(no subject)

I forgot to get rubber bands at Bob Slate's, despite H's multichannel admonitions. (I think my cellphone doesn't make enough of a racket when I get texted; I'll have to do something about that.) But going back there anyway tomorrow to pick up the box of jewelcases I ordered today. These are for a silly little background project I started last week: collecting as many episodes of MST3K as I can via BitTorrent, and burning them to DVD. Have most of Season 3 (the first year I watched the show, as a college freshman) wrapped up now.

I'll probably only collect them up to a point; the last couple of seasons, around 1998-99, were pretty dreary.

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Spent way too much time (for an every-hour-counts project) wanking around with DHTML today. I learned the DOM last year through Volity, and it puffed up my confidence for being clever (uh-ohhh) with web applications. One thing I never had to run into with Volity UI programming: cross-browser incompatibilities. After several hours of twiddling (including reading why everything I knew about the DOM was wrong, again) I have a cute feature that works OK in Safari and Firefox but maybe not in WinMSIE and I'm not even going to touch MacMSIE. Feh.

The cute feature is inspired by the state rollovers from the map at http://electoral-vote.com (sorry; don't look if you don't want a flashback to November), which I always thought was a clean and clever way to provide fine-grained data out of a coarse, at-a-glance view. I need to do something similar with data that lives in a table, existing happily as a big matrix of numbers, but with three or four dimensions of metadata under every nugget. Am already using cell color and shading as cues, and it's not enough to cover everything. I think it may work just fine to have table cells umbrella open into little mini-reports when mouseoverized. Maybe.

At least it fails silently. ha ha ha

(no subject)

I wonder how much joy mrmorse is getting from the fact that the latest White House paid-shill grumblings involve someone who apparently chose a nom de plume after the boss villain from the Legend of Zelda games.