was reminded of lewis' out of the silent planet as we watched the sun setting last night. at least, i think it was lewis. it could have been an asimov short story...don't remember. anyway, the author created the martian race to have enhanced sensory capability. sound, sight, and touch somehow merged into one sensation--an overwhelming experience for humans. anible mentioned a movie (city of angels?) that had angels hearing music in the sunrise, which made me think of the lewis/asimov story.

i wonder if humans started out with one sense--if our minds were able to interpret signals from ears and skin and eyes etc. into a coherent whole--but the fall splintered it into five pieces...

watching the sunset from cornell's Slope is something of a community event. there's the old couple, sitting side by side, not touching, not speaking, drinking in the sun color. there's the group of nameless teenyboppers, potential students with disposable cameras and high giggles and miniskirts. there's the lonely photographer, headphones in place, gazing intently as his camera twists and struggles. there are internationals from india and korea and france, boisterous, quick line everyone up on the railing, ok smile *click*, gone. the singletons, post-docs, sitting five feet from everyone and shyly making quiet conversation as the evening passes. all the while the sun slips lower, now cloud-hidden, now gone. and you stand, pick up your blanket and brush the grass from your legs, and walk back to your car with your new family. no goodbye's, no have-a-nice-evening's, no friendly smiles. just silent anticipation, silent knowledge of future encounters.

there was a car crash as the sun set last night. (you can hear everything that goes on in the city from the slope.) *srreeeweeereeweweeerewewerewTHUNK* it was the impact that did it--we hear brakes squealing all the time, that's not unusual. they're not followed by THUNK's. quite a dramatic effect. all conversation stopped in midsentence, all heads turned toward downtown. we didn't hear any ambulances afterward, so maybe it wasn't serious.

in other news, there's a nature article about the corollaries between music and language. there's a study that found that the number of times a word appears in a literary work is roughly equivalent to the inverse of its frequency (or frequency squared, depending on your source--the details aren't relevant at the moment). the explanation is that literary works create their own context--in my first paragraph, it's more likely that i'd type sun than ferrari, for example. a physicist from argentina found that the same principle applies to notes in tonal music. makes sense, if you think about it--a work in g major is going to contain a lot of b-naturals. what i found interesting, though, is that the principle doesn't really apply to non-tonal works (also makes sense). the article (not the study, i don't think) explains that they have a much lower level of "meaningful context" than tonal works.

well, that's bunk, as any musician with theory training can attest. much atonal and non-tonal music is highly systematized at the pitch level, at least as much if not moreso than tonal music. (in particular, those schoenberg pieces the study used.) good grief, part of the definition of atonal/non-tonal music is that it doesn't recognize one pitch over another, so of course this study won't say much about it. i wonder what would have been the result had the study not used individual notes as its word corrolaries. individual notes are more like individual letters, savez? a piece in g major can contain a g-sharp and still be tonal, but you won't know it without the context. now, you take a set--that'd be a bit more along the lines of a musical "word." and i'll bet it would show a high level of "meaningful context" in atonal/non-tonal music. anyway. be interesting, no? (the actual study is available for download in a variety of formats, if you're interested.)

lessee, other notables. the us computer emergency readiness team is recommending that people use a different browser than ie, due to the latest ie security exploits. so it's official, guys! ie sucks, ditch it! also, the sovereignty handover in iraq happened this morning, two days ahead of schedule. be interesting to see if we're really leaving....

o, i've still got gmail invitations to give away, get 'em while they're hot.

i had a fantastic weekend.

weather was around 70degF and SUNNY--both days, baby--with a little breeze by the lake. ah, it was lovely.

and i cannot, for the life of me, remember what happened on which day.
story of my life.

anible and i brought food to upper buttermilk in the afternoon, walked around the pond. it's a nice walk, lots of off-trail jaunts available. where the trail crosses a stream there's a place to play on the river islands, skip stones and get feet wet. we stopped there for a bit--it was almost an out-of-body experience, to have such glorious weather. did you know, my area had rain for 26 days straight last month? but to continue. it's mostly flat until you cross the stream, at which point it turns into six mile creek. updownupdown. cliffs and so forth.

we went biking on another day (sunday? it could have been sunday). had an absolutely rotten time, but it was good for me and the weather was still postcard-esque. sat in the grass at cornell plantation for a while beforehand. i was working, he slept. mostly. could have lingered there much longer than we did...

yesterday (i think) mum and grandpa and i went sailing. which was quite a feat, considering the complete lack of atmospheric energy. (also considering a near-collision with a stack of slate--my fault, of course. mom rescued us.) was pretty funny, grandpa had heard there would be 10-18 knots blowing, and the lake was clear as glass. (i had the tiller when mum and grandpa were setting up the mast. "point it into the wind, gemma!" "what wind?! where's it coming from?!") no matter, it was lovely regardless. i hadn't seen grandpa's new boat, 18-ish footer and wide as a tank. you could seat 12 people in this thing. first time i've sailed in a gaff rig. very exciting, you know. the wind did pick up after we'd been drifting for about an hour, and we had a nice sail. and i drove everyone nuts with my camera. she's a good boat, we'll have fun with her. solid, but not so much so as to be boring. ah, we will have fun with her. *grin grin*

in the websphere, redemption in a blog has released version 0.2 of his mbox-to-gmail importing utility, gexodus. it will take your mozilla mail or thunderbird mailbox files and import them into your gmail account. haven't tried it yet, still waiting for the recursive directories feature, but looks like a great tool. (incidentally, if you don't have a gmail account and you'd like one, leave a comment with your [spamified] email address and i'll send an invitation your way. i've got a few left, and no one i know wants them.)

other goodies: hide your laptop in a pizza box, lots of linkage for web standards.

there's got to be something going on here that i'm missing. (also at the bbc, npr audio, the washington post, the new york times, and reuters. see bugmenot.com for logins, if you need them.)

please. tell me this is yet another example of biased journalism, tell me this has no claim on the truth. tell me the united states of america, self-styled global policeman, did not just break the geneva convention.

please?

those of you who know me personally are familiar with my deep and abiding love of motion pictures. stagecoach, arsenic and old lace, breakfast at tiffany's, the great escape, the sting, star wars, top gun, the matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, i could go on. i love movies. and i love good actors.

take johnny depp, for example. fantastic actor. if the esteemed oscar judges hadn't pre-determined a sweep for the lord of the rings, he would have had a best actor out of this year's awards for pirates of the caribbean. he is the only actor, in all of hollywood, who could have pulled off that role.

so we got a dvd in a pizza box the other day. (thanks, pudgie's.) don juan demarco, starring johnny depp, marlon brando, and faye dunaway. (dunaway was horrendously underused, but that's a different story.) not a bad movie, all told--sort of a cross between a fairy tale and a seventh-grade wet dream. (the fairy tale is the good part.) the story centers around 'don juan,' depp, who believes (or does he?) that he really is byron's lover of lovers. brando plays the retiring psychiatrist assigned to don juan's case, and dunaway play's brando's wife of many years. anyway, i read some really less-than-satisfactory reviews (poorly written, poorly conceived) by people in high places (roger ebert--yes, that one--and whoever the guy is at the san francisco chronicle) and was inspired to write this little tirade just to set the record straight.

first of all, mr. ebert: ruining brando for those of us not familiar with his work, purely because you've been desensitized to his acting techniques, was unnecessary. his acting wasn't the greatest i've ever seen, but neither was it the train wreck you described. techniques work, that's why they're used. to let your bitterness at his perceived indifference color the rest of your review is--well, 'annoying' is a good word, if generous. and the popcorn scene was cute. so there. where's your sense of romance?

and mr. san francisco chronicle, to go on about marlon brando's (rather excessive, granted) bulk for two and a half paragraphs is a little ridiculous.

back to you, mr. ebert. let's address your last few paragraphs, shall we? the popcorn scene was cute. wait, i already said that. excuse me. to continue: don juan did not fight a duel with his own father. is that in the poem? (i know, i haven't read it, i should be ashamed of myself. i've seen several versions of the opera, does that count?) 'cause it ain't in the movie. don juan also did not "save himself by disguising himself as a woman." a sultan's wife bought him as her sex toy, and SHE put him in drag to hide him from her husband. (and technically, rocco wasn't dancing in the patient's ward, but i'll let that one slide.) did you even watch the movie? o, and your comment about "the next time i see dunaway"...come on, sir, really. we all know you're famous.

mr. san francisco chronicle: you may have misinterpreted what you called don juan's "vampiric" tendencies. that "one-second shot" of a prior conquest wasn't intended to show a woman pining away for the lost love of her life. she was back in exactly the same position she had been when don juan found her--alone in a restaurant, awaiting an overdue companion (not don juan). (and incidentally, it made a nice contrast with the other scene in the restaurant--here's a life with life, and here's a life without.) if there was an "emotional devouring" going on, it was on her part.

and...that's it, really. o, depp had a few cary elwes moments. *grin grin* the "big question" seemed to be, if life is what you make of it, can only the clinically insane make it better than it is?

nice to have a clean floor. why is it that uncluttering my room unclutters my brain?

masses of mozilla goodies today. first up: i relent. firefox 0.9 is fantastic. i don't know what happened between the release candidate and the milestone, but it's fantastic. the incompatibility between my theme of choice and my favorite extension has been resolved, the new extension and theme managers are great, the long-overdue update utility is really handy, the data migration tool is solid and works with other browsers (internet explorer, netscape, etc.) as well as earlier versions of firefox, the speed enhancements are much appreciated, and so on, and so forth. go get it.

thunderbird, sister mail client to the firefox browser, has also been released. it's also got shiny new extension/theme managers, plus major speed improvements and a much smaller download. go get that, too.

over here in the article arena, we've got a special at arstechnica.com, an interview with mozilla engineer scott collins. entertaining guy (read the section on what happens if you try to develop big programs without tinderbox) with interesting things to say about mozilla, longhorn, .net, and so forth. a few highlights:

on toppling microsoft (obligatory, you know:

There's only one thing powerful in this world enough to topple Microsoft, if toppling Microsoft is your goal, and that is Microsoft. People and empires, they fall under their own weight, because they're the only ones heavy enough to take them down.

astute. the only thing that can take microsoft down is its own inability to deliver.
on do-everything software:

But I think in the new world it's not about one big program to solve everybody's needs, it's about a zillion tiny programs all stuck together. Stuck together one way for you, stuck together another way for me that do the right thing.

that, ladies and gentlemen, has been my software mantra for years. preach it, mr. collins. he also discussed the possibilities of a mozilla/mono (the open source project to create a free implementation of the .net framework) collaboration: I think Mozilla and Mono have a tremendous synergy that could really lead to great things, and I'm all for that, netscape's biggest mistake: And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name, the (other) gre, xul, xpcom, and this sentence is much too long.

lockergnome is running an article on why you should dump internet explorer, written by (this is the interesting part) an msce. pertinent quotes on security

What makes other browsers better than IE at protecting vs. spyware and other attacks? Well, it’s simple really - most other browsers don’t make it so easy to install malicious software on your system without you knowing about it.

and web standards

The absolute worst browser when it comes to supporting the standards is Internet Explorer.

(emphasis his, not mine.) he presents firefox as a worthy alternative:

Not only does it keep your browsing sessions a lot more secure and spyware-free, but it also supports the standards religiously and has some a [sic] wide range of powerful features....I personally recommend Firefox [over opera and other alternatives] due to its excellent development team and large user base.

thank you, mr. miessler.

in closing, let me just comment that it is absurd for a grammar nazi to be dating a linguistics major.

aigh, i be smarshed. (yes, i did just make it up. it's totally rufus.) did a twenty-miler with anible this evening, to taughannock and back. fortunately, the return trip is significantly lighter on the ol' quads than the trip out--with the minor *cough* exception of one horrific uphill. legs were just seconds from their early retirement notices. but it was lovely out--partly cloudy, zephyr-y, nice and cool by the lake. was a good feeling, coming down the hill to the park and getting broadsided by a fifteen-degree temperature difference.

one of these days, i'll do a ride like that and NOT be completely useless afterwards.

firefox missed its projected release date for the 0.9 milestone. not a big surprise there, i don't ever remember a phoenix/firebird/firefox milestone being released on time.

incidentally, i've not been terribly impressed with the release candidate, fantastic new documentation notwithstanding. the new extensions and themes managers are sluggish, as is the old download manager, and i'm not a big fan of the new theme (included for copyright reasons--it's not finished yet). drives me nuts to have firefox almost freeze every time i download something. (it works fine if you don't have the manager pop up when the download starts, but i like the progress indicator.) nevermind the longstanding memory leak in windows. and then there are all the issues with the new api's--which, granted, are not the browser's fault, per se. my favorite theme hasn't (yet) been updated and the default for 0.8 breaks one of my favorite extensions. ah well, 0.8 works for me for now, so i'm perfectly happy to wait until 1.0 (later this summer). it still beats internet explorer (and opera, for that matter) into the dust.

<update date="20040615" time="0922">
according to mozillazine, firefox 0.9 was, in fact, released on the fourteenth. so i guess i'm just in the wrong time zone. the bigger picture (from the burning edge) has a fairly comprehensive list of updates since 0.8--there were a few i forgot about, including the 'set as wallpaper' dialog, the ability to copy images from the context menu. *looks again* o my goodness. they finally turned on inline autocomplete...aigh, i may have to try it again, folks.
</update>

on that note, some linkage:

• the firefox release candidate has been reviewed at madpenguin.org, on the fedora core 2 platform.
• the mozilla store has been redesigned, go buy stuff!
• a new-to-me article from design by fire on the shortcomings of the open source movement. pg-13 for language. title insight for the unenlightened. great rant, he's voiced a lot of my own experience, particularly with web standards. (there's some other good stuff at the same site, take a look around as long as you're there.)

o, and there's a release candidate out for thunderbird 0.7. haven't tried it yet, check the forum post (see first link) for a listing of new features.

(i hate it when you're computing in a dark room on a laptop and small bugs land on the screen, because you can't kill them on the screen and you can't see them unless they are...)

go'geous day today. amazing. perfectly blue sky, full sun, 75-ish degrees. (we got one day of no rain between may 3 and may 28. welcome to central new york.) anible and i went to taughannock falls, a favorite park among the locals. it's got three sections: one for the gorge trail (inland) and one each for the northern and southern halves of the peninsula (split by a river). anible and i tend to favor the north shore, because there's a better view and it's not (usually) as packed with obnoxious people. (except for the time we arrived right in the middle of a sorority beer bash. that was exciting. *cough*) no food stand, you know. so anyway! found a picnic table right on the water (well, obviously, not literally on the water, per se--yeshua was unable to join us in bodily form. more along the lines of six inches back from...) and skipped stones for a while. i was a none-too-pathetic stone skipper in my day. so much fun to surprise anible with these things. *grin grin*

<rant>

there was an unbelievable amount of crap sitting on this beach. i should have taken pictures. it was vile. used water bottles, misshapen plastic of unknown origin, bottle caps, dead balloons--ridiculous. people. boaters. you're not stupid people, so this shouldn't need repetition: when you throw your junk off your boat into your lake of choice *drumroll* it washes up on shore. bring a trash bag with you, for pete's sake, they're really not that hard to use.

</rant>

anible discovered the saxophoning crayfish (as yet unnamed) while we were stone-skipping. had to get a few pictures--really, how often do you find that kind of talent in a crustacean?

in other news, i discovered the joys of fantasy stock markets yesterday. started with b$500, now worth about b$420,000. and i don't even know what i'm doing. (check out my profile, there's a link in the top box.) lots o' fun for the moment, i'm still waiting for the novelty to wear off. makes me wonder what kind of effect bloggers have had on the real stock exchange, actually. i really know absolutely nada about it--is it possible to zip in, buy a few thousand really cheap shares, watch them go up 30 cents, and then sell the buggers off?

you know what'd be a great idea for a poll? (if one was in the habit of polling?) 'hangnail handling: clip, bite, or file?'

first swim of the season yesterday. it was beastly hot--no breeze, no clouds (until later in the day), just full sun and lots of humidity. and i work from my air-conditionless home. out of my attic bedroom. in which i keep the windows shut to discourage indoor nest-building by stinging insects.

it was a good ten degrees--at least--warmer in my room than it was outside. i could have watched the sweat bead out of my pores.

so anible got back from rochester, and we went swimming. ah, it was lovely. took off to the popular swimming area at six mile creek, near the wildflower preserve. not the best place to swim at the creek, but the only one that doesn't involve a mile-long uphill on the way back. *grin* by the time we got there it had cooled off enough that really swimming wasn't necessary. we waded thigh-deep along the far bank instead, under a grove of hemlocks at the river bend. (*happy sigh* yes i'm a sap, leave me alone.) the gorge is distinctly gorge-like at that particular corner. the walls curl easily ten feet or so above the water level, and the riverbed is chiselled smooth. ah, it was so good to be outside in the sun and water. curse the economic forces that bind us to our paychecks! ar!

we stayed for around an hour. saw a mole trying to make its way up the wall--it was having difficulty, so anible helped it. *grin* played with these little water beetles i'd never seen before. impossible to catch, i don't know how they moved so fast. got the adrenaline going when we simlatenously noticed hundreds of discarded exoskeletons stuck to all dry rock faces. anible commented, "they're bee larvae, see the legs? there are usually three or so hives up in the trees later in the summer." needless to say, we left shortly thereafter. *cough* good ol' apiphobia. i would have taken pictures, but i didn't have my camera at hand--bad idea to take expensive electronic equipment into rivers, you know.

o, went to see the latest harry potter last evening. a fun movie. if you haven't seen it and you're going to, here's a tip: don't despair, it really is a good movie with a good ending. heh, the foreshadowing is fantastic. you know all those random shots of harry staring out of clock faces or into his reflection? yeah, they're relevant. it's very nicely put together.

happy international blogger's day! there's nothing actually going on, but at least we get a day! go be expressive!

here are my contributions to a few worthwhile googlebombs going around.

to start things off, here's a definition of jew. go visit wizbang for more info on why the term "jew" needs to be bombed. then there's the obligatory weapons of mass destruction bomb. no apologies to supporters of the bush administration, this is funny. finally, the mass genocide/religious persecution in sudan has been googlebombed in an effort organized by passion of the present. more info on the sudan googlebombing at itchyhands.com.

UPDATE 20040609T11:26: the jew googlebomb has worked!

venus crossed in front of the sun early this morning, for the first time in 122 years. if you missed it, don't worry, it's happening again in 2012. there are also articles at sky and telescope, astronomy.com, and space.com.

in other news, cnet is running at article by their chief political correspondant on why the fcc should curl up and disappear. it's a good read, here's hoping somebody Up There(TM) is paying attention.

over the past few days, i've been searching for the ideal (free) php editor/ide, jes' to make me work a lil' bit easier. i've posted a few short reviews below, on the off chance that anyone else has been doing the same thing.

phpedit:

the licensing issues are a headache, and the download/install process gives new meaning to the term bloated. the lack of ftp support means i can't use it. otherwise, if you're not interested in a project manager, you may want to check this one out.

maguma studio free:

a better choice than phpedit, but still less than optimal. again, limited ftp support means i can't use it.

dev-php:

too buggy for consistent use. it's a shame, i generally favor open source solutions, but this just isn't usable.

mps php designer:

waste of disk space, don't use it.

pspad:

if you don't mind reorganizing the layout and reopening remote files every time you start the program, use this editor. i found it to be too much of a pain, but there's no accounting for impatience...

crimson editor:

my pick. use it, use it, use it.

phpedit: my first attempt. there's a sizable online community (forums, profiles, etc.), and a few application spinoffs. waterproof, the parent company, has just released version 1.0, complete with a brand new licensing plan. *coughgag* you download the 20mb+ install file, wait five-ten minutes for the several megabytes of raw html manuals to copy over (anyone care to explain why they didn't use .chm format?), and then learn, "sorry, you need a license." you're confused, you go back to the main site for more info. nothing doing. you try the forums, and aha! you can get a temporary license in your phpedit online profile! no mention, however, of the alleged "free license for personal use." ah well. barring the installation, this is really not a bad editor if you can live without a project manager (the included plugin is extremely buggy) and ftp support (it's in the project manager). the install includes php 4.3.6, which is the latest version i've seen an editor include, and the dbg debugger, so testing out that code doesn't require your own server. it also has context-sensitive tooltips for help remembering which function syntax belongs to which function. very nice.
summary: the licensing issues are a headache, and the download/install process gives new meaning to the term bloated. the lack of ftp support means i can't use it. otherwise, if you're not interested in a project manager, you may want to check this one out.

maguma studio (free): the 'lite' incarnation of the pro version. install was not a problem, and included php 4.3.4 and the debugger. studio free is crippled, which means most of the really nifty features are disabled. the project manager is one of the few tools that works, but it won't take ftp files. outside the project manager, ftp support is limited--you can't batch open files from your server, and they aren't included in the editor's 'open file' memory (which keeps track of every open file at program exit, and reopens them at the next program start). the function tooltips are quite good, including both the syntax and an explanation. i did have some problems customizing the fonts, but that's mostly cosmetic.
summary: a better choice than phpedit, but still less than optimal. again, limited ftp support means i can't use it.

dev-php: hard-core open source, back in active development after a long freeze. (not related to dev-c++, which is a solid ide for c and c++.) dev-php uses the nullsoft installer, which means installation takes about fifteen seconds. it doesn't make any shortcuts (start menu, quick launch, etc.), however, nor does it include a build of php, a debugger, or a manual, so you'll have to get those yourself. the editor is relatively lightweight, with a slick interface (i'm a gui junkie, leave me alone). i couldn't get the ftp client to make nice with my linux firewall, so i have no idea how that all works. the syntax highlighting is buggy, but the tooltip function help is adequate (syntax only, which is really all you need).
summary: too buggy for consistent use. it's a shame, i generally favor open source solutions, but this just isn't usable.

mps php designer: this one's something of a joke. once you get past the "no disk" startup errors (just keep hitting cancel), you're treated to an office xp lookalike, complete with a "my bar" widget on the left. it includes "my projects," "my snippets," "my tags," etc. (i don't know, i found it really annoying--i'm using php instead of asp for a reason, here, folks--but maybe some people would find it...um...inviting?) on the right, there's an html tag generator, which produces code that won't validate as xhtml. more annoyingness. to top that off, there was no tooltip function help, and the ftp client had the same problem as the one in dev-php.
summary: waste of disk space, don't use it.

pspad: full-featured web ide. i like a lot more than i dislike about this editor, so i'll get the three negatives out of the way. first, the open file memory doesn't include remote (ftp) files; it opens the temporary copies rather than reloading off the server. (probably because the multiple ftp account support means it doesn't automatically reconnect to ftp servers.) second, the tooltip function help doesn't include the syntax in the tooltip. i generally know what my function does, but i can never remember the argument order, so that's not terribly helpful. (the syntax appears in the actual file if you select the function, but then you've got a bunch of deleting to do.) third, there's no layout memory. pspad has a lot of tools that dock along the sides of the editor, so that's a pain. i have to spend a couple minutes reorganizing every time i start the program. that's it, everything else i like. the syntax highlighting customization is great, it handles my fixedsys font properly, the ftp manager is really nice, it's got a whole host of html/css/etc. tools (such as integration with the top style css editory), the code explorer is well-organized and useful, etc., etc., etc. some of the other tools include a clipboard monitor for organizing your copy-paste's, an ascii table, and a couple color tools, to name a few.
summary: if you don't mind reorganizing the layout and reopening remote files every time you start the program, use this editor. i found it to be too much of a pain, but there's no accounting for impatience...

crimson editor: all-around programmer's editor. extremely versatile--i use it as an ide, i know others who use it as a notepad replacement. no frills whatsoever, just pure functionality. it's a beautiful thing. anyway! (this was actually the editor i started with and wanted to move from, and i ended up coming back.) the only weakness of crimson editor is its lack of tooltip function help. other than that, it's perfect. open file memory includes remote files, ftp client includes multiple account support, layout memory includes every dock position. the project manager is the best i've seen, for two reasons. one, it easily allows remote files to be added. two, it has right-click options like "add active file" and "add all open files." you'd think it would be obvious, to include the ability to add files in use to your project file, but every other editor i tried made me go through dialogs and explorer windows--it was absurd. the file is sitting right there, open, just add it! it's also got customizable template files, which is handy for such people as litestep developers. *cough* the real power of this editor, though, is in its ten customizable user tools. i have it set up so that f1 references the current word in my php chm manual, f2 in my mysql chm manual, and f3 in my html chm manual. shift+f1 searches the documentation at php.net for it. f9 checks my php syntax, and a couple more hotkeys give me a preview of the active file in firefox and internet explorer. there are also ten customizable macros, i haven't looked at those yet. *grin grin*
summary: my pick. use it, use it, use it.

hmm...that's a little extensive. maybe i'll move it to a separate software review page someday....

ah, the festival. ithaca at its best. except for "ithaca's only traditional brazilian samba band!", which was absolutely rancid. seems the only requirement for the lead singer spot was fluency in portuguese. but the rest--mmmm. macgillicuddies, classic rock-n-roll, elvis-style. half the town was swing dancing in front of the stage. oculus, alternative/techno/punk/etc., massive crowd. (strange coming to them after macgillicuddies, i must say...) the infamous drum circle, which gathers after dark at the alternative community school to rhythmize. tents upon tents of really cool artsy-craftsy/tie-die stuff, none of which i bought, because i had a grand total of $5.00 in my wallet. international food, in one place for the only time all year. the the skinny german juggle boy, accompanied by a bunch of gnomes and some talented elephants. (ha, you think i'm kidding!) a whole afternoon outside, in the sorta-sun (hey, it's still ithaca), with anible, who caught a toad.

i love this city.

*urhghruhf dur* coffeeeee... *grurhfghrufh* ...must... *urhgur* ...have... *gurhg* ...coffeeeeee...





*ugrh*

say hello to div#inset, the bordered brown monstrosity over on the left. i noticed earlier that this site has been (miraculously) receiving 15-20 unique hits per day, most of them from people i don't know, so i figured an explanation was in order. if you're already enlightened, i'll clue you in: this site is hideously ugly in internet explorer, thanks to microsoft's blatant disregard for web standards of any kind. the color blocks in the background are gone (it's all green instead--might change that to blue or something), the side blocks don't auto-size height, the main block isn't formatted correctly, etc. so i added the inset, just to let *cough* internet explorer users know that i am, in fact, a middlingly competent designer. just consider this my belated contribution to the browser upgrade campaign.

eventually, i'll convince blogger that php exists on my server, and only have ie users see the inset.

incidentally, here's a css tip i picked up in my insetting efforts. i'm posting it here because i looked all over for it and didn't find it, and wasted much sleeping time. anyway. the techno-inclined among you may have noticed that my links are bordered on the bottom, not text-underlined. because that property applies to all links in general, it'll border-bottom anything between the <a></a> tags. so if your link is, in fact, an image, you'll end up with this 1px border beneath it. less than ideal, no? so you think, hmm, that shouldn't be there and you go in and make all the img tags that are descendants of a tags have no borders.

but alas! it doesn't work! *banging head on keyboard*

punchline: the border property applies to the link, not the image. so to change it, you have to change the link, not the image! my solution: give the link tags an img class if i'm using an image, and then add a.img { border-bottom: none; } to my stylesheet. problem solved.

it's been so long since i've been really productive, i'd almost forgotten what it's like. honestly, there is nothing quite akin to being done after hunching at my midget desk for eight hours straight. it's like...it's like finally seeing your 4.0 on the record after fidgeting and fiddling through the two weeks after finals.

someday, i'll construct analogies that have nothing to do with academia.

in other news, found a fantastic freeware file manager today. dual pane, keyboard shortcuts up the wazoo, integrated file preview, dos command line, usable bookmarks--it's very nice. still need to figure out how to convince windows that i really don't want to use the explorer file manager, at all, ever. i know there's a way, i just don't remember what it is. ah well.