Posts in the Humor Category

Ever since the day after Carolyn came home, our cat Gravity has mostly ignored Carolyn’s presence.  We’d been somewhat concerned that there would be hostility between them in the months to come, which wouldn’t really end well because Gravity still has claws.  Those concerns are now, for the most part, erased.  This afternoon, we discovered that not only has Gravity gotten used to Carolyn’s presence, but now regards her as a part of the family.

We know this because Gravity left Carolyn a gift—a freshly killed mouse, lying on the floor right next to the bassinet where Carolyn sleeps during the day.    From what I understand, this is typically how mother-cats feed their children, and start training them to hunt for their own food.  I wished there were some way to communicate to Gravity that she could have her hunting spoils back, since Carolyn’s fairly well fed even without rodent supplements.  When you think about all this, it’s really rather touching, in a morbid way.  Kat and I both got a pretty good laugh out of it.

Of course, then I had to dispose of the carcass.

So Safari 1.2 is out, and of course was released just two days after I changed designs.  So the fix for the first-letter bug that occurred with “Thoughts From Eric” in the previous design is in place, but you can’t see it working here.  On the other hand, my recently constructed test page demonstrating Safari 1.1’s bugs with :hover and generated content show that 1.2 fixed the problem.  So, that’s cool.

What is even cooler is John Gruber’s in-depth exploration of the OmniWeb beta.  The “tabbed” interface, although not what I personally think of as tabbed, is still a welcome addition; I’ve found that I basically can’t live without tabs.  (I do a sweep of all my regularly read blogs by opening them all in tabs, via a bookmark group.)  What sounds really outstanding, though, is OmniWeb’s workspaces and site-specific preferences.  It’s probably enough for me to tolerate the obsolescence of the rendering engine, which is equivalent to Safari 1.0, but we’ll see.  You should see, too—go read John’s review of the browser, which is comprehensive and detailed.  Truly excellent.

Complete topic shift: back in September, Molly was aghast at the Quizno’s television commercial featuring an adult male human suckling at the teat of a wolf.  Well, their new ad campaign has launched, and if anything it’s more wrong.  Sure, it’s a complete ripoff of the Spongmonkeys, mostly because it turns out the same guy did both.  Warning: if you follow the Spongmonkeys link, I am not responsible for any psychological damage you may suffer, but it is very much like the commercial.

Is it just me, or are commercials in general getting a lot weirder of late?

• Love, Feline Style was published on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Carolyn, Humor, and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

Congratulations to new uncle Tantek Çelik, who correctly identified his nephew via CSS selectors, not that his accuracy comes as any surprise.  There are some great pictures to be seen as well.  Family additions seem to be in the air of late, and it’s a very welcome trend.

On that same note, today is the first day that domestic partners (either hetero- or homosexual) can register their status with the city of Cleveland Heights.  Ours is the first domestic-partner registry in America to have been created by voter approval; 55% of city voters in November cast their ballots in favor of the registry.  You can read more about the effort and aims of this registry at Heights Families For Equality, which spearheaded the drive to put the issue on the ballot.  (Equal time: Cleveland Heights Families First Initiative, the primary opposing organization.)  It’s sort of odd to have this registry launching just as the Ohio Legislature has passed a Defense of Marriage Act, declaring gay marriage against the “strong public policy” of the state.  But life is rarely consistent.

I did hear an interesting criticism of the registry this morning, which is that it may create the illusion of rights that don’t actually exist.  For example, if a domestic-partner couple assumes that the registry confers inheritance rights, then a surviving partner may be very unpleasantly surprised.  In other words, get your wills in order, and don’t rely on the registry.  This is just good sense anyway—Kat and I made sure our wills are clear on that score, instead of relying on our married status—but it’s a timely reminder to make sure you understand what rights you do or don’t have, and act to fill any gaps you discover.

I dropped by Derek’s site after linking to it and noticed a link to this amusing, if slightly strange, Presidential transcript.  The opening line has kept me chuckling all morning:

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

It’s definitely a situation where I wish there were an audio copy, or at least tonal annotations, because the whole scene reads one way if you assume the President’s tone throughout to be serious and earnest, and another if you assume it to be joking and jovial.  Personally, I assume the latter, which still makes the whole thing read kind of like a “Kids in the Hall” sketch.

• Familial Extensions was published on Monday, January 26th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Humor, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

The e-mail backlog has finally forced me to do something I’ve long resisted: the site now has an FAQ.  I thought about calling it a QAF (Questions Frequently Asked) or maybe an FRE (Frequently Received E-mails).  But in the end the weight of tradition got me to go with the traditional nomenclature.  If you’re thinking of sending me e-mail, please read the FAQ first to see if the answer is there.  As much as I love correspondence, I just can’t keep up any more.  In fact, I couldn’t even before Carolyn arrived, and so now I’m doubly unable to keep up.  Hopefully the FAQ will help, just a bit.  Thanks for your collective understanding.

This is truly excellent: arbitrary-element hovering in IE/Win.  In other words, stuff like pure CSS menus and such can actually be used in real-world designs, thus reaping the benefits of dramatically reduced markup weight.  The approach the behaviors take reminds me a lot of what we did to get the Netscape DevEdge menus working in IE/Win, except we did it in JavaScript, which may have made our technique a little weightier on the back end.  Either way, they’re both excellent solutions.

There’s a lot more gold to mine in the behaviors/script/structural markup vein, I suspect; the melding of IE-specific behaviors with lightweight scripts and CSS could lead us to a great many advances in standards-oriented design.  While it would be nice to see IE advancing so that we didn’t need these kinds of solutions, at least they exist.  Here’s my short, off-the-cuff wishlist for things for which we can hopefully use behaviors to replicate CSS2 functionality:

• Support for generated content; counters would be a truly awesome bonus
• Fixing the box model in versions of IE previous to IE6
• Better (read: more smoothly scrolling) support for fixed-position elements and fixed-attachment backgrounds than current scripts provide

I think there’s a way to use behaviors to get alpha-channel support in PNGs, too.  Can anyone confirm that?  If not, it’s something to investigate.

Now on to slightly more surreal matters.  Sure, I’m fairly well known as an expert in CSS and Web standards, and some of you know that I do a weekly Big Band-era radio show, but how many of you were aware of my career as a shoe designer?  Doug Bowman wrote to let me know that Matt Haughey had spilled the beans, so I’ll own up to it here.

Okay, not really.  But if you go to the Medium Footwear site, wait for the Flash interface to load, hit “Collections,” and then click anywhere on the splash page, you’ll see—and I swear that, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up— the Eric Meyer Collection.  There are nine different models, and the really funny punchline to the whole affair is this: guess which of those shoe styles I like enough to consider buying?  As it turns out, the “Structuralist” design.  Seriously.

• Running Just To Stay In Place was published on Monday, January 5th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

An interesting idea: Pixy’s fast no-preload rollovers, which I first heard about in a presentation at Seybold.  It seems to me there’s one potential drawback in this method, which is that it requires that your links be an exact size, or at least never be taller than a certain size.  Since I spend a lot of time thinking about techniques that will work well even if the text is scaled up 300% or more, this “drawback” is probably more of a concern to me than to the rest of you.  I don’t mean to denigrate what Petr has done—it’s a clever technique, and has a great deal to commend it, including reduced server load.

So, Eolas.  Their claims of inventing plug-ins or applets or whatever put me in mind of a similar yet much dorkier situation surrounding the new movie Underworld, summarized rather well by the guys at Penny Arcade, as usual.  Of course, Microsoft itself patented style sheets back in the late Nineties, so it’s not like they’ve never been down that road themselves.  I’ll freely admit that Microsoft never did anything with said patent, and that puts them a step above Eolas in the trudge toward something resembling the faintest shadow of a moral high ground.

One of the reasons I’ve not gotten too worked up about all this is I still have this idiotic faith that reason will, eventually, prevail.  The British Telecom “patent” on hyperlinks came to nothing, so far as I can tell.  Whether this was due to a court throwing out the claim, or the collective will of the Web ignoring it outright, I’m not sure, but that’s sort of the point: it was never a big deal.  I keep thinking whatever process got us there will similarly operate in the Eolas case.  I can’t do much about it either way.  Hey, maybe Eolas did patent the process of whatever it is they claim to have invented years after other people had already done it.  Great.  As soon as I secure a patent for my novel method of representing complex information using only the integers one and zero, I am so going to clean up in the courts.  (Hat tip: Chris Lilley, ca. 1999.)

Of course, we also have ISO and OCLC poisoning the community well in different but still deeply distasteful ways, so maybe I should reconsider my faith in reason winning the day.  Is it time to pull out the term “morons” yet?  How about “scummy bastards?”  Somebody let me know.  Meanwhile, I generally find relief from goofy humor and mind games (of the good sort), so let’s try some of that on for size, shall we?

Davezilla shares a semi-coherent translation on a snack-food packet (for more such goodness, please to enjoy the site of Engrish).  I’m reminded of one of my favorite business cards of all time; it came from a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  This card stated, in bold red capital letters near to bursting with pride, “WE SPECIALIZE TO MAKE ALL OCCASIONAL COOKIES.”  Sadly, this glorious bit of prose no longer graces the new cards they now hand out, which instead inform us that they are happy to offer novelty adult cookies.  I sometimes wonder if that simply means that the fortunes come with the words “in bed” already printed at the end of the phrase.

The page I’m about to point to is best viewed with a fairly wide browser window, because it’s peppered with some very wide images, but “The latest works” is very much worth visiting if you’re fascinated by optical illusions.  I’m always intrigued by examples of the brain percieving motion where there is none, and sometimes wonder if this capacity is in some weird way the neurological basis for conspiracism.  Note that not all the examples may work for you; only about half to two-thirds did for me.  But the ones that did… wow.  I expect it’s the closest I’ll ever come to being a synaesthetic.

• Dynamic Mental Static was published on Friday, September 26th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Humor, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

The TiBook’s Ethernet connection is all wireless now, thanks to the Netgear MR814 I installed yesterday.  I discovered that the one place on the front porch I really wanted to have access is a complete dead zone, which is highly annoying.  The rest of the house and the back yard all give me anywhere from 75% to 100% signal strength, and even the other half of the front porch wavers around 75%.  But the part where we have the really comfortable chairs set up, not to mention several short tables for drinks and such, is just a huge cone of silence.

Eventually, I realized it was probably our screen windows.  I’m pretty sure ours are a metal mesh, not vinyl, and if I’m correct it means they’re forming big impenetrable barriers to any WiFi signal.  My experiment of walking out into the front yard and immediately getting 50% signal seems to confirm this.  In all honesty, it’s probably just as well that there’s at least one area of the house that cuts me off from the Ethernet line.

To celebrate, I’m sitting here on the active side of my front porch, enjoying the sunny, breezy weather and listening to the cicadas while I share with you a few amusing and/or interesting things I’ve collected from various sources in the last few days:

• You may recall the Bork edition of Opera, and of course there have long been scripts that alter content to sound like Yoda or any number of other distinctive speech patterns.  A close cousin to the Jive filter is Tha Shizzolator, courtesy everyone’s favorite rapper/porn artist, Snoop Dogg.  I found its translation of meyerweb highly amusing—I love the fact that it turns a reference to Doug and Tantek into “bomb diggity muthas”—and can hardly wait to see what it does with this entry.  Societal note: if you are offended by certain “naughty” words, or live/work in a place characterized by easy offense, you may want to avoid the Shizzolator.  I’m just sayin’.  Interesting technical note: the entity ¶ becomes &pimpa;.  I have no idea why.
• I never enjoyed the group pictures taken ad nauseam throughout my senior year of high school, but at least none of them ended like this one did.  Takes ponding to a whole new level, really.
• Speaking of group photos gone horribly wrong, this one also features a soaking.  The difference is in the liquid vector, and of course there’s a little more intention behind this one.  I just hope that was the last picture in the series, instead of the first one.  There’s one guy toward the left side of the group who seems to be a little more aware than the rest.  Or maybe he just had forewarning.
• Badger aerobics were never so… odd.  I got this from Jeff Veen, who was dead on when he said, “Every single person you know is about to send you a link to this.”  You may as well just get it over with now.  How long can you stand to let it run?  I timed out after roughly five minutes.
• This little Flash movie is funny in certain ways, and yet not funny in too many others.  Likely to be offensive to people who have an aversion to inconvenient truths.

• Off the Wire was published on Saturday, September 13th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the General, Humor, Politics, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Is anyone else getting spam from German e-mail addresses looking for a dimensional warp generator, preferably in the New York/Boston area?  Because so far I have three of them, and for once my spam actually amuses me more than it annoys me.  A few unedited excerpts:

I’m offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment)… The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available… The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system

Wow, five thousand whole dollars?  Somebody’s sure willing to spend a lot of money, eh?  There’s more to the message, but I’m laughing too hard to reproduce any more of it.  Here’s the whole message, with a strategic edit.

The best part is that all my copies of this spam show a date of 5/15/48, so I’m not even sure of its century of origin.  All I am sure of is that whoever’s sending it is seriously warped, possibly to the point they don’t actually need the equipment they seek.  Well, either that or somebody’s time machine broke down and they’re looking for parts.  I wonder how long they’ll have to wait before a reliable “vender” emerges?

• Warped was published on Sunday, July 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman was nice enough to point people toward meyerweb’s redesign, and also to say some kind words about yours truly that he’ll probably regret some day.  I know I have already, because when goofy rendering errors were reported in IE6/Win, I kind of felt obligated to do something about them instead of just shrugging and saying, “Eh, not my problem.”  Curse you, El Jefe!  I shall be revenged!

Two days ago, I got an e-mail message that had me falling out of my chair, I was laughing so hard, and I simply can’t resist sharing it with you.  I’ve edited the text a bit for clarity, and the name has been removed to protect—well, the guilty, really.  In a legal sense, I mean.

I’ve spent some time reading and working with several CSS books….  and I have to tell you that Eric Meyer on CSS is the best…. if I want to know how to do something and refer to the pile of books near my left hand, it is the one that most easily produces the answer.

It has one other great advantage over all the others as well:  it is by far the best book to roll a joint on.  Shape, size, thickness, glossiness, flexibility, and color are all excellent and [far] ahead of the competition.

It’s amazing how a well designed book serves all purposes.

Well.  Glad I could help out.

A day or two before that fascinating bit of e-mail arrived, I was standing in clothing store located in a brand-new shopping mall just recently built a couple of miles from our house, when the following lyrics came over the store speakers:

Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

…and I thought to myself, “Is someone trying to be ironic?”

• We Live To Serve was published on Wednesday, June 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Humor, Redesign, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

There’s an interesting review of Eric Meyer on CSS at Linux Journal.  Instead of just reviewing the book, Russell Dyer also asked me some interview questions and wove my responses into the review.  I really like the format; it allows him to make points about how and why the book was written in a certain way without just guessing.  It also means that a reader will get a better sense of the book’s purpose through the author’s words.

Thanks to Nick, I found out what operating system I am.    I’m wondering how much time constitutes a passage, since I don’t feel that old.  Yet.  As for few understanding me, that’s no surprise.  Nobody gets me.  I’m the wind, baby.

I thought about incorporating a graphic displaying the current U.S. Homeland Security Advisory System level into my site design, but in the end decided I didn’t want John Ashcroft getting anywhere near my Web site.  Thus I continue to shore up a pleasant illusion that he couldn’t have someone crack into the server’s file system and download everything in about nine seconds if he felt like it.  All in the interests of defending liberty from those who would destroy it, of course.

Although it occurs to me to wonder who that someone might be.  The Department of Justice?  The National Security Agency?  (Side note: one of the funniest things I’ve seen lately is that the NSA has a privacy and security notice on their Web site, and it’s sort of a shame that it doesn’t just say: “You have none.  Get over it.”)  The Department of Homeland Security?  Probably any of them.  It bothers me that the only safeguard to my personal privacy could well be an interdepartmental fight over who gets to invade it first.

• New Review, Old Author? was published on Monday, February 10th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, Humor, Politics, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.