I have just heard that Andrea and Ryan, two of the most wonderful people on the planet, now have a son, born at 1am this morning, 8 pounds, 20 inches long, happy and healthy.
Congratulations Dre and Ryan!
So tell me: What makes you happy ?
Category: Life
People (I Tell Ya!)
There is this guy who has stopped into the kung fu class a couple of times to observe. The first time, he just stood by the door and every time someone from the class wandered near, he would ask questions like “How does this style compare to Tiger Crane?” or “Have you ever taken karate?” This time he stood by the door and asked questions like “Have you ever heard of Leopard Style?” and “That roll you did looked like an aikido roll.” He also wanted to know if he would lose 130 pounds if he joined the class.
My answers to these questions were, in order, the following: Don’t know. Yes. No. Ah. Maybe.
Regarding the aikido question, for which he seemed genuinely interested in an answer, I told him something I picked up from the Bruce Lee interview in the Gold edition of Enter the Dragon:
As long as people have two arms and two legs, there will only be a certain number of movements which are applicable to the martial arts. Of course there will be similarities. there are very few useful ways to do a dive roll. All of the less-than-useful ways have been weeded out by attrition. There are not certain styles which are better than other styles. Whether or not it works depends on the instructor and the student. Why did you come to this class if you want to know about Tiger, Leopard, Hamster, etc.?
So I don’t know if the answers he received yesterday helped him, but he sat quietly and watched most of the class. Time will tell.
Today, down at the river, Scott and I watched a guy with a three-pronged grappling hook (like ninjas use to climb walls) dredge a section of the river just below the dam. Naturally, this caused some speculation:
“Is he hunting for a body?” “Do you think he lost his fishing pole?” “Do you think he meant to get his grapple caught under the rocks over in that deep part?” “Maybe he’s trying to snag a fish…”
The reality was much more prosaic: He was clearing the area of old cast-off fish lines and boat ropes.
Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Should Be Covered in Honey and Staked Out Over an Anthill is the following:
Say you are building a fully CSS-bases website. No tables anywhere. Say the navigation requires that you have elements (anchor tags) FLOATed right. No problem so far. Now you put images inside those anchors for to create a nifty rollover effect. Looks good everywhere. Works perfectly everywhere.
??? Waitaminnit….
IE5.0 on the PC. Having an image inside a FLOATed anchor causes the image to block the mouseover event on the anchor. In other words, when the anchor is moused over, the image swaps just like it should, but the anchor is no longer an anchor. The CSS border picks up the presence of the mouse. The border (1 pixel) can be clicked on, but the area covered by the image cannot. And using document.getElementById(“nav”). getElementsByTagName(“a”)[0]. onmouseover = function() {} doesn’t work because… because… because IE5 is stupid and outdated and people who refuse to upgrade DESERVE to see broken things.
For the record, I am calling this one the “Floated Anchor/Image Mouseover Bug”.
Addendum, With Puppy
Mike , whose mojo Knows No Bounds, had this information about the tire swing:
The tire swing is a Mark di Suvero creation from the late 70s. He’s a well-known and important artist in the American modern/contemporary art scene, and has recently contributed a second major work to the Grand Rapids community at the Frederik Meijer Gardens. Mark works out of NYC in a very cool studio near Long Island City in Queens, but keeps a home in California as well.
“Motu,” the title of the installation that you played upon, is of Latin origin. It’s derived from the city’s motto “Motu Viget”, which roughly translates to “Strength Through Activity.”
Yesterday Virginia took me to the home of one of the families for whom she is a nanny. While there she showed me a box-full of two-week old shih-tzu puppies, for which she acted as a sort of midwife, even saving one of the puppies from suffocating.
I looked up the shih-tzu in an old book I inherited, where it had the following information:
The shih-tzu – or “shitzoo”, in some parts of the Midwest (c.f. “kazoo”) – is a small dog, originally bred as a guard dog in China. Its agressive personality and fierce loyalty make it much harder to hate than most small dogs, and it has, in fact, been removed from the canonical List of Yappy Dogs (Smythe, 1886).
When attached via velcro to a broom-handle the shih-tzu makes an excellent dust-mop, and such is its personality that it views such behaviour as a sort of fun rough-house. They may also be used by hand to clean window sills and doorframes. Care must be taken when shaking the dust from the shih-tzu coat (Stewart, 1999), and we recommend that the dog actually be brushed instead.
Shih-tzu puppies – unlike the offspring of other small dogs – are born (Freud, 1886), rather than found secreted under rocks. From a quite young age they develop an instinctual hatred of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, and will often cry when in the presence of a computer on which it is deployed. This hatred manifests itself later in life when the adult shih-tzu, which is often employed in web design and development, will go out of its way to write Javascript which causes IE5 to crash.
The shih-tzu is impervious to all known vectors of physical harm, although employing this trait in military or commercial ventures has yet to succeed (as exemplified in the Carnivorous Bomb Shelter Disaster of March, 1959).
The adult shih-tzu is best sustained with a steady diet of socks and the ankle-bones of small children.
Who the hell writes this stuff?
In other news I just finished cooking up a huge pot of borscht, enough bright red soup to last me the week. In the process I burned my left thumb something fierce, and every few seconds I must stop typing in order to immerse it in icewater.
PHP Goodness
In my perpetual cycle of attention-whoring, I am working on adding reader-submitted comments to the individual post pages. There is a form there right now; it doesn’t go anywhere.
As I was warming up for class I watched the last hour of Aguirre, the Wrath of God , directed by Werner Herzog and starring the deeply spooky Klaus Kinski. There are a lot of strange men in cinema right now… John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, and the like, but none of them can hold a candle to Kinski for sheer screen presence.
I Got A Million of ‘Em
First, there is some great news! We’re-Here is apparently on it’s way back to the internet! The past five months have been long, cold and lonely.
Second, right now, at this very moment , I am listening to a truly groovy, hip cd: Filmstrip(Frame 1) , from Mush Records. This is the precursor to Ropeladder 12 , which I received as a Christmas present from the drunkard dynamic Mr Bock . Both are full of abstract – avant – underground hiphop. NerdyCool, smart, and totally great programming music.
Third, today for lunch Alison, Michele (coworkers) and I walked downtown and ate at Twochoppers Deli, home of the TwoChopper, which is quite possibly the best sandwich in the entire world. On the way back to work we stopped at the tire swing behind Calder Plaza, which is quite possibly the best tire swing in the entire world. It can comfortably seat eight people, it weighs around two hundred pounds empty, and it is a great place to bring a date. I am not sure what kind of tire it was in its previous life; probably some kind of tractor. A big tractor.
Today’s reason why IE5 Can Tie a Pork-Chop Around Its Neck and Play With a Doberman is the following: Placing block-style elements inside a FORM tag causes the Cascade part of Cascading Style Sheets to stop cascading. So instead of referencing a TD tag as “table.content td”, it must be referenced as “form table.content tr td”. This in and of itself is not such a huge thing, but the FORM tag, which doesn’t actually exist, much like a TR tag doesn’t really exist, shouldn’t have ANY effect on the cascade or styling or space on the webpage, or anything else. And it certainly shouldn’t BREAK anything!
Dear IE5: fuggoff!
( The Spoon Song by Nicodemus and Jay B is totally happenin’)
Peace and Quiet
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.
Shiny!
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.
Weather Related
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.
The Vultures Are Circling
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.
Laziness
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.