hermiene.net

So, it's Christmas again; the time of year when dumb people buy dumb stuff to other dumb people with their dumb money. It's a crazy world.

Why can't I live in a Walden Two society? Or an arcology? Or both? I want a Segway, damn it...

Learned how to remove the red eyes phenomenon in Photoshop, so I added an updated picture of me.

So, the new style sheet is ready. What do you think?

Changes and additions:

• More colors!
• New list item images for three levels of nested, unordered lists.
• The style sheet changer is gone. I played around with a replacement for it, a style changer, which enabled you to change the presentation of various things on my site (such as the line-height, navigation bar position, and navigation bar state (fixed or absolute)), but it proved to be too hacky to be worth it. Incidentally, the Settings page is gone.
• Code blocks' languages are no longer identified with a background image. It's not really necessary.
• I found a really nice monospace font, called ProFont, that makes reading code very easy. I now use it for all the code examples. I really recommend you install it.
• Alternate style sheets removed.

Of course, there are some issues. This time I honestly, really don't have any sympathy for you if you use a broken browser; I write 100% correct code and I cannot and will not be punished for that by having to use hacks. This site is dedicated to showing the Good Side of web development. That said, here are the issues:

• IE rips the Archived News apart.
• IE screws up IRC excerpts. For some reason, it hides the contents of <dt>s under the background.
• Mozilla doesn't get display: inline-block;, so code blocks are utterly fucked (by dumb luck, IE SP2 gets it (but only for <code> elements)).

I'm now annoyed by my current style sheet and my style sheet changer. I want to dump them all and work on a new, improved style sheet, free from all the cruft and ugliness of my current one. I intend to use the holy Cascade to its fullest potential and make extensive use of @import, moreso than I'm currently making. With this change comes the ability to affect certain key aspects of my site's style, such as which font to use, the size of the font, background color, and navbar placement, among other things. I'll still have copies of the old style sheets, of course, but not available to the public (unless you hack the URL). The reason for this change is that making and improving upon one style sheet is easier and gives better results than working on and maintaining several half-assed attempts at design (and I'm not very good with design to begin with).

Do I complain a lot? I like to think that I don't, so that means I'm entitled to moan a little about stuff that annoys me. No, I'm not going to talk about the evils of abusing <table> for layout or the evils of using <blockquote> solely for indenting text. I'm not even going to complain about the evils of using proprietary code. No, I'm going to complain about real life stuff that currently bother me to varying degrees. These include, but are not limited to, the following (in no particular order):

• The bus I take home from school is usually packed with people, so I inevitably have to stand in it, along with several others. For some weird reason or other, people who have to stand stop and stay in the middle of the bus. The back of the bus isn't on fire, nor are there any corrosive gases. There aren't even Glukkons. So the reasons for their not using this fine space remains a mystery to me. It's also highly annoying, seeing as I'm usually the first person to exit the bus and have to push my way through lots of people to reach the exit. Why don't they learn? The bus driver always tells them to move to the back of the bus (and I do too, on occasions), yet they persist to stop and stay in the middle.
• The school's "intranet", it's:learning, still uses a non-uniform naming scheme for the classes I take. I will have to consult my teacher again and ask for an update on the situation.
• The seats on the bus stops I use are made of metal. It's fucking cold! Why they made that decision is beyond me.
• Most seats on the bus stops around my city center are sloped. Not only that, but they provide virtually no friction, so people can't use them unless they bring glue. I'll admit, they look cool, but style doesn't buy usability. At least they're made of plastic, so they're better than the ones I use to get to school.
• People who pronounce "ha det" "hadem" seriously annoy me (they should say "hade"). I believe this is a Rogalandism (Rogaland is the county in which I live).
• The weather in Norway sucks, especially this time of the year.

So, this last Sunday was Father's Day. (Scandinavian countries celebrate it on the second Sunday of November. It varies from country to country.) I didn't get my father anything, nor have I ever done so; Father's Day is a crock, and my father agrees, so it's all good. He'd rather be respected and loved all around the year, than having bitter fights all around the year except one day, where he gets a crummy gift that he could have bought himself if he wanted to. Incidentally, I never buy Christmas presents for people, and I never will. Do people hate me for that? No one's telling me. Will people hate me for that when I grow older? Probably. But they'll also hate me for not making my kids (if I get them) believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Fools. I don't see them making their kids believe in the invisible green man on my right shoulder who is responsible for making calculators and trains work.

Yay, my very first political news entry! I won't actually say much, but rather quote an article which sums up my thoughts on the U.S. presidential election pretty well:

"You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you're an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don't normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex and maybe a few luminous transcendental deities that look remarkably like Jenna Jameson."

Oh, by the way, the quote doesn't sum up my thoughts; the article does. I just find the quote incredibly funny.

There are now four Wilburers.

Today I discovered that my English teacher didn't know what the word inexorable means. But I first had to ask him for the meaning of inextricable. So I guess we're even. :-)

Site updates are slow and will continue to be slow until Real Life stuff gets done. This means, among other things, that the Big Thing previously hinted at will be put on ice. For now. Siiiiiigh.

Grammar is fun. Some differences between English and Norwegian grammar:

• Norwegian nouns have gender (three of them).
• Norwegian adjectives and adverbs are similar if the noun of the adjective is of the neutral gender. Also, adjectives are conjugated according to the gender of the noun.
• The possessive apostrophe is absent from Norwegian since we don't need to differentiate our plurals from our possessives (Norwegians, take notice).
• Norwegian doesn't conjugate verbs according to subject.