Thoughts From Eric Archive

Some thoughts on the ongoing electoral fun:

“…don’t assume that no matter who wins and no matter what happens, it’s going to be bad for America. It might be quite good, because it might be sobering for the country to realize we’re in a completely new era, nobody’s got a lock on the truth, we’re all trying to understand the future.”

Wise words from Bill Clinton in a recent CNN interview.  Of course, in observing that nobody has a lock on the truth, he’s espousing a very liberal point of view.  As far as conservatives are concerned, they do have a lock on the truth, and anyone who doesn’t agree is either morally corrupt, weak-willed, or just plain dumb.  This from the ideological camp which gave us Rush Limbaugh.

Things are settling down at long last.  Kat and I have no significant travel plans for the near future, which in its own way is quite a relief.  It’s nice to look at a calendar and know that (barring unforseen events) we won’t be leaving the state until 2001 at the earliest.  This blissful state of affairs will let us concentrate on things like properly configuring the steam radiators in our house, for example.  Or try to figure out which painting or other piece of art should go where.  I’ll be able to set up a regular writing schedule for the next book, and even play the occasional video game to relieve my frustrations at Word 98 for being… well, for being Word.  Kat and I can go on dates, even have friends over for parties and family over for the holidays.  It’s all so domestic, we can hardly stand it.  (Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to survive.)

• Monday, 20 November 2000 was published on Monday, November 20th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

We’re back.  Again.  Not that twelve days in San Francisco and Ragged Point is anything to complain about, really, but we discovered that we miss home after a while.  This even though the weather during our trip was as close to perfect as one could possibly ask, and the venues were nothing to sneeze at either.  My talks and other activities at Web2000SF were what scientists call a “huge peck o’ fun,” but even better was meeting and greeting so many cool people.  Some I already knew well via e-mail, like Molly; and some I’d met before, like Tantek and Jeff and Sherry (from Terry!); but many others were effectively met for the first time—Bryan and Lori and Jennifer and Steven and what seemed like dozens more.

In a way, I felt bad about the situation at “Real World CSS,” my Wednesday presentation.  I didn’t have any network access, so the presentation suffered, and the room was packed to overflowing (and fire code violations) by interested audience members.  The interest was profoundly gratifying in an ego-centric fashion, but it wasn’t the best job I could have done, and the environment was less than ideal for those trying to find seats.  The Friday talk was less of a hit—especially among those who didn’t want to hear that the user controls the browsing experience—but there was very good attendance without the need for sitting in the aisles, and a lot of appreciative comments and exclamations from the audience, so that was good.  It was interesting to be giving a talk called “CSS For Anarchists” while the President of the United States of America was giving a speech a floor above me.  As I’ve always said, timing is everything.  I don’t know how many background checks got run on me, but I’d like to know.  Fortunately, the Secret Service decided to not arrest me for seditious activities or some such thing.  In sum, I don’t know about others, but I had a darned good time.

So did Kat, who got to play tourist and jaunt down to L.A. without me to see various college friends.  It was a short jaunt, and she got back in time for the election.  Being on the West Coast, we could watch most of it unfold without the massive sleep deprivation which the network anchors, all based in the east, were obviously suffering.  We were watching ABC when Florida was moved back into the “undecided” category for the second time; the sense of history-in-progress was fairly palpable.  Or else we were starting to experience sleep deprivation ourselves.

I’m not going to comment on the election process beyond this: the whole situation is intellectually fascinating, and I’m very ambivalent about how I’d like to see it resolved.  In process terms, I mean; I know who I’d like to see win—but if you think I’m going anywhere near that particular bear trap in a public forum, you’ve got another think coming.  The closest I’ll come is to say that, as I write this, I’m finding that every time a campaign spokesman from either side opens his mouth, my opinion of him drops.  Every time.  That’s just, you know, depressing.

Just a side comment: the format of these posts has shifted from “third person objective reporting” to “whatever Eric feels like saying, generally at some length.”  You probably noticed that already, but I thought I’d mention it explicitly.  Mostly because I can.

• Friday, 11 November 2000 was published on Saturday, November 11th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Politics, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Another month, another lack of updates.  Our house is coming along quite nicely, although it’s nowhere near where we want it to be.  I’m told that’s how it goes.  As my friend Bruce D. told me, “Now you have a kit which is never finished and to which you’ll never have all the parts you need at any one time.”  The big challenge now is trying to find bedroom furniture to match the ceiling fan we bought.  Salespeople give us really odd looks when we tell them this.  Kat’s recovered completely from her surgery, which is great.  I got back from Vancouver a week ago; nice city, but lots of rain.

• Friday, 27 October 2000 was published on Friday, October 27th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

It is often amazing how fast time flies past.  No news posts for the last month definitely doesn’t mean no news—it’s just that we’ve been too busy to do updates.  In brief: we moved into the house and had some work done, Kat had outpatient surgery, and Eric signed more contracts to speak and write on the topic of CSS.  That’s about it, but it’s certainly enough.

• Friday, 29 September 2000 was published on Friday, September 29th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Of course, work on the house and the attendant move continue to dominate our lives.  While we were away for a week, the nearly 2,000 square feet of hardwood floors were refinished, and they look great.  The yard’s been ripped apart until it’s something like what we want—not finished, by any stretch of the imagination, but much better than it was.  We still have some distance to go, but things are pulling together.  The actual move is looming ever closer now, and hopefully we’ll get everything lined up for departure on schedule.  In fact, we’ve been so fixated on the house and moving that I completely neglected to post the fact that Kat passed her certifying exams a week or two back.  I never doubted that she would, but of course the waiting for test results is always quite stressful for the person doing the waiting…

• Friday, 25 August 2000 was published on Friday, August 25th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Okay, the Big News:  we actually went and bought a house, and take possession of it today.  Pictures won’t be forthcoming any time soon, since we have a lot of work to do and furniture to buy, but at least our address and phone number will finally settle down into something permanent.

• Friday, 4 August 2000 was published on Friday, August 4th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been no replies.

Big news a-comin’—stay tuned.  In the meantime, enjoy the humor of CNN.com, a new page on the site.

• Friday, 28 July 2000 was published on Friday, July 28th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been no replies.

Eric says: The site got a facelift today (thanks to Molly Holzschlag for letting me steal her ideas).  I hope you like it, and let me know if you see any major problems.  Note:  the reason the site looks so bad (but not totally unreadable) in Navigator 4.x is that I did my best to create standards-compliant markup and styles, and Nav4 doesn’t deal very well with that sort of thing.  If you’re using Navigator 4.x, please restrict any bug reports to pages where there is no text, or the layout is so mangled that it’s impossible to read the text.  As for the long silence since the last update—okay, so we’ve been a little busy lately.  I’ll try to be more forthcoming with news in the future.

• Friday, 14 July 2000 was published on Friday, July 14th, 2000.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been no replies.