Another Brave Little Squirrel

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Another brave little squirrel comes right up to the lens, on the grassy field near the Peace Monument, the US Capitol, and Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenue. In the background is the monolithic Department of Labor building. And another squirrel.

Photo taken with a Canon Powershot A400.

Also see Supreme Court Attack Squirrel, Judiciary Squirrel, National Mall Bench Squirrel, Tenacious Smithsonian Squirrel, and various other squirrels I have encountered.

Four Years Since

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An anniversary reminder from Anil Dash: it has been four years since Zeldman said “To Hell With Bad Browsers.” It was around then that we got to know the @import hack, started to shun Netscape 4 with div.ahem { display: none } “browser upgrade initiative” messages, and slowly began turning the <tables>* on bad web markup practices.

And today, four years later, we’re thinking of IE5.x the way we thought of Netscape 4 back then; sites like ABCNews and Orbitz and McAfee and of all things, MSN, sport XHTML pages with CSS layouts; and Mozilla not only came into being, but reached and passed v1.0, was downloaded millions of times, and is even beginning to threaten IE’s browser supremacy. Who’d have thunk it?

The face of the web was changed in four years, thanks to Jeffrey, ALA, and the WaSP. It’s like a graduation with flying colors.

Here’s how the Web Archive remembers it, albeit without CSS.

* WHAT A CLEVER PUN THAT WAS. WASN’T IT CLEVER?

Use Unsharp to Sharp

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Please, sweat the small stuff. Cameron Moll has some good advice for Photoshop artists on the use of Unsharp Mask to compensate for the problems of interpolation in resized images. It’s such a basic thing, yet I’ve been overlooking that step for years.

Zero Dollar Business Plan

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I feel that I must apologize, somewhat, for the increase in advertising on various pages here on my site. My rationalization is that it helps serve the hundreds who come to my site via Google searches everyday and want more than just my journal entries: sometimes, the content-driven ads actually have answers for them. Right? Right?

Oh fine, it’s the money.

Speaking of which, remember how I mentioned that content on “mesothelioma” and “asbestos” generated the top-earning clicks in text-based advertising? Well, Michael Buffington (of Stinkfactor Challenges fame, though sadly the domain was allowed to expire) has started a profit-driven asbestos weblog, exclusively about asbestos issues and that little Google Ads box in the corner. And why not? As Mkelley said when he started Applesque, “Where else but on the web can you start a business idea with $0?” *

The Ferengi would be proud.

* It must be pointed out, however, that the $0 doesn’t cover the cost of domain registration and web hosting.

Rembrandt, Goldworthy, Spock, Hughes

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I spent much of the weekend with Amy at the National Gallery of Art, viewing Rembrandt’s late religious portraits, Six centuries of prints and drawings, and Andy Goldsworthy’s nearly-complete Domes.

We also watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock on DVD at home, and later watched The Aviator at the new Regal cinema at Gallery Place/Chinatown.

Just this to say about The Aviator — Wow. Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn; is there anything Blanchett can’t do? And DiCaprio actually makes for a convincing Howard Hughes with the moustache — until he speaks. Maybe they should have pitch-corrected his voice or something.