Blush

I voted for "Known Hardware Issue", which I thought was a brilliant expression of nerdly apathy (as befits the death-before-victory theme this year), but apparently "jmac's Birthday Party" was the clear winner of the mystery hunt team-name ballot. Shucks, guys. So there's my present!

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Last night was my night for LotR dreams; I guess I was too dead tired the night after actually seeing the film to have any such coherent imaginings.

The silliest one involved my reading a news story about the wood-elves starting an NFL expansion team. Their uniform was ridiculous, involving sleeveless jerseys, with the belly-pockets one sees on hooded sweatshirts. On this pocket was written "POLICE", but the photograph didn't clearly show the whole word, so I joked (in a blog entry linking to the article) that it actually said "POLIO" and that each team member would carry a different debilitating disease to use against their opponents.

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In a crafty mood this evening, so made an SVG card deck. Note that clicking that link will probably make one of two things happen for you, at least if your computer it set up like mine: you'll get a cascade of nigh-meaningless XML (if you don't have Adobe's SVG Viewer plugin installed) or (if you do) you'll see something that looks like a deck of cards, except with hollow squares replacing every suit symbol. This is because I used fonts for every symbol on every card; the only manually-defined shape was the border rectangles. Alas, most fonts don't support the Unicode "miscellaneous symbols" space I plucked these glyphs from. So, yes: like everything else I try to make, it's broken because I'm just too cutting-edge.

Actually, Squiggle renders them pretty nicely, so I took a couple of screen-samplings from that.

There actually was a practical point to this exercise, viz: remove all the <use> elements from the document, and you got yourself a nice, non-displaying library of SVG symbols, ready for manipulation by strange & alien forces, such as ECMAScript. Can you guess that I did this in order to take a break from cleaning up the Volity paper, which is about a remarkably similar topic?

Shocked and appalled that the month is more than half over. I'll try to have this paper done by XMas.