I’m flying off on Thursday back to Athens. One of my coworkers, Phil, will be returning to New York City the day after I leave. Anne wanted one of the two of us here for the two intervening closes so that we could provide coverage for the magazine’s servers. The closes went very well.
I am busy trying to make plans for Italy and wrap up all of my work. It looks like I will be coming into the office both on Wednesday and Thursday. I have an meeting on Thursday just before my flight.
It’s a lot of work to do, and I still have not settled on a contractor.
After a frank exchange of ideas with my brother I made another attempt at using DIVs with CSS and the float attribute in CSS. I was unable to get Mozilla to render the content in the way I wanted it to display. Interestingly, IE did what I wanted.
With TABLE tags, the site still looks great in links and lynx, two text-based browsers. It works slightly less well in screen readers; the one I tested was Simply Web 2000, a free screen reader. In fact, the only reason why I took another attempt at making the site table-free was to make it work better with screen readers.
For what it’s worth, I will probably try again later. Right now, I’m leaving the site design as is.
I had tried to design this page without using any tables. It turns out that this was a fool’s errand. I was unable to find a way to make multiple DIVs degrade gracefully. Without the geek-speak, this means when you shrunk your window horizontally, the text on my sidebar would display over the images. This leads to a poor user experience. I have replaced the middle DIVs with a TABLE tag. In most browsers, this should render just as fast, and in older browsers, this should look a bit better. People who feel that the TABLE tag should only be used for tabular data may not be happy, but what can you do? I still validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and my CSS is still clean, so I don’t really care.
If you didn’t understand anything I wrote in the previous paragraph, don’t despair. Just know that this page will look nice when I post large images.
In Japan, DoCoMo Sentsu, Inc. is working on system to barcode fish immediately after it is caught. This will allow people to determine exactly when and where a fish was caught, who caught it. They will be able to check this information from their cell phones. This way, the end customer can determine the exact provenance of the fish. Being a person who loves to eat, I think this is pretty cool. Could you imagine if it was used in other food industries as well? Contaminated food could be easily tracked back to its source, and customers could make more informed decisions about what food they choose to eat.
Friday night, Kiera invited me down to the pier between 66th and 72nd streets on the Hudson river to see Casablanca with some of her friends. The Parks Department set up a large inflatable screen at the end of the pier, and they fired up a DVD player wired to a projector. It was pretty cool. The weather was warm and clear, and the movie was really great.
It’s a nice park at the end of the pier. To get to the park, you walk down the side of Manhattan to the water. There is a fairly steep ramp that takes you from Riverside Drive to underneath the West Side Highway. (It may be the Henry Hudson Highway at that point; I don’t know.) Right next to the pier is an older loading dock. I remember reading exactly what it was for, but now I forget. I did take a photo, though.
From the pier, you could see all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. The view was very pretty.
(Full disclosure: I pumped up the saturation in this photo a little bit, but I think it is an accurate representation of what I saw.)
This is the first post I am making via email. If it works well,I’ll do it more in the future. Well, it didn’t work. First, blogger doesn’t accept HTML mail through its gateway, and also Mozilla stupidly took all my referenced images and included them as inline images. I can’t find the option in Mozilla to change this behavior. Anyone know of a good offline post creator that works with blogger? XHTML support a big plus.
For the first time since I have moved into my totally un-renovated, totally empty apartment, I yearned for my kitchen. I walked to the farmers market today outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall. They had stacks of heirloom tomatoes of different species, piles of raspberries, thick slabs of fresh fish, tons of cut flowers, crates of colorful potatoes, and overflowing tables of peaches and nectarine. I bought two peaches and a container of red raspberries and ate them on the steps of Borough Hall.
It was a little overcast outside, and it rained later, but I still enjoyed sitting outside and watching the world go by.
Dockers stain resistant pants stop being so stain resistant after washing them many times. Now I have a small brown spot on my pants, surrounded by a wet spot with pink streaks from the hand soap in the bathroom. Luckily, it hit exactly just on the inside of my leg, where it is guaranteed to cause the most embarrassment.
Mark Pilgrim wrote a pretty funny rant regarding developers and specifications. There’s a bit of truth to what he writes. After reading it, I wonder if I am a moron or an asshole. Can you be both? :-)
Faisal and Aleecia’s wedding was very nice. They got married at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. It was a really nice space with two floors. The ceremony was on the ground floor, and then the reception started upstairs as the gound floor was reconfigured for dining. It was a pleasant service with a lot of people.
The two of them did something really nice and totally unexpected for me. After everyone was seated for dinner, they gave a brief speech where they welcomed everyone to the ceremony. Aleecia then said they had to single out one person who came the farthest to get to the wedding from New York City. Then, she asked that I stand, and they thanked me! At their wedding! It was very touching and greatly appreciated.
Folks at the wedding included: Faisal and Aleecia, Dan, Chad and Tina, Cheryl, my brother Larry, John, Tommy, Chris and Sandra, Dmitri, Ethan, Fleur, May, Kiera, Andy and Lisa and like a billion other people I know. You may like to know their last names. Too bad for you. I also ran into or met many other people. Given that I had no sleep and a bit to drink, I have forgotten many names. [I am going to try to milk that excuse for as long as I can.]
After the wedding, I went out to a bar with some folks.
I like John’s expression in this photo. Remember it before Fleur sees the photo and makes me take it down. Andy and Lisa are the cute couple in the background.
From left to right: Larry, Kiera, Tommy, May, and unknown cigarette hand. Note that Tommy has already taken his shirt off.
I took a bunch of other photos, but most of them are kind of junky. With editing, everyone thinks I am a better photographer than I really am.
