Tuesday

The weather has turned cooler, and windy, but there's hardly been a cloud in the sky. The campus is a lot quieter than usual, due to spring break, so I've been snapping a few pictures of buildings while the snapping is good. The Boojum tree has been duly euthanized -- cut off about four feet from the ground, so far. There's a colony of cactus around its base that they probably didn't want the tree surgeons to squash. The bottle-brush trees are magnificent, trailing lavish plumes of scarlet. My allergies are at the point where one Benadryl a day isn't enough, but two are probably too much, which is about as bad as it gets. (I'm ridiculously sensitive to that stuff; most of the time one 25mg tablet a day is more than enough. Too much makes me tense as well as dry-mouthed and drowsy, so I try to keep the dose as low as possible.)

You can now get a G-mail account from the Google front page. At least, I could, and did.

Amazon is now showing Crystal Soldier as 'usually ships within 24 hours', but my March 1st order is still marked as due to ship in the first week of May. I'm slightly tempted to cancel and re-order, but it seems silly.

HTML neepery

I wonder how many people know this.

IE will handle absolute URLs and CSS when rendering HTML from a local disk.

Mozilla-based browsers won't, as far as I can tell. I discovered this last summer, in the course of doing a complicated data CD layout on a tight deadline.

I have no idea whether the HTML standards even have anything to say about this kind of thing.

(On the anti-Microsoft side, after I installed XP SP2 my IE went through a phase of giving me grief about using the Acrobat plugin on local files. I'm not entirely sure whether this has been fixed globally in more recent patches, or whether I somehow managed to find the right overrides on this machine.)


Yes, I'm weird; I code HTML with my fingernails by hand, using emacs or even notepad as my editor. Occasionally I used to cheat and use Word to set up the skeleton of a complicated table. Then I found out how to use imagemaps instead. Defining the regions by hand, of course.