Them darned fancy <HR>s …

Friday, July 12, 2002

I've been following dive into mark's 30 days to a more accessible weblog and so far, everything he's said to do I've pretty much done with this weblog.

Today's entry is about the <HR> tag and how to change the look of them. The method he uses works, but is a bit of a kludge. Mostly because it supports Netscape 4x, which doesn't support CSS to any decent degree.

That's why I've forgone Netscape 4x support entirely. How I do it is the way it's supposed to be done. First off, in the HTML for this page, I hide the style sheet from Netscape 4x:

<SCRIPT>
  @import "/bdstyle.css";
</SCRIPT>

Netscape 4x doesn't suport “@import” so nothing gets included (thankfully, else my style sheet would crash it, hard). The style sheet then has:

HR.next
{
  width:                50px;
  height:               16px;
  border:               none;
  margin-top:           0;
  margin-right:         auto;
  margin-bottom:        0;
  margin-left:          auto;
  padding:              0;
  background-image:     url(hr.gif);
  background-repeat:    no-repeat;
  background-position:  center;
}

Then in the HTML page, to use the image, I do:

<HR CLASS="next">

And I have my fancy <HR>. And it works fine under the current versions of Netscape (6x), Mozilla (from about 0.9.2 on up), Opera and Internet Explorer (although those last two draw a faint grey border around the image).

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Hot times at the homestead

The A/C guys turned out earlier than expected, which is good. They found the problem with the A/C, which is even better. The condenser unit shorted out and needs replacing, which is bad (sigh—there goes my refund). And they might not get the part until tomorrow, which is horrible!

Aaaaaaaahhhhh!

Cool times at the homestead

But the good news is, they got the new condenser unit installed!

Woot!

We have coolage!

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The fit hits the shan

It's the scheduled day at the office. Prior to sitting down at my desk:

I get a call from R (for whom I manage a few servers). One of R clients is mentioning the terms “proxy,” “multiple IP addresses” and “redundant servers,” which to me screams “reverse proxy” which means at best, a recompile of Apache (since I never compiled in reverse proxy support) or worse, a complete reinstall of the latest version of Apache. Oh, and the client wants it done by tonight.
There are no parking spots available at the office. None. I have to drive to the end of the building and around the corner before I'm able to find a parking spot. This has never happened in the few years I've been working with Smirk.
The three-phase power system to the Data Center is blown. We're running on the backup generator and the three A/C units in the Data Center are off line.

It can only get better from here, right? Right?

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Idiocracy

In Idiocracy, Private Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute (Maya Rudolph) are part of a secret military project that goes awry and they find themselves 500 years in the future, where the United States of America has been so dumbed down that Joe (with an IQ of 100 in our time) is literally the smartest man in the world.

Past the fart jokes, it's a rather biting satire on our current culture, one of mass marketing, post-literacy and monster truck rallyesque rehabilitation centers. As one reviewer put it:

And if the guffaws don't seem as plentiful as in Judge's previous works, it isn't due to poor quality but rather because each laugh is tempered with the unsettling realization that his vision of mankind's future might not be too far off the mark.

And if you stick around past the credits, there's a small scene that resolves a small, but recurring plot point.

From
Majestic <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>

To
Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>

Subject
[Majestic] Re: Your robot is making bogus requests to my webserver

Date
Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:27:48 +0000

##- Please type your reply above this line -##

Your ticket reference is XXXXX. To add any comments, just reply to this email.

I can tell from your responses that you are much better than us, so we can only continue to avoid visiting your site.

Kind Regards
XXXXX

I guess this is their way of politely telling me to XXXXXXXX. Fair enough.

The Boston Diaries

Friday, July 12, 2002