a. fish

Merger Behemoths: Corporate Gremlins in our midst

SBC DSL connection down. Modem on, all lights blinking. Linksys router fine. Customer service phone tree "if you want customer service, press one," gah...tech support with "Jessica" from Bangalore helps me verify my DSL modem is on and that all lights are blinking. No problem is found but there is a fix: reset my SBC email password. I am back online. Elapsed time: two hours.

Pals

I may not have kids in time for them to know their grandparents, so I'm really grateful bro and sis-in-law stepped up to give dad this new chapter.

Never knew pop had such a flair for silliness.

Civilian shoes

Last night I passed the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit and quickly snapped some photos before getting on Civic Center bart.

HTML challenge

Under Craigslist "Gigs - Computer" secion, someone is offering $25 to the first bidder who can solve this:
make text wrap up to the side of a circular image.

My answer: create the ILLUSION of text wrapping a circular image by shrinking the image, then embedding the <img> tag after the first line of the person's bio.

before	after
x      xxxxx     xxxxxxx      xxxxx        x	xx     xxxx      xx
The quick   x brown fox xxxxx jumped o xxxxxxx er the la xxxxx zy dogs.    x	The quick brown  xx fox j xxxx mped o xx ver the lazy dogs

Come back sun!

Just returned from the grocery, where a wool legginged and knit cap clad cashier, shivering, counted out my change. Quite a contrast from the sidewalk soirees and convertible puppies of ELEVEN DAYS AGO!!!

The capitalist angle: women benefit newspapers

SFChron's newest columnist Pati Pablete says it all.

"Bottom-liners, take note," says Pati. This is not to make life more fair. Life isn't fair. More women should be in the newsroom because it would sell more newspapers.

"While the dearth of women in high positions isn't unique to newsrooms, the reasons to reverse the trend are." Newspapers are losing readers, and "women make 80 percent of all household purchasing decisions, and that their median income has increased 63 percent since 1970. (The median income of men has increased less than 1 percent)."

Read what else she discovered in the daylong "Women in the Newsroom" workshop. Or don't. It's your loss.

Out of hibernation into the Elbo Room

Nothing prompts your friend to drag you out to a club scene evening (on a Monday) like a breakup. Noooo! I am not ready for all that bar posturing and hip referential banter. I am boring damnit! I watch PBS and C-Span and listen to Garrison Keiler. Cannot discern Smashing Pumpkins from Rage Against whatever it is engraging them these days.

So the cover charge at the Elbo Room is on a sliding scale of all things, and we slide it down to $5. I sip my beer awkwardly clutching my jacket, purse and umbrella as I fail to decipher much less add to the conversation (who are these people? Karen seems to know them.) I affix my eyes on the stage, they have to rest somewhere, and at a live music venue there is a focal point no safer.

Turns out the friend forced you to a nice little evening of acoustic music (which for music nincompoops like moi is a jazz and folk blend.) If I didn't know better, it was a $50 evening at Yoshi's with younger performers: Jason Miller, vowel movement leader aka vocal percussionist (beatboxer) Kid Beyond, and a slimmer, younger, more animated and inventive Chapmanesque Berkeleyite in Shelley Doty and the X-tet. Just to poor salt in my wound Kid Beyond joins Doty at the end for some vocal percussion improv (what must a girl do to be miserable around here?)

In all my friend meant well, twas not an terrible evening...for a Monday at least. I survived. Oh, our cover goes to a good cause. And we can do it again the third Monday of next month. Just wish there was stuff to do in this town.

Profile of Paul Wolfowitz

Back in November, this article transformed my mental caricature Paul Wolfowitz into a complex, if mysterious human form. He may soon be president of the World Bank. The Believer is from New Yorker's November 1 2004 issue.

Juan Cole, Middle East History professor at the University of Michigan, suggests some consequences of a World Bank run by Wolfowitz (via John Robb.)

Friday Nephew Blogging

Gay marriage inspires straight man

LTE in today's Chronicle:

Editor  --  For 18 years my girlfriend and I lived in sin, happily so. But then last year, when I saw all those homosexuals lining up at City Hall to get hitched, I began to wonder if perhaps the institution of marriage had some value after all. If so many people were willing to fight for the right to be wed, if it really represented equal rights and freedom to so many, then perhaps I had given the subject short shrift.

In December, we tied the knot in the rotunda of City Hall, one example of the effect of same-sex marriage on a real heterosexual couple.

ERIC IPSEN

Berkeley