Monthly Archives: July 2005

Facial Feminization Surgery

aka Facial Feminizing Surgery. I was watching a Discovery Health Channel documentary last night on sex changes and found out for the first time that hormone therapy, breast augmentation, etc. can be supplemented by actual surgery to the transsexual person’s skull (at least in male to female cases). Get rid of the brow ridge, take down the jaw, mess with the hairline… I’m amazed at how much of a difference this all makes. I just thought it was brilliant and realized that if I were to ever be a surgeon, like my Aunt Laurel, this is what I would enjoy doing. Here are a couple of sites about post-surgery ladies:
Site One and the awesome Site Two.

this just in: rights still inalienable

The House of Representatives, after deliberation and careful consideration, has decided that “civil liberties just aren’t that important anymore”:http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-07-21T165437Z_01_N21540320_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-USA-CONGRESS-PATRIOT-DC.XML . Sigh.

consider XML namespaces deprecated

The adage goes: “XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.” “Parand Darugar”:http://www.parand.com/say/index.php/2005/07/21/abolish-xml-namespaces/ has challenged that idea (or validated the sarcasm) with a compelling case for “abolishing XML namespaces”:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-abolns.html.

I never did warm to namespaces, personally. The idea looks good on paper: provide infinitely-extensible support for any number of document formats within a single document. In practice, supporting namespaces always seemed to require ten times more work than the problems they purport to solve, so I’ve avoided inflicting them on others. Now I’ll treat that as a rule, and encourage others to do so as well.

Happy Armstrong Day

36 years ago today, men landed on the Moon. That makes this Armstrong Day 36 on the “Tranquility Calendar”:http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html. Google has put together a “fitting tribute”:http://moon.google.com/ based on Google Maps.

They went “in peace, for all mankind”:http://www.alanbeangallery.com/WeCameInPeace.html. Let’s hope we go back soon.