Where I’m @

20010331

In my haste to put up the CSS updates page link on Thursday, I neglected to mention that the link came from that source of all things good and wonderful, the webdesign-l mailing list.

Don't forget to spring forward tonight!

20010329

Ahhh. And a document was posted that explained some of the CSS changes in MSIE 6.0 (which sorta calls itself Mozilla).

20010327

Was informed via the invaluable webdesign-l mailing list of the bug report page at Microsoft. If you find any bugs in the proggie, please please tell them, otherwise it won't be the <sarcasm>perfection we expect from them</sarcasm>.

20010326

For some reason, I was been eagerly anticipating the IE 6 public Beta. Probably because despite my wariness of and frequent downright disgust with the Empire, I have to admit that IE 5.5 was a pretty good browser. Bloated, of course, but decent support for those things I wanted to be able to do — CSS and the like. Unfortunately, the IE6 Beta that I got (because I'm thinking that perhaps there is another version out there or something) doesn't even support a CSS2 syntax for greater specificity, used on this page. Haven't checked yet for things like alternate stylesheets. Urgh. In the plus column, however, it does seem to lay out pixels on the page like NS, which was a problem for me before. I do occasionally like to have down-to-the pixel layouts.

20010325

"Adolph Levis, Pickled Goods Producer Who Invented a Beef Snack, Dies at 89"  I tell ya, you can't make this stuff up. The man invents the Slim Jim in the 40s, sells his company in 1967 for $20mil. Not a turnaround like those boys from Netscape, but in 1967, $20mil was $20mil.

And in the TV section from this week's Times, the broadcast I wish I had cable for: "Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war in the Persian Gulf and now U.S. Secretary of State, shares stories and recipes with Martha Stewart . . ." Did I mention that you just can't make this stuff up?

Finally, come on. What was with the Britney Spears ad for Pepsi? (No, I absolutely refuse to put a link up to that.) Didn't Chrissy on Three's Company invent the suspenders subtly emphasising the mammalian protruberances mammary glands over 30 years ago? And didn't we decide it was, um, tasteless? Whoops, there goes my inner snob piping up again.

20010324

I've been this close to blogging the last, oh, FIVE days. Would I lie to you?
So much to recount. Where do I start?
Oh, how about the dream I had where I was the son of the current US President? Yeah, chilling. I was sitting there with monkey-face on the steps of some foyer-type room with red carpeting all around, and we were making speeches. Mine was supposed to be about something really important, but I couldn't remember my lines, which, considering who I was following, made me feel really stupid. The next thing I can remember about it was a priest setting down a communion cup and tray of wafers on the steps next to me, for unknown reasons. Then the commander-in-chimp was reading WIRED magazine. [Insert any of the obvious snide remarks here.]
Ooh, or how about the dream I had that consisted only of looking down on the crown of my head and noticing a really bad bald spot. That I was trying to hide with a combover. Now, I have no fear of being bald, but a complete horror of accidentally (no, I don't know how it would happen by accident) being a Combover Man. My dad's bald. His father's bald. My mother's father is mostly bald. I expect to be bald. 'Course, it would be nice to be able to grow a beard or mustache while I'm not bald, but you can't fight genetics.
Then again, there's the good Chinese restau we went to last night, somewhat by accident, not entirely in a pleasant mood, but where I had a really good soup that I didn't know I had ordered and some superb salt-baked (albeit "baked" meant "fried") pork chops and the SO had shrimp-stuffed fried tofu and the big table next to us had what looked to be some delicious snails and the table next to them had Marlboro Lights. I'm finding that it's pretty common in Chinatown restaurants to flout the city no-smoking ordinances; doesn't bother me so much — I did spend a semester in Paris — but the SO doesn't cotton to it, so it bothers me, too. Right, the name. Ping's. On East Broadway, not the Ping's on Mott, which I hear is less enjoyable.
And finally perhaps there's the three movies I've seen in a little over 24 hours. Bartleby, an adaptation of a short story by Herman Melville (who seems to be getting a lot of screentime these days), starring Crispin Glover as the title character; David Paymer as his boss; Maury Chaykin, Joe Piscopo (!), and Glenne Headly as his coworkers; and the fantastic Seymour Cassell as a local pol. Preceded by a forgettable short, The Upheaval, adapting a short story by Chekhov of the same name, starring Frances McDormand and featuring music by an acquaintance of mine, Rick Knudsen. The Day I Became a Woman by Marzieh Meshkini, written and produced by Mohsen Makhmalbaf; three partly intertwined stories, set on the Iranian island of Kish, about being a woman in modern Iran, pulled off well with equal parts humor and sadness. Mouchette by Bresson; that's all you need to know about a movie, that it's by Bresson, to run and find a copy if you haven't seen it yet.
And now it's bedtime so I can get up early and do some more work on this site's redesign.
A bientôt.

20010320

This gem from Anders Pearson via the webdesign-l mailing list, dealing with clients who want you to work with sloppy code but not on sloppy code:

another analogy: someone hires you to clean their carpet. you show
up at their apartment and find 2 tons of manure sitting in the
middle of the room. the client doesn't have any problem with the
manure but would like the unsightly kool-aid stains underneath
it gotten out. obviously you need to do something with the big pile
of crap before you can even get at the stains.

20010314

Only about a month and a half until the first home game of the WUSA's New York Power, featuring Gao Hong, Gro Espeseth, and Tiffeny Milbrett!

20010312

Not much going on today, what with so many people seeming to be at SXSW hobbing and nobbing.

I did finally clue in to Jason Kottke's silkscreen font, though, so the day wasn't a total loss.

20010308

From a cool tool, a cool word: shangle. I don't have Lexis/Nexis, so I can't find out too well whether I'm late to this party as usual or whether it really qualifies as a venerable neologism.

Sometimes my Netscape 4.74 just up and dies. I'm not so fond of NS4.x, though I do use it for checking certain things and making sure degradation works. But when it dies, it dies in the middle of loading a page. Last time it kerflutzed, I was left with this:

20010307

Intellectual property rules, American style. {thonks to Porter Glendinning on the webdesign-L mailing list}

20010306

Ever have an experience where someone does something that makes you vacillate between being mature and ripping the offending (and I mean offending) party's head off and throwing it in the East River?

In other news, the snow here is a real bust. We were supposed to get something like a foot and, while what we got ain't chicken feed (does that betray my descendance from farmers?), it's really fairly limited. Pesky little flurry-like activity (the word seemingly preferred by TV forecasters) all day. I was so excited last night that I woke up several times and had to go look out the window just to see. Nothing. Mother Nature fails me again.