Well, I’m off to Union Station to catch a train to Baltimore. But the mobile blog (now with new interface!) will help me scratch the blogging itch on the go.
Lost In Translation
Lost In Translation will play “Telephone” with your words, translating them back and forth and back again through five languages. (Link via Ben.)
“Wild vacuum-breathing beasts from Rhode Island! We have to get away!”
– Savage of derespiration of the animals of the console of Rhode! We must go!
Okay, now I’m going to go and wash my ear.
The Cockroach Challenge … of Doom!
Suddenly, an extremely large flying cockroach flew in through the window, glanced off the wall, and buzzed my ear before landing on my bed.
I’ve dealt with cockroaches before, with great vengeance and might, but this was a somewhat unique situation: Kill it now and stain the sheets, or shoo it off and have it flying around and escaping deeper into the house to lay eggs and spread disease? I opted to go for the kill.
The challenge: swat it with my slipper, at such an angle and speed that it would suffer a mortal blow, but not so smashing that its viscera would spatter across the bedsheet from a burst wound.
I poised, and it tensed, wings raising to launch anew.
But I prevailed, with a sudden blow so quick that it severed one hairy leg, and sent the insect flying off the bed to the wood floor. It landed, bounced once, struggled a bit, then was still. Dead, yet unspattered — but for the single cockroach leg lying atop the sheet.
I triumphantly flicked the leg into the garbage, scooped the rest of the carcass into the garbage with a few squares of tissue, and drowned what remained of its life in 70% isopropyl alcohol.
Now excuse me, please. I need to go wash my ear.
Tables and font sizes in Mozilla
We’re used to font-sizes not getting carried into table cells, so that when coding CSS for tables-based layouts, designers declare font-sizes separately for the body and td tags.
That seems to have changed with Mozilla 1.x. For example, with the stylesheet…
body { font-size: smaller }
td { font-size: smaller }
… one would expect IE or Netscape to show text of the same size in and out of table cells. Mozilla, however, carries the “smaller” property into tables, so that the extra font-size declaration for td becomes annoying and redundant, displaying an even smaller text size.
This poses a problem for people trying to make cross-browser table-based layouts using relative font-size keywords, percentages, or ems. The solution? Either use pixel-sizes, or don’t declare font-sizes at all. Oh, the horror!
(CSS layouts which aren’t dependent on tables seem to sound more and more sensible everyday, don’t they?)
DC Heat Wave 2002
<old geezer voice>
Record high? Cooling centers? You call this a heat wave? This was a brisk, cool day back in Manila.
(Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit.)
Maryland Transportation
To figure out how to get to and around Baltimore tomorrow, I’ve been consulting WMATA, the MTA, Yahoo Maps, and Craigslist’s DC Forum. Now I think I know how to take the MARC, I know the basic routes to get where I’m going in Baltimore, and I’ve learned the “WMATA Bus Trick.”
Gee. How would I have done this without the internet?
Why Andy Warhol likes Campbell Soup
It doesn’t take a Freud to figure it out: Andy Warhol liked Campbell soup because it reminded him of his mother.
Camgirls and Enjo Kosai
Another feature on camgirls, this time from Yahoo! Internet Life. Page 3 mentions cultural similarities with Enjo Kosai, a now-illegal practice in Japan where well-to-do teenage girls trade sex and/or dates with older men for gifts and cash. Shocking, to be sure, but the parallelism is quite interesting.
No doubt, some of you are thinking, Why does this horny bastard keep blogging about camgirl “culture” and Asian sex when it’s obvious he’s just fixated on softcore cam shots of nubile young jailbait teens? Sick puppy!
Wait, wait, no! Beyond the usual adolescent fascination over the culture’s dangerous overlap with the far-less-subtle sphere of online pornography, what I find a bit more troubling are these words by former stripper Lily Burana: “Everyone vies for the attention of teenage girls — from men to marketing departments to entertainment industry tastemakers, They’re choosy, they’re sophisticated, and they’re cultural arbiters in their own way, and everyone knows it.”
Good gosh. Okay, young girls just beginning to discover the blossoming power of their sexuality, by virtue of their sex, hold enough cultural clout to be the trendsetters of our day? Does that sound accurate to you, and if so, just a bit scary? (Related angsty pithyism: “If hypnotists are so good, why aren’t they the ones in control? What if they are?”)
Well, perhaps I’m delving too deeply into something which could be a potential stumbling block, so I’ll quit it while I’m still decent. Oh wait, too late.
Baltimore on Thursday
I’m going to Baltimore this Thursday to scope out student housing options for the upcoming schoolyear. If anyone has suggestions on cheap furnished rooms for rent in the Bolton Hill, Mt Vernon, or W Mt Royal Ave. area, or if anyone in the neighborhood wants to meet up for afternoon tea and biscuits or something, drop me a line.
(Remember; I’m not picky about the rooms I live in, having come from three years of living in a tiny L-shaped box of about 10 m2. As long as it’s in a safe area and is furnished with the basic necessities of urban American living, I’ll be content.)
New Web Standards Project
The new WaSP is up. Also see ScottAndrew’s Netscape 4 “tribute.”