Tweaking

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer,
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
-- William Blake

Wednesday, November 10, 1999
One year ago: Crowds
Two years ago: Orycon II

Two years ago I was reporting on Orycon, and that's where I'll be this weekend. It's fun to look at those entries, and at last year's trip! I remember Vicki and me being very amused by Jack's complaint that the super-hot Thai food had so much room taken up by the peppers that he didn't get enough meat! He loved the hotness of it, though.

I was shocked and ashamed yesterday, when Miriam wrote to tell me that all she was seeing on my journal index page this month was a blank purple page. She was using Navigator, of course! (See Jeffrey Zeldman on "The Day the Browser Died" in A List Apart.) So I installed Nav on my work machine, which I'd neglected to do since starting my new job, and installed HTML-Kit which contains HTML-TIDY (a validator thing), and cleaned up my code. I don't know which change fixed the problem, but Anita's BOD is once again visible for you Nav holdouts. I usually check in a Win32 version of Lynx, too!

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The current nine thirty show on KUOW is "A Lesson Before Dying." I think it's a novel (read aloud in installments) about someone being executed, set in the south, during the forties. I don't know much more, because I actually get up and turn down the radio when it comes on. Not something I want to hear about! That's one thing that squicks me in movies, too -- someone begging for zir life. I had my eyes closed during the knife scene in Saving Private Ryan.

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I don't know why I'm getting so sleepy, so early, these days! Last night I was so tired that I didn't even get online when I got home! I actually watched TV, then went to bed before ten, instead of going to dance class and the Washington Dance Club. I stayed home tonight, also, but I actually had a task to accomplish this evening, so it's slightly more justified.

The time for the overlow shelter at St. Joseph's has rolled around again. I needed to stop at the grocery store on the way home, get twelve of everything, then divide the stuff into twelve grocery bags and put them in the refrigerator for delivery tomorrow evening. Fruit-flavored applesauce, yogurt, tangerines, string cheeze sticks, and packs of peanut butter crackers, this month. It's called "breakfast" but it doesn't need to be breakfast foods.

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Two substantial meetings at work yesterday and today. We are looking at all that we want to get done, and thinking about what's practical with one less person for a while, a move to a new office any day, the holidays coming up soon, and all that. I voted for doing the "low-hanging fruit", the work items that would be easiest and least disruptive, with the biggest impact. I warned against getting caught up in feature creep, shoe-horning lots of stuff into our current production process and current design. That way lies madness! So I did a few tweaks to our home page, and Chip did some more, and both of us were satisfied. I'll bet you can't even tell what we did!

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Nancy Firedrake has started writing a journal again, at Forbidden Planet (good name!). I'm glad!