thyme
1.30.2004
My food discovery for the week: fresh thyme makes a tasty enhancement for roast beef and mashed potatoes. Bruise the thyme a little for best flavor.
Also pummelos are delish.
aspiring scholars
1.22.2004
One of the more unusual tasks I have to undertake in the line of duty is screening scholarship entries. The company I work for is the administrator for a college scholarship competition in which the entrants apply online, answering short essay questions. As tens of thousands enter, we need to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Although it's an unusual job, it's also mind-numbingly boring, I'm sorry to say. Once the novelty wears off, scholarship screening turns a person into a drone with a finger hovering over the discard button. It's remarkable how few really unique experiences end up in scholarship entries. It makes you very jaded. Dean's Lists, cheerleading captains, torn ACL recoveries, and valedictorians all fail to impress me.
However, reading scholarship entries puts you in touch with the thought processes of thousands of college students. It's informative. I'm glad to say there are quite a number of young (and not so young) people who want “meaningful” careers - in service to humanity or to contribute to art or literature. I'm sorry to find that so many young women think that a “big success” is graduating from high school without getting pregnant. Most of the entries manage to be reasonably coherent, though I sometimes encounter some pretty dreadful malapropisms. There are a lot of eating disorders out there, and a lot of parents who actually tell their children that they could never make it into such-and-such college, which I find appalling. One young woman said that success was good, but rubbing it in the face of people who doubted her was better. Yow.
Reading all these entries puts me in touch with a kind of high school psyche — and reminds me of my own high school years. High schools are like their own very small, insular, rather warped societies. Things that are insignificant to the outside world can be deathly important to high schoolers. In some ways it amazes me that people come out of the experience with healthy minds — and some don't, I suppose.
Still, it's heartening to know that there are so many people out there with determination to better themselves through education, and mostly with good motives — kids who want to be teachers, mothers who are returning to school to inspire their children, workers reeducating themselves for more meaningful professions. It makes up for the times when I think to myself, “If I have to read the words ‘honor role’ [sic] one more time, I'm going to scream...”
living, playing, and dying daisies
1.19.2004
Been rather busy...
My gerbera daisy died. It had had a disease called powdery mildew for weeks if not months. It really looked like it was doing OK, it just had some fuzzy white stuff on it, kind of like bread mold. Everything I read said to spray the plant with a fungicide. So I did. “Spray every surface of the plant.” That's what I did. Within four days all the leaves wilted and the plant croaked. I killed my plant. I should have just left the mildew alone.
Found a new place to live. In less than a month I will finally have my own washer and dryer, dishwasher, frost-free refrigerator, and be able to walk into my bathroom in the middle of the night without apprehension of hearing the next-door neighbors getting it on like wildcats in heat. Gotta be grateful for that.
I just got Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for PC. I was surprised and disappointed that KOTOR for PC doesn't support a game controller, especially since it's a console port. I think they did a good job with the keyboard/mouse interface, but it's still way more comfortable to game with a controller, in my opinion.
I'm feeling scatterbrained. Perhaps in a week or so I'll have something more pithy or profound to say.
column background colors - revisited
1.9.2004
Ha!
The very problem I blogged about just a little while ago — making two columns of different length appear equal — is the subject of a new article at A List Apart. And it turns out Dan Cederholm's strategy is the same one I came up with and am currently employing on this site. His explanation is much clearer than mine, of course.
Guess I knew more than I thought I did.
printing background images
My latest design frustration: our client has a simple listing of text links down the side of the page as their navigation. They decide they want to put little fleurs between each link to separate them. I figure out a way of adding the images that takes less than five minutes and I only have to change one file — the CSS.
The HTML looks like this:
<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="link1.html">link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="link2.html">link 2</a></li>
</ul>and the CSS has this definition:
#nav li {
list-style-type:none;
padding:1em 0;
background:url(fleur.gif) center top no-repeat;
}That worked great and I was extremely pleased that it took so little time and effort on my part. Then a new wrinkle was introduced.
It turns out that this particular client had a way of reviewing the site that hadn't occurred to me — she had her assistant print it for her. She never looked at it on screen. After being assured by the account rep that she had tried unsuccessfully to convince the client to look at the screen instead of the printouts, and some silent muttering to myself about the need for minimum technical competency among web site owners, I thought, well, look, we just need to get the client's assistant to turn on background printing. Then the client can see her fleurs and everyone will be happy.
Yet another wrinkle was introduced.
When I printed the site from Mozilla with background colors and images turned on, the fleurs printed and it looked fine. But printed from IE, the site was missing the fleurs. Background colors and images were set to print, and indeed, they were printing, all except those stupid fleurs.
You could see smoke coming out of my ears at this point. After all the machinations we were going through to try to save this client from herself, to be foiled by a browser bug was irritating, to say the least.
I was pretty sure we couldn't get the client's assistant to install Mozilla on her system to do the printing. Besides, there was always the chance that our client would decide to print from the site herself, find out that IE didn't print out her fleurs, then rage and storm about the “defect.”
So I butchered my code. I took the background rule out of my CSS and inserted <img scr="..."><br> into every list item of the navigation on every page. Cursing silently...
a home for my tunes
1.7.2004
So the new iPod mini has come out. I like the way it looks, but it's not so cool as to make me forget the whole bang-for-the-buck factor. I've been looking at portable, high-capacity MP3 players for a long time now, but still haven't taken the plunge. It's a big chunk of change to lay down for a piece of equipment that is on my “non-essential” list.
For a while I was thinking about getting the old Archos jukebox because I could use it as a photo wallet, too, and it runs on rechargeable AAs (no non-replaceable batteries for me, thank you very much). User ratings on it were a little iffy though, so I passed it by. I hate Archos' website. Why do they make it so difficult to compare individual products? Why is so unclear which things are links and which are not? Why do they have so many ugly animated banners? Why does it have to load so slowly?
This is what I want: a player that works with Windows and Mac; to which I can offload photos from my CompactFlash card; that has a battery I can replace myself. I'm taking recommendations.
Update: OK, I've spent some hours investigating, and I've come to the conclusion that what I'm looking for does not exist. Phooey. 01.08.04
small steps and great ones
1.5.2004
Quite a few things in the news today to make me hopeful:
Afghanistan approved a democratic constitution; the Mars rover is sending back pictures from hundreds of millions of km away; the leaders of India and Pakistan are meeting for the first time in over two years.
This last bit of news reminds me of the importance of pragmatism in world affairs. I don't pretend to be well-versed in world politics, but it does seem to me that pragmatism is usually more valuable than idealism in global relations. From what I know of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he's gone out on a limb several times to take actions that resulted in better relations between Pakistan and the U.S. as well as between Pakistan and India. I don't know what his personal motivations are, but I know the results seem to have been good so far.
On the world stage, wanting peace for practical, even selfish reasons can be more powerful than wanting peace for idealistic reasons — since the practical reasons can be argued with some force, while it is much more difficult to argue people into your own idealism, especially when it may conflict with their own. For example, Musharraf may want better world relations for Pakistan for purely economic reasons, while some of his own people will want him dead for what he is willing to cede to the U.S. or India. But if he is successful in bringing more prosperity to the country, the results will become powerful persuaders in themselves.
Perhaps I'm naive, but that's my two cents, anyway.
signs and markers
1.3.2004
Though I am not, as my friends know, a religious person, and though I am wont to scoff at mysticism, I still regard myself as a spiritual person. There have been times when I have felt that circumstances about me were such as to guide me away from a path I had chosen and onto a new one. It always seemed ridiculously conceited, however, to say that I felt the hand of God in my life, especially when around me I could see people who did not seem to be receiving spiritual guidance that they needed. But of late I have been taking stock of my life, and looking back, I can see that at potential crises of my life, points at which the whole of life could be shaped, circumstances outside my control were shaped as to be forceful, almost pointed, markers for the direction my life should take. I can only say that I am grateful beyond words for this unseen hand in my life, and will take care not to squander this life which has been so sedulously guarded.
If this seems a strange, enigmatic post, I can only say that my life has been going through a powerful process of change lately, and I want to make some record of it. And to remind you, my friends, not to ignore the signs and markers in your lives.
