coverable?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 11:09 AM on September 28, 2005
(2 comments)
What's the name of the blog (short for "Web log," a kind of online journal or diary) that covers hypertext-like design features in print media like newspapers?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 2:53 PM on September 19, 2005
(12 comments)
Source for library-style enamelled-metal bookshelves (or equivalent)?
posted to Ask Metafilter by joeclark
at 7:46 AM on July 10, 2005
(6 comments)
Not porn, just gay
PayPal suddenly delists queer sites: “
[H]e raised objections to PalPal’s action, saying his organization’s aim is to educate the public on ways to avoid AIDS. He said PayPal never responded to his concerns.... PayPal sent
[another site owner] a reply saying the company would consider reinstating his account if he submits a statement promising to ‘remove the book covers wherein individuals are touching each other’ ”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 11:09 AM on October 23, 2004
(25 comments)
How to quit being fake
John Kusch: “When I was 13, I decided to become a fake poet.... When I was 27, I decided to become a fake writer. When I was 32, I decided to become a fake personal assistant.... I was tired of dressing Fake Business Casual, of lowering my fake gaze in the boardroom while dropping off copies during a fake meeting, of waiting until the fake members had their pick before being allowed to have a leftover cookie.... So I got a job working nights in a jail, alphabetizing things that nobody else can be bothered to alphabetize, where I will be left alone, where I can be a real nobody in a real nowhere, under the radar screen that I am beginning to suspect is fake, too”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 8:02 PM on May 22, 2003
(64 comments)
Penisblog
Ben Brown did it ages ago, staking out the avant-garde as usual. Now the meme gets its own site. Can you match the member to the bloggeur?
(Extra credit for spinning the project into a discursion on openness and self-revelation online.)
Not, as they say, work-safe.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 8:17 AM on April 16, 2003
(64 comments)
Du-blog-ious Achievement Awards
Marc Weisblott cannot even keep from slagging
himself: “Maintained a personal blog without permalinks, archives, or even dates on the posts, thus preventing the sort of critical scrutiny he performs on others. Barely earned more money at age thirty-one than he did at twenty-one. And – oh, yes – enough of a coward to not be able to compile a Worst Blogs of 2002 list without attaching himself to the end of the list. Or is that just unadulterated self-loathing?”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 5:40 PM on December 26, 2002
(8 comments)
Columnist too hung over to cover case of alcoholic
Rosie Di Manno,
Toronto Star: “I drank to grotesque excess the other night, waking up the morning after with a double-whammy red-wine-and-nicotine hangover.... The upshot is that I missed a full day of the trial I've been covering the past couple of weeks – a $750,000 civil suit brought by [Thomas] Kerr against nine police officers.... That night... was one of the few, very few, evenings over the past quarter-century when Kerr wasn't sloshed.” Journalist, heal thyself.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 11:18 AM on December 16, 2002
(8 comments)
Web/TV, apparently
The CBC gives the Web/TV interface another go with
Zed. Instead of collateral materials from a TV show posted on the Web (a begrudging old-media conceit), you post on the Web and it’s all voted onto a TV show. Details skimpy at present, but quite possibly viable.
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 1:50 PM on March 12, 2002
Report from Ground Zero
Brenda Berkman, highest-ranking female FDNY firefighter (25 women, 11,475 men): “[O]ne good thing that has come out of it is that I didn’t have to die to find out how many people care about me. It has really been overwhelming, the love and concern that has been directed to me from women and men from all over the country.”
No female firefighters died in the bombing: “We have fathers and sons on that list, brothers on that list.... But no women firefighters, which was an absolute miracle because a huge percentage of us are in the companies that were hit the hardest.”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 7:38 AM on March 11, 2002
(2 comments)
The meaning of Stuart Adamson
Glenn McDonald: “
Supernatural is death music to me now, in a year when the last thing I need is more contemplation of death. The gift the end of a record gives us, and so too the end of a career or a life, is the opportunity to go back to the beginning again... All my grandparents are dead. The leader of my favorite band is dead. Two of my favorite writers are dead, and one of the others hasn't published a book since 1963. We too will vanish, whether in flames or our sleep or capitulation.... Mean what you are. Do nothing that can be undone, and live or die with the consequences. Live in such a way that if you tell people to stay alive, and then die nevertheless, they will know that what you and they believed together was stronger and truer than anything that merely happened”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 10:49 AM on December 23, 2001
(5 comments)
Tilda Swinton: Action Heroine
Who’s next among alabaster-complected redhead action heroines – Julianne Moore? “In the end, what ensures our fixation on the screen is Tilda, Tilda, Tilda. Has she been pumping iron or what? Previously known for her glacial composure, here she’s virtually an action hero”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 2:47 PM on December 16, 2001
(14 comments)
Captioning Stories
Real-time captioners worked nonstop during and after the bombing. “What was so challenging about captioning live television coverage of the September 11 terrorist attack was that the emotional impact of the enormity of the horror took its toll on me personally. My sister is a flight attendant for American Airlines, one of my sons is a pilot for United Airlines, and my other son is a firefighter paramedic.... [C]aptioning the coverage of the anguish experienced by the families of the pilots, flight attendants, firefighters... was the first time in my 28-year career that I was not able to distance myself emotionally. After 16 years of work in the Los Angeles Superior Court reporting horrific criminal cases, including death-penalty cases, I thought I had the ability to steel my emotions and do my job. But nothing in my past prepared me for this”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 12:28 PM on December 3, 2001
(2 comments)
In death, J.D. O'Neal leaves few with fond memories
“Jerry Dow O’Neal II owned
The Current News, a small gay magazine. [...] By last month, when J.D. O’Neal committed suicide to avoid prosecution and shame, hardly anyone in Kansas City considered him a good friend. The 37-year-old white-collar crook and gay-rights opportunist had created enemies throughout the community. [...] ‘It was important for [J.D.] to appear successful.’ [...] ‘I’ll believe he’s dead when I see the body’ ”
posted to MetaFilter by joeclark
at 6:18 PM on November 24, 2001
(3 comments)
