January 31, 2001
8:12P
PUTTERING AROUND

Special thanks to Colin of for pointing me in the direction of Reunion, the genealogy program that is totally Mac compatible unlike Family Tree Maker. And the best part was that Reunion was able to import my FTM database. Yea!

I spent today cleaning up things on my site. Updated the accessibility links in my resource guide. Ran across AWARE, a project of the HTML Writers Guild. It list some resources, and you can view their accessible style sheet.

I also discovered Andreas World Conspiracy Headquarters and added him to Believe It or Not (Their Names are not Michelle).

Web Site Tests Verio's Role as Copyright Police.

A grrl after my own heart, Leigh: "Speaking of code, I can't answer your questions like 'How do you get Dreamweaver to do that?' because I don't use it. That's right, I'm hard core... I code EVERYTHING by hand in BBedit, so I haven't a clue as to how to get any WYSIWYG program to do any of it."

January 30, 2001
11:09A
SPRING HAS SPRUNG

The wonderful thing about living in the Bay Area is the short winter. And I use the term 'winter' loosely. Winter is typically the six-week period from Thanksgiving until about two weeks into January. It gets a little colder and you have to wear a sweater with your shorts and maybe gloves because the steering wheel is chilly. But now spring has sprung and here's the proof.

Long distance troubleshooting is a challenge. We sent Mama a monitor when it seemed the old monitor to Elvis, her PowerMac 6100, went out, but the new monitor had the same problem as the originial. Honey finally deduced that it was probably her lithium battery that died instead.

This morning I overnighted Mama a new battery, pictures of the inside of her computer and directions on how to install. She'll also be cleaning the dust bunnies around the power supply fan with canned air. She's a little nervous about it all, but I told her it was a piece of cake because it was a Mac.

Next month I'll be picking up an iMac for her. I'll install the latest software, Yahoo! Messenger so we can chat, Timbuktu so I can manage her computer, and Family Tree Maker so that we can share data despite the fact that the company no longer supports Macs. It still works with system 9.0.4, but probably won't work with the next upgrade. Hmmm...back burner.

Michele sent me a screenshot of a discrepancy in the way my portfolio displayed on her Windows 2000 PC. I was dismayed as I am a twee bit anal about the way my webpages look. At work I was used to having a Mac and a PC side-by-side with various browsers versions open as I build webpages. At home, without a PC, it's like flying almost blind.

I totally stressed all day yesterday over having to lay out so much money on a PC/monitor at a time like this, until I ran across Virtual PC. Bingo! Now my portfolio's corrected, and with the money I saved not buying a PC and monitor, I will now use a little to buy more RAM for Bettie today. I love happy endings.

Now, time for the really important things.

January 25, 2001
7:57P
OPPORTUNITY

Two things and then the door's closed: Netscape.com to become portal for Time Warner content and Netscape's Vanishing Point?

Worked all day updating my portfolio and resume. Have a couple of nibbles. Too good to be true. Surely.

Having a crisis de webpage: ems or pixels. I tried ems (accessibility) until I saw what it does on some pc's. Tonight I'm doing pixels, and trying to live with my conscience.

Speaking of accessibility: The politics of design and Disability Matters.

A couple of other useful things from Evolt: Freelancing tips and the browser archive.

Kynn's Web Page Evalutors, one-stop webpage evaluation. Also found this: IBM's Ease of Use, covers design, guidelines, accessibility, and more. Nice.

January 24, 2001
7:41A
GRAY DAY

Who knew? Yesterday, I could've sworn that I was planning on having lunch with Miz Liz and Wendo at 11:30, instead I was boxing up my things at work. The L word. The whole team was affected. Amputation was short and sweet. My cauterization took place last night.

Who knew that when I put in my two cents on A List Apart's Coping with the Web Design Crisis that the last words, "Of course, as I write this, layoffs are pending at my company", would come back to bite me on the ass so swiftly.

The agenda for today is to file for unemployment, overnight Mama's adapter cable for the monitor we sent her last week, and see Sherah before she goes to work. Only then can I sit and be still. Let it overtake me. Surrender to the sadness.

The positive...good opportunity to grow, good opportunity to spiffy up the portfolio, good opportunity to learn how to do a physical portfolio, good opportunity to walk and exercise, good opportunity to finish the redesign of Heartless, good opportunity to do some freelancing...can't be dealt with at this particular moment. Will do my best Scarlett and think about that tomorrow.

But right now in Funnyvale, it's rainy and gray. And so am I.

January 23, 2001
6:35A
HIDE CHAPPING

We're in another stage 3 power alert, so better hustle before the lights go out. Which puts me in the dilemma...do sheep entry or blow dry hair? You see which won.

One thing that really chaps my hide is when whole pages of my Stupid Penis Tricks are hijacked. I contacted the owner, R.W. Bivens of Executive Magazine, and asked that the SPT page on his site be removed. He told me that he bought it as part of a package from Brian Bernzy. I don't know how Mr. Bernzy can sell something that is not his. Anyway, my lawyer has been notified. So when I go to verify that my page has been removed for Executive Magazine, I see that it merely has a redirect to some sleazy site and pop-up. I go up one layer higher, and there it is. I swear it never ends.

Top xxx cliches of alt.sex.stories. I know none of y'all go there, but thought you might find it amusing. And if you've ever wondered what happened to a particular porn star, here's Dead Porn Stars. Rough vocation takes it's toll. And if you like to see the word *fuck* a lot, this is the site for you. Rowdy grrl in me like's their attitude.

Totally switching gears...I've been making a concerted effort to upgrade to HTML 4.0.1, feeling so proud with my css, but also feeling the frustration of code breaking. Getting a little tired of all the work-arounds and am ready to dump Netscape 4. If you are also upgrading to HTML 4.0.1 and are a Mac user, the following from Eric Krock via Robert (thanks Robert) might be of interest to you :

Most of us, being human, have producted imperfect HTML markup. Unless you're absolutely certain that your pages are fully, 100% compliant with HTML 4.01 and CSS1/2, you'll want Gecko, Mozilla, Netscape 6, and IE5 for the Mac to render your web pages in "backward compatibility mode," which means that (a) the browsers will bend over backwards to work around bad code, and (b) they will support presentational hints in HTML markup that have been deprecated by HTML 4.0 and later (such as <FONT FACE=...> ). So, use any DOCTYPE you wish except for the HTML 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE with the explicit URI: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">... because Gecko, Moz, N6, and IE5 Mac, by request from the content developer community, put the browser into "standards compliant layout mode" when they see this DOCTYPE.

In standards-compliant layout mode, these browsers will not emulate the quirks of older browsers, and they will ignore deprecated presentational hints in the markup such as FONT FACE=... Unless you really, really consider yourself an expert on the subtleties of HTML 4.01 and CSS1/2 and know for sure exactly what you're doing, you probably don't want to be in this mode. This mode (and the feature of entering it upon encountering the HTML 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE with the explicit URI, has been added (in Gecko, Moz, N6, and IE5 Mac) due to requests from web content developers who wish to be able to have their pages rendered according to the standards (without quirks or presentational hints) in standards-compliant browsers, while simultaneously in the same page including presentational hints so that it will look OK in older browsers as well.

Lesson: if you do 4.0.1, make sure it is 4.0.1.

For some breadcrumb trails, check out the Open Directory Project.

For Mac news and analysis, here's the MacEdition. A good article by CodeBitch on the state of CSS. Keep up with Apple and Apple products at As the Apple Turns.