November 26
My two minute political opinions.
All of the politics going on at work has made me more aware of all of the politics going on in the larger world, both in America and abroad. Plus, I listen to NPR every day on the way to work and on the way home again in the evening. And since I have quite a commute, that means I get a good two hours of political commentary and news every weekday. So I have formed a few opinions. Politics and religion being two things that are best left out of polite discussions (anyone here change parties or deities lately?) I will just let it all out here. Warning, rant ahead.
<rant>
The war in Iraq (and elsewhere): Against it. Do not support it at all. I think that George W. Bush (who I am ashamed to have as my president) is a greedy, deciptive, two-faced, power-hungry, hawkish, self-righteous, prissy, mean, corportate-money-grubbing, sanctimonious, opportunistic piece of Texas trash. (To all FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security agents whose google searches for subversives may have turned up this page, can you hear me now?) Honestly, adjectives fail me when attempting to describe G. Dubya Bush. But he has been ripped up one side and down the other by far better political commentators then myself, so I will leave off for now. Back to the war. Against it. But at the same time, it is much to late to pull back now, especially since we have bombed much of the middle east into a smoking pile of rubble. If we take off now, with not so much as a 'good luck' they will hate us even more then they hate us now. And let's be honest. If they didn't hate us before the war, they hate us now. Who doesn't hate a foreign occupying force, even if (especially if?) that force pats you on the head and says that it is for your own good? We can't really force the American flavor of democracy on Iraq if they decide that another flavor would suit them better.
Gay marriage: For it. Why not? To all of those conservatives and bible-pounders who bleat about the sanctity of marriage, I say this - if a man and a woman who have known each other less then 24 hours can go to Vegas and be legally married by an Elvis Impersonator at a drive-thru 'Luv Chapel' then there is no sanctity of marriage, so get the hell off your high horse. It is not as though heterosexual marriage has such a great track record in this country either. Look at the divorce rates for crying out loud. 30 years ago it was illegal for a black person to marry a white person. You could be lynched for even contemplating it. Today, we look back and say how silly all of that was, to try to legislate against interracial marriage. And 30 years from now, people will look back on the frenzied debates today and say, how silly to try to legislate against gay marriage.
The Democratic Candidate debates: Geeze, people. Stop all of the mean-spirited sniping already. More actual plans for the future and less haphazard bashing please.
The RIAA: Fuckin' evil. My proof of this? Read this article... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34191.html
</rant>
As you can probably tell, work is pretty damn dead today. So I have a lot of free time on my hands.
November 24
Apparently there was some sort of a big-deal football game in Ann Arbor this weekend... I think that it might have been the 100th UM vs. OSU game. :) Not that I really pay much attention to such trivia, not being a sports fan myself. (I guess I just have no school spirit for my alma mater when it comes to athletics) It is events like that that make me glad that I no longer live a scant block away from the stadium. As it is, I spent the entire day consipiciously avoiding Ann Arbor and the crazed football fans. Geek that I am, I went to a LAN party and spent the day playing Counter Strike, Jedi Academy, and Powerslide. Then after 9 hours of that I came home and spent over three hours de-bugging and QA'ing CEEL. An entire day in front of a computer. Aw yeah...
And for those who haven't yet: go see "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World". I saw it Friday night with Elizabeth, DeForest, and Zach. VERY well-done movie. I might even be willing to fork over to see it again in the theater.
November 20
Things have been moving really well lately on the CEEL site. So as to avoid any unseemly break in services, I have mirrored the whole site (the beauty of "copy all" and "paste") in another part of the PSC network so I can make the changeover from table-based layout to CSS and XHTML. I have already done that part... did it last night while I was watching South Park and other such Comedy Central Offerings. Now I get to start testing and troubleshooting the PHP includes and the code for the navigation. Which may or may not be time-consuming. It all depends on how robust the code I wrote is. I do have a sneakign suspicion that when I copied the files over to the mirror directory, I forgot to modify the PHP include code to reflect the fact that the mirror site has (naturally) a different URL. We will find out this afternoon, won't we!
So I interviewed for this really great sounding job yesterday - it is for an electronic publishing librarian position at UM. I wish I knew how I did in the interview... it was a phone interview so you don't get the feedback that you do when you interview face-to-face. (which, quite frankly, I prefer - the face-to-face that is. Lack of feedback leads to feelings of insecurity) ANYway. The job sounds great. I would get to transfer a lot of my current experience with juggling communications with myriad database vendors and content providers, taking their product (in whatever form they give it to me) and formatting it for the web, and then dealing with different access and security requirements. Plus, since it is electronic publishing, I would get to deal with a lot of the copyright/information law stuff and how it effects born digital information and standards development. Which would be <l33t>SW33T</l33t>!
The best part is that information law and standards work - that is what I am interested in exploring in a PhD program. Would I forgo a doctorate if I was offered the job? Well, I just might! That doesn't change the fact that I want to eventually get a PhD... But what an opportunity this job would be..... Ahhh... I am getting ahead of myself. I may not even be offered the job....
And in between all of the CEEL stuff and my job at FALCON I still manage to steal a precious few minutes every day to work on my own site. So look for an update in a week or so. I too will be abandoning my backward ways and look only to the future. That's right! All CSS2/XHTML 1.0 Strict (well, maybe 1.0 transitional) for me! Look ma, no tables! Which means that older browsers are out of luck. But hey... no one can be infinitely backwards compatible.
And don't worry about wondering when the upgrade will be online. You will know it when you see it. I just can't resist throwing a little redesign in everytime I do a backend upgrade.
November 15
I just got back from taking the GRE. I am not optimistic about my performance, and even though it will still be two weeks before I get my scores, I still feel like I did not do well at all.
I hate standardized tests. It feels like such an artificial way to test someone's abilities. It seems as though all it really tests is your ability to remember stupid math formulas (that most people look up rather then memorize) and know words that are not part of any normal person's (at least, not any normal person that I know) working vocabulary. And all under strict time limits! woo-hoo.
*sigh*. Damn.
I keep telling myself that the GRE score is probably the least important of all of the things that an admissions board looks at - surely grades, recommendations, essay, and compatible research interests are far more important then a single test score. But still. I can't help feeling that a bad GRE score will automatically disqualify me from PhD programs. Maybe that is the Type A personality coming out - being unsatisfied with anything other then perfection and never thinking that I am doing "well enough".
I guess that all that is left for me to do tonight is to follow the time honored remedy for "I think that I did poorly on an exam" feelings that is known to students world wide. Alcohol. When students at UM (not that this is unique to UM of course) suffer from exam induced blues, they typically act to alleviate those feelings by grabbing a friend and hitting the bars.
Since I already have my Masters, I am a little more spohisticated. I will get John (who is even now enroute) and we will go to Cafe Felix (a lovely jazz and martini bar) and have fancy, high-octane drinks and I will kick his ass in cribbage.
Sarah is in town this weekend. Maybe I will call her too. We can all get tiddly on martinis and I can forget my abismal performance on that paragon of standards everywhere - the GRE.
November 13
Last night was...SPECIAL.
Driving home from work, I was listening to the severe weather and tornado warning on NPR as I admired the towering cumulous clouds that were rapidly piling up on the horizon. They were quite beautiful - white with purple shadows against the darkening blue of the sky and lit with the orange and gold and carmine of the setting sun. Beautiful. I wished that I had my camera with me. Interesting how cloud formations this attractive can mean that horrific weather is on the way.
I had so much I wanted to do yesterday. Work on the script to switch stylesheets on the CEEL site and practice for the GRE. (I have been taking a lot of online GREs in order to practice. I figure that doing this will get me back into the swing of things much better then re-memorizing quadratic equations). I had the TV on for the severe weather warnings (and as background noise) and the wind speed outside was picking up. Great storm weather.
Good news. I finally got the javascript to work right and I had the alternate stylesheet looking pretty darn spiffy if I do say so myself. I had just uploaded the files when the emergency broadcast system interrupted the TV to announce that the tornado warning had been rescinded. (The wind outside was still picking up speed). Given the events of the rest of the night, I can't believe that the severe weather warning was called off....
Five minutes after that - ****fizzzzz****POP! I lost all electricity for a few minutes before it came back on. Ten minutes later it did it again. I ran around like a chicken missing a vital body part unplugging my computers. From my balcony I could see some flames and showers of sparks as the elecrticity went out again. Then came back on. Then more sparks, more flashes of fire and a faint burning smell and the power was out again. Cue the sirens and cops and emergency vehicles as people of authority began clear all traffic off of Plymouth and send cars back from whence they had come.
I wandered outside into (what I read about this morning in the paper) was probably 70mph gusting wind. There was a cop stationed near the drive into my complex, so I wandered down with some questions (like...what is on fire? should I clear out?). The cop had her hands kind of full turning back traffic, but I managed to get out of her that a branch had blown into power lines on Barton Drive, snapping a whole bunch of them and starting a small electrical fire.
The lights weren't going to be on anytime soon. Good thing I had lots of candles and an oil lamp. But so much for the GRE practice. At least I got the javascript done. I tried reading by candle light - which was difficult with my vision and probably, given the fact that I have already had eye surgery twice, not one of my best ideas. Eventually gave the whole evening up as a lost cause and went to bed.
Around 3:30 in the morning I was awakened by the blinding glare as the lights came back on. I got up and started to blearily wander around to turn things off.
****fizzzzz****POP!
Power gone again. Back to bed. The lights were on again when I got up at about 6:30. Woke up all by myself, which is a good thing, since when I had tried to set the alarm on my watch, I accidently set it to 6:00pm instead of 6:00am. Go me.
Very gusty wind all day today. I was absurdly grateful that my power was still on when I got home from work.
November 10
Well, the situation at work, at FALCON, has been getting progressively odder (and not in a good way either). And after the way that my job at Diamond Bullet fell victim to the faltering economy, I have difficulty trusting that this job will have any significant degree of longevity. I don't know if I am seeing the writing on the wall yet... but I am not going to wait around before laying in contingency plans.
Contingency plan number 1 is of course looking for other work. Which I have been doing on and off. It is hard to be completely dedicated to ye olde job search while you are still working full-time, no matter how uncertain you feel about your current job.
Contingency plan 2 is going back to school to get my PhD. This isn't some knee-jerk reaction to the continuingly disheartening economy... I have known for a while that I want to eventually get my doctorate. And maybe 'eventually' is sooner then I think it is. At any rate, I will never know if I can do it or not unless I apply. So I am applying... I have scheduled to retake my GRE (next Saturday) and have attended the admissions event for SI (the only place I am applying to this year). The admissions event was yesterday, and it was .... odd. Mostly because of the whole deja vu thing of having gone through the same sort of thing when I was applying for my Masters. Only this time I knew most of the SI people running the event. Heh. Hopefully my previous history with SI will give me an edge in applying, but I don't know... The stats are kind of disheartening. Well over 200 applications for fewer then 10 doctoral slots. Damn. Really really competitive. I know I have the grades to get in, and I know most of the people there, which is good. But I am worried about the GRE since it has been so long since I took a standardized test. I will be doing a bunch of practicing/studying this week, but still... So the best things I can do for my application are to write a really kick-ass application essay, find (and contact!) a prof whose research interests line up with my own, and get good recommendations.
I am interested in digital libraries/electronic collections and how they are effected by the two predominant trends of a push toward universal access (W3C web standards, CSS, XML, section 508) and the pull toward propriatory content and restricting access to information (copyright, emerging information law, etc). I am pretty sure that I can find a prof who is interested in those things - and a lot of the profs at SI are involved in aspects of digital library research.
And I am pretty sure that I can get good references as well. I would really like to get Ingrid, my supervisor at FALCON, to write me a letter... the only difficulty will be in figuring out how to frame that request so that it doesn't sound like I am going to jump ship tomorrow. Ptobably the fact that even if I do get accepted, I would still be around another year would help....
November 7
I heard one of the most intriguing/disturbing remixes ever on NPR on the way home from work today... a techno/trance version of "These are a few of my favorite things". It took me several minutes to recoginze it - I could just barely hear the familiar melody line under the heavy house beat. Those wacy people at NPR! Who knows what they will play next!
November 4
I am sick. Or maybe it is allergies. Anyway, I am congested. Feels like my head is stuffed full of cotton. I started out work today by blowing my nose so hard that I gave myself a nosebleed. And I ended out the work day by giving myself a nasty papercut. That is pretty much the kind of day it was. I should have been working on graphic mockups for a site I am designing at work, but it is hard to be creating when you are congested. So instead I spend the day working on a CSS and PHP navigation menu.
Useful CSS tip of the day: you cannot insert a <div> tag within a <ul> (or <ol> for that matter). The reasoning is unknown... as far as I can tell, you just can't do that. Another tip - <div> attributes will always over ride <class> or <span> tags if they are contained within the div and have conflicting attributes. Again, that is just the way it is.
Why? Because I said so. Well, actually because the nice people at W3C said so...
And the PHP and CSS for the CEEL site is going much better, thank you. Got a test page with the header and footer includes up and working and validating. So, pending approval by Michael, I can start cutting over the live site to the new CSS and nav tomorrow. And with any luck, no one will notice at all! Which is the point. If people notice the site looks different after I make all of the back-end changes, then I didn't do my job right.
Ph34r my l33t CSS ski7z. Heh. :)
November 3
Well, this was an interesting weekend. Chuck and Elaine's party Saturday was as fabulous as all of their parties tend to be. In the middle of the party, their neighborhood lost power. Which was an appropriate Halloween-party sort of thing to happen. No one cared. No one really even noticed. The power was out for several hours - most of the night - and the party went on as though nothing untoward had happened. Of course, there was a little scramble at the outset to find flashlights and place and light candles all over the place. And those of us who were playing Settlers of Catan found it a little hard to see the board, but we played on.
Ye-haw. :)
And there was more Catan (again at Chuck's) on Sunday since fencing had been cancelled due to a combination of bad weather and lack of available indoor practice space. I love Settlers of Catan. It is a great game that I recommend to just about everyone.
In other news... still working on the CSS and PHP. I have the CSS pretty much nailed down, and am really enjoying working with it. The PHP on the other hand... I know exactly what I want to do. I am trying to write a script for a dynamic nav that looks at where the user is in the site and swaps out the normal nav button (pretty standard CSS rollover buttons) with a special "You are here" image and adds in the correct sub nav in the correct place. But I am not familiar enough with PHP scripts and syntax to know if I am approaching the problem in the right way or not. Right now I have the site nav in a system of arrays, and I think I can find a script that will detect the URL of the current page, and then maybe cobble together a series of if-then-otherwise loops for the display... but I have the feeling that this is not the best way. I think it can be done a lot more simply and elegantly... but I am not sure how. I think I will break from it for now, look at the problem more tomorrow, and then ask Michael about it when I go to the PSC tomorrow afternoon.
Anyone out there who knows PHP and can offer advice, I would love to hear it!