The rumorage/etc. regarding My Likely Next Job:
Because most of you don't know, some history. Bios evaluation over at Intel had some people who were going to leave. My roommate clued me into this fact and did me the favor of putting my resumé on the relevant manager's desk. I got an interview, it went well (I used the verb "bodge" in it), with the parting words being, "I'll call you. It looks good." Then Chipzilla failed to meet their quarterly earnings expectations, meaning they made a big huge giant assload of money minus a couple of percent. Investors clamped their little wool-covered ass-cheeks together, so Intel instituted a hiring freeze while they redo the 2001 budget. Now bios eval is understaffed, I remain underpaid, and it's all going to stay just like this for at least another month, at which point there is no guarantee the bios eval folk will be able to hire anyone at all.

15:29

Count me in to not come a-knocking.
Come to think of it, a bed made out of pure chromium would probably shatter under any kind of significant shear, so it couldn't rock too much.
Enough. You may poison me now (oh, yeah--among the reagents I ordered for this upcoming semester at my job was 100 GRAMS OF SODIUM CYANIDE. With some potassium cyanide on the side for flavor. Christ on a cracker, Batman.).

Anyway, Dachannien, the "I have... I have.... I have... ...a swank basement" thing came from that damned commercial for some IT software company/product in which that well-known chick band could be heard to sing "I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything", and people hold up signs in crowds saying "I am..." as an announcer tells us how cool the product is. That, and some guy's name which gave you the impression that the guy would have "a really swank basement".

Oh, dear. I have to to go: I just got a phone call from a prof who'd been teaching a class in Costa Rica for the last three weeks. Apparently the freezer in her lab died in that time, and it contained many animal specimens awaiting chemical preservation. They are now "not-so-fresh". You see why I'm trying to escape this job.

OkayIloveyoubuhbye!

13:46

Let that be a deciding factor in your purchasing decisions - the drive to be better than your college professors....

23:42

Hey, Ramp....

"I have... I have.... I have... ...a swank basement"

Where did that come from, anyway?

11:45

Speaking of chrome.... One of these days, I want to have a chrome bed. That would rock. It would also be extremely heavy.

Do you want to know why this University sucks? Because we just had 3 Pentium III-800's stolen out of a secure office (not our office, thankfully). They were stolen out of a computer lab in Wickendon, which I was administrating. I could just shoot someone right now.

17:06

Hmm, I had just been thinking the other day it would be nice to have some fresh ground pepper. And how can you go wrong with a chrome pepper mill with stainless steel drive shaft and grinding mechanism?

14:15

Now that's what I'm talking about. I wish I had a stainless steel drive shaft.

11:30

I have a pepper mill, sort of. I have a spice bottle of peppercorns with a built in grinder, so that works. But I still, after 2.5 years out on my own, still don't have a salt shaker. I suppose the hidden benefit is that I don't add extra salt to my foods at home, and I'm less likely now to do it when I'm eating not at home.

09:01

Anyway, it's ok. At least you have a platform to play your games on, even though you don't actually play them. I just bought Mechwarrior 4, and I don't have a computer to play it on yet.

08:47

Can someone tell me why I'm still dumping money into PlayStation games when I don't play it that often and already have half a dozen games I'm in the middle of?

17:21

Hey Deacon.... you have to go into your config in order to set your handle. I hope that you're not waiting for me to do it, because I can't.

I didn't know that you had a Palm Pilot, Ramp. When did you get one of those?

20:48

Just out of curiosity, Ramp - do you remember why you wrote "Fling Feces" on the piece of paper? Did you write it down because it would be good as a band name, or was that comment made only upon finding the paper?

04:18

A while ago Rejemy was wondering if anyone wrote down that quote from the Dracula episode of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. I recently found the piece of paper:

"Dammit! Y'know what? I'm sick of this crap. I'm sick of being the guy who eats insects and gets the _funny_ syphilis. As of this moment, it's over: I'm finished being everyone's BUTT monkey!"

On the same piece of paper (this is before I got a Palmpilot): "Fling Feces"

My roommate thought it would be a good name for a band, and I agree.

16:56

The problem with CSS all along is that it's basically a wankery academic excercise.
Sure the W3 is nominally the group that sets web standards, but they haven't been in charge of web technologies since Marc Andreesen graduated and rewrote Mosaic into Netscape.

So any browser-related standards they come up with are just so much wind-blowing jabbering, since it's the browser makers that control the de-facto standards.
Which unfortunately translates into "Microsoft" which certainly doesn't have the interests of independant developers at the fore-front. Oh the irony of me making that comment.

I suppose Mozilla is still striving to meet the standards, and that's all well and good as far as it goes. I tried NS6 for about 90 seconds before I saw that you couldn't right-click-paste into the address bar. Jeez, people! Right-click menus are standard on Windows text fields. I don't have a very high tolerance for so-called "platform independent" widget sets.

Still, someone may at some point take the Gecko engine and embed it in some chrome that doesn't suck.

But does this really help me? No. Sure, I could code up a site with all the standards-compliant CSS I wanted, but I like my sites to be viewable by the general public. The general public doesn't have much of an incentive to upgrade. Maybe doing the CSS would be useful as an academic excercise, but these days academic excercises make me want to eject my skull.

13:45

But, hey, in the next couple of years, maybe MS and Netscape (or whoever's left in a couple of years) will get their act together and implement CSS properly instead of spending all their time on making their browser look exactly like WinAmp (*cough* Netscape v6).

And then the Steaming Turd will shine forth in all its glory! Well, after I redo the stylesheets for browsers with the correct implementation, that is....

05:04

Okay, another stupid web browser tricks question. If I use javascript to detect on the client-side what browser is being used, and use that info to pick a document.writeln() to write the <LINK> tag corresponding to a stylesheet that was hand-tailored to suit that particular browser, will it work correctly? I guess what I'm asking is, does javascript get "preprocessed" for the purposes of modifying the web page before the page gets rendered, and does that apply to stuff in between the <HEAD> tags, too?

...of course, to venture a guess based on past experience, the correct answer here is: "It's browser-dependent." ROFL.

02:50