Translink, you’re breaking my heart

I finally (finally!) got my Translink card. So excited! It now joins my BART EZ Rider card, my MBTA CharlieCard and my WMATA SmarTrip card. (Aside: TTC and (NY)MTA, get on this.) Inside the envelope are several letters and brochures. I head to the Translink web site to add funds to my card. Fail #1 …

HOWTO read and pronounce URLs

URLs usually appear in written form — online or on paper. Sometimes, URLs are spoken aloud. You’ll often hear URLs read out: during television and radio advertisements in voicemail messages on conference calls So what? Well, almost everyone gets it wrong. And you sound like an idiot when you do. I’ve seen directors of national …

HOWTO set up an SOCKS proxy via an SSH tunnel on Mac OS X

Recently, I came across some streaming video that was only available to Canadians. Being a Canadian in the US, I felt somewhat entitled. Yes: I wanted to watch a hockey game. I knew I could do this with an SSH tunnel. I just wasn’t sure how. There are lots of pages explaining how to set …

JavaScript: how to unescape HTML entities

I was searching the web for JavaScript HTML entity unescaping code. I found lots of really bad ideas. Sound familiar? Some were quite complicated. It looked like the scriptaculous guys had the right idea. However, all I could find was a cached page with no code. A quick peek inside prototype set me on the …

Local Obama website roundup

There are lots of San Francisco Bay Area-oriented Obama web sites. However, many of them have not been updated in quite a while: Silicon Valley for Obama aka Ca14forObama (June 22, 2008) Bay Area for Obama (and its clones, South Bay for Obama, etc.) (February 22, 2008) Obama SF (unknown) SF 4 Obama (unknown) Are …