Every once in a while the term “battle of the sexes” comes up in reference to a sporting event – often with the background of some competition that should be an equal battle for men and women because success is based on technique and strategy, not size or speed or strength or other such sexually-deferential qualifications. Golf comes to mind, as does curling – these are places where, at the highest level, the field really should be mostly level. And yet, for reasons that mainly remain unknown, the men usually – in fact, pretty much always – win these things.

Fine. But if you take virtually every physical attribute out of the equation, what then? For answers, why not spend a few evenings with Jennifer Shahade? She has an impeccable chess pedigree, has played around the world at the very highest levels, and – best of all – knows how to write. Chess Bitch has an excellent sense of rhythm, no punches pulled, and a lot of insight into competition, sexism, emotion, and the workings of what might the ultimate “old boys” network. Highest recommendation.

A random thought: I may be in the minority here, but I find it exceedingly odd that a publicly-funded institute of higher education should be named after a man made it his life’s work to eradicate free thought and open minds. Especially in the young. Via torture. Lots of torture.

The phrase “mixed signals” comes to mind.

The topic of Twitter has been done to death on these pages. In the interests of everyone’s sanity, I won’t bother linking back to previous rants on the subject. But regardless of your take on Twitter, you cant deny that one of the more interesting – and potentially useful – side effects of the whole thing is the rise of “short URL” services. Sure, everyone knows about TinyURL, but when you are really tight for characters even “tinyurl.com” takes up too much real estate in the message. If you really want to save space, then head on over to “is.gd” and get the shortest possible URL on the planet, period. it will be at least 60% smaller than the same link through TinyURL, and it works a treat. Perfect for SMS messages, browser email links, and – if you are so inclined – the dreaded Twitter.

NOTE: If you want super-duper ease of use then you should make a “bookmarklet”. Create a new bookmark, and paste this in as the address:

javascript:void(location.href=’http://is.gd/create.php?longurl=’+escape(location.href))

Then clicking on that bookmark will open a new page with an “Is.Gd” URL linking to whatever page you were just on. Stick it in your bookmarks bar or link a hotkey to it for extra-quick action. And don’t say I never did nothing for you.

There are staggering amounts of XML being tossed around these days. You cant take three steps through the average content provider without tripping over some sort of tagged file. It’s becoming something that more and more people are having to deal with, work with, manage, or just spew out on a regular basis.

Now one of the great things about XML is that you can manipulate your average file nine hundred ways from Sunday by applying various schemas – or as the cool kids are calling them these days, stylesheets – as needed. One of the not so great things is that if you are working in a Windows environment, there is no built-in way to do these manipulations from the command line – a method that is sort of necessary if you want to do any scripting or scheduling of the operation.

Luckily, Microsoft has long made available a perfect solution for this – a little package called MSXSL. It’s free, it’s easy to download, and it works wonderfully – they just never really bothered to tell anyone about it.

Once you download it, you just tell it where the file you want to process is, what Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) template you want to apply to it, and where you want the results to go. Since everything is command line parameters, you can trigger it with a script or a schedule, you can pipe variables into the command line, you can do just about anything. It makes life extremely pleasant if you need to do this sort of translation or transformation on a regular basis.

The full documentation and download links are right here. It’s free, it works, you can’t really ask for more. Enjoy.

I have been reading a fair bit of Jack McDevitt’s work lately – I don’t know how, but I totally let him fly under my radar until just last year. After reading Seeker, however, I was pretty much hooked and felt the need to catch up on his catalogue. I just polished off Omega (the fourth book in the Engines Of God / Priscilla Hutchins novels) and there was an offhand remark about the nature of a possible “god” that percolated way down into my brain and now keeps popping back up at random times – a throwaway thought that I find myself turning over in my mind like an especially delicious morsel, one that a lot of people who mindlessly yoke themselves to the millstone of organized religion need to sit down and think about.

I am paraphrasing here, but the idea was that any supreme being with the grace and subtlety to design a infinite universe based on permeations of a very elegant quantum mechanical ruleset wouldn’t really be interested in people kneeling down and chanting prayers by rote and waving burners of incense around.

In fact, any supposed creator – which anyone capable of any sort of critical thought knows is nothing more than a leftover mythos from an age of ill-educated barbarians – would be more likely to be totally insulted by the inanity of it all. Sort of a “I gave you a brain, why don’t you use it” kind of response.

Too bad the churching types don’t widen the definition of sin and make “being a moron” the most grievous one of all.