Things've been quiet here, I know. Been busy with holiday stuff, work stuff, and lots of just being lazy. This site has been nagging me, though, and once I'm over this hump of just-kicking-back and napping I should return to it.
In the meantime, happy new year!
Why I Hate Advocacy. Mark-Jason Dominus on Perl.com. Same sort of thing bothers me. I use Perl not because I think it's the only and best tool for everything (hell, this site is implemented using a lot of PHP), but because I think that it's a great tool and I love working with it. Often, though, other things will do the job better or will be easier to work with. I've long been puzzled by people who advocate for the use of Perl or any other language above all else in all situations.
I got sick of the text "afongen" header and threw an image on there. A PNG, just cuz. And since colors are displayed in bizarre, unpredictable ways in different browsers, I'll have to play with this thing soon to get the pages the way I want them. I'd rather that the image have a transparent background, but as I mentioned a while back, alpha-channel PNG support is kinda sparse in browsers these days, which means yet more browser sniffing. <sigh> All in good time. In the meantime, the color contrast is a little weird in Mozilla.
Flipping through the channels, we come across John McCain on CBS, wearing a truly hideous tie. Probably looks fine in person, but on TV the bold greens and reds just glowed something awful. It's as if no one told him that he would be on TV.
Kiara turns to me: "There they go, the liberal media, trying to make conservatives look like idiots."
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I tried to donate blood today and failed. :-(
It's never happened before. The nurse had trouble finding a vein, and when she did it was deep. That was new. After a while, she noticed that the blood bag wasn't filling like it should, so she moved the needle around in my arm, which made me really dizzy. That brought a horde of people around really fast, lemme tell ya. After much hullabaloo they realized that the blood was clotting (great platelets!), so they let me go after only maybe a third of the bag. What a disappointment. Nothing like that has ever happened before. I think that I was turned down a long time ago because my pulse was too high--my heart always races when people are checking my pulse, I can't explain it. But I've never been dizzy or sick. (Kiara, on the other hand, has some dramatic stories to tell...)
At this point I only give blood at the biannual blood drive at work, but I think that I'll start donating more often now, every 56 days or however often they let me.
On scottandrew.com, a demonstration of what the DOM and the new browsers can do.
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Shark Tank: And heaven knows these users need supporting.
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Ever since election night, Kiara and I have been watching election coverage on The Daily Show on Comedy Central. It's a far sight more entertaining than the major news network coverage, yet it still has real information. Truth be told, were it not for the Daily Show, I would pay little attention at all to the goings-on and not feel one bit guilty. Sure, it may be one of the most momentous political controversies of my time, but if so...well, that's a bit sad.
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Had dinner with some friends the other night at an Indian restaurant in Columbia Heights, Udupi Cafe. Yum. We'd never been there before, but plan on returning soon. Highly recommended.
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Still working too hard.
My family has long exchanged Christmas lists, suggestions for those who have no real clue what we want. Which considering how tight we all are, is pretty much all of us. 'Round about this time, my mom starts hounding each of us for our list, and I'm usually the last to cough mine up--although I think my dad's a strong holdout. Every year, my list gets less and less interesting. Basically it's down to books and sweaters. Hey, I'm a simple guy. Family: email me if you want my list.
Dang. I added this really cool thing to the template, but it made the whole page render funny in Netscape 4. I'll have to do some browser-sniffing, which I'll be doing when I add skins anyway (but on the server side). You'll just have to wait...
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Made a few changes to the site. Renamed the "news" link to "meerkat," since that's all it is right now. It'll probably be at least a couple weeks before I incorporate other feeds--for now I'm just focusing on tech and science news.
Also, I added a "print" link, which should produce a reasonably printer-friendly version of the site. If you're using Netscape 4 or older, the right margin may run off the page when printed. I'm unlikely to do anything about it anytime soon. It's the result of how Netscape handles DIVs. I suppose that I may at some point parse the HTML and strip the DIVs, but there are other priorities right now.
I've also updated my resume, for those who are curious. I am maintaining a second, truly printer-friendly version of my resume to accommodate the known problem with Netscape 4. No DIVs.
Yesterday I read Edd Dumbill's summary of Tim Berners-Lee's presentation on the Semantic Web at XML2000. made me wish that I could get at more than just the presentation slides. Today I found an MP3 of the presentation. More coverage of XML2000 is also available.
Not many updates lately. I'm still working on developing skins for this site so that, in part, it doesn't look so nasty in Netscape 4. Lack of alpha-channel PNG support in Netscape is really beginning to annoy me. Who'd've thunk it? Upgrade if you can, folks.
December already. Working with events in Netscape 6 should take your mind off that.
Unable to get Meerkat feed.
