pleonasm:now

I never thought I'd be here today. My flight from Atlanta to Paris was cancelled (Air France strike?), so they put me in a hotel for the night, and now I'm in downtown Atlanta all day, until my flight late tonight. I lived here for six years, and it's weird to be back, but great to see all my old friends. I'm using a computer at my old workplace. It's a 1.4GHz Pentium 4, and I've never used anything so incredibly fast.

I'll be back in Paris tomorrow - unless my flight gets cancelled again.

26 april 2001

Wow. Eight days without a post. Well, this is my last week in the US for a while - I have no idea when I'm coming back - and I've been busy saying goodbye to friends and going places. They were the quickest three months I can remember. I went to the Wild Animal Park, finally, this past weekend; I'll post the photos from that as soon as I get back to Paris on Thursday (well, as soon as I get over my jetlag, which always hits me pretty hard).

When I was a wee lad, I used to start a diary every January 1st, taking care to write something every day, but it would always tail off somewhere in the middle of March of April. I hope this weblog doesn't end up like that. The last week has been difficult and hectic, so I think I have a pretty good excuse, but I will always try to post regularly. Many other bloggers, however, don't post every day either, so I don't feel too guilty. It's a good thing no one is reading this anyway!

23 april 2001

Bad Netscape. Naughty Netscape.

I just spent over an hour checking and rechecking some HTML code in an attempt to find out why Netscape 6 was adding unwanted space to table cells (yes, I do still use tables sometimes), throwing off the entire alignment of a page I was creating. In desperation, I turned to Google and searched for an explanation. I found this article at evolt.org, which brought blessed relief from my frustration.

It turns out that if your document type declaration is not written in a certain exact way, Netscape adds the unwanted space. Don't ask me why; it makes no sense at all. The DTD has to be HTML 4; however, I had originally declared an XHTML DTD because my code is XHTML compliant. So I guess I'll have to declare no document type at all, which is bad, but I don't have much choice. It's insane. Ironically, Netscape consistently causes me more aggravation that even the AOL browser when I'm coding web pages.

15 april 2001

This was in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about a student jumping into a giant cake at his high school anniversary party:

The arrest came 11 days after the incident, during a scheduled meeting with the school principal, said Sarah Fisher, Jamieson's mother, who watched as school police handcuffed her son.

“I said, ‘This is absolutely incredulous,’” Fisher said. “There are many ways you could have handled this without taking it to this level.”

I've always loved it when people say “incredulous” when they mean “incredible.” It's up there with “irregardless,” “supposably,” and “mischevious.” I'm not really a linguistic snob, though; it's just amusing. But I'm glad the newspaper wrote “principal” and not “principle,” which I've seen a few times in print.

14 april 2001

Today is Friday 13th. This morning, I walked under a ladder, and a black cat crossed my path. Really.

I won't be going to the Wild Animal Park until next weekend (21-22 April) after all, but I'll try to get some other pictures up instead.

13 april 2001

Palm Springs was wonderful. I've posted a bunch of pictures on the photos page. I'm still not sure about the cities in the Valley (Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Indian Wells, and more), which are sprawling and rather uneventful, but the desert and mountains around them are stunning. I can't wait to go back to see more of the canyons and hike in the desert. Also, taking the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (a cable car that takes you up Mount San Jacinto) was a fantastic experience. The views from the top are nothing short of mindblowing.

The San Diego Zoo photos are up now too. I may be going to the Wild Animal Park, the Zoo's sibling institution in Escondido, California, this weekend, so I'll be sure to take more photos and post them here if I do.

12 april 2001

I'm off to the desert tomorrow. I'll edit and post the Zoo pictures when I get back, I swear. Over and out.

7 april 2001

There's an article currently at A List Apart about creating Flash e-commerce sites. This seems rather strange, given the same site's concern about accessibility - a concern so strong that they redesigned the site to separate style from content, allowing it to be viewed in all browsers, including text-only browsers such as Lynx. Why would any serious e-commerce site make the decision to cut out large numbers of potential customers? I can download and install the plug-ins to view Flash sites with no problem, but I still tend to leave Flash sites after a few seconds because they break the web navigation paradigm we're all familiar with. People who don't know how plug-ins work won't even get that far. Bah, humbug!

6 april 2001

Online clothes retailer boo.com is back with a site not a million miles different from the original, pre-implosion design. (Well, I don't know how long they've been back, but I've only just noticed.) I still can't imagine who would buy clothes online. The only way I'd even consider doing so would be if I already owned something, a pair of Levi's jeans, say, and ordered a pair exactly the same. Which would be pretty boring.

I've just seen the light. This is how I want my house to look. When I get one.

5 april 2001

The sun is shining today! It has been gloomy and cool in San Diego for weeks, which has been disappointing. This time last year it was warm and sunny every day. I took advantage of the weather today to walk all the way through Balboa Park, from Sixth Street to the cactus garden. In 1997, I saw a diamondback rattlesnake, its head and about a foot of its body sticking out onto a path which ran through the undergrowth behind the cactus garden. I knew exactly what it was, because I had just seen one in a glass cage at the zoo.

This coming weekend, I'm off to Palm Springs for four days, so I won't be posting here, although I'm sure there will be plenty of photos when I get back.

4 april 2001

I went to the San Diego Zoo today, with friends from out of town. I took photos, and will put some in the photos section as soon as I've sorted through them (I took 48). The landscaping and planting there are wonderful, but I saw an old man (who one would think would know better) carving his initials into a tall cactus with his car key. People never cease to amaze me.

3 april 2001

The Opera browser, which I love in every other respect, puts extra, unwanted space around forms in web pages, even when the style sheet sets all padding and margins to zero. Why? I'll investigate this bug further and report it.

Products I'd like to see in electronics stores (maybe some already exist?):

• a small (non-hard-drive) mp3 player that ships with more than 64MB memory, and doesn't cost $500
• a MiniDisc player/recorder that plays mp3 files encoded on MD discs
• headphones that don't blow out after two months of normal use
• international (110 and 220 volt) battery charger for my ever-expanding array of small electronic devices

The Virgin Megastore in Paris has this incredible system where you can take any CD in the entire store, wave the barcode underneath a sensor, put on the headphones there, and listen to the CD. I can't even begin to imagine how they manage what must be an immense database and music archive, but it's a great way to spend some time - on the rare occasions you can get to the front of the line to use one of the machines.

2 april 2001

Welcome to the new incarnation of pleonasm.com. It used to be a regular, static personal page, but now it's a weblog that I will endeavour to update daily. There's no real theme, although I expect I'll talk a lot about web design (particularly style sheets and web standards), Perl, and other nerdy obsessions of mine.

There's not much content here at the moment, but I'll be writing every day, and I'll soon be adding more photos. Watch out for sound files and longer texts too.

Read this important information about the layout of this site. I agonized over whether to design the site this way or not, but I think it was a prudent decision. If you disagree, or if you think you have a browser that is compliant with web standards but you still have display problems, please let me know.

Y'all come back now, ya hear?

1 april 2001