Monday 15 May 2000

Pic of the day: Look at it! I ran the lawnmower over my hair! And I don't feel any weaker for it, quite the opposite. And only 20 bucks poorer.

I woke up slowly. The last dream of the night started ... but it was the wrong dream. There were not enough children in it. This was an earlier dream. I stopped it and started the dream again. But again the year-ago dream came, not the one that should come. I tried again, and finally tired of repeatedly getting the wrong dream, and woke up.

My clock radio would still not wake up for a few minutes to give me the latest news. I spent the meantime pleasantly inbetween wake and slumber, gently touching myself. (No, not there.) It felt good to be alive, felt good to have a body, to be physical. Eventually the radio turned itself on and brought me the latest news about the hostage situation in Sierra Leone.

I remember Sierra Leone from when I played Shadow President. Smallish country on the west coast of Africa, around where many ancestors of today's Americans came from, quite suddenly and much to their surprise. A little on the north side of that, perhaps. But the name doesn't sound African, it sounds more like Spanish. Like what I'd imagine "Mountain of Lions" would sound in Spanish. And why is Freetown capital of Sierra Leone and not of neighboring Liberia, as would be good and proper?

No longer a body, but a living information processor, I eventually got up and went to work.

Work was unimpressive as usual. Tomorrow may be different, though. The people are planning to send a mass mail (snail mail) to thousands of clients. We did this last year too, for a different occasion, but somehow it seems that nobody else retains any clear memories of how we did it. (Our current software tools does not exactly make this easy and intuitive, and there is nothing I can do about that.) Printing large number of virtually identical letters is an exciting happening for people in our line of work. Yes, it is that pathetic. People are close to quarreling openly over the right to do it. And yet they have forgotten the details. Heh. It must suck to not be a nerd.

In the lunch break I went out and got a drastic hair cut. Oh, it's the same mediocre style as last time, though the folks at work are polite and compliment it. All she did was remove lots and lots of hair.

Also visited the flower market. Not that I bought anything. I did sniff one, though, today. Heh. It was hot. Rain is expected for our national day, the 17th of May.

I am feeling better today, but I am worried about just how changeable I am, how hard it is for me to make a decision last. On the bright side, a good night's sleep can improve my mood drastically if it is low. As has been known to happen occasionally, if not often.

I looked further into the mysteries of Style Sheets, though not very deeply. As my proud fellow geek ARJ so kindly pointed out to me, the idea seems to be to separate the formatting from the content. Write the content in HTML and the formatting in CSS. I guess what has evaded me is the need for lots of formatting at all. To me, the standard formatting of HTML has been sufficient both for my publishing and reading needs. Almost.

I confess to using the TABLE tags excessively for formatting things that are not natural born tables, such as this page. The reason for this was that I wanted the margins. As the 800x600 screen resolution completely overtook the old 640x480, my journal started to get hard to read. Harder to read than the contents and grammar warrants, even. Which is bad enough, I guess. The lines would just go on and on from left to right, and be hard to follow. By setting margins (and later defining a separate color) I made the lines shorter. But of course, these days people have 1024x768 or higher resolution, and we're back to the start. I can only hope people have the wits to not run their browser maximized. This should magickally solve the problem with overly long lines, it sure does for me. (Except for a few sick and twisted web sites, which insist of specifying a long physical line length, forcing me to scroll. Needless to say, I avoid them if at all possible.)

My starting foray into CSS has not found a great way to format text differently based on the screen resolution, anyway. Perhaps there is one, perhaps not. It is possible to set margins without resorting to tables, though I have not found out if I can do the color trick. Anyway I guess it takes a while before the poor and oppressed have all upgraded to browsers supporting CSS. They just may have, though, before I make heads and tails of it.

Speaking of heads and tails ... No, I don't think so. Bedbug time! Have a personally good night, people.