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online glossaries
Saturday, September 16 2000
Early this morning a very black man was ranting and raving at the top of his lungs about some detail of the Spanish-American War in Cuba. The rant was delivered with a wonderfully rich alcohol, poverty, insanity and age-flavored roughness. It would have made for a perfect sample in a musical creation. I looked out the window just as a white man passing my house gesticulated towards the lunatic in exasperation. This caused the black man to run back to the source of his power, his partially-full shopping cart, which he then wheeled rapidly east down Rochester. It's a lot of work to push a cart around all day picking up cans. It just seems easier to have a real job, but I guess guys like this will never be hired by anyone.
All day long I devoted myself to final development and finishing touches on a mechanism allowing members of my experimental Vodkatea community to build their own glossaries. This was the second in my series of database "toys," generalized content management tools based on my experience with non-database-driven content applications, in this case the Big Fun Glossary.
This new glossary system benefits from the SQL string-parsing experience I gained building my random phrase toy. It actually parses the contents of the definitions, looking for terms surrounded by [brackets] and automatically hyperlinks them if the bracketed term has a corresponding definition. This allows users to easily build internally-hyperlinked glossaries on any subject they want to. If you'd like to play around with this system and start your own glossary, try it out. And if this thing ignites your fancy and I don't get deluged with requests (I doubt I will), I'm even willing to create custom front ends for the display of your glossary on your website. I'd love to have all sorts of glossaries in this system, allowing for such fun tricks as a search engine that can produce multiple definitions for the same word as it appears in multiple glossaries.
I'm still using a lame AOL 700 hours free connection to do my internet stuff from home, but today I got sick of working this way and decided to do my development from my desk at work instead. (One of the alternative ways I could have spent my evening involved going to a bar to watch a ball game with John and Fernando.)
Inspired by my work, I was at my desk until after dark. Since I don't even know where the office light switches are, the only illumination was my 17 inch multiscan monitor. A couple other people came in while I was there and apparently didn't notice my presence, because when they left, they turned on the burglar alarm. I didn't notice this until it was too late, so of course it went off. Neener neener! Protocol at this point demanded that I call Honeywell and tell them it was a false alarm, but of course the memo from HR spelling out this protocol had conveniently forgotten to provide Honeywell's number. So I turned off the alarm and got the hell out of there before the security detail could arrive. (I've been told that employees who set off the alarm are charged for the price of the security response, so I didn't want to be caught, even if the alarm wasn't my fault.) Once I was outside the final gate, I realized I'd dropped my keys nearly irretrievably on the other side. I had to use a long-handled broom to sweep them back to me.
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