Why? Why not?

Some linkage today for those of you who are interested in web design:
First up, Listamatic, a collection of ways you can use CSS to style lists, like I have on the left. There’s also a tutorial here. Basically, the argument goes that, if you’ve got a list of links forming a navigation bar, then the best way to structurally represent that in your HTML document is with a list. Then you can use CSS to change the formatting of the list to make it look pretty much however you want. That’s the beauty of CSS.

Secondly, that site has a nice list of articles about various web design issues. Also handy links about general web design/CSS use issues are: A List Apart, run by CSS guru Zeldman, Position is Everything, a handy list of techniques and discussions, and Eric Meyer’s css/edge, a collection of simply amazing effects that can be pulled off with html, CSS, and a compliant browser. Also handy is Meyer’s list of CSS Links. And for testing your layout, nothing’s better than Loren Ipsum, the fake Latin text that’s been used for layout testing for centuries.

There’s all sorts of cool stuff you can do with CSS, especially to do with accessibility and different media types. For example, you can set up your pages so that you get a ‘printer friendly’ page automatically when you try and print, by setting specific rules for print media that hide extraneous detail.

Well, Trang, Grem, Erin, and I had a great weekend in Canberra visiting Helena. I cooked pizza on the Friday night, which I was pretty happy with and everyone else seemed happy with as well. Saturday we hung out and went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean during the day, and went out for dinner for Helena’s birthday at night. Sunday, we had brunch, went to the Kingston markets and bought chilli, and went to Floriade. All in all an excellent weekend. I do love the Kingston Markets, especially the food section.

As you can see from the right bar, I’m playing GTA: Vice City again, the den of iniquity that it is. I’m stuck on a mission that involves my character picking up drugs for some Haitians from under the noses of the cops. Unfortunately the cops aren’t too happy about it and keep mowing me down like a stray daffodil on a Sunday.

Well, we had a huge wushu lesson on Sunday – Grandmaster Liu Jing Ru came to teach us Liu He Tong Long (Six Harmony Praying Mantis) and his own style of bagua. It was great fun, and certainly worth the time and money. Five or so hours of training have meant that I’ve been feeling a bit old the last couple of days, though. I’m certainly looking forward to getting warmed up and stretching everything back out properly, and also to practicing the forms we learnt. Mega thanks go out to Sifu Julianna, Will, Amanda, Murray and Eric, who all contributed to making the day as successful as it was.

I got a bonus from work! Yay! It’s reasonably big, which lessons somewhat my money stress about going to America at the end of November for Ly’s wedding. I also bought myself a present:

256M of mp3s in a fits-in-your-palm package. It’s excellent. Now I just need to get my playlist right…

Well, it’s been a very busy week. After the power outage, there was plenty of running around fixing things to be done, a whole lot of documentation added to my ‘to be written’ pile, and a whole lot of running around. Things seem to have calmed down a bit now, so I guess it’s going to be document, document, document for me in the next little while.

I actually was given a day off as a result how happy everyone was with how we dealt with the power outage, and I took it yesterday. Mal and I set up our computers at Rommel’s place, and Jason’s as well. With Tats and his laptop, we had a nice little 5-PC LAN setup for our gaming amusement. The only problem was that poor Mal’s PC was being really flaky – crashing all the time. Oh well. Hopefully he’ll work it out soon.

So, it’s been two years since some guys blew up some buildings with some planes. Personally, I’m inclined to say:

Big.
Fucking.
Deal.

The US has borrowed heavily on the goodwill it had after September 11, 2001, and I think that, now that some payments are due, they’re finding that the interest rate on the loan was a bit higher than it anticipated. The shit that the US government has pulled in the last two years is unbelievable. I find it hard to be impressed by the tragedy of 3000 people dying when the US has more than likely killed ten to a hundred times that amount over the past two years with its blind belligerence and foolish manichean world-view. (For the non-historically minded: Manichean = dualistic, ‘you’re with us or against us’ style philosophy.)

Hoo boy. It’s been a crazy one today. The power went out at work last night at about 6pm, and didn’t come back on until about 4pm this afternoon. Given that Leveraged is a financial company that has to settle trades each day, this was bad. And led to me running around a lot sorting stuff out. The rest of the week is going to be busy as well, recovering from this.

But, on the plus side, the Wushu nationals were EXCELLENT! It was great to see the how good everyone else is, particularly in the division I was in. I was very happy with my performance, but, unfortunately for me, everyone else in my divisino was better. D’oh. Amanda, Kevin, and Andrew all won medals (huge congrats to them), but I think that we all did our forms really well and came away with a weekend of worthwhile experience under our belts.

Plus, meeting all the wushu folks from Melbourne was great fun.