CSS

I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past few weeks redoing the Caravan Beads website. Most of the structural work is done, I’m happy to say, so soon I’ll be able to concentrate on adding content and stop trying to brute force CSS into my aged brain.

My father, who died when I was 16, was an early-generation computer programmer. He was also a masters-level chess and bridge player and had the kind of brain that could program computers in machine language. At least I guess that’s what it was: he routinely brought home huge printouts that consisted solely of 011011010010110 kinds of stuff. Greek to me but he understood it. Wish he’d lived to see the modern computer age. The machines he used were pre-transistor dinosaurs that filled a building.

Anyway, I definitely did not inherit his skills. So the past few weeks have been moderately painful and I wouldn’t even rank myself as a CSS kindergardener yet. Fortunately there are lots of great websites one can learn from. Here are a couple of the ones I found useful:

For examples of liquid layouts that behave well when scaled up and down in size, Matthew James Taylor’s site was a good place to start.

For sheer amazing feats of CSS magic, Stu Nichols’ CSSPlay site is the place to visit.

And a couple of days ago I found this collection of CSS tools. Have only had time to glance at them but looks like a great resource. There are a bunch of other collections also. Just google “css tools” and you’ll have too many places to visit.

I’ve also gotten a lot of use out of BBEdit, CSSEdit, and a new program, Coda.

Magic

Months ago I set up a Twitter account to see what it was for. Didn’t really see it as useful to me so have let it slumber for months, in spite of which I have a grand total of ten followers.

This evening, however, while at the gym, I decided to do an experiment. I’ll be honest: I don’t think it will work. But no cost to try it. So I sent out a tweet saying that I was looking for anyone who studied French at UCLA back in the ‘60s or later with Mme Sylvie Walker. She was Swiss, married to an American (Professor of English, I think), and a wonderful, funny, witty, outstanding teacher. I loved my French classes with her and wish they had been twice as long.

We corresponded for a while after I graduated in 1970. I was in the Peace Corps from 1970-1973 in Senegal, but at some point thereafter—because I’m a terrible correspondent—I lost touch with her. So the Twitter experiment is just for nostalgia sake and also to see if my tiny group of followers know anyone who knows anyone etc. etc. And if my tiny group of blog followers would like to pass the question on as well, I thank you in advance.

Okay, now to the title of this post. As the news washes over us day and night, I wonder how much of our attention is directed to the wrong things. Not that AIG bonuses aren’t infuriating; of course they are. Not that we shouldn’t worry about the financial black hole whose event horizon seems to be spreading rapidly across the planet. But what are we ignoring?

Like the person with high blood pressure who ends up dying of the cancer that was overlooked for too long, I wonder whether sooner or later (and it’s the sooner I worry about most since I’m old enough that later may not concern me personally) we will discover that we paid too much attention to the magician’s left hand when we should have been focused on his right. While we wondered whether or not OJ was guilty (first time), bankers were inventing derivatives. While we focused on various other scandals of the day, the 9/11 hijackers were in flight training schools.

It’s not that there aren’t people paying attention to potentially serious issues that only get occasional media coverage. But from what I see on the big TVs at the gym (which is where I see the mainstream media), relatively few stories get saturation coverage and everything else is ignored.

A big part of this is the time scale involved. For example, glaciers all over the world are retreating. If you live in Maine like I do, or Florida, or Louisiana, or Texas, this is not high on our list of concerns. But for millions and millions of people in Asia, or the northwestern USA, or anywhere else in the world where winter snowpack and glacial melt provide vital water for drinking and irrigation, the vanishing glaciers are a ticking bomb.

But it’s not a bomb that will explode tomorrow or next week, so aside from scientists and a handful of writers, it’s not at the top of most people’s lists of things to worry about, even though the problems that will arise from a diminished water supply in areas of huge population could be historic. Civilizations have fallen when water supplies vanish.

Oh well. Every day is a test for every species on the planet including homo sapiens. Personally I’m betting the bacteria will outlast us.

Hendra and the bats

I’m often wrong. When I was a teenager I decided to not pay attention to the Beatles because they were so popular. Silly decision. When podcasts first started appearing, I wondered who would listen to them and when they would have the time. Wrong again.

So now, when I go to the gym, I almost always listen to podcasts. If you’re interested in science, the one I heard tonight was fascinating, albeit scary. It’s from Background Briefing on ABC Radio National (the Australian equivalent of NPR). It’s about Hendra virus and fruit bats.

Fairy Tales

I confess: my mind wanders when I’m doing physical labor. We got about a foot of fluffy snow today. I’ve been over to the store twice to shovel, run the snowblower up and down the sidewalks, and generally deal with snow today so I don’t have to move so much of it tomorrow. The sidewalks are the toughest part because every time the city plows go by, they refill the space I cleared earlier.

But I’m not complaining. Wet snow is fifty times worse and this was all powder.

So while shoveling and manhandling the snowblower, I was thinking about the imminent end of the Bush years and the soon-to-begin Obama administration. I was also thinking about the Grimm’s Fairy tales.

When I was a kid, we had a thick green copy of the complete Grimm’s Fairly tales. At least I remember it as green. I think it was one of the first books I read. For any of you who might not be familiar with these stories, the main thing to know is that they were pre-Disney. Good and bad were easy to distinguish, and when someone--often a witch, evil step-mother, or rotten queen (some characters were all three at once, very efficient)—was caught out at the end of the story, the punishments were quite graphic and horrible. I believe the creepy queen in Snow White was given red-hot iron shoes in which to dance, and rolling witches downhill in barrels with nails driven through the sides was considered a good way to end a story.

No house arrests back then, Mr. Madoff.

Definitely vivid stuff that kept my attention.

Anyway, the tale that came to mind was Sleeping Beauty (Briar-Rose), and in particular the penultimate paragraph where the prince kisses the sleeping princess and everyone wakes up from their hundred year slumber:

Then they went down together, and the king awoke, and the queen, and the whole court, and looked at each other in great astonishment. And the horses in the courtyard stood up and shook themselves, the hounds jumped up and wagged their tails, the pigeons upon the roof pulled out their heads from under their wings, looked round, and flew into the open country, the flies on the wall crept again, the fire in the kitchen burned up and flickered and cooked the meat, the joint began to turn and sizzle again, and the cook gave the boy such a box on the ear that he screamed, and the maid finished plucking the fowl.

And then the marriage of the king's son with briar-rose was celebrated with all splendor, and they lived contented to the end of their days.

The Bush era passes, and we are awakening from a long national enchantment or bewitching. What do we find? Two unfinished wars, wondrous transfer of wealth from the many to the few, millions of workers shaking off the clinging cobwebs of an evil spell to discover that they have lost homes and jobs, laws bent and broken, and on and on.

Grrrrrr!

But I am optimistic. In times of crisis, Americans can accomplish almost anything. We’re neck-deep in the crisis, and Obama gives me hope for three reasons.

First, he is articulate. Clear speech and clear writing come from clear thinking, and we desperately need clear heads at the helm.

Second, he is not afraid to speak truth. The fact that he is not promising miracles, that he has already made clear that fixing the current mess will take years and a lot of hard work, is a breath of fresh air. This is not a “mission accomplished” President.

Third, the fact that we elected Obama tells me that the spell has been broken. That cracking sound you heard on November 4th was the BushCheneyRove enchantment exploding.

Actually I can think of lots of other reasons, but that’ll do for tonight.

The really hard problems #1

I think fairly often about problems which we (I’ll restrict the discussion to this country, so we means citizens of the USA) have not solved in the sixty years since I was born. I’ve nicknamed these “How can it be okay...” problems. Here’s one that’s high on my list:

In our rich and powerful nation—even allowing for the damage done during the past eight years, we’re still vastly wealthy compared to many countries—how can it be okay for children to go to bed hungry? For surely it is okay, or we would not permit it.

Rather than continue, I’m going to let this be a chance for you, my occasional readers, to weigh in. How can hungry children be okay?