"Sun"day 4 July 1999

Glorious rain outside. Not the tired drizzle that slowly dissolves the courage, but the beating hammer of rain that made the ancients fall down and worship the gods of storm and war.

I sure don't have a problem with the rain, since I don't work outdoors and do not even need to go to work on Sunday. And since Norway is not (yet) part of the US, there are no fireworks and such in any case.

I suspect that given the choice, most Norwegians would rather join the USA than the EU. Actually our politics are more similar to the EU in many ways, with a more active role of the state in economic affairs. (Though there is some progress in reversing this trend lately.) But emotionally Norwegians have more sympathy for the American way of life, and we also tend to take up the role of cheerleaders whenever the USA decides to bomb someone somewhere. Sure, the Americans are incredibly arrogant; but then again, so are we. And it beats the attitude of some other Europeans, that ooooh we cannot stand up to the eevil American cultural imperialism, so let us pass laws against American films. We Norwegians like American cultural imperialism. We drink cola and eat hamburgers and buy American clothes and clothes which we think are American but which are not.

The weekend is winding down. Apart from playing Theme Hospital and playing Civ 2 the Dinosaur scenario, I've also been fussing over my March ("Mars") archive. I intend to put it up on the Diary Farm before farming out June.

This whole calendar thing cries out for FRAMES, but I feel bad about frames. They tend to raise the entry level for readers. Some old browsers cannot handle frames at all, and I have no idea what kind of browsers my visitors have. I do however have an idea that I don't want to turn away anyone who comes here, especially not the poor.
Furthermore, frames are hard to get right on all the various screen resolutions out there (and that's even assuming that people have their browser full screen). I've more than often enough come to sites where frames require scrolling to read each line of the text. I tend not to stay long there unless they have something of great import to say. And let us face it: Amateurs who think they are experts, rarely have anything profound to share.

There are, in general, lots of things one can do with a web page. And often as not, people do that. Particularly to personal home pages. Background pictures can be beautiful, but they have to be unusually diffident to not distract from the text. There is a reason why we don't write letters on gift wrap paper, as one web designer remarked. A simple marble background can be quite as relaxing for the eyes as a single color, but you still have the extra little load time.

I'm somewhat undecided about the fad about dark backgrounds, which I have lately noticed particularly among young female journallers. It may add dramatic intensity to the site, but sometimes it makes the text too hard to read, and I press Ctrl-G on my Opera browser and override the page with my own pre-defined setup. One bonus of HTML over conventional printing, at least!