Now that's my kind of crazy

Gogol Bordello rocked so much more than I even expected. The music was fantastic for getting the crowd excited and bouncing up and down. There must be several people with sore arms today, after they thew the horns to the beat almost nonstop for nearly two hours. My legs were sore from jumping up and down, but one just can't stand still with that much excitement.

But more than that, they really put on a show. This wasn't just some guys standing on the stage noodling around while the paying audience looked on. This was a high-energy, sweat-flying-everywhere performance. There were two female dancers, Pamela and Elizabeth, who also played the washboards, tambourines, and either cymbals or drums. Pamela might have the best job in the world; at least it seemed that way at one point during the grand finale (for I can't think of a better term to describe their final musical outpouring, which I might have called a medley if that didn't sound too tame).

Anyhow, what I’m talking about is when she took her big drum, put it on the hands of the audience close to the stage, got up on top of the drum and knelt there while banging the drum in the midst of this musical frenzy. It was so awesome! And then the lead singer, Eugene Hutz did the same thing, but he stood up on the drum while belting “Undestructable!” into his microphone! Fantastic! Brilliant! I’m still excited about it!

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Bus mall paranoia

Standing at the bus stop last night, I heard a whole lot of shouting going on in the Subway behind me. The other three or four people at the bus stop and I simultaneously swiveled our heads toward the sandwich shop to see what was going on. A black woman was yelling at the soda machine at top volume. She was really pissed off. The young fellow behind the counter studiously scraped away sandwich fixings (real or imaginary) and made sure to avoid eye contact.

Shortly thereafter, she exited the store shouting. "YOU'VE GOT TO TEACH THAT KID TO SHUT UP!" she bellowed. Her ranting seemed to be somewhat without focus as she wandered down the bus mall, her voice echoing off of the now-empty buildings. A guy at my bus stop added to the cacophony by letting out the odd whoop here and there during her tirade.

About half a block down, she did find a focus. There was a man on the opposite side of the street who was probably looking at her to see what all the commotion was about. She stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, staring at him and yelling, "RACIST! RACIST! RACIST!"

Now, there's a part of me that really wanted to go help. I wanted to usher her calmly out of the street (fortunately devoid of traffic) and utter some soothing words. I wanted her to find some semblance of calm. But there's another part of my brain that was firmly convinced she would bite me if I tried to do anything of the sort. This is the side of my brain which tends to win these internal debates.

As Ransom likes to say, crazy always wins.

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Trials and tribulations or sheer stupidity?

One of the more annoying aspects of developing websites is the wonderful world of cross-browser compatibility. How do you make a web page look and behave the same in IE, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Opera, etc., while keeping in mind that sooner or later the graphic designer is going to do a pixel by pixel comparison with the original PhotoShop file you were handed? It's no easy task.

Mostly, this stuff isn't a huge part of my job anymore, and it's so much better than the early days that I don't even mind. Standards compliance has come a long, long way.

But every once in awhile, a browser does something so ridiculously stupid that I want to start throwing things. Take, for instance, the website I'm currently working on. I finally remembered the pesky thing about Internet Explorer putting padding around forms (why do they do this?) so I got the last of the display issues sorted out. But there are two pages with forms on them that just wouldn't submit when the enter key was pressed. Typical form behavior is such that hitting enter in the middle of an input field will submit the form.

Here's an example of an input field, in case you're not sure which one it is:

Now, both of the forms in question submit perfectly fine in Firefox, whether you click on the submit button or press enter in the text field. One form consists of one text field; the other has a text field and a dropdown list.

A quick Google search unearthed the answer. Are you ready? It turns out that if you only have one text field on a form, it doesn't submit when you hit the enter key in Internet Explorer. If, however, you add a hidden input field with any name, it will work as expected because suddenly IE thinks of this as two input fields on the form -- so even in the case where I had two total fields on the form, one of them was a dropdown, so it didn't count.

This is, by far, the dumbest, most asinine, stupid waste of time I've encountered in the last eight plus years of building websites. My hidden form field might just be named "youmotherfuckersatmicrosoftwastetoomuchofmytime."

Incidentally, I haven't checked into whether this is a .NET only thing, or if it affects pages in Internet Explorer. I'd test it out real quick-like right now, except that I'm using Ransom's new laptop, on which he's wisely installed Linux, so there's no IE for the testing.

Update: this only appears to be a problem in .NET. I suspect it has to do with the fact that .NET web pages rely on JavaScript to handle form postback -- perhaps there's some funky logic whereby it's looking for an array of input fields, and if there's only one, it doesn't constitute an array? I'm totally not spending more time on this to find out, but my off-the-cuff guess is that it's something along those lines.

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Some things

• The other day, as I was riding my bicycle home, I saw a rooster walking along the sidewalk. I started giggling because it really looked for all the world like the rooster was out for his evening constitutional.
• I just got to send an email that said, "Did you just call me a potato?"
• Last night, I ate trout for the first time. It was also the first time that a fish ever showed up in front of me with its head still attached. Luckily, if you sort of push it open so the skin lays flat on the plate, the eyes are looking down and are therefore not visible. The trout was delicious.

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Modes of speaking

At dinner last night, I was temporarily at the table alone, so I found myself listening to the conversation between the waitress and the two men at the table next to me. One of the fellows was upset because he'd had a hard day at work. The waitress told them of her other job and how she sometimes had a difficult time being friendly to people.

"It's hard!" said one of the men. I mean this entirely without offense, but there was something very gay about the way he said this.

I had already figured that the two men were gay because of their general mode of speaking, but the fact that homosexuality was apparent based on the pronunciation of these two syllables struck me as odd and caused me to wonder: is there a gay accent?

This brought to mind an amusing incident in Hungary, back in 1997. On a train to Budapest, a guy approached us trying to book reservations for one of the hostels he worked for. Though Hungarian born (Magyar being his native language, which isn't relevant here; I just like that the language is called Magyar), he spoke English perfectly. He sounded exactly like like a gay American, which caused me to wonder when he mentioned his girlfriend. All was cleared up, however, when we asked where he'd learned to speak such good English. "I've been studying with an American theater group in Germany," he said. I stifled a giggle.

So last night, I sat at the table wondering about whether it can be said that there's a gay accent. It's not as if there's a gay dialect, since the words used are the same. But is accent really the right word? If so, that would mean that lots of sub-cultures have accents: stoners, surfers, soriority girls, etc. So where is the line drawn? What makes an accent an accent and anything else just a way of talking? Is there any difference?

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Gogol Bordello

Ransom has me totally hooked on Gogol Bordello. They describe their sound as "Gypsy Punk." It's rad.

I think Classic Rock magazine sums it up well: Gogol Bordello are a band that had to happen eventually. But history will record that it was Eugene Hutz, a larger-than-life, New York-based Ukrainian emigré with an extravagant moustache who got there first..."

They're coming to Portland at the end of March -- I can't wait!

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Suddenly, there's a theme to the day...

In comments on The Aural Times today: "You put the disco in international discourse."

On Pulpshopgirl: "You put the oi! in embroidery."

My dear readers, you put the Ar(r)! in nerd army, even whilst I put the blah in blog. (Say it out loud, it makes more sense).

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