First of all, how are you? It’s been a while since I have said anything here, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking of it.

Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, on to business.

I am currently working on the hardwood floor on the second floor. There is much of this to do, and it takes far longer than it seems like it should. I’m sure professionals would look at my work speed an laugh, but that is how it is, and I am doing it as well as my deteriorating body will allow. We are about a year and a few months behind on this, but that is how it goes sometimes. What is in now looks really sharp, and I think the whole project will be a success at the end, even if we did do the baseboards a little wrong. I’ll keep you updated on the project.

I am still as fat as ever, so no progress on that front.

My next project that I am just starting in on is the Wieland Archive. This will be housed at the appropriately named website and will contain a database of archival information. This will consist primarily of items my father has collected over the years, as well as pictures and letters. I think at the end the archive will contain in the area of 100,000 items or so. It may well be the most complete collection of anybodies life. Entering the information will take years, I suspect, so all the better to get started. I was thinking about using regular blogging software to handle all this, but have instead decided to create my own content management system to run it. It should be pretty lean, as few bells and whistles are needed, at least on the back end. I’ll still try and keep the front end pretty. I’ll let you know when the first version is up and running.

We got a 2005 Prius, and are quite happy with it in the first couple of weeks.

Over at EatMe I have put up the first part of my Thanksgiving dinner menu. I will try and get to the rest of it as soon as possible, for those of you who are interested.

I am currently running Firefox 3 alpha (which installs with the ominous name “Minefield”), and haven’t really have any trouble yet. The pages seem to load very fast, but aside from that there don’t seem to be many immediately noticeable changes, but of course most of my extensions failed to work. I am also running the new Thunderbird 2 Beta1. There are some front end changes in this one, and it seems to work well so far, but I am still very new to it. It is prettier for sure. They have also added tagging, which some people will love, but isn’t a feature I use all that much. I think Mail for the mac had it, but I don’t think I ever used it. My testing of MS Word 2007 continues, and I love it. It is really nice to use, and I may actually buy it when the beta runs out. I am going to download the new version of Open Office today, so I’ll be better able to compare.

Must watch more Christmas movies.

It bothered me enough that I decided to make my very own listing dingus for this website. I have now done this. It is in pretty good shape already, though there are a couple of things I would add if I wanted it to be perfect. Currently you can add lists on any topic, and create lists on already existing topics. Your lists remain your own, and also get compiled into a general user list that shows all of the items in all lists in the category, along with the counts of how often they appear. In addition to these two lists there is one list for the Master Rater. This list is the right list for that category, and you can compare your list to it. Each list item may contain a name, description, and external link. This link is available next to the item name. The items can be reordered in the list (though this is an area that needs to have additional options because moving one at a time could be annoying in long lists). There is also an info page for each item that includes comments about that item. The first person to add an item in a category gets to enter the description and the link. All others will have to settle for comments.

I like this little thing, but like many of the silly things I do there is little demand for such an application. Additionally, it would only really be cool if about 1000 people were using it. Since I have just the one reader this could be hard. It is up to you. You must go and tell 1000 people to use this thing so I can see it really work.

You can find it at the Master Rater section of the Gameboard area, whatever the hell all that means. You will, of course have to register and sign in if you want to check it out, but that is a pretty painless process.

As usual, I will be surprised if anyone checks it out other than myself.

I started to think that if you took the oldest person alive today, and went back to their birth, and took the oldest person at that time at went likewise back, we are very close to periods that seem absurdly far away. For example we are only twenty or so people from the time of Christ. Perhaps forty people lay between us and the time of the construction of the great pyramids in Egypt. Only around 100 people can link our time to the dawn of civilization itself. That’s not many at all. By the time we die, some of us will have lives approximately one percent of all of civilized history.

This kind of freaks me out.

The oldest person in the world has died at 116. The new oldest person is also 116.

Astronomers decide Pluto is not a planet. Everyone else decides, who gives a shit?

The Evolution of Creative Oversights.

Something is wrong with the New York Times site and I have to click “Back” several time to actually get off the front page. Fix that crap.

Taka bout confusing.

America the Shootiful? That’s the best you could do? That’s worse than “Taka bout”. This may be the worse flash cartoon ever. The worst political cartoon ever. And just plain terrible.

Now I want to go to Utah, and that’s saying something.

You don’t know how excited I am to hear that there is going to be a fresh fish market within walking distance of my house. This is the best news I’ve heard in a while.

Over at One Pot Meal, I found a link to the US Dept. of Labor and an essay on a Shaker Approach to Web Design. The idea is good, and seems out of place at the same time. Hard to do. I decided to make a graphic for it. For no reason at all.

The interface is dramatically better than past generations. The toolbars take up far less room on the screen than before, and are well laid out, though the change may take a little getting used to for some. There are some handy-dandy new features, some of which may actually be useful in real life.

First off is tabbed browsing. A browser without it isn’t even really a browser at all, so they finally decided to catch up there.

There is also a neat littler button that opens thumbnails of all open tabs in one view. This is neat, but in reality will probably not be very useful.

There is a button that makes the browser panel full-screen, and hides the toolbar. This is also neat, and allows one to see a huge amount of a web page, but it also hides the windows taskbar, making it impossible to see other open applications. This would only be useful if you were using the internet but not other applications at the same time.

There are a ton of other little do-dads, but what I was really interested in was the support for standards.

It seems that they have added support for the position:fixed style. This has long been lacking, and will open up design for many sites. For me personally, it impacts the game I am writing.

On the site for explorer, they claim to honor the :hover pseudo class for all elements. My testing has not shown this to be true as yet.

One thing I do know about it is that it makes this site all screwed up. This may also be true in the current version of explorer, and is really my fault. I am doing some stupid stuff to make my links look the way I want, and should probably just cut it out.

The text rendering seems just outstanding, and even better than Firefox. Hell, the text in Explorer looks better than the text in Word, at least the old version I’m using. Really nice.

I think that this update brings Explorer up to the level of Firefox, and in some areas beyond, but I am still not going to switch for general use. Why, you ask? It too Microsoft about four years to come up with this update, and it just now reaches the standards of css1. This is years too late. Firefox, though it may be behind for the time being, will continue to grow and change. It will soon outpace Explorer once again, and all will be right with the world.