Ecce Sigum

  • 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.

  • IE5 is the new Netscape 4

    Yeah, you heard me. Let’s all say it together this time:

    Internet Explorer 5 is the New Netscape 4!!!!!!!!!

    What would have been a three week build of a static site is instead a 5+ week build of a static site. Thousands of client dollars WASTED on an old and out-of-date browser based on antiquated technology. IE5. Perpetrator of the Padding Bug, the Egregious Box Model Hack, the Traveling Float/Margin Bug, among others.

    I got started in this business during that single day in 1999 when IE4 and Netscape 4 were on even footing. At 9am the next day IE started to pull ahead, and (AOL paleo-reactionaries aside) Netscape 4 is now fast on its way to an unmarked grave. So now is the time to pick the next weakest link and start in with the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

    IE5. New NS4. Particularly IE5 on the MAC, which though it has “Practically the best standards support of any mainstream browser” has specific bugs which make it impossible to write clean stylesheets. The fact that it INTERPRETS the code correctly does by no means suggest that it DISPLAYS the output correctly. It doesn’t.

    There is a well-known IE6/PC bug when applying floats, that horizontal margins tend to be doubled. Spec a 10px margin to the left of a left-floated DIV tag, and IE6 will give you 20px. Sucks, but easily compensated for with a little math and a single alternate line of code.

    Float a bunch of DIV tags in IE5/MAC and apply a 10px bottom margin to each. Force them to wrap around something like e.g. an image. Suddenly, the fourth DIV tag has doubled it’s bottom margin, turning an elegant grid into an unfinished tangram! And no global styleshete changes will alter the behavior!!!1!$@1!

    So the solution becomes, target that one DIV tag with an egregious ajacent style selector, like div.container+div+div+div+div. Those of you who speak CSS will understand this. Those who don’t … just take for granted that IT WORKS!!!!

    Reload the page and…beautiful. The DIV has been cowed.

    But…but…there is another DIV tag, one row down, one column over…

    20. Pixel. Bottom. Margin.

    Everything below it: U.G.L.Y. You Ain’t Got No Alibi.

    So we add another rule: div.container+div+div+div+div+div+div+div. Kick that sucker back in line. Works. But now…one down, one over. You guessed it. 20 pixels.

    You know what? Fuck it. Fuck you, IE5 on the PC for not displaying dashed borders, and Fuck You and Everyone Who Looks Like You, IE5 on the Mac, for the Traveling Float/Margin Bug.

    The days of putting stylesheet pearls before browser swine are OVER!

    So join me, O my brothers and sisters, and scream it unto the heavens:

    Down With IE5!!! Death to IE5. As Was Netscape 4, So Now Is IE5!!!!! IE5 is the New Netscape 4!!!!

    There. I feel better.

  • 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.

  • Outside

    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.

  • A Riff on Reality

    oil-stream-1

    More here . Some of them kind of look like the clouds on Jupiter, don’t you think?

  • Current Events

    On NPR this morning were sound-bite interviews with several man-on-the-street types regarding the current war in Iraq. The opinions fell distinctly into two categories: America Love It Or Leave It, and Down With the American Hegemony. The opinions of the country currently seem to run the entire spectrum between these two extremes.

    I propose some lateral thinking. I say that it is not “America” that is involved in the war; rather it is “The Administration”. It is often overlooked that the country and the people running it are very seldom one and the same. Think about it: America has been around as a country for just shy of 227 years. The Bush administration has been around for just over two. In three more years, America will still be here and Bush will be back to jerking off on the electric chair.

    I love my country a great deal; I can’t imagine that living anywhere else would be an improvement. This is why it pisses me off so much that my employee George W Bush is trying so hard to fuck it up for so many people. He is on track to rile up the rest of the world, get them pissed at us, then when he inevitably loses the next election, the next president will be caught in a shitstorm not of his own making.

    I did a little reading about Saddam. The guy is as bad as Stalin ever was, and the world will be better off without him. That is not why we are at war. I have stated it before and will continue to state it until Bush Who I Regret I Pay With My Taxes admits as much: this is exactly and only about oil rights. It is a power grab by The Administration which labors under the ludicrous assumption that the USA belongs to them. The members of the administration only have as much power as we give them, and I get the feeling we have given them too much. There are too many appointees and too few elected officials. The gap between man-on-the-street and bureaucrat has widened to an unacceptable degree.

    If any of you are involved in protests I say this: don’t turn your anger on the people who are involved in the actual fighting. They have a terribly hard job to do, and they need all the support they can get. They are Americans to be proud of. The despicable ones are the decision makers who brought this war about in the first place. The ones who tell other people to go out and die, without doing it themselves.

    And we should leave off the French-bashing. They showed a lot of balls by not toeing the line with the US. French-bashing may be fun and amusing for the inbred rednecks which make up so much of America, but it distracts us from issues like the blatant over-ruling of so much of the constitution and bill of rights in the name of “security” and “patriotism”.

    Peace out.

  • The Evening Redness In the West

    It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
    Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

    red_buddha_0

  • Changing States

    For the second day in a row Scott and I were in the right place at the right time. Today as we were walking along the river all of the ice between the 6th Street Bridge and the Leonard Street bridge (about a quarter-mile of river) let go and thundered over the dam.

    river_melt_3

    It was quite impressive. Some of the pieces were more than twenty feet across and about a foot thick, and must have weighed well over a ton.

    river_melt_4

    The entire ice pack took half an hour or so to clear the dam. The turbulence at the foot was filled with huge ice chunks and tree trunks and old shoes and pop bottles and a single soccer ball. The local ducks like to camp out at the top of the fish ladder and some of them were doing small-scale reinterpretations of the Titanic, getting bumped around and generally pushed toward the dam. A heart-stopping moment occurred when a duck hopped up on one of the ice floes just before it want over, but the duck took to the air in plenty of time to escape.

    Sooner or later one of them will be a little slow on the uptake and Grand Rapids will find itself a duck short.

  • Different Seasons

    The upper river has been frozen since mid-December. Sometimes the ice creeps back from the edge of the dam. Sometimes the ice hangs over the edge of the dam. Scott and I contemplated walking across the river, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Something about river ice seems inherently less trustworthy than, say, lake ice.

    This is what the river has looked like for most of the past three months:

    river_melt_0

    Yup. That was pretty much it, up until this past Friday. The warm weather has been melting the ice at an extraordinary rate. This is what the dam looked like yesterday at around 6:00 pm:

    river_melt_1

    About eight inches of water going over the dam. The ice was still touching the shore up by the 6th Street Bridge. Fishermen were braving the still frigid water and dodging the occasional chunks of ice.

    At about 1:00 pm today the weight of the backed-up ice pushed a couple of trees over the dam, which had been hung up at the top for a couple of years. Scott and I had been saying for a long time “Wouldn’t it be cool…” and we finally got to see it. As he said, we deserved to see it.

    At 5:30 pm today, this is what the dam looked like:

    river_melt_2

    When the ice and the trees gave way there was a mad scramble as the fishermen sought shelter in the rocks and shallows.

    By tomorrow morning the rest of the ice will probably have let go for the year and the river will be running high, and the fishermen will be pulling salmon out by the barrel-full.

    Happy birthday, Virginia.

    Happy St. Patrick’s day.