I should work on my titles.
Newsarama published a press release recently about Titan’s collections for The Spider and The Steel Claw, classic British “weird heroes” of the 60’s-70’s (I’ve mentioned the Spider before). This is supposed to come out in June, and seems tied-in somehow to Alan Moore and Co.’s revival of these characters in the upcoming DC series, Albion, also out in June.
Speaking of Alan Moore, I didn’t link to that massive Alan Moore interview yet, did I? So I do so now.
The Guardian has a special report on Robert Crumb, which I think is a fine excuse to post dirty pictures here.
Saved it here for reference purposes, and was a bit horrified when it just slipped out onto LJ and wriggled around in assorted friends pages. But now, in the proper context…
Did I say reference?
This is a geekburst of an entry, but this stuff builds up, and can hurt one’s bookmarks unless blogged regularly.
Yesterday I had a look at GreaseMonkey, a nifty FireFox extension which lets you set up javascript scripts that run automatically whenever pages from a certain site or sites are loaded. If that made your eyes glaze over, feel free to skip this entry. However, if you are still here, you probably want to look at this repository of GreaseMonkey scripts. Some of these are just little things to fix annoyances like a site with articles that are too narrow, or (to give an example of one of the two default scripts that come with the extension) transform plain text URLs into working links. The one I got excited about, geekishly enough, is the Javascript Textile one.
What this does is add a button next to any text area that will convert any Textile markup to HTML, using only Javascript. The reason I’m interested in this is that, back when I was using Movable Type, I had a bunch of entries that used their Textile formatting plug-in, and ever since moving to WordPress, that text has been messed up. The messed-up entries start in February 2003, with (fittingly enough) an entry titled Installed MT-Textile. My point is that now I can go back and fix them with a click.
Or so goes the plan.
Sort-of unrelated, I ran across JavaScript O Lait, an interesting Javascript library with a strong focus on AJAX (communcation with the server through Javascript, without requiring a page reload). It has modules for XML-RPC as well as JSON-RPC, which messages are expressed in JSON (the syntax used for Javascript data structures) instead of the much heavier (and parse-intensive) XML.
Geekish, I said.
This is pretty cool: EvilLyrics, a lyrics search tool; it picks up the name of whatever song is currently playing on your computer (it’s suppossedly for WinAmp, works with other media players – for instance, it works fine with foobar2000, the media player I’m using here), and searches for the Lyrics and shows them. It also checks if there’s a Karaoke version of the song, if you fancy singing them yourself…
[ link from Captain Internet. ]
Gosh. I see I only posted once in February. Possibly I was busy?
Well, I did get rid of 3 cats (Cecilia went to Miller; Sumsum went to the SPCA in Tel Aviv; Misty went to a couple that Aya found, bless her). And I moved apartment, to Tel Aviv. So yep, it was busy.
Also, work was hectic at the time, as I recall. Worked one day from noon until 3AM, which was odd fun.
The new apartment is smaller than the apartment in Hod HaSharon (2 rooms instead of 4), and cheaper (about 800 NIS less, or even more when you factor in municipal taxes and common maintainence (Vaad haBaeat)). It’s on Derech HaShalom 93, 2nd entrance; or Amishav 24, 3rd entrance. In both cases, it’s apartment no. 5, and even though the place is right on the border of Givatayim, it’s definately in Tel Aviv, as I discovered this morning when I got a parking ticket on Amishav.
Is this a good neighbourhood? Well, it’s got some basic shops and an ATM nearby, but so did the place in Hod HaSharon. Noise is part traffic or neighbours dragging their furniture about. The dust is different, whiter and more abundant. Otherwise, not too many things to indicate that I am in The Big City, really.
This Monday we found that someone put Fox catalogs on each doorstep in Aya’s building; Coming home on Tuesday I found that in my building, someone left me (and presumably everyone else) an orange plastic bag with anti-withdrawal pamphlets and parsley from Gush Katif.
Yep, it’s that kind of neighbourhood.