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Sunday, 18 February 2001
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I like diners. Basic food, within a buck or two of a meal at the golden arches (hawk, spit!), served by human beings who are frequently past high school age, not generally as greasy (the food, that is) as a Big Mac (hawk, spit!) or equivalent... Nobody outside of the third world would confuse it with gourmet cuisine, yet it's frequently quite pleasant. My problem, you ask? Well, my last two diner visits leave me zero for two in the happy tummy game. In fact, both occasions left me subsequently spending more time than I like enthroned upon porcelain. Am I just getting old? Are my guts of iron finally rusting? Without getting overly indelicate, let me just observe that I'm even beginning to moderate my ingestion of assorted hot peppery things, because I prefer to enjoy such items only once. Rather than twice, if you catch my drift. My after-dinner mint of choice these days is a Tums. Well, actually a handful of same. Ah, youth...
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Monday, 19 February 2001
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Well, I finished with the Problem Child client today. For now... Road Runner still hasn't put through the change in their MAC address, so they aren't pulling the proper IP yet, but that should be sorted out by tomorrow or so. I installed Sybergen Secure Desktop, no, I mean Sygate Personal Firewall (it's changed names at least once since I started using it late last year). It's reasonably easy to set up and use, and you can give it a list of trusted IP addresses, as well as open selected ports. But I'm still confused about registering it and paying for it. Every time I've registered, under various clients' names, I've always gotten the same registration number. Huh? And they don't make it obvious enough to slow kids like me, how to send them money and make everything all nice and official. So I'm wondering if some of my Road Runner problems might be simply the firewall deciding I've used up my twenty-five cents worth, so the game's over, please deposit another twenty-five cents, thank you very much. I guess I'll find out in another sixty days. Live and learn. I did try ZoneAlarm, which is fairly nifty, but I didn't see how to give it a list of trusted IPs, so it didn't work for me. If anybody knows different, please let me know.
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Tuesday, 20 February 2001
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Jornada update: I'm liking this thing real well. My quibbles have pretty much boiled down to one — it keeps turning on and launching apps while it's in my pocket. I haul it out, expecting it to be dark and silent, and lo and behold, my Contacts list or the Notes applet is open and running. I have it set to shut down after one minute of inactivity, but geez... And of course, as I mentioned before, the little plastic flap that covers the PC Card slot is unquestionably doomed to a lost eternity, sooner or later. Bad design. What were they thinking? But that's minor. The independent spirit demonstrated by this little unit may become a problem in the future. But so far it hasn't significantly drained the battery. Battery life in general is acceptable so far; supposed to go eight hours. I'm resisting the temptation to let it drain all the way down, and see what it comes up with. When that happens with a Palm device, of course, you go back to square one, as if you just took it out of the box. Presumably the same here, but I'll wait until I feel a little more in control of this thing before I go experimenting. My philosophy — do it on purpose, with some control over conditions (ie backup, etc.) before it happens by accident.
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Wednesday, 21 February 2001
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More HTML and CSS tidbits, courtesy of Daynoter Bo Leuf...
I wrote:
I like your page’s mouse-over style, with the yellow background. I use Front Page 2000 with CSS, but I didn’t notice any standard choice I could make while creating a style that would let me do that as a Style. Would you mind telling me how you did that? Thanks!
And Mr. Leuf replied:
Pete -- Glad to hear from you. The mouse-over style is defined in the Cascade Style Sheet associated with the page, using the "pseudo classes" for a link, that is to say the state changes that a browser tracks locally. In CSS, this is coded as:
a:link { color: #000099 }
a:visited { color: #006600 }
a:hover { text-decoration: none ; color: #660000; background-color: #ffff33 }
The in my opinion most authoritative book on CSS is the one by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos: "Cascading Style Sheets -- Designing for the Web", Addison-Wesley 1999 (2e), ISBN: 0-201-59625-3 I usually don't go for fluff or animations, but this seemed innocuous enough and is actually useful in spaced-out WikiWord links if one does them without underline.
Neat! I tried incorporating a variation of this into my own main style sheet, and I like the result. Previously I had tried setting the rollover style to bold, but I didn't like how the text "jumped" whenever the mouse passed over a link. This is "quieter", I think. I notice, parenthetically, that I really hate the American style of always putting punctuation marks inside quotes. To me, probably as a remnant of programming training, where syntax and style matter for both readability and compilability (I think I just made that one up), it makes most sense to include punctuation within quotes only when it's actually part of the quoted phrase. I believe the Brits do this more sensibly.
Bo also comments about Front Page:
FrontPage is a seductive trap-door. It makes things look easy, and is OK for small webs and people who want to "wordprocess" their pages -- in other words work sort of as they're used to in Word. But it's full of gotchas and ultimately paints the webauthor into tight corners, including the one that it's non-trivial to stop using it and continue editing an established site with any hope of keeping the layout intact.
I have no doubt this is true, as it's all of a piece with Microsoft trying as hard as they can to coerce everyone into marching in MS lockstep, doing everything "The Microsoft Way", which usually means something like "Don't you worry your little head about all that yucky technical stuff, sir! We've programmed your computer to take care of all that for you!" Ick. Of course, I'm all for hand-holding when learning new technologies, but it's critical to be able to turn it off when you no longer need it. So by all means, give me wizards and give me help files, but let me disable as much of the "smart help" as I choose to live without. Remember Microsoft Bob? (I occasionally think about old Bob, but only in the context of installing him on an engineer's machine as a practical joke. I would, too, if I were only positive he would uninstall cleanly.) I suppose he evolved into Clippy, the universally loathed, vituperated, and abominated Office help gizmo. I wonder what his next incarnation will resemble... If I have to "subscribe" to the next MS OS to find out, I don't expect I'll ever know. And that'll be just fine.
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Thursday, 22 February 2001
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I'm playing with DreamWeaver 3 again this morning. I followed Bo Leuf's advice and changed my table widths from a fixed number of pixels to a percentage of the page. We'll see how it works. But I can't find the combination that will make DW3 actually ftp the files up to my site. A simple ftp client has no trouble with it, and FrontPage 2000 works as often as not. I don't know if I'm simply not tweaking the settings properly, or if DW3 uses something more complicated than basic ftp.
I filed my tax returns (federal and state) a couple weeks ago. My life is so simple these days that I was able to figure both returns in about an hour total, and then file the federal one over a touch-tone phone. I already got the refund directly deposited into my checking account. That's good, because it let me pay off my hefty Jornada spending spree in one chunk.
I remember years back when I had my own little part-time business building PCs, and a mortgage, and various other deductions... I sweated bullets sometimes, trying to make the numbers come out right. I used TurboTax frequently, and liked it reasonably well. But now things are simpler. Here's how much I made, here's how much I paid, here's how much I owed, gimme the rest back. I guess I'm looking for the silver lining in the fact that the simplicity comes from me not being able to deduct any of my expenses, since I don't currently have a mortgage. The standard deduction is still bigger than whatever I could scrape together, since child support isn't deductible. Maybe I should've structured it as alimony, which is. Ah well, water under the bridge...
And I still like the Jornada, but its habit of turning on without me telling it to is starting to bug me. I think most people that get serious about computers are in some ways control freaks. We may not expect or want to control other people, but by golly, those electronic gizmos we spend so much time on (or "on which we spend so much time" for those who speak proper English) had better knuckle under and toe the line. Or we'll go get one that will. If such exists...
I still wish I could've tried a Compaq iPaq before I made the purchase decision, but they don't seem to actually exist at the moment, outside of marketing literature. I need a unit I can carry in my hip pocket without causing it to declare independence and go into business for itself. Putting a handheld in a shirt pocket is foolish, because every time you bend over, it falls on the floor. Gravity, you know. And when expensive plastic-cased items repeatedly hit the floor from a meter or so, they eventually stop working. Don't ask me how I know this. And those kewl leather holster-thingies that clip on your belt aren't much better. Bend frequently at the waist, and eventually they also pop off the belt and kamikaze. Don't ask me how I know that, either. OK, one could hypothetically thread one's belt through the little nerd holster as one is getting into one's pants every morning. One could, but I never will. Just won't happen. So to make a short story long, any handheld I buy has to be hip-pocketable with no disconcerting secondary effects. The Jornada tickles my fancy, but I can't actually say it satisfies my needs yet. Don't miss the next exciting episode...
The Next Exciting Episode...
This article from the Register tells me that I probably made a bad pocket PC choice. Beta VCR anyone?
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Friday, 23 February 2001
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No entry.
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Saturday, 24 February 2001
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No entry.