Dear Fedex.com:

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I just wanted to let you know that I recently found it easier to walk to the nearest staffed Fedex office, visually confirm its street address, and ask for the phone number, than it took to to use your website to find said office. The following problems were encountered in attempting to use your search form:

  1. The Find Locations page is hidden away in a slideout menu which does not work in Opera 8.
  2. In Firefox, the search form does not work. The button refuses to submit until the page is reloaded. When it finally submits on reload, the form returns a “please fill out the fields commented in red” error, while showing no comments in red. This is because the form requires at least one of the “Type of Location” checkboxes to be selected; they are prechecked in Internet Explorer, but said checkboxes are empty in Firefox, a real web browser. One wonders why you could not have just used more semantically correct radio buttons rather than checkboxes, using HTML’s “checked” attribute rather than whatever Javascript is doing that work. (I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that thing about the radio buttons, but checkboxes are perfectly semantic for this.)
  3. By the way, that search form also breaks the Enter key, forcing advanced users to suffer the tribulation of moving a hand off the keyboard to click a mouse button just to submit the form. Unacceptable!
  4. And finally, the Fedex locations search results page does not show phone numbers.

Please, Fedex, hire someone like 37 Signals or Happy Cog or something to get your site properly fixed, because right now, store-searching is a mini-disaster.

Starting Them Early

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So you’ve got your Bratz, you’ve got your Li’l Bratz, and you’ve got your Bratz Babyz. Well, if we’ve reached the “babies” stage in indoctrinating our children into this fabulous culture of vain, vapid, materialistic, sexually unsubtle consumption, then the next logical step in the product offense — and I do mean offense — should be prenatal. BRATZ FETUZZEZ: “keepin’ it real in the womb.”

(There was going to be an image here, and I was in the process of photoshopping Bratz lips and eyes onto an ultrasound screenshot of someone’s unborn baby, but then I figured that would be too tasteless to waste effort on, so I closed the file. Sorry.)

Via Lileks.

Wachovia in XHTML/CSS

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Check out Wachovia.com, latest big-time entry into the world of XHTML/CSS markup. The new front page is straightfoward, readable, and clearly structured, with headers and lists of links providing quick and clean access to the bank’s various products and services. The inside pages are still the old table-based tag soup, and the new front page doesn’t validate all the way just yet, but it’s a good start.

Do Not Cling to Me

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Stained Glass at First Baptist DC

One of many stained glass windows at First Baptist DC. I think this one depicts the woman with the discharge, who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was made well. My mistake, Rod tells me that this is “Mary and the Risen Christ,” right after the Resurrection. Jesus is depicted carrying a shovel, which causes Mary Magdalene (to whom Jesus was not married, by the way) to think he is the gardener.

Opportunity Stuck on a Dune

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Mars Rover Opportunity seems to have roved into a rather deep patch of sand from which it is now having trouble extricating itself. Check out this hazcam photo to see just how far into the Martian sand the wheels have sunk. The rover team at JPL is carefully working on solutions for Opportunity to wiggle and ease out of the sand without getting more stuck.

Another advantage for human explorers: an astronaut could simply lift his knees higher.

Also check out Spirit rover’s lovely panorama from the slopes of the Columbia Hills.

Arnold, the Adventists, and the Sabbath

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Legalism 101: in which Arnold, a Christian ex-Seventh Day Adventist, meets up with his old Adventist friends.

(Update: Life Outside Adventism, a followup epistle from Arnold.)

I remember reading some Adventist literature in a Wordstar document a long time ago, and it was, at the start, good and solid Christian doctrine on sin, grace, salvation, and the sufficient propitiation of Christ — but something funny happened a few pages in. The text began to cover the Old Testament, with, as you may expect, a special focus on the Jewish Sabbath and its importance to the faith, then suddenly turned from the Bible to a rather unhinged history lesson on the “evils” of Roman Catholicism, how the Pope is the Antichrist and the Beast of Revelation, how the Catholics had twisted Scripture by changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and that true Christians must worship on the Old Testament Sabbath, as so ordained by God in the Ten Commandments. The Adventists’ Sabbath rule wasn’t a legalistic binding, (i.e. you don’t go to hell for not worshipping on Saturday, since you’re saved by grace) but the message being pushed was clear: “Evil people changed the Sabbath to Sunday. You’re a Christian; you’re not going to do what the evil people are doing, are you?”

The author of Hebrews is fairly clear about the new meaning of the Sabbath rest given to those who follow Christ: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”

The Sabbath day of rest was intended as a sign of the time when we would rest from the toil of the Law, by placing our faith solely in the grace of our Savior, and not in our own works. The early church broke bread and collected offerings on the first day of the week as a way of commemorating the day that Christ rose from the dead: not as a way of replacing the old Sabbath, but as a way of celebrating a new one, a Sabbath which transcends days of the week and works of the Law, a Sabbath that the elect will always be in, on all days, for all time.

Hey, Saturday-worshippers, I didn’t make this up. It’s in the Bible. Yet, as I do with the Roman Catholics: if you acknowledge Christ as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead, I embrace you as brothers and sisters yet.

More from CARM.org and TheBereans.net.

When Paulo Got DSL

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Well, I’m now on DSL; I ordered the service last week, got the self-install kit with modem/wireless router two days ago, and the activation notice came today. Installation was seamless: hooking everything up and installing and configuring the software took just 30 minutes. Cancelling my old — and faithful — dialup account at Allvantage took just two minutes more.

At last, my connection speed actually feels “normal.” Now I can pick up my laptop and carry it to the couch to use the internet without trailing that phone line behind me, and the first twinge of bandwidth guilt — that feeling of needing to use all this lightning-fast throughput to download something — is already setting in.

I’d like to be nice and share my wireless connection freely for neighbors to pick up, but of course I’m concerned about monitoring connections for possible security risks, both technical and national. OS X 10.2.8 has a firewall on it, but I’d still like to know who’s connected to my network at any given time. I tried downloading Kismet, but the documentation was incomprehensible. Now I’m trying MacSniffer (OS X graphical frontend for tcpdump output), but of course, that just gives me a raw, unintelligible flood of data. Anyone got solutions for OS X?

Update: Sensibility has taken hold, and it’s all WEP’d now. Thanks for the advice.

Exploding Toads and a Movie Review

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Toads in Germany are mysteriously exploding, and scientists aren’t sure what’s causing it. I’ll bet it involves the introduction of nanomeds into their environment followed by large doses of gamma radiation.

(Yeah, yeah, I just rented Hulk. Not all that great; the movie was really trying for a “comic book” effect, and what it achieved instead was more annoying split-screens than 24.)

Update: The culprits might be hungry crows skilled at quickly pecking out toad livers. I guess that’s why we call a flock of crows a “murder.”