Monday, July 15, 2002

I didn't like the look of the Tahoma font today. Not sure why. I was all set to work out a way to present a drop-down list of fonts that would allow individuals to customize the font that appeared in their browser, changing style sheet settings dynamically. I'd mentally worked out how I wanted to implement this great functionality. Then I realized that everybody's browser already lets them do exactly that. If I simply throttled back on the styles, I could take advantage of what's built into every browser anyway: the ability to set a preferred font. Sometimes it's best to add by subtracting. 9:08:43 PM

This happened at a co-worker's apartment complex. His brother is one of the bystanders who was not able to resuscitate the girl after she'd been taken out of the pool. A 13-year-old girl has died after an accident at a swimming pool in an apartment complex in Roseville. Bystanders were trying to resuscitate the girl when police arrived about 4 p.m. Sunday at the Hillsborough apartments in the 2300 block of Woodbridge St., said Roseville police Sgt. Lorne Rosand. 4:39:33 PM

Flipped through the latest issue of Wired over the weekend, and enjoyed the brief article on crop formations as an alien response to transmissions originally sent out into the vast reaches of space in 1974. Then I found this lengthy and detailed explanation at memepool. Lots of good questions on either side of the skeptical fence with this one. Assuming it's a hoax, why would anybody go through the laborious detail required to match and modify the 1974 transmission, etc., let alone create the crop formations themselves? Assuming it really is alien contact, and the aliens deciphered and understood this transmission from another planet, why the heck are they using wheat to communicate their response? If it's a hoax, what's the point? Who could possibly benefit from the joke? If it's an alien response -- one that isn't transmitted like ours, but delivered by manipulated the surface of our planet -- why the heck are they using wheat? 2:28:44 PM

This must be some kind of elaborate joke, even though the .gov at the end of the URL looks pretty tough to fake. Citizen Corps? Volunteer for America? Operation TIPS? Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities that will be selected. And the best part is what happens (image shown here)if you actually try to volunteer. It must be a practical joke. Probably not, unfortunately. Update: Most definitely not a hoax, joke, or other internet tomfoolery. Operation TIPS is really real. Amazing. Nice outlet for Johnny Paranoid Racist to report all of the "potentially suspicious" activity he sees during the course of his day. You can bet we'll never hear about the vast number of false alarms that this system will create, or if it's mentioned, it will quickly be brushed aside as a "small price to pay for freedom." So what if the local police come knocking on your door, or take you from your place of work for questioning. If you're innocent, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. Then again, depending on the level of potentially suspicious behavior involved, you might just be an enemy combatant, who would lie about whatever you were doing anyway. But we won't talk about that either. Important Matters of National Security and all that. Very hush-hush. Sigh. I'm feeling mighty cynical this morning. 7:00:09 AM

Rob just pointed out that the new layout doesn't work in Opera or Mozilla. It'll take some more work to get it cleaned up, apparently. Going to implement some table trickery until I get a better handle on cross-platform CSS. At least now the screen resize should work in any resolution, with any browser. 12:14:38 AM