Damn you, Gary Wright!

So today is devoted to Dreamweaver and all its delightfully simple offerings. We're building a site for Marvin's Gardens, a fictional plant store with a heavy preference for irises. The interface is simple and straightforward, and despite the instructor's inability to answer any questions that aren't answered on the sheet in front of him, things are going relatively smoothly.

Except for the constant loop of super '70s hit "Dreamweaver" in my head. That's getting kinda old.

Yesterday I got a certificate saying I'm html certified. I hope that certification programs for things that matter are more stringent than what we went through. Say I'd been training for CPR certification: I would have just learned how to breathe through my mouth and somehow been awarded a certificate saying I was equipped to perform CPR.

[][][]

I usually give Christopher Hitchens a hard time because he's a drunken Bush apologist, but I couldn't agree more with him on the cartoon issue. Supposed champions of free speech in the West have been weak in their response to this cultural clash of free expression vs. rigid religiosity.

Also, this is really interesting. The entire staff of the New York Observer walked out when their publisher backed down from publishing the cartoons.

From a note from the editor in chief:

For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the
minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

...

This was not an easy decision. I've been reading the Press since 1988 and have dreamed of running it for nearly as long. The paper's editorial staff has worked impossibly hard hours and has come quite a ways in only a few months towards restoring the paper's tarnished editorial reputation and credibility. I'm proud of the work we've done, and wish we'd had time to finish the job. I wish the Press all the best, and hope that under new ownership and leadership it can again be an invaluable read for all good Gothamites.

I love a good newsroom drama. Does it make me a bad person for never having seen Citizen Kane all the way through?