Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Not the best quality panorama in the world, but not terribly bad, considering it was taken while bobbing along on the waters of Lake Union in a Duck.
Rick picked me up Tuesday morning and took me down to Ride the Ducks as my birthday present. Quite fun, actually, for a silly little tourist thing to do. :)
iTunes: “Romeo” by Summer, Donna from the album Flashdance (1983, 3:16).
Looks like Washington might be facing another drought this summer.
Washington was going through a drought the summer I came down here, too. While I wasn’t really complaining (gee — more sun? shucks!), I also didn’t really realize the extent of it until I headed out with some friends to see the Barenaked Ladies at the Gorge in central Washington. On the way out we passed a reservoir that was no more than half full, the air was scented with the smell of smoke from the forest fires raging across the state, and at one point the sunset was nearly obscured by smoke from a fire just a few miles away.
After getting everything set up at the campsite, we packed ourselves into two cars, and headed down a quicker route back to the Gorge for the show. The way there was fascinating — currently, huge amounts of the state of Washington are on fire, and there were amazing clouds of smoke from the fires just 40 miles away or so in the sky. The smoke turned an otherwise clear night to a completely opaque murk. Just fascinating to see — and the smell of burning pine in the air was an added reminder that all this stuff wasn’t that far away.
Growing up in Anchorage and now living in Seattle, neither droughts nor forest fires are generally something I have to be overly worried about most of the time (earthquakes, windstorms, and the occasional volcanic ashfall are more likely to crop up on any given day in Anchorage). When they come along, though, they’re often not that far away, either.
iTunes: “Swamp Thing (Southern Comfort)” by Grid from the album Music for Dancing (1994, 7:14).
How would you feel if a major reason for your existence in the world, possibly the primary reason for your conception, was to act as a genetically guaranteed donor to cure your older sibling of a disease?
Kind of weird to think about.
Sure, this kind of thing has been done for years, just without the benefit of Gattaca-style genetic screening to ensure a compatibility match, but it was a far more private matter. With the news stories surrounding these more recent children, how might they feel if somewhere down the line, when they’re old enough to understand, what if they somehow find out that they are one of these kids?
“Well, we weren’t planning on having another child, but then your brother got sick….”
Better or worse than finding out you’re adopted?
What if there was any favoritism — real or perceived — in how the two children were treated before this aspect was discovered? If the older child (the recipient) was seen as the “favorite”, how much could that affect the younger child’s perception of themself? Or if the younger was perceived as the “favorite”?
That could easily be enough to screw you up for a long, long time.
Day three of the May Birthday Extravaganza — my long-time friend (since 4th grade) Royce hits 31 today.
Happy birthday, bub! :)
iTunes: “Profecia” by Calva Y Nada from the album German Mystic Sound Sampler Vol. IV (1993, 3:30).
Apparently I pissed someone off with my self-righteous indignant babbling about IE (and, implicitly, Windows) being inferior to just about everything else out there (including, but not limited to, the Mac).
Last night I installed the latest Security Update for Mac OS X, and something tweaked out right at the end, locking up the computer. When I did a force restart, the computer wouldn’t boot — it got to the grey startup screen with the Apple logo and spinning progress widget, and just sat there, happily spinning away, but never progressing beyond that.
I poked at it for a while last night, resetting the PRAM, figuring out how to get into Open Firmware and reset the NVRAM (whatever that is) that way, nothing helped. Bleah. Tried to reinstall Panther from the 10.3 discs, and realized that by participating in the Apple Up-To-Date program, I’d been sent upgrade discs rather than install discs, and they wouldn’t let me put a fresh 10.3 install over 10.3.3.
Bleah. Went to bed.
Got up this morning, dug out the System Restore disc that came with the G5, installed 10.2, upgraded to 10.3, and ran through Software Update a few times to bring me up to 10.3.3 plus all current updates (including the Security Update that freaked out last night). Everything’s back up and running rock solid again, but that was a good three hours (one last night, two this morning) that I’d much rather have spent in more productive ways.
Ah, well, at least it’s done. On the bright side, while I won’t claim that OS X is completely trouble-free (and I don’t think I ever have made that claim), I still think this process, on the whole, was preferable to a Windows reinstall. For instance, even after a full system reinstall from the ground up, I still have all my applications, documents, and system preferences right where they were when the whole ordeal started, and don’t have to re-install or re-configure anything. That in itself probably saves me another couple hours of recovery time.
iTunes: “Hooked on a Feeling (Ooga-Chaka) (Ooga Chaka)” by Baby Talk from the album Hooked on a Feeling (Ooga-Chaka) (1998, 3:02).
Standing on the corner, I saw a bus coming down the street. Damn — “Ryerson Base” scrolled across the front, marking it as an off-shift bus going back to the base, so I turned around and wandered back to the bus stop to keep waiting.
Then I heard the sound of the bus braking and pulling over to the side of the road. The doors opened, and the sweet smell of pipe tobacco wafted out as the driver beckoned me in. “Hop on!” So I did.
“Just smokin’ down the road,” said the driver as the bus pulled out and I sat down. “I’m heading into the base, but I can get you that far, or if you see another bus that’ll work, just holler and we’ll get you on that one.”
A few blocks later, he pulled to the side again, and picked up another two guys waiting at their stop. “Jump in and hang on,” warned the driver, and the bus roared back to life, taking the next corner faster than I’ve ever seen an articulated bus corner before.
“So here’s the deal,” said the driver. “We’ve got about three more streets to cross, then there’s a stop just before the base. There’s a ton of buses that go through that stop, so I’ll let you off there, you’ll get downtown, and I’ll be on my way home.” Sounded like a good plan.
As we got closer to Ryerson Base, the driver pointed out the other two bus bases in the area (three of the five or six bases are in the south downtown area). Distracted by being able to play tour guide, though, he suddenly realized that he’d passed up that last stop that he was going to be dropping us off at.
“Well, that was my mistake. How about this — when we stop, just stick with me,” he said, and pulled the bus off the street and into Ryerson Base. He pointed off to the right side of the bus. “See that sign? That’s the parking assignments. This is a sixty-footer, so I park in lane 27 or 28.” Another quick turn, and the bus pulled to a stop in the midst of thirty or forty other members of the Metro Transit bus fleet.
The bus went dead.
“Okay, guys. Stick with me. You don’t want to get hit in here.” We all got off, and followed him out of the base and across the street into the employee parking lot. “Normally you wouldn’t be allowed in here, but it was my goof up. I don’t want to send you walking down that corridor,” and he gestured down the narrow road, obviously intended only to allow bus access to and from the base, “so I’ll just have to give you a lift to another stop.”
A few moments later, we all piled into his little Geo Metro. He waved his employee badge at the gate, the crossbeam lifted, and we drove off down the road. Not long afterwards, we pulled to the side of the road at the corner of Fourth and Jackson, in the International District. “That’s it for tonight, guys, I’ve got a ferry to catch.” We thanked him, got out, and he drove off into the night.
The other two adventurers wandered off to wait for the next bus to take them the rest of the way into downtown. I looked around, figured that it wasn’t that far, and started walking home through the Seattle night.
iTunes: “Helium” by 29 Died from the album Sworn (1995, 3:59).
Okay, first things first.
This is a personal website. I speak for myself, and myself alone: not for my employer, my friends, my neighbor, my government, my country, or anyone else. Just lil’ ol’ me. And, me being me, I will occasionally be a bit — or even more than a bit — of a boneheaded, ranting ass. I might even enjoy it. That’s just the way it happens every so often.
Now, I don’t mind at all if someone calls me on it — matter of fact, it’s a good thing that there are people who will call me on it when it happens. I’d hate to see where I could end up with an entirely unchecked ego! ;)
That said, IE still sucks, and it’s still not my fault. ;) However, progress has been made on that front, thanks to the absolutely mindblowingly incredible technical wizardry of Dean Edwards‘ IE7 hack, which uses CSS and JavaScript wizardry to beat IE into behaving like a modern, standards-compliant web browser. The hack has been installed on the main page of my site (with the rest of the pages soon to follow), and the difference it makes is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Many thanks to bethlet for reminding me of that piece of code.
Last night’s post was written in a fit of frustration (and really, one that I go through just about every time I work on a redesign when I get to the point of battling with IE). While my “screw it” attitude was a bit extreme (and probably wouldn’t really have lasted more than a couple days — I just shot my mouth off this time instead of stewing quietly until a solution was found), I fully stand behind the sentiments behind it. Other people have said it before me, and will say it again later on (though possibly with more tact). Outside of corporate-decreed lock in, there’s really no real reason to be using IE as your primary browser anymore, and there are plenty of benefits to switching to a modern browser.
However, as in the real world IE is (unfortuately) not likely to go away anytime soon, all ranting aside, I will continue to at least make an attempt at supporting it. I won’t code for IE, but I’ll at least do my best not to code against it, either.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. ;)
It’s day two of the May birthday extravaganza — my brother Kevin turns 28 today!
Happy birthday, Kev!
iTunes: “I Sit on Acid (Remix)” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1991, 6:22).
I expected this, of course, but it’s still a bit disheartening. I spend a lot of time working up a change to my site design, get the basics up and running, just have a bit of tweaking to do…and then I take a few moments on a break from work and take a look at it under Internet Explorer 6 for Windows.
And cringe.
And you know what? I don’t care. I’m not even going to bother fixing the various oddities that crop up under IE. It’s not worth the time, trouble, and headaches that it would entail.
It comes down to this, quite simply: Internet Explorer sucks. It’s buggy, shares responsibility for many of the security issues in Windows, offers far to many ways for people to compromise your system, and doesn’t support modern web standards. Sure, I know that IE makes up somewhere over 90% of the web browser market, and I know that because of that, it’s quite likely that somewhere over 90% of the people who stumble across my site won’t be seeing it the way that they should.
I don’t care.
Thanks in part to the fact that I do pay attention to modern web design techniques and standards, people using IE are quite able to read my site. All the information is there, it’s just not presented how it should be. But that’s not my fault — it’s IE’s fault — and that’s not worth me worrying about.
As proposed by Tim Bray, Eclecticism now joins the “Use a Better Browser” campaign.
If you were looking at this in any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would look and run better and faster.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may currently have the largest market share, but it has been stagnating for a while. There will be no new Internet Explorer version until Microsoft’s next operating system. It won’t be available for several years and you’ll need to pay for Windows to get it.
Meanwhile, other web browsers have been innovating and are becoming more and more popular. Today, these browsers run faster and look better than Internet Explorer.
By using a better browser your experience will be better. Plus, you will help to foster a competitive environment in which browser technology can continue to innovate and make everyone’s web experience more pleasant and exciting.
So that’s that.
Get Firefox. Get Opera. Get Konqueror. Get a Mac and use Safari.
Just get away from IE.
iTunes: “Glory (Cajun Dub)” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album Glory (1993, 5:31).
First things first: I’m 31 today. Woohoo! Go me. :)
Now that that’s over with, I’m also turning on the “new” site design. As I mentioned before, visually it’s only a partial redesign, in that I’ve moved it from a single-column layout to a two-column layout. Code-wise, however, it’s been redone from the ground up. The majority of the work is done though, aside from some work on fleshing out the sidebar and fine tuning things.
Of course, that means that there are very likely bugs. Feel free to post anything you might notice in comments, and I’ll get it taken care of as soon as I can.
(TypePad’s caching mechanisms may be playing games with my stylesheet — while the new stylesheet is in the system, they seem to be serving the old stylesheet. If things look completely wonky at the moment, that’s likely why, and there probably won’t be much I or anyone else can do until the servers catch up with the changes I made. Sigh.)
iTunes: “Difficult Listening Hour – 02v2” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 1:04:41).