March 15, 2003

More or Less Geeky

The last time I wrote about geeky stuff, I got an angry letter from one of my readers. "Do you just do this to make your non computer geek readers feel bad?" she fumed.

Of course, when that reader is your own mother, it is wise to pay her heed.

So today I'm clearly separating the more-geeky stuff from the errr... less-geeky stuff. First, the less-geeky stuff, in brief:

• M'ris has finished her fifth book! I'm a few days late on this news item, but in my defense, I sent M'ris a congratulatory email the day of. In that email I told her that now it was time to start working on rev02, rev03, et cetera. She sighed and said she'd start that "tomorrow". Pfft. Lazy as always, that one.

  In other M'ris-related news, it looks like the Black Beret of Revolution is being passed (oops, a correction: loaned) to someone else. Unfortunately, M'ris never exhibited the requisite level of enthusiasm for the Movement (don't let the picture fool you).

• The best part of last week's "Freedom Fries" fooflah was the rather dry response from the French Embassy:

  The French Embassy in Washington had no immediate comment, except to say that french fries actually come from Belgium.

  Actually, Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) have it all wrong. If they really wanted to make the French angry, they should start slapping the "French" label on even more plebian American foods. Cheeseburgers would be "French Burgers". Pork rinds would be "French rinds". Pabst Blue Ribbon would be "Ruban Bleu du Lafayette". And so on.

• I helped Nancy move out of her old place last weekend in preparation for her move to Seattle. Nancy says that my Move Karma is so high I am actually banned from helping her with the final stage of the move. I've never heard of having an enforced cap on one's Move Karma, but I suppose it's a plausible explanation. (As are the other, much more obvious reasons why I would be banned from the next move, but let's not think about that shall we?)

  Anyway, what with Mike gone, Sam is the last one left in that apartment. Replacing Nancy and Mike are two cute, athletic college girls, which -- I know -- I know -- is truly awful, isn't it? Send your sympathy cards for Sammy here, I'll collect them and forward them in due course.

Now to the more-geeky stuff. In the last entry, I mentioned my frustration with HTML tables and how the spec treated them inconsistently. This spawned an interesting conversation with Kelly Cochran about table-based designs vs. CSS-P designs, standards, and other topics. It turns out that I wasn't too clear in the previous entry, so for the record: I prefer CSS-P designs over table-based designs, and I use them wherever possible.¹ I was just trying to make a point about tables qua tables: if you use tables to mark up tabular data, and you want to make sure that your tables are HTML 4.01 Strict, you will run into strange inconsistencies in the spec. That's all.

1. On the other hand, I'm not a fanatic about using CSS-P, and I'm certainly not prone to making grand, hand-wringing pronouncements about how tables are evil.