Opera

I've never been to the opera. I like listening to it. Now that I live in Southern California again, close to opera buff Janis, we...are...going...to...The Opera™. (Having a Kirk-pause moment it seems. *clears throat* There, it's passed.)

Anywhoo, at some point later this year, actually February of the next, we will see Fidelio (Beethoven), Otello (Verdi), and Therese Raquin (Tobias Picker), at the San Diego Opera. Cool, huh?

Not all at once. Sheesh, don't look so worried.

Why, we'll be just like yogurt! Cultured and everything!

Thanks

T&M: Thanks for the birthday present!

Clinton, Britain, and Iraq

From the Scotsman, Oct 3 2002:

Bill Clinton gave his full and unequivocal backing to Tony Blair on Iraq yesterday, declaring that the Prime Minister was the only man who could unite the world against Saddam Hussein....

Mr Clinton appeared to give his reluctant backing to military action as a last resort, but stressed the UN had to be given the chance to secure the return of its weapons inspectors to Iraq first....

He also said he wanted to see "regime change" in Baghdad, but that this should come about in "non-military ways"....

Mr Clinton argued the first priority should be to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, something he claimed should have been completed before the focus was turned on Iraq....

Mr Clinton admitted the US did not do enough to support international organisations. In a blunt warning to Mr Bush, he said: "You can't have an integrated world and have your say all the time. America can't dominate and run the world in that direction."

Gosh. That just sounds so...so...so darn sensible. You go, Bill.

Zope is Zope

Today I installed Squishdot on a 2.5x implementation of Zope. This product took more time to download [and downloading took approximately .0001 seconds] than it did to get it up and running. [Bear in mind that Zope was a previous install and I knew it already worked.] Squishdot's a slashdot-similar weblog tool, hence the name.

I'm genuinely impressed. By contrast, I was looking at the install of WebGUI we have to toy with, here [I have lots to toy with, here], and being vaguely dissatisfied with the User Content Submission System, so I modified that code to produce something more weblog-gy about 2 weeks ago. I keep detailed docs on what I do, and a work-blog is a reasonable format, thus this had immediate use for me. It's all in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow. No need to summon me in a seance just to ask what the status of my last projects were.

Either interface and back-end is fine for someone like Sidra At Work(tm) -- a simple work log, no threading, no discussions, basically no bells, whistles, or ding-a-lings (patent pending), so it's not like the up-and-running time makes a big difference. It's my job.

But the ease of gearing up Squishdot is certainly a plus when we're looking at interfaces [the average poster and a blog/project's manager] for use outside the MIS department.