The University of Louisville in Kentucky recently surveyed a panel of presidential scholars and asked for their opinions on the worst presidential mistakes. To be sure, they also surveyed members of the general public to get their take, but I respected their decision to focus on experts in the field.

Now, before anyone gets dismayed (or excited, depending on your point of view), I’ll reveal that George Bush isn’t on the list (neither “W” nor “H.W.”). As it turns out, the most recent president on their is Clinton, and he’s down at number 10 (for the Lewinsky thing).

History wasn’t really my strong suit in school, but I got by. All the same, some of the “great mistakes” that they mentioned were only on my periphery of knowledge. Take this one, for example:

#7: Thomas Jefferson: Embargo Act of 1807

“His embargo almost destroyed the American economy, and in attempting to enforce it he was the only president ever to use the US army against the American people. The embargo's effect was that of a flea trying to stop a dog-fight by threatening suicide.”

— Forrest McDonald

[…]

Um, there was an embargo in 1807? Ooh-kay — so noted. (Then again, maybe that partly explains why scholars placed that event at #7, while the public placed it at #9.) In all, the list and the accompanying commentary made for an interesting read.

Via Metafilter Projects, I’ve discovered the Belgian Anti-Defamation Institute which helps to dispel some common misconceptions of Belgians. For instance:

• BELGIANS MAKE GOOD BEER

  Our research has shown that this stereotype is:

  +TRUE

  […]

• BELGIANS ARE GOOD DANCERS

  Our research has shown that this stereotype is:

  -FALSE

  […]

It’s a good thing I ran across this useful resource — I wouldn’t want to be misinformed about such things. Well, to be sure, satire ensues :).

I was pleased to discover the #CSS IRC channel the other day and I’ve just learned that there’s a #Prototype IRC channel for discussing the Prototype JavaScript framework and the script.aculo.us effects library. (Sweet!)

For what it’s worth, I was actually looking for a general DOM Scripting IRC channel at the time, but I was delighted to run across this once since Prototype & Script.aculo.us are the two libraries that I’m actually using at the moment. Anyhow, the channel is #prototype on irc.freenode.net; or, if you want to try connecting to a different server, Freenode has several others from which to choose.

SXSW is loads of fun, but, invariably, there’re some tough decisions on which panels to go to — this year is no different. I've managed to figure most of them out, but there’re some for which I’m still a bit torn. So, for these guys, I’m open to suggestions :).

Saturday, March 11th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting (Room 18ABC) …or…
• James Surowiecki Presentation: The Wisdom of Crowds (Ballroom E)

The DOM panel would normally be a shoo-in for me, but I remember hearing from a few people last year that the similarly-titled panel “How to Bluff Your Way Through CSS” wasn’t merely a snarky title, but literally a panel on how to pretend that you’re knowledgeable about CSS. If that’s the case with this DOM iteration, I’m not so sure I’d be as interested.

Monday, March 13th — 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

• Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common Ground, Part 2 (Ballroom E) …or…
• Microformats: Evolving The Web (Room 17AB)

Eric Meyer or Tantek Çelik? That’s a tough one. On one hand, I dig web standards; on the other hand, I always end up missing Çelik’s panels on microformats (due to conflicts like this one) and people tell me that they’re very good.

Monday, March 13th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability (Ballroom E) …or…
• WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel: Getting the Job Done Right (Room 16AB)

And, in this case, Morville’s presentation sounds really interesting, but I don’t really want to miss out on the accessibility bits either :-/.

Anil Dash’s kickball game is somewhat of an institution at this point — he organizes an informal kickball game on the Saturday of SXSW before panels. No one really takes the game very seriously, but it’s great fun.

Having said that, his Kick! website still has the info up for 2005 :-/. Has anyone heard whether the game is still on for this year?

It would be untrue to say that “ironically, I don’t understand what irony means”. Not that I understood the understood the nuances behind irony (until recently), but that the sentence itself wouldn’t be an example of irony. If all this is too meta too soon, I’ll back up a bit.

I’ve become aware that many Americans misunderstood the meaning of “irony”, equating it with a gap between what is expected and what actually happens, such as saying “ironically, I encountered a traffic jam when I was already late”. I hesitated in using the word until recently as I didn’t want to contribute to that blunder. A trip to Wikipedia has helped clear up the nature of irony, though.

At first, I skimmed through the article, but that only made me more confused. After reading it more carefully, though, a tidbit towards the beginning helped shed some light on it — “A common metaphor for using irony is to ‘have your tongue in cheek.’”. And, an example that they give is that saying “Lovely weather outside!” — when it's actually raining — would be irony.

So, is irony the same thing as sarcasm, then, you might ask? Well, as I understand it, sarcasm is a subset of irony, with the addition that sarcasm also includes an aspect of ridicule. Anyway, I’m obviously a master of irony now. (See? That’s irony in action ;). )

I came across a mention of a #CSS IRC channel among the comments on a post at TechCrunch. I did some Googling around to try to see if it was a just-started channel trying to get off the ground, but it looks to be a more established venue.

I’ve found that a second set of eyes can often be invaluable when debugging CSS (or code in general, I suppose) — sometimes all it takes is a second point of view to help shed some light on a problem. So, I think I may just give this channel a shot. The channel is #CSS on EFnet and I figure that I’ll load it up during the day and let it run in the background; even if I don’t run into an issue myself, maybe I’ll be able to help someone else out.

The channel’s official home page goes over a few rules that they follow — they're generally pretty reasonable, such as “You must validate” and “We need a URL to your problem”. In addition, though, they also discourage nick-changing (“nickname_lunch”, “nickname_brb”, and so on) which I may have to un-learn. I’ll give it a try and see how it goes :).

(Oh, and here’s a list of EFnet servers in case that’s helpful.)

If you’ve talked with me IRL recently, you may already know this, but I’ve started a new job on Wednesday :). The company is Bright Corner, which is out of Plano, and I’m doing front-end development for them (just as I was at my previous job). The company recently merged with Geniant and the combined company is taking the name of the latter (so, I actually work for Geniant).

They’re a fun group of people to work with and I’m enjoying it so far. To help give an idea of the company’s character, they have free sodas in the fridge and they’re down with wearing shorts & sandals in the summertime (whee!). It wasn’t the free sodas, though, that convinced me to switch companies. All the same, I left my last job on good terms and I’ll miss working with those guys.

DealNews is reporting on a combination sale / coupon code at Dell which brings the price of their 24" LCD down to $739 shipped:

Dell Home offers the Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24" Widescreen LCD to $799.20 with free shipping. Coupon code “?7VKHB0253GTSM” knocks the total price to $739.20, $60 off our mention earlier in the week and easily the lowest price we've seen. Features include a native resolution of 1920x1200, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 16ms response time, 16:10 aspect ratio, picture-in-picture, integrated 4-port USB 2.0 hub and flash card reader, and VGA, DVI, S-Video, RCA, and component video inputs. […]

Must resist… must resist…