Ecce Signum

Got a call from a friend a little while ago. While his power was out yesterday someone broke into his apartment and stole his VCR and his fiance’s laptop. Material loss was minimal but she had years of documents on the computer. After work I will donate my unused VCR. Unused since I broke down and bought a DVD player.

Todays justification for pouring chlorine in the Browser Gene Pool is the simple fact that IE5 is the oldest major browser still in widespread use, and that is justification enough to start treating it like an obnoxious little yappy-dog.

Remember the scene from Good Omens where we learn the reason behind Crowley’s extraordinary collection of houseplants? Every now and then he would go through them and find the one which maybe was’t quite as green or bushy as the others. He would then carry the plant around while making comments like “You see this one? He just isn’t trying. He isn’t a Team Player.” And he would leave with the plant.

A few hours later he would return with the empty flower pot and leave it in the middle of the room, thus ensuring the healthiest, most vibrant (and terrified) collection of houseplants in London.

Ah, if only browsers were as intelligent as plants.

Today Virginia and I wandered around the campus of Aquinas College taking pictures of ice-laden trees. Beautiful stuff, if you are not a property owner.

About half an hour into our excursion a breeze picked up and the trees began a crystalline crick-crack , punctuated by branches falling in bursts of ice. I didn’t say anything but being under trees in that condition made me a little nervous.

Still: A beautiful day to be outside, and effectively broke up the melancholy of setting the clock ahead an hour.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Can Take A Long Walk Off A Short Dock is the fact that Microsoft decided to use ActiveX to grant access to XML in its browsers, thereby effectively shutting Macintosh out of the running. The could have done something more universal (like Mozilla!), but instead chose the exclusionary/reactionary path. Actually, this applies to all versions of MS Internet Explorer, but Macintosh is only abused by IE up to version 5.x.

Die, internet explorer 5. Die, die, die. Go, and darken my monitor no more.

All of my plans for this evening were cancelled by a solid inch of ice coating every available outdoor surface. I still have power, but the streetlights went dark at around 10:00. The trees will be sweeping the sidewalks by morning.

So I did what any other red-blooded American would do when stuck inside on a bitter Friday evening in April: I looked at porn.

No. Scratch that. I did my taxes. There was a heart-stopping moment when I though I would owe something in the neighborhood of $2k, but a quick review of my math showed that I had used Cosine when I should have used Sine, and I will in fact be getting a little back.

So what to do with this minor windfall?

I could get a new digital camera – not that there is anything wrong with the current camera. I could bulk up my DVD collection, or my CD collection, of my bookshelves. I could get a good start on a liquor cabinet. Or the contents thereof, anyway. Maybe a good suit. I bought my current suit just after I graduated from college, eleven years ago. I haven’t worn it since 1995, and it was a little tight around the waist at the time. I could buy a new sword or two. Not very practical, buy quite high on the nifty scale. Furniture is out of the question, because I can’t fit much of anything through the doorway into my apartment. A bike might be fun, but I have no place to store it when I am not riding.

Option paralysis.

I added a little more content to Master Lee’s site, this in the kung fu and tai chi forms pages. A little here, a little there.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 can Eat Shit And Die is that it comes in such a wide variety of distinct flavors: IE5 on the PC, IE5 on the Mac, and IE5.5 on the PC. Three entirely different beasts, one major browser release. So not only is the rendering engine crap, but just try coding a workaround with it’s half-and-half support of the standards. Makes we want to break things.

And so to bed.

President Bush has caused the death of fewer than a hundred American soldiers in Oil War 2003, and already the corporations are squabbling like fat children over a bacon pie to determine who gets trading rights for Texas II. France, who up until oh, about two days ago, was Iraq’s biggest trading partner, says that all contracts with Saddam Hussein made before the war will still be valid after the war. The US and Britain think otherwise. I can say with dead certainty that were it France declaring war on a US trading partner, the US would be all “Back off, Frog” to France, no matter what the justification.

And who’s getting the biggest contracts? Dick Cheney’s corporation. Hmm.

I hope the SUVs will still run on oil which The Administration has diluted with the blood of American soldiers. That’s why we sent them over there.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Can Go Eat A Bag Of Hell is the following: IE5 does not recognise padding applied to the bottom of an image. That beautiful dashed (in non-stupid browsers, anyway) line which should be 20 pixels below the image is instead a solid line stuck to the bottom of the image like a flattened dog turd on a cowboy boot.

On a much lighter and more beautiful note, Potato Moon has a gig at Hair of the Frog brewery tomorrow night, starting at 7:30. I plan to take Virginia, if we feel up to being around other humans.

Weeellll This evening I got off my lazy, inconsiderate ass and added content to Master Lee’s Website . I realized part-way into the work that some of the pages needed sub-navigation. Fortunately the design – created by the inebriated inestimable Bock – left room for such a thing, almost as if he anticipated the need.

I got my geek on this weekend with a movie and a comic book. The movie was Donnie Darko , which was all about angst and time travel and demonic rabbits. Okay, I may have over-simplified it a little, but it was a suspense movie of a flavor not entirely unlike PI . I highly recommend it.

The comic book, or “graphic novel”, if you will, was the collected first six issues of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The reviewers at Amazon (follow the link) do a much better job of pimping this than I ever could; suffice it to say that I was hooked on page 2.

And last but not least, I am slowly putting together a page of useful design and development tools, which can be had for free at various places on the internet. It is linked in to the right, in the middle of the Library section.

I spent several hours today on a ladder drilling holes in a house, in anticipation of a day of blowing several bales of shredded paper into the walls for insulation. This was something I did for a friend in exchange for wood-fired pizza. I think I get the better end of the deal. How often does someone say “You want to come over and drill holes in my house”

Working in front of a computer for so many hours a week, I sometimes forget the simple pleasure of a day of hard manual labor. Far from being a wasted weekend day, today was relaxing and refreshing. I saw a couple of friends I haven’t seen in several months, and a couple of others whom I see every week, but seldom have the chance to talk to.

I have been sick most of this past week, which is fine, because the weather has been…not so great. I have made headway on my stack of books, including over a hundred pages of This Cold Heaven, by Gretel Ehrlich, which is a travel narrative about Greenland, by a poet who was once struck by lightning. It is a fine, fine read.