Sam I am

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.

You can read about the item a bit more at the Daily Yomiuri On-Line. I saw the item linked from Engadget.

Of course, I wonder if they are marking individual herrings….

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.

After leaving the Main Press Center in Athens at 4:00 am, I arrived at the Airport around 4:45 am. Athens airport is not such a great place to hang out. Maybe it picks up after 6 am. I got on my Alitalia flight to Milan at 6:30, and arrived there at 10:30 am or so. Milan’s airport was really nice, although going through security again to get to the international departures terminal was a bit of a pain. The business class lounge in Milan was a lot nicer than the lounge in Athens. The people working there were nicer, and the food was a bit better. I got a nice espresso.

My flight from Milan to Washington, DC was simply incredible. The airline staff was wonderful, the food was quite good, and the seats were luxurious. And when I say the food was good, I mean it–it wasn’t just good for airline food, it was legitimately good food. I had two kinds of pasta, a nice dish of grouper, and a really nice dessert of fruits. There was gelato as well, but I didn’t want to stay up. I was able to sleep for four hours, and then I had a small meal before we landed.

Business class makes a big difference. If I had flown coach for nine hours, I would be a wreck right now. Getting in a really decent four hours of sleep made a ton of difference in my life. I was able to be a human being at the wedding, and I was able to actually work effectively today. Time Inc. definitely got its moneys worth.

I might dig up the menu from the international flight a bit later and pound it into the computer. It’s pretty impressive.