Category: Uncategorized

Once again, breakfast was a bowl of cereal with a sliced banana.



<ins datetime="2003-10-10T12:58:00-05:00">I went for a walk over to the Hub for lunch with the gang from the office today. I had a bowl of orange chicken on chow mien and a bowl of hot and sour soup. In a minute, I am going to walk over to the computer building for a meeting.</ins>



<ins datetime="2003-10-10T20:45:00-05:00">Dinner was a salad and two beers.</ins>

Apparently <a href="http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/" title="Lincoln Stein's Home Page">Lincoln Stein&rsquo;s</a> excellent <a href="http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/" title="CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library">CGI Perl Module</a> is installed on our script testing machine. Here is <a href="http://scripts.cac.psu.edu/users/m/h/mhl100/scripts/favorite.pl" title="Hello Ice Cream">an example</a> Perl script that uses CGI.pm.

I had an omlette with sauteed peppers and onions — and I think a glass of juice — this morning. I went for a four mile walk over lunch, and ate a granola bar. Gretchen has promised salad for dinner, which I will probably accompany with a couple of beers.

I just discovered that my high school has a really good Web site. Looking at some of the pictures, I am not sure I would recognize the place any more, but it is good to see that the school is doing well.

While snooping around this site, I found a link to my elementary school as well. Of course, I knew it by its original name when I went there.

I would never have believed it myself but there is actually a specification for <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt" title="RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines">netiquette</a>.

<img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/primebear.jpg" alt="Prime Number Shitting Bear" height="95" width="128" />



If you have the time, you should definitely go see the <a href="http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html" title="Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu">Prime Number Shitting Bear</a>. Those crazy Finns. :-)

If you find yourself feeling a little down, and feel that finding a glimpse of the master plan that interconnects everything might give you a lift, here is a fun &#8212; nay, &#8220;silly&#8221; &#8212; thing you can do. Surf on over to the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/" title="The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).">Internet Movie Database</a> (IMDb), select the &#8220;<a href="http://us.imdb.com/search" title="The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).">More searches</a>&#8221; link, scroll down to the &#8220;On This Day in History&#8221; section, enter your birthday, and press the &#8220;Go!&#8221; button. The resulting list will tell you who was born, who died, and who was married on your birthday. Now don&#8217;t you feel better?



For instance, here is a selection from the people who were born on my <a href="http://us.imdb.com/OnThisDay?day=21&amp;month=September" title="births/deaths/marriages 21 September">birthday</a>.

• Stephen King
• H.G. Wells
• Chuck Jones

Kinda makes you think. Doesn&#8217;t it. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/wink.png" height="18" width="18" alt=";-)" />

I am trying to see what cool, compliant things I can do with the latest version of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/" title="Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2">Cascading Style Sheets</a> (CSS). When it comes right down to it, I guess I basically have a need to follow the rules. I am like that. However, there really are some <em>cool</em> things you can do.



There are a lot of sites that provide great references, tips, and tutorials. Here are a few:

• The Noodle Incident has some great tutorials, including the CSS Panic Guide and the Box Lessons
• Meyer Web includes two large sections on CSS including CSS info and css/edge
• Glish has a section on CSS layout techniques
• A List Apart has all kinds of articles for people who make websites — including articles about CSS.
• Blue Robot has a few interesting bits on CSS including the Layout Reservoir and this piece and this piece on CSS centering.
• Code Style has a CSS style guide which includes a font sampler that provides a reference to the most common fonts available.
• The Web Design Group has a few CSS articles including a nice description of the CSS structure and rules and a listing of the CSS1 properties.
• Web Reference has a number of CSS articles.
• Apple also has a few articles on CSS in their Developer Connection.
• The World Wide Web Consortium has a page dedicated to CSS news, browsers, authoring tools, other software, and specifications.

In the “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” department:

Speaking at the company’s annual meeting for financial analysts here, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s cofounder and chairman… acknowledged today that the company’s error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day.

Markoff, John (2003, July 24), <i>Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth</i>. Retrieved July 26, 2003, from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/25/technology/25SOFT.html" title="Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth">www.nytimes.com/ 2003/ 07/ 25/ technology/ 25SOFT.html</a>.

First World War Head Injuries

In the First World War the number of head injuries was very high and soldiers took a long time to recover. To begin with, the soldiers only had cloth hats to wear, but after the introduction of tin hats the number of injuries to the head increased dramatically. No one could explain it, until it was revealed that the earlier records only accounted for the injuries, not fatalities. After the introduction, the number of fatalities dropped dramatically, but the number of injuries went up because the tin helmet was saving their lives, but the soldiers were still injured. This demonstrates the second rule of statistical interpretation: which question is being asked? A leading or misleading question used to gather statistics can result in misleading statistics.

<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/U196159" title="BBC - h2g2 - Star Trek Nut - U196159">Atlantic_Cable</a> (2003, July 28), <em>BBC - h2g2 - How To Understand Statistics</em>. Retrieved July 31, 2003, from <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1091350" title="BBC - h2g2 - How To Understand Statistics">www.bbc.co.uk/ dna/ h2g2/ A1091350</a>.