30 December 2002

I finally devoted some time to revamping the web space. While doing the conversion to an XHTML 1.0 Strict structure with Unicode (UTF-8) character coding as described in the What’s New dispatch, I was reminded that I started abandoning the table-based layout in November 2001! It was time to place the space on a more modern structure, one that did not rely on heading tags for font effects, for example, and that did not create barriers to older browsers or alternative browsing technologies. The big victims of this redesign are browsers of version 4, more specifically Microsoft Internet Explorer and iPlanet Netscape Communicator. Users of IE4 (who will not have been able to even reach this page) will need to set the preferences to not display stylesheets, while Navigator 4.x users will see the navigation line as a vertical unordered list, and the named entities will be a visual irritant. Like my design for the WamaLTC site and my proposal for the WAMALUG site, the site pages look best in Mozilla. Despite the overwhelming proportion of web surfers that use Internet Explorer, and the sincerity of an IE Mac’s designer’s shock (shock!) that a modern browser like Mozilla breaks on his weblog’s layout, and while I have made some compromises for the sake of IE6, there are just too many difficulties coding for it to make it worthwhile, especially since with this redesign I make the life of browsers at work with iPlanet Communicator 4.75 that much more difficult.

I have heard from a third person who liked reading my movie dispatches. Grr. But who’s to say what further changes in site content might be in store? ;-)

27 December 2002

So, I went to the Washington Auto Show for the third year in a row. This year, I paid special attention to final assembly points. Some manufacturers are coy on this point, so I was doing a lot of bending to read the small panel on the frame visible only when the driver’s door is open. Biggest surprises? A Honda Civic three-door hatchback from Swindon, England. A Mitsubishi Diamante from Adelaide, Australia. The back row at the Volkswagen display, with the Golf, from Brazil. Except for the Steyr-Puch Gelandewagen masquerading in America as DiamlerChrysler’s Mercedes-Benz G-class (made in Austria), the rest of this year’s line-up was from mostly expected places: United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Korea, England, and Sweden. Do GMC buyers appreciate it should they read that their purchase is from the Truck and Bus Group operating in Indiana? For that matter, it sure seemed like no two GMC models came from the same factory! The display accompanying the MINI Cooper chose to feature in its timeline of Mini history the Mini Moke used in The Prisoner television series. Up front, anyway, the actual vehicle has plenty of footroom. Ah, if only the Jeep Liberty had an internally mounted spare tire.

15 December 2002

Thanksgiving evening I was having a spot of fun changing the Apple logo in the menu bar of my Macintosh Performa 6118 from multi-colored to gray when Corel Photo-Paint 10 quit with an error of type 2, Stuffit Helper (a part of version 7.0) caused some more difficulty, and trying to Force Quit the Finder failed and I had to hit the power button. I never booted to that hard drive again. So I with assistance from my brother, whose copy of Norton Utilities 4 for the Mac was sturdier than version 6 was, have been busy trying to reestablish dominion over the system and get things sorted out for resuming work on editing the web sites. The holiday message may be curtailed and/or late this year. (The file date of the 2001 edition is December 8!) It’s not so much that the Performa and the PowerBook are old computers. Until this fall, when the effect of Jobs’ edict to developers to stop work supporting Classic (that is, system 8.6 and 9.x) become apparent with upgrades to programs I use arriving for Mac OS X only (or, more cheekily, for OS X and 9.2 when 9.2 can be installed only on machines that can run X anyway), I was still able to buy new software from store shelves. (Windows 95 users should be finding the software selection that includes that OS steadily shrinking, too.) Mozilla itself plans to relegate the Classic edition from 1.3 and up to port status. Maybe I’ll be spending more time reminiscing with Dan’s 20th. Century Abandonware Site or the site devoted to WordPerfect for DOS Updated from now on.

All of two people have reported noticing that I have suspended public reviewing of movies, but I have updated the menu for the curious. Oooh, I noticed that Dina Meyer played a Romulan in Star Trek Nemesis. It’s rare that the Star Trek crew put a really pretty actress under makeup like that. (The Ashes to Ashes episode of Star Trek Voyager from March 1, 2000 is one of the rare exceptions.) Any excuse to take out the Starship Troopers DVD, eh?

Might as well add Zeldman to the array of links I set forth below regarding the subject of web design.

16 November 2002

I have been too busy designing the web site of WamaLTC and, using what I have learned from doing that, revising my imitation of the WAMALUG web site to see any movies or make any changes to this web site. I have found useful in my work the CSS at the newly redesigned wired.com, especially the sweet trick to hide the borders on images that serve as link anchors in all styles-aware browsers (including Netscape Communicator 4.x, without it going nuts over a styled image). Other resources have included the Taming Lists article at A List Apart (plus Practical CSS Layout), the CSS Rollovers Internet Styleguide and the older version thereof (although I note that ANY use of the voice-family hack as extolled by Eric Meyer on CSS will prevent Netscape Communicator 4.x from reading the entire style sheet even if none of the declarations are harmful to it). Also Pure CSS2 Rollovers at WebReference.com, the Be Mean to Opera hack at Albin.net (too bad Opera 6 doesn’t fall for the trick), the Commented Backslash MacIE5 CSS Hack v2, the tips for using @import, using media or @media, using a comment, using the attribute selector, using the child selector, using Tantek’s Hack, and using others at the Hide CSS from Browsers collection. I got the trick for the popups at my imitation WAMALUG site from Pure CSS Popups. For column layouts, consider this lesson or those at glish.com and the tips at bluerobot. The Rich in Style site seems to lack current information. And, oh yeah, Minolta never got back to me on that upgrade installation information. Fortunately a little Googling found me an explanation for a different firmware upgrade that I was able to use. Sure enough, I haven’t taken any new pictures, either.

30 October 2002

I’ve promised not to use any of the ideas from the book Building Really Annoying Websites in my own web design, but the fact that to any reasonable web surfer every suggestion therein is a matter of common sense (to NOT do it) doesn’t seem to have stopped more than one web site (including one for a small local chain of shops) from implementing one or more such errors of web design. Frankly I am leery of even clicking through to some of the sites listed at Really Bad Web Sites! I had been fairly close on my attempt to create a CSS rollover menu but I found a more structurally coherent representation. There’s still a ragged right margin to the menu in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows. It works in 5.1.6 on the Classic MacOS, so what’s their problem? The clear property is still giving me problems.

29 October 2002

Jaguar, the Apple Macintosh system software release 10.2, displays my Serbian-langauge site map flawlessly! A fantastic improvement over the previous 10.1 which must be what I was looking at in January. Sweet! The design of the website for WamaLTC continues. With so many browsers at my disposal, each having their own peculiarities (Internet Explorer 4.01 Mac will cascade style sheets identified for print and screen, so I have to adjust their LINK order and declare {display: block;} for the navigation, and then Internet Explorer 4.5 Mac won’t honor {display: none;} on a <span> tag, so I have to declare {font-size: 1px;} for it, and on and on...), it’s quite the puzzle. Internet Explorer 6 also can’t seem to remember that it doesn’t need to dial out to reach 192.168.0.x—it’s a local address!

26 October 2002

Criminals run red lights. Red light runners are criminals. How much more difficult can it be? Working on the WamaLTC site has highlighted some of the deficiencies of this web site (for example, using heading tags to format text instead of giving structure to the document is an impropriety). Some of the links from the Tools page reflect my latest attempts to move the pages closer to XHTML validity and accessibility standards. Interestingly, some of the work I’ve done on the style sheets has pushed the appearance in Netscape Communicator 4.8 closer to that in Netscape Navigator 3.04 (only some of the font styles survive). Then, in creating a style sheet for print media over at WamaLTC, I’ve exposed even more flaws in the operation of Internet Explorer on the Windows platform. I’m quite disappointed that—what is it now? 90% of the world’s browsers?—are Internet Explorer (although the 5.x Macintosh version is not too shabby) when it’s so flawed. Mozilla 1.1 has no problem interpreting the style sheets for screen and print separately, and furthermore, is perfectly prepared to implement the potentially obscure property of content. Visitors to WamaLTC using Mozilla 1.1 (I have no idea how far back the capability has existed) and printing a page there will get the actual URL between brackets after every link in the flow of the document with no additional typing from me other than the declaration for the CSS2 pseudo-class :after { content: " <" attr(href) "> "; } for the anchor tag.

22 October 2002

I have been handed the authority to make of the site of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club (WamaLTC) what I will. I think the final straw in prompting the powers that be in the club to grant me the access was my mentioning that the sole page on display at the site had the old WAMALUG logo (which we changed last spring). As I make progress in designing the site, trying to make it neck-deep in cascading style sheet technology for smaller file sizes, separation of content and presentation, and a logical structure for alternative browsers and user agents, I will have less time for the movie reviews (which I am convinced all of two people ever read). I’m very tempted to get a cable connection to the Internet to speed the process of evaluating photographs from Brickshelf for inclusion on the site. And Google comes to the rescue again when the Minolta DiMAGE 7 Upgrade Kit arrived without the software installation pamphlet it should have come with. Bad enough that the software is delivered on CD-R! My frustrated e-mail to Minolta, when I couldn’t locate a copy of the pamphlet or other instructions on their site, is still unanswered.

12 October 2002

Another Macintosh has entered my household, the PowerBook 1400cs/133, and I’ve found a site that explicitly seeks to imitate Steve Kan’s comprehensive approach to the Performa 6100 series. While I knew when I visited the Micro Center computer department store in the Pan Am Center last Friday that there was a Michael’s craft store next to it, it was only later that I remembered that on the west side of Nutley Street, there’s woods.

25 September 2002

Wow. If you had stopped by a little earlier today, everything in the garage would have been free! I left the door open after bringing in the recycling bin after the truck was through the alley just before seven o’clock in the morning. Left it open all day. Oops. Sometime in the first week of last month (August), one of Google’s bots found this webspace (judging by the contents of the DVD list they have cached). That’s a little spooky. How do I fit into the famous algorithm based on how many sites link to a page, and how worthy they are? For no particularly good reason, I’ve been checking whether my installed software is up to date. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me how more and more of it is being abandoned. Nogatech, for example, manufacturers of the Notebook TV PCMCIA card television tuner, gave up branded retail products in 1999, I discover at the Zoran web site. I already have the final 1.61 driver. Starfish has relegated the Earth Time plug in to a single entry on a list of discontinued products and offers not one frequently asked question about it. That’s a shame, because I haven’t been able to make it work with Mozilla, and keep Netscape Communicator 4.79 around almost for the sole reason that I can use this plug in (which corrects the system clock) with it. Venik’s aviation site doesn’t work with Mozilla, either, I wonder from the displayed source whether it’s the mixed case in the tags that’s causing the trouble.

31 August 2002

A small sign on the ticket counter at the AMC Hoffman Center 22 announced the end of an era. Effective Tuesday, September 3rd, there will no longer be a Twi-lite price. One of the differences at American Multi Cinema has been the ticket price between four and six o’clock, a lower price than the matinee price before four o’clock. The low price allowed me to see many movies in the mid-nineties for around three dollars each during the first run. AMC curtailed the practice on the weekend within the past year, though, and has now seen fit to abandon it entirely. I was rarely able to take advantage of it recently, anyway. Mozilla 1.1.0.2002082611 seems to be working okay, well enough that I have uninstalled Netscape 6.2.1 on both machines. Sure, that means no AOL Instant Messenger communication with me, but that’s how things are.

27 August 2002

Most amusing. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has iterations of the website of the LEGO® users group WAMALUG from the years 2000 and 2001 in its clutches. I was able to discover the Who’s Who list that the first charter points to, and, even better, link directly to it [link removed] from the analogous page at my imitation web site. Who would have guessed that the site currently has a site map [link removed] as well? (There is no navigational path to it.) In other news, me and Google keep snooping. Plus, Mozilla 1.1 Final was released yesterday.

20 August 2002

I love it when that happens. The computers behind the AMC Movie Watcher rewards program still do not operate in real time. By visiting the Mazza Gallerie 7 in the morning and the Hoffman Center 22 in the evening at the right point level, I get two free tickets. Turns out this is more important than ever before, seems the Hoffman Center sneaked the price of a ticket up to nine dollars. I’ve been letting this web space slide a little while I work on a complete replacement for the site of my LEGO® club, WAMALUG. Check out the unauthorized imitation from the link on the Tools page.

01 August 2002

There’s a reason grocery stores are experimenting with self-service checkout. It must be really hard to keep up with all the items a modern supermarket sells, but a customer usually knows what they’re buying. I happen to purchase a type of bakery item that has baffled cashiers for some time now, so much so that I have memorized the SKU which must be entered to ring it up. Earlier this week, a cashier could not believe I was not a former employee myself for knowing that. All I did was watch their fingers when they did it right.

24 July 2002

Mozilla 1.1 beta was downloaded, installed, and run on my NuBus-equipped Performa. Yay! Tabbed browsing, the Site Navigation Toolbar, the web site icon display.... Let’s add another browser to the list below of those which properly render these pages:

• Mozilla 1.1.0.2002072203 on the Macintosh platform

Although it is true that with the refusal of Mozilla or Gecko to believe that I have Cyrillic fonts in my Macintosh system, pages that declare a "Windows-1251" character set display in a very tiny font size.

17 July 2002

There may be some hope for my Performa after all. The system requirements for Mozilla have come back down to MacOS 8.5 and up, and compatibility with the NuBus is promised for 1.1b.

05 July 2002

Has it really been over a year* since I last bought a compact disc? The RIAA can’t blame MP3s, CD burners, or peer-to-peer networks for that. I just don’t listen to music much these days. But the opportunity of the One Hot Weekend Event at Tower Records/Video to purchase the soundtrack of Enterprise at over 30% off seemed a good one to complete my collection of Star Trek soundtracks. Since none of the series since the original has tracked later episodes with music from earlier ones, most of the newer soundtracks have little to recommend them. Consider The Best of Star Trek® Volume Two from GNP Crescendo and the terrific recognition of listening to Suite from The Corbomite Maneuver or Suite from Balance of Terror compared to the utter uselessness of, say, Suite from Bride of Chaotica. (*Yup. God Bless the Go-Go’s on May 15, 2001.)

30 June 2002

I forgot to include another browser version in the list below of those which properly render these pages:

• Opera 6.03 on the Windows platform

So I saw only three movies this month, a low matched only earlier this year, in January. A little earlier this month, I updated an answer on the Q&A page to address some of my reasons. I did accomplish that processor upgrade I mention below, it’s only a G3 card running at 240 MHz on the 30 MHz bus, but it’s enough to allow using Netscape 6.2 and Internet Explorer 5.1 and know that the speed is limited by my dial-up connection. Curiously enough, Apple Remote Access no longer reports the speed of the connection. In the now what? category, amidst the processor upgrade and switching hard disks and re-installing programs, I can no longer read my Cyrillic inclusions on the Macintosh. However, I have been able to accomplish work in CorelDRAW on the Macintosh. Once the PCMCIA card reader gets repaired, I hope to test out the compression side of Stuffit Deluxe in uploading photographs from the digital camera.

19 June 2002

The link toolbar in Opera is available only in version 5.0 for the Macintosh. Press release. The link toolbar in Mozilla (later renamed to the Site Navigation Toolbar) was included in versions 0.9.5 through 1.0 Release Candidate 2, and was backed out for Release Candidate 3 (and the Final) for performance reasons.

18 June 2002

Yay!! My favicon.ico file displays in Mozilla 1.0! When I discovered that I would not be able to run Mozilla on my Macintosh, I downloaded the Windows version yesterday, installed it today, and discovered that it displayed my favicon.ico file in the Location Bar. I still can’t find the buttons which react to <LINK> tags for which I have been preparing since December. I can’t find them in Opera for Windows, either. Very strange. Oh, look, Slashdot has a favicon, too. I find it completely weird that Microsoft Internet Explorer, which started the push for favicons, still won’t display one for my web space. Looks like I can add two more browsers to the list below of those which properly render these pages:

• Mozilla 1.0.0.2002053015 on the Windows platform
• Netscape 6.1 on the Windows platform

16 June 2002

Bad news for me. According to the Release Notes for Mozilla 1.0, there is a known incompatibility between Mozilla and NuBus Macintoshes (my 6118CD Performa is one of those) including those with upgraded processors (which I hope to do soon). So why does Netscape 6.x install and run on my Macintosh? Can Open Source Software advocates explain that, and their dripping condescension towards the NuBus line of PowerPC Macintoshes? The retail price of the Sonnet Crescendo G3/500 card has dropped to $US250, so it is not a matter of the performance that can be achieved from these machines.

There is a workaround for the lack of response of the Windows version of IE5+ to the CSS method of horizontal centering, which involves reliance on its incorrect application of the "text-align" attribute to block-level elements (and not solely to their contents). However, while I could apply text-align: center; to the body elements in my cascading style sheet, this would require applying text-align: left; to the divisions, and the alignment I achieve between the "T" in the header and the white background of the rest of the content is destroyed. My advice to the self-satisfied people who use Internet Explorer 6 because it’s-the-standard-people-develop-to is: upgrade to a browser (or platform) that works.

I offer a replacement [link removed] for the code to include the monitor of solar x ray activity and geomagnetic field activity I mention below on your own website.

15 June 2002

Well, I am shocked. I installed Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (the reported version number is 6.0.2600.0000) and discovered that it was no more competent to center the content of the pages in my web space than was IE5.5 or IE4. That is, it is unable to properly render the style of {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto} as applied to the <DIV>s that enclose the content on these pages. This is a violation of a Cascading Style Sheet standard, in which this style is the only approved way to center content. I have rewritten the browser assessment script implemented on the home page to lump users of IE6 (introduced with such fanfare along with Windows XP) with all the others using Internet Explorer on the Windows platform. Note that this lack of competence is not a part of the user experience with Microsoft Internet Explorer (now at version 5.1.4) on the Macintosh platform. Still, I felt a need to add this browser to my testing suite, and I apologize to those users of IE6 who read an inaccurate assessment of the capabilities of their browser earlier. This is a disappointment, especially since Opera 6.01 for Windows and Opera 5.0 for Macintosh (recently respectively added and registered, I registered the Windows version, too) have no difficulty with this most basic of CSS declarations. At least IE6 doesn’t blow up (have a page-destroying bug) because of the padding declarations I use in this web space (although the IE family for Windows is susceptible to them, perhaps when used inside table cells). I noticed that Mozilla 1.1 is identified as requiring Classic MacOS 9.1, so I downloaded the Full Installer for Mozilla 1.0 (which is supposed to run under MacOS 8.5+), but I have been unable to complete the installation of this open-source browser because of an error of type 12. Oh, yeah, and without so much as a do-you-want-this the installation of Internet Explorer 6 obliterated the Internet Explorer 5.5 and the side-by-side version of Internet Explorer 4 that I had managed to retain upon installing Internet Explorer 5.5. Clearly, end users of Microsoft’s latest browser have absolutely no need to develop web content accessible under earlier versions.

For reference’s sake, these are the browsers that are known (i.e., I have installed them, launched them, and confirmed their successful operation) to properly render the pages in my web space:

• Netscape 6.2.1, on both Windows and Macintosh platforms
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1.4 on the Macintosh platform
• Opera 6.01 on the Windows platform
• Opera 5.0 on the Macintosh platform

In case it makes a difference, the above list reflects current installations under Windows 98 (Version 4.10.1998) and MacOS 8.6.

These browsers are known to be defective in one or more ways to render the pages in my web space:

• Netscape 6.0 on the Windows platform
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, 5.5, and 4.0 on the Windows platform
• Netscape Communicator 4.x on both Windows (98 and NT4 including versions 4.0x, 4.5, and 4.7x) and Macintosh (System 7.5.3, 8.5, and 8.6 including versions 4.04 and 4.79) platforms
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 on the Macintosh (both 68k and PowerPC versions) platform
• Netscape Navigator 3.0x on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms

It’s been a while since I had it installed under System 7.5.3 on the Macintosh platform, but let’s just assume that Netscape Navigator 2.02c is defective in rendering modern web pages as well.

Why is this important? I write XHMTL code to W3C standards, as may be confirmed by clicking on the yellow buttons at the bottom of the home page, and a modern browser is supposed to display the code in a way which complies with the standards. By coding to standards, as opposed to the quirks of any particular browser, only one set of tags, attributes, and declarations need be prepared for any web page, and all modern, standards-compliant browsers will display it properly. This is surely not the only defective implementation of CSS in any of the browsers (and I do not suggest that Netscape or Opera is perfect, and I really don’t like the extra line spacing Opera adds to items in an unordered list) but since webmasters love to center their content, this bug is pretty annoying. The attitude of the Web Standards Project doesn’t sit well with everybody (someone hanging on to an 8 year-old computer despite the bounties that thrift shops and eBay offer comes to mind) but looking backward for compatibility with old browsers is the wrong direction for web design to take.

03 June 2002

I’ve finished reading 50 In 50, a collection of short stories from science fiction author Harry Harrison, one for each year he has been selling. Besides the irritation that there is no copyright page or other indication as to when each story was composed (I’m going to guess that the one with the green women on Mars piloting boats down the canals is an earlier one) there is the arresting presence of reverse anachronisms. I do believe I first noticed such things upon re-reading Isaac Asimov’s first novel of the detective Lije Bailey and his assistant R. Daneel Olivaw, The Caves of Steel, which features the android robot with the completely human appearance, moving sidewalks, and megalopolises in general, all very nice and futuristic until the moment Bailey makes reference to his hat. Asimov had no way of knowing that within a decade of publication, Kennedy’s inaugural would destroy the hat as a fashion accessory for men. Thus, Bailey’s hat becomes a reverse anachronism that pulls me back in time when I read about it. One of Robert Heinlein’s novels (it might be Stranger in a Strange Land) has personal helicopters and living grass in homes instead of carpet, but when it comes time to pass a secret recording from one operative to another, it is in the form of a wire recorder. A wire recorder?! You see what I mean. Among the reverse anachronisms in Harrison’s collected work are seams in the stockings of a young woman (a robot pretends he was examining its crookedness when caught inspecting the human female), a secretarial pool (in a corporation dedicated to populating the world with genetically engineered humans), the word Negro (a race war turned hot), and a New York City in which the demographics have gone unchanged since the early fifties (based on the ethnic slurs expressed).

28 May 2002

Ah, what a time we live in that parents must explore the Internet to keep up with what their own children are up to. Low Industries [link removed] is one example, caution, it launches a pop-under and includes vulgar words.

26 May 2002

If you’re waiting for my pronouncement on Star Wars Episode II Attack of the Clones, keep in mind that someone else will be paying for that.

18 May 2002

As I experiment with the CorelDRAW graphics suite and BBEdit 6.5.2 and build in anticipation of WAMALUG’s participation at the Manassas Railway Festival on the first of June, my movie reviews may become more curt. More changes in store hours. Tower Records/Video #195 will close earlier Sunday through Thursday (retaining the midnight closing on Fridays and Saturdays), while Shoppers Food Warehouse #52 has decided to open 24 hours daily.

07 May 2002

I was spending just a little time in a local bookstore flipping through a book about Spider-Man so unofficial it has no photography or graphic elements which can be related to the property. Seems like the screenplay of the movie that just opened to such terrific business is very closely based on the original story, down to the wrestling (hot stuff in 1962, apparently).

06 May 2002

As it happens, the Apple Store at Clarendon has BBEdit 6.5 for sale at a good price, but now that I have arranged for the download of MacOS 8.6, I have placed an order for the premier text editor for the Macintosh at the cross-upgrade price. The installation of System 8.6 also means that I have AOL Time Warner Netscape 6.2.1 loaded onto a Macintosh, although not without some errors of type 84 upon the first attempt. Errors of type 84 (menuPrgErr) happen when a menu is purged. More specifically, the Menu Manager attempted to access information about a menu but the menu record was purged. That’s real helpful. Since I am at a loss to ensure that all menus stored in the application’s resource file are marked as unpurgeable, it’s just as well that uninstallation and a new installation were successful in launching a working application. Certainly, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.1.3 Mac seems reasonably snappy on a 400 MHz Power Logix G3 upgrade card.

05 May 2002

Oh, you’re not scared of me. Why would you be? You’ve already committed at least one moving violation against my person, and are flirting with an assault charge for tracking me down to my car. (How did you figure out which car it was? Is there something about it that says, My driver does not take kindly to being run down in a marked crosswalk by a red light runner?) So forgive me for not being impressed by a blowhard in an old tan Toyota Corolla who can’t take a little correction. Shall we take it up with the Arlington County Police Department a few blocks east? That’s on top of a day that included a driver of a Cadillac that didn’t let a red light stop him from crossing four lanes of Jefferson Davis Highway at 23rd Street. How much longer is it going to be before every intersection has to have a tan HUMVEE with gun emplacement on top to deal with these unrepentant criminals? It’s like Jim Carrey’s character in Liar Liar said, Stop breaking the law!

I was driving back from the Cinema Arts Theatres 6 past midnight after seeing Y Tu Mamá También and saw that the McDonald’s in Annandale offered a 24 hour drive-thru window. In an area when grocery stores have cut back to Wal-mart hours and don’t often stay open past midnight (the Tower Records/Video in Annapolis closes at ten o’clock now just like the one in Santa Monica) Wendy’s has lengthened its drive-thru hours until two o’clock, and now this McDonald’s has seen fit to compete. Too bad there is nothing left for me to eat in these places, and I’ve recently discovered (by reading the Business section) that McDonald’s is the corporate owner of Chipotle’s and Boston Market.

23 April 2002

The purchase of a vector graphics software program has led to a minor burst of design.

17 April 2002

Uh-oh, another visitor to these pages has been identified. Who would have guessed that a busy webmaster would backtrack to a referring page? Is there any question as to whether this particular individual can code? No, there is not a question. Not with over a million graphic images automatically thumbnailed upon uploading, there isn’t. I am still creating the occassional doubled </cite> tag (which closes the <div> normally around the textual content and lets the balance spill out over the background color).

06 April 2002

Well, whew! At least I noticed in the first week. The General Cinema Corporation has sold its local theaters to American Multi Cinema and left the area. The Mazza Gallerie 7 and Springfield Mall 10 will seriously dilute AMC’s proud record of an ever-higher average of screens per site. They are mere multiplexes and not the megaplexes that are the future. Er, according to AMC’s press releases, anyway. The Springfield location has only a few posters so far to indicate the change in management, while the General Cinema signs are still up, uncovered, inside and outside the mall. It won’t necessarily change my theater choices (of AMC theaters, I have only gone to the Hoffman Center 22 since it opened last June) but it does dominate the area between the Potomac River and Stafford County with five locations and only one United Artists, two Hoyts, two Regal Cinemas, three Loews Cineplex, four National Amusements, and five independent operations as competition. This week Kissing Jessica Stein goes wide. With a minimum of research, I have determined that The Simian Line is a term used in palmistry and that the film includes Cindy Crawford. Oops, my bad. Minimum of research, indeed. The actual press release dated 29 March explains that AMC has bought the bankrupt GC Companies, Inc. and added its theatrical exhibition properties to its own circuit.

31 March 2002

Moo. We are shoved through like cattle everywhere I go. And notice how the most dangerous place to be in the area last night was the University of Maryland (and not Connecticut Avenue between Florida Avenue and 21st Street at 1:45 a.m.)? Later today I visited the Muvico Egyptian 24 at Arundel Mills for the first time as part of my desperate attempt to stay out of Loews Cineplex venues. It opened December 8, 2000 and I’m sure the monumental architecture was stapled together by indifferent workers. Their board was too small to list the movie I wanted to see! Plus I have yet to figure out what The Simian Line is—it’s not been mentioned by any of the local sources, maybe I should start reading the Baltimore Sun.

16 March 2002

Stuff keeps disappearing, eh? Earlier this year it was the Geppi’s Comic World in the Crystal Underground (a name from the early seventies which itself has disappeared in favor of Crystal Shops North). Then it was the Friend Test I mention below. Now I read that the Loews Cineplex Foundry 7 closed on Monday! (Google’s bots and/or spiders have already indexed the Got Plans? discussion transcript from Thursday at washingtonpost.com.) I was last there to see Birthday Girl on 23 February. With my publicized opposition to attendance at the other Loews Cineplex outlets because of their high screens, asymmetric seating plans, and disintegrating seats, it will get that much tougher to see the interesting films. (Looks like I will have to wait for the DVD to see Charlotte Gray, for example.)

26 February 2002

I had the link to the Windows version of the Minolta DiMAGE Image Viewer Utility v1.1.1 here as an aid to downloading it. Edition for Macintosh System 8.6 through 9.2.1. (I was successful.) Would you believe I cannot find a cropping tool in it? Just as well I have the LAB-10 software from the Olympus transparency scanner. I suppose I might as well admit that I have succumbed to peer pressure and that the small change to the Q&A page is the answer Yes. to the question of whether I own a digital camera. I joined some WAMALUGers for dinner at Clyde’s in Tysons Corner and although my clothing is a little smoky afterwards I think we had a good time. I tried to stay meat-free (although feta cheese is a pleasure from childhood which may be indulged in now only rarely) by ordering an appetizer as my main meal. So it’s not going to be a high-profit table on a Tuesday.

24 February 2002

My movie reviews for a week ago are a little curt. I suppose I was disappointed by the fuss over movies that will, ultimately, mean as much to me as, say, The Thin Red Line or Ordinary People do now. Oh, wait, I never saw Ordinary People, only had to read the book in high school. I’m still trying out substitutes for the Did I like it? question I found so unhelpful last year.

From what I can read at Richard Whettestone’s illustrated criticism of each episode of Enterprise and the recaps of each episode of Enterprise on a scene-by-scene basis over at Television Without Pity, the series is just getting worse and worse. Yet the reviewers Trek Today digs up continue to give it good grades. Is it an age thing? Sure makes it easier to respond to pitches for the local cable company’s digital offerings (with multiple sports channels, no less)!

Last week’s DVD releases were dispiriting to a degree unmatched in quite a while. This Tuesday should turn things around. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is due! The review of a preview copy over at News Askew (Your Daily Source For All Things Askew!) is quite favorable.

12 February 2002

Wouldn’t you know it? My brain needs a full-time fact-checker. I’ve had to correct the text of Enid’s line from Ghost World in the entry below (confirmed against the closed captioning).

With forty-two respondents to Charlotte Geary’s Friend Test I am still in the top ten! Can’t these people read?

Surely I deserve a Golden Globe nomination at least: my performance as a smiling, friendly, helpful person at the WAMALUG layout this past weekend must qualify for some category.

Coincidence, or something more? Of the three participants who have uploaded photographs from the event so far, none chose to feature my train set that included three very modern diesels, three unibody tank cars, four Top Gon coal cars, all in 8-wide, and a 7-wide extended vision caboose. The distinctive shapes and Class A railroad liveries of the locomotives in particular elicited knowing expressions of recognition from our train-savvy visitors. I am grateful that Kevin Loch, at least, did include in his photo-taking circuit of the layout a nice street-level view of my bank building, modeled after a photograph I found on page 152 of the book Lost America: From the Atlantic to the Mississippi (a long-ago gift from my father with a 1971 copyright). The National Exchange Bank of Hartford, Connecticut bore a Rebuilt 1869 sign near its top and was demolished in 1917. The book, intended to raise awareness of the destruction of the architectural heritage of the United States and stimulate interest in preservation, notes that [the] fashionable and rather ornate motifs of the Renaissance Revival were replaced by a Chinese restaurant.

Several times this week already I’ve been grateful I have a Macintosh at my disposal, and especially for Graphic Converter version 4. My insolent Windows computer did not have a rotate command in the program that came with the Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanner [and rotate is not in the help index either], the ancient Olympus LAB-10 software can handle JPEG and TIFF but not GIF, the Kodak Imaging program refused to load claiming that I should contact my administrator for help, and Paint is completely hopeless for anything other than bitmap files. Graphic Converter rotated a GIF without fuss on Sunday, and last night I needed it to convert a bitmap (because I used Paint for editing) to a GIF.

Not that the continuing propaganda campaign from colleagues about digital cameras is having effect, but I did explore the web site for the Minolta offering yesterday. I like that I could use my Maxxum flash and remote control cords with the DiMAGE 7, and its 28-200mm optical zoom lens* is a reasonable range. There is both a viewfinder and a screen on the back, but only the viewfinder is tiltable.
*35mm equivalent

07 February 2002

Yes, it’s true nothing much has been happening here at the web site lately. I haven’t seen a movie in a long time and tomorrow Charlotte Gray moves—yuck—to the Inner Circle theater. I managed to network my two computers together with Ethernet and have a browser on the Windows computer display files in the Web Sharing folder on the Macintosh hard drive. I have been building in anticipation of the participation of WAMALUG at the Greenberg’s Train Show in Upper Marlboro this weekend. I have been finishing the preparation of my income tax returns while watching the DVD of with a friend like Harry.... And last night—yay!—I found Ghost World available on DVD! The line of Enid’s that medium is really only for suckers who don’t know the concept of value can still crack me up. On the other hand, you shouldn’t expect a LiveJournal style of reporting here. Charlotte Geary invited visitors to her page there to take a Friend Test and I scored 8 out of 10 putting me in the top ten of almost 40 respondents. Is that scary or what?

20 January 2002

A reality check. I stopped into the Apple store in Tysons Corner Center today and after observing the hubbub over the new iMac and noticing that their software selection is a little stale (there is still a box of the Dr. Solomon’s Anti-Virus program with a sticker on the box boasting compatibility with System 9) it occurred to me to see whether one of the display models was connected to the Internet. Innocently stepping forward to one of the G4 tower models and waving the mouse pointer over the Dock, I brought Microsoft Internet Explorer to the fore and saw that the current site was a page at store.apple.com. Ha! Pressing Command-L to bring the keyboard focus to the URL toolbar, I typed in the address of my web space and was disappointed to see that the link to my Serbian-language site map, while it appeared in Cyrillic, had the same spacing between each letter that my own experiments in displaying the page on an older Macintosh running a much older System (8.5.1) had achieved. Visiting the site map itself demonstrated the same expanded letter spacing, broken word wrap, and lack of at least four letters that I had experienced earlier. (For the technically inclined, all four letters are ones not used in Russian which suggests that others which I have not used yet would not appear either.) Clearly, the default installation of System 10.1 does not display the Windows Glyph set seamlessly and as emotionally satisfying it might be to leave Microsoft behind more research is necessary. Come to think of it, I didn’t see the premier text editor for the Macintosh for sale at the store, either.

I have had difficulty downloading the free update to System 8.6. Every time, part 1 gives me an error. I’ve tried all three browsers and an FTP program as well. My connection, while usually strong on a Macintosh, has been croaking after about 2 hours, so I’ve been unable to download the consolidated file, either (it would need over 3 hours at my modem speed). While a cable modem might seem very tempting at this moment, I have been reading Lawrence Lessing’s new book, the future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world, and I have a few questions for my happy neighbors. Does it bother you that the upload speed is so much slower than the download speed, symptomatic of the cable company’s interest in you primarily as a recipient of content and much, much less as a source of content? Or that the cable company actively seeks to prevent you from being a source of content by prohibiting operation of a server or shutting down certain ports? Does it bother you that the cable company has the capability to change the code layer to discriminate the content that reaches you, potentially making the offerings of its investors arrive much more quickly or insistently, and making other content (such as information regarding other Internet Service Providers) not reach you at all? Does it bother you that you are no longer a part of a peer-to-peer network but instead are just another cable customer looking at a different screen?

15 January 2002

The problem of keeping up with the changing content on the Web is one everyone faces. For a hobbyist such as myself playing with obsolete^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlder computers, tracking down the necessary and useful software can be a challenge. It turns out that there is a fellow (Steve Kan) who has put together a personal web site which includes a page devoted to the type of computer (including the Macintosh Performa 6118CD) that is currently engaging my tinkering attention. However, he, like so many others in discussing the availability of Macintosh System 7.5.3 (including myself in my dispatch last year) links to a technical reference article at Apple that no longer exists. Instead, one must now visit this folder for the English North American release of the Unity system that runs on many Macintosh models. Now, if I can just download all twelve parts of System 8.6 (who is bold enough to download the 34.6 megabyte consolidated file at 26400 bps?) and get it running on this ancient PowerPC 601 and purchase the commercial edition of BBEdit at the upgrade from Lite price, I just might start another folder for Macintosh-edited pages. My source for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 for the Macintosh changed their domain structure, but I was still able to find where their page for software downloads had moved to and obtain the version for PowerPC. The browser testing suite I mention below expanded on the tenth with the addition of Opera 5.0 Final for the Macintosh. Plus I’m up to 6.2.1 and 4.79 on the Netscape products. My current incarnation of the web statistics tracking script on the home page gives Netscape Navigator 2.02c for the Macintosh significant trouble.

04 January 2002

I had a monitor of solar x ray activity and geomagnetic field activity on the home page for a day. Two members of WAMALUG had announced their engagement on LUGNET (but not at the WAMALUG Yahoo! groups, curiously enough) so I did a Google search on the prospective groom and discovered that he had web domains devoted to ham radio and solar system mysteries [maj.com]. At the latter, he included a monitor of solar x ray activity and geomagnetic field activity (useful enough for people operating ham radios) and the HTML code to include the monitor on one’s own web page. Unfortunately for me, the code was horribly non-compliant with XHTML 1.0 not least because of improper nesting of tags. As satisfying as it was for me to pummel the code into compliance, the delay in loading the home page while the monitor fetched the two graphics indicating the status was not acceptable. My efforts to create a little popup window using JavaScript have not been successful.

03 January 2002

By downloading and installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 for the Macintosh on a Performa 6118CD, I have expanded my browser testing suite by one more. I could previously test in Netscape Navigator 3.01 for Windows, Netscape Navigator 3.04 for Macintosh, Netscape Communicator 4.04 for Macintosh, iPlanet Netscape 4.75 for Windows (at work), iPlanet Netscape 4.77 for Windows, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 for Macintosh, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows, and AOL Time Warner Netscape 6.2. Can someone using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 let me know how the web space displays therein?

01 January 2002

The magic is gone. When I attended the Hot Wheels 2002 Washington Auto Show last Thursday, I discovered that the S4 Avant wagon that had taken my heart last year is no longer in the line-up at Audi. At least the seat cushions on the Chrysler side of the DiamlerChrysler product line are bouncier this year. (Over on the Diamler side, the very expensive G-class is billed as new even though Steyr-Puch of Austria have been building them for years.) And as much as a certain mature relative might hanker for a Chrysler PT Cruiser, for a Made in U.S.A. experience might I suggest a Jeep? The new Liberty (Toledo, Ohio) is just the slightest bit of a hop up to sit in, and the room in the back seat is good, too. (The rear leg room in a Cadillac Seville, on the other hand, compares not so favorably to a Neon! General Motors really is relying on that cut-out in the back of the front seats to get any room for the knees.) Another thing I noticed this year, besides the inside-the-trunk glow-in-the-dark trunk releases, is that no one, but no one, is competing on gas mileage. It got to be pretty unnerving to see how many vehicles reported an EPA estimate of 18 for city driving. I’m used to 30 myself, so this is a change I’m not looking forward to.