Good… GOD! There was much gnashing of teeth over center content that was playing “tag” and “hide ‘n seek” with the side columns on the 3-legged blog today. Lots of futzing and saving of various close-but-not-quite stylesheets later, I finally tracked down the problem. It was the italics in the blockquotes. No matter what values I set for the various columns, the italics were just enough to throw it all into confusion. End result: no more italics in blockquotes. So then what do I do? Download Firefox and muck about a bit more. Huh. Not bad – it works in…
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MIAMI, July 27 – Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. Oh, here we go again. And guess what? It wasn’t made public until a citizens’ group requested audit data for the 2002 election. Turns out election officials knew something went wrong in spring 2003, but didn’t publicly acnknowledge a “malfunction” until a year later. Good for the citizens’ group for bringing this to light, and good for everyone that’s been hammering on this issue…
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But running the website soon became a dominant activity in his day, and on June 28, Billmon announced: “Last call.” Whiskey Bar would no longer accept comments. “You’ve only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I’ve got a full-time day job, and something had to give,” Billmon said. “In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn’t able to keep up with it.” It’s always a shame when a well-written, popular blog stops taking comments, or…
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A US-bound flight from Sydney turned back on Tuesday after a note found on board raised fears of a bomb threat, Australia’s government said. Flight UAL840, carrying 246 passengers and bound for Los Angeles, landed safely back in Sydney airport nearly three hours after take-off. Okay, that’s interesting. I looked up the flight information in SABRE for this flight, and it’s described as a crew issue. ¤QUA/2840/27JUL« UA RESPONSE F:UA840/27JUL MEL/2029CT/OFF 1129A .14E SYD/0503CT/IN 550P 5.00L ‡DPTS CNCLD LAX/0504CT/ARVS CNCLD ‡ETD 100P OT JFK/0504CT/ETA 927P OT SYD/WAS OFF SYD 257P - RETURNED TO FIELD DUE TO CREW SYDLAX/PSGR PROT -…
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She began participating in discussions on a Web site called “Democracy and Freedom,” which is often at odds with the government. By 2001, she opened her own site, much of it dedicated to literature, but she also published some articles calling for more freedom. As cyberspace became her home, she began to defend what the Chinese call netcitizens. Fellow SF fan and netizen Liu Di and I have a lot in common. We write about our interests in science fiction (she’s more interested in books, I’m currently more interested in television and movies). She writes about politics and dabbles in…
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Just don’t do it. Don’t panic, or the air marshals will be forced to smack you silly. And then you’ll end up as an ignominous dupe on the Urban Legends page… even if you are an otherwise smart journalist. The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves. Oh, and by the way Ms. Ima Responsible Journalist Scaredypants, way to inject your progeny into the story so we all know you’re a…
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At a recent conference, there’s mention that the new version of MT coming out will have dynamic templates – this is a good thing. However, will have to figure out if I’ll still be able to use MT-Amazon in entries – this may not be possible or prudent with the new version. Need to find out more, as I’m in the habit of doing Amazon tags on the fly, rather than in static content. About breaking plugins, they’ve chosen this route because for some plugins it is ridiculous to expect them to work in dynamic templates. He gave me the…
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You’re driving along, you’ve got cameras in the car, when suddenly you spot something that begs a second look. You go back, take photos, avoid another car that also went back to look again, and pantomime shrugging and “I don’t know either” as you drive past them. You’ve had a “what the hell is that?” moment. We had one today. David and I drove aimlessly, more or less with the object of getting to a beach or park along the shore of Lake Michigan, so we meandered along northwards along Sheridan Road, which is one of those historic byways that…
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Yeah, well, I’ve been hankering after a 3 column layout for a while now, and this one works in both IE6 and Firefox. My old 2 column layout does not play well in Firefox: probably something icky to do with either divs, or it doesn’t understand the width expressed as a percentage. It only took all day. However, part of yesterday and much of today were spent chasing after a 3 column solution that simply would not work; I found a much more workable one that was easier to adapt at the Moveable Type support forum. For the record, the…
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MEDFORD, Ore. – A nylon necklace strung with condoms has sparked outrage at the county fair. Strangely enough, the necklace kits were very, very popular with older teens, the target group for a Planned Parenthood promotion aimed at making contraceptive use normal and less embarassing. However, due to the obligatory “numerous complaints” from parents whose kids were not among those making the condom leis, Planned Parenthood agreed after meeting with fair officials to stop the promotion. It wasn’t difficult for them to come to this agreement, because they ran out of supplies for making the condom leis, which consisted of…