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Sunday, 4 February 2001
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Well, I couldn't stand it any more. Life without my trusty PDA is like... well, it's like life without a rectangular plastic object poking a hole in every left hip pocket I own. It's like life without trying desperately to remember how to enter a Tab character in Graffiti. It's like life without constantly trying to keep the portable synched (or is the past tense "sunk"?) up with two desktops and a notebook. In short, I missed all the little ways the stupid Palm made my life easier. So I went to CompUSA for another look at the Palm IIIc, the cheapest contender. I decided that it was the cheapest ($329) because it's the cheapest, know what I mean? Little dim screen, same clunky plastic case as the standard Palm III of song and story, same Palm OS. And that meant that the
Handspring Prism ($449) wasn't worth an extra $120 for a brighter screen and an expansion slot. So that bumped me over to the "Windows for Pocket Computer" (as I think they're calling WinCE now) camp. And that meant HP, Compaq, or Casio. Casio was $50 more than the big names, though the unit didn't look bad, really. But I mean... Casio? Sorry, Casio isn't a computer company. And Compaq is out of stock pretty much all over, because they can't get LCD screens quickly enough, so that left the HP Jornada. So I did it. I unlimbered my plastic lifeline and ordered one from HP's own website. Free 2-business-day shipping, no tax; so I paid exactly $499, saving myself the $40 sales tax I would have paid at CompUSA. I'm an idiot, and I'm $500 poorer than I was Friday night, and I
don't even have the machine in my hot little hands yet, and I'm sure I'll hate myself in the morning. Oh yeah, it is the morning. I guess I merely find myself moderately distasteful. I can live with that. And the HP is very cute. Cuteness über alles, baby. Don't miss the next exciting episode.
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Monday, 5 February 2001
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Mike Barkman sent me a sad screenshot of the way my website looks in his browser. The table obscures some of the text that should appear above it. So I told the table to stop using absolute positioning, and just plop itself wherever it felt like. Believe it or not, that might actually be all I need to do to fix that. I'm so non-cluefull sometimes. But only mostly. Thanks, Mike. BTW, the page didn't act that way for me in IE 5.5, or in Opera 5.0, or in Netscape 6.0, or in Netscape 4.08. Just goes ta show ya. Good thing HTML is a universal language, readily understood by every browser. It's a write-once-run-anywhere world. Not. But anyway, Mike please let me know if that made it better.
¤later¤
So I decided that I'm not good enough at HTML to create a web page that 1) looks the way I want it to, and 2) is W3C HTML4-compliant, and 3) renders almost identically in various browsers. In other words, non-standard things like FONT and COLOR tags do render in most browsers, while absolute positions often don't. Over-reaction? Nah... I'm still just playing with this thing. And my HTML code is still WAY more readable and less cluttered that the equivalent would be if I just let FP2K do what it wanted. <RANT> Have I mentioned today that Microsoft is Evil? My mostly-frivolous definition of evil definitely includes those entities that want to force me to work their way, rather than my way; and that want to alter common standards for reasons that (despite all denials) really are just for the sake of marketing and market share, rather than pure technical superiority. </RANT> Oops, sorry. Was that out loud?
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Tuesday, 6 February 2001
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Mike Barkman helps me out with a little more feedback, which I appreciate. He writes:
Yee-haaah. Looks good to me. I won't do another screenshot, though <g>. I started out my page in Dreamweaver 3; because it did bells & whistles, I hung them everywhere. Frames, mouseover navbars, the whole nine yards. Then I was taken to task by daynoters, hung out to dry, and now my site is plain vanilla tables. There's only a couple of CSS styles on the index page, and I must replace them; Dreamweaver does a really cool HTML style palette -- all it does is apply the tags underneath the WYSIWYG window when you click on a para. We also use this philosophy for client sites. No flash, no animated gifs, no shockwave - just try and make it as readable as possible and look nice. I note that a lot of people use Front Page; must be OK for the Thompson and Syroid crew to use it. But DW has a special menu item for cleaning up HTML code (also MSWord HTML), and that keeps me out of trouble.
keep on truckin' ... /Mike
And my reply:
Thanks for the feedback, Mike. I appreciate it. If I ever run across Dreamweaver at a ridiculously low price, I'll have to look into it. I really love the idea of the HTML-cleaner-upper. Writing HTML takes me (wayyyy) back to my college days, programming in COBOL, Pascal, PL/I, and so on. It made me accustomed to the idea that there was a right way and a lot of wrong ways to write code, and also that syntax was important, and that any "programming environment" should verify syntax, whether it actually enforced it or not. In other words, that whenever I departed from a standard, I should at least be aware that I was doing it, so I could choose in an informed manner. I find FP2K to be reasonably easy to use, and quite capable in general. The only things I object to are 1) it's often inexplicably unable to publish to the web, giving useless error messages. On those occasions I can generally just ftp the files up manually. And 2) all the proprietary, MS-only "gubbage" (to borrow a technical term from Dr. Pournelle) it wants to include on every page and web that it creates. Other than that, I really like the interface, which I find intuitive enough to keep using it.
Mike brings up a good point, though, as reinforced by the Daynoters' web pages in general: content matters most, and stylistic elements are only good if they make the content more readable and easy to find. Clean fonts, simple dividers, small graphics, use of white space... Never mind the self-elected high priests of web style — content is the reason for having a website in the first place, or so I would've thought. Hey, listen to the junior altar boy preaching to the choir. Sorry.
So anyway, my daughter sprained her ankle again at basketball practice last night. She's a walking (on crutches) contradiction — very athletic, loves every sport ever invented, and has a fair amount of native talent. But graceful? Not on your life. My baby don't gonna be a ballerina. I cringe every time she does this, and she does it pretty regularly... ever since she could walk (well, run) she's been breaking wrists (two or three, who counts?), a collar bone (once, and was playing softball ten days later), ankles (I can't count that high)... Praise God she's never cracked her head open (yet). My heart (like everyone else's) goes out to the Syroid family, with little Landon's broken leg. My best advice to Tom — hopefully this will be the worst time, but it ain't gonna be the last one. Every parent who looks at those cute pix Tom put up of his kids can tell right away: yep, that boy is all boy from the get-go, and he's gonna get hurt from time to time, because he's fearless. Like my girl. OK, she's not all boy, though when she was little we kind of had our doubts, and she still hates dresses . But some kids just gotta go, and you ain't gonna stop 'em. We parents just get to mop up after. Hey, man, I'll tell ya — it does wonders for your prayer life...
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Wednesday, 7 February 2001
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Computer Associates is big. And they make my current flavor of choice in antivirus software, to which I've alluded before: InoculateIT Personal Edition. I'm not putting a link to it here, because their website is totally useless at the moment, the victim I assume of yet another corporate reorganization (YACR?). The "Support" links from www.cai.com point to pages on www.ca.com, which no longer exist in their former locations. A phone call to CA tells you that everything has moved to esupport.ca.com, which doesn't exist. It's actually esupport.cai.com, which tells us:
Welcome to Computer Associates' new web-based, self-help support system.
Our site has been re-architected.
- friendly navigation
- configurable "my support"
- knowledge based search engines
So that's what happened: it was "re-architected." My spell-checker flags that one, and for once I agree. Some corporate flack has imbibed at the fountain of Military-Speak and begun verbing his nouns. Sad, but once affected by this English-corrupting affliction, few have ever recovered the ability to communicate in their mother tongue. Apparently "re-architecting" involves creating a new home page without actually changing any other affected links. Front Page has a menu item that's supposed to do this for you, but I guess when you work for a computer mega-company, far more advanced tools are available. So I can't actually get the latest version of IPE, or its latest virus data update. A small price to pay, I suppose, for the pleasure of surfing through a re-architected website.
But anyway, the reason I originally wanted some CA support was that I can't install their Antivirus Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server, on my old Compaq Prosignia Something-or-other (running NT4 SP6). When I try, it tells me that I need to have Exchange Server 4 or greater (it's running 5.5) and Exchange Client 4 or greater (I installed Outlook 2000). To quote Mr. Syroid, "Well, That's Funny." So eventually a CA support tech is supposed to call me back. I have a case number and everything. But I'll probably fall out of my chair in shock if anybody actually calls. Meanwhile, I have to dig up some support in the real world, which means the Invisible Nerd Network. Nerds, and you know who you are, please feel free to comment.
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Thursday, 8 February 2001
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Well, it happened. A rep from CA called me back early this morning, and told me that when the AntiVirus Agent for MS Exchange setup program says it wants an Exchange client version 4 or better, what it really means is that it wants Outlook 97 or Outlook 98 installed. Outlook 2000 doesn't count. So off I go to uninstall, reboot, reinstall (if I can dig up a CD of the requisite antiquity), reboot some more, and then try the AV Agent install again. That's why they pay me all that money, I guess. Being an IT staff of one can bring the occasional trying moment. Yee ha.
¤later¤
OK, so that wasn't it. I installed Outlook 97, and rebooted, and it still won't install. Maybe it has something to do with the administrative account that it needs to use. Ack. And I can't Read The Fine (!) Manual, because it doesn't appear to exist. I just keep clinging to the memory of that factory job I left behind, and telling myself that this is way better. At least nobody's breathing down my neck, telling me to hurry up because it needs to be working in half an hour. It won't be...
Oh BTW, I found a copy of macromedia Dreamweaver 3 in our software cabinet, and nobody else is using it, so it must belong to me. I'm using it for this update. Funny how I've become accustomed to having every word spellchecked as I type. But the basic DW3 interface is... interesting. Kind of cluttered, but apparently pretty powerful. I'll have to restrain myself from trying anything arty. First impression... kewl.
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Friday, 9 February 2001
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Well, I've had the HP Jornada 548 for about two days now. It's about a quarter inch longer and thicker than a Palm III, about the same width, but noticeably heavier, with a solid-feeling metal case and flip-top cover. It does a couple things I'll probably never use it for, like play MP3 files — with 32 megs of RAM, I'd realistically only have spare room for a couple of songs, after the normal software and data are in place. And it records sounds with a little built-in microphone, which I don't expect to need, but you never know. But it carries around all my contacts from Outlook, and my inbox, as well, though I may skip that. I got AvantGo working, though we'll see if it stays that way. It took a lot of futzing about, but it seems to work OK now. And I loaded up a bunch of free eBooks for the MS Reader; public domain and freeware only. All the books of the Bible (ASV), some old Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom space operas for fun, Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic Wars, a couple of the free titles from Baen Books... Good for the odd moment of spare time in waiting rooms and what not. And I decided that I really need a spare AC converter and docking cradle, so I can keep one at home and one at work. They decided that cradles would come in either USB or Serial flavor, pick one. So I'm paying extra to pick both, along with the spare AC converter. Oh, well... This better not break or get lost, and I better like it a lot for at least two years, because it costs an arm and a leg. But doggone, it's nifty.
I "took a meeting" (yuck) today with a web development company that wants to host our company website. They offered to host, get the URL on all the kewlest search engines, and redesign the site for more sex appeal. A la carte pricing, of course. We need some more quotes, of course. But from what they mentioned in passing about their company's "corporate culture," I'm probably working in the wrong place. Of course, I'm way not young enough or kewl enough to mix socially with 20-something web weenies.
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Saturday, 10 February 2001
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No entry.