Nice weather all over Europe today, I’ve been wearing a t-shirt all day; it was 19C when I landed here in Zurich this evening. Hope this isn’t a bad omen for the weather in South Africa. This is also the least busy I’ve ever seen this airport. What, no one flies between 17:00 and 22:00 on a weekday?!

I spotted this interesting article during the flight from Bucharest. It’s almost unbelievable:

“As part of the US Navy’s secret Marine Mammal Project, the dolphins have been trained to use their in-built sonar - the clicking that humans can hear - to locate mines which they then mark with floats.”

Those crazy Germans are at it again. They’ve banned EA Games’ Command and Conquer Generals from being advertised, or sold on shelves (stores can keep it under the counter though, and sell it to adults who ask for it). Why? Apparently “it portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.” I suppose chess is next on the list. [via Slashdot]

Finally, I’m really beginning to despise these Swiss keyboards! Not only are the “Y” and the “Z” switched around, but all the character entities are in the wrong place. How can you be expected to press shift+7 to get a slash, or ctrl+alt to get an “@”.

Phew! Found the $300, and just in time too: I leave for South Africa today. I’ll be visiting family and friends for about three weeks, as well as sorting out all the stuff that will need to be shipped to Canada in May. The warmer weather, together with the incredible food, will make for a pleasant break.

I’m afraid posting may be quite ‘irregular’ for the duration, as I won’t have access to a PC other than at my friends’ houses. Internet cafe’s are also by no means ubiquitous. I’ll do what I can though.

I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the concept of paying for software, but I’m trying. The only software I ever really purchased (i.e. not from a some guy in a dark alley): win95, WarCraft II, Duke Nukem 3D, win98SE, Office 2000 Standard, Wolfenstein 3D (yes the OLD one), Civilization II: Call To Power — in that order.

Today the thought popped into my head that perhaps I should go about this whole business by trying to think of software as the tools in my garage, or the appliances in my house. What’s that honey, you want me to rennovate the kitchen this weekend? Ok, I’ll need to get a new saw, and a router. In that sense, the next time I think: “Hey! I’d like to be able to do _____”, I’ll say to myself: “I’ll need to buy that _____ software program for it.”

That’s fine until you do a price-check though. Photoshop might very well be every bit as important in producing my photographs as my camera is, but my red-meat-eating, beer-drinking, car-crazy neanderthal brain is just never going to let me fork out $900 for a that little plastic disc — esp. when I know I’ll have to spend that same amount on the next version. I really don’t mind paying a couple of dollars for the programs that I use, but we’re not talking shoes here, I’m not Carrie Bradshaw, and I ain’t bending over!

Scott points to a foreign language survival guide. This might have saved me some time back in grade 10/11/12 (we had people from 42 countries represented in our meagre 400-student ranks), but I think I managed to pick up the essentials nontheless — mostly thanks to a bunch of loose-mouthed taxi drivers.

• Washing your hands, and then realizing today is washday, and ALL the towels are in the washer!
• Finding the $100 bill you misplaced in September, but still unable to track down the $300 you stashed away at Christmas.
• Staying up through the night, until 8am to watch a sports event (you know that if you go to sleep you’ll never wake up for it), then dozing off during a commercial break at 8:05am.
• Finding jewellery intended for giving to that ‘special someone’ (who you haven’t seen since December ‘01) — just what the hell do I do with it now anyways?

Last week I mentioned that I was looking forward to a road trip of sorts during the summer. Quick disclaimer: I won’t be doing it on a lawnmower.

My PC was flipping out like a squirrel on crack these past couple of days. It seemed to think it was born to shutdown, reboot, and entertain me with blue screens of death (everybody’s favorite) in between. For fear of kicking its sorry ass, I avoided it the whole weekend.

After a careful process of elimination this afternoon, I determined that it was one of the sticks of RAM that was bugging out. Unfortunately it was the 512mb stick that had to be yanked, and now I’m down to a measly 256mb. I will just make do for a while though — at least until I’m back in North America, and can RMA this puppy.

Did I say CSS 2? Excuse me. Apparently I was wasting my time printing out the first 100 pages of the spec for reading. I could’ve, should’ve, would’ve been getting going on CSS 2.1 already — corrected and stripped of all that shall be made obsolete by CSS 3. Hat tip Zeldman.

Abandon ship! Women, HD Cinema displays, and Powerbooks first. This could really be the end of the line for poor old Apple Computer. Al Gore has been elected to the company’s board! Brace yourselves for the woozy of a ‘switch’ ad this is bound to result in.

EscapeRail is a collaboration of fire escape photography. Something different, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Jeffrey Zeldman links to a free favelet (works for PC and Mac) that outlines a page’s DIVs in your browser. I suspect that this will be of great use for dealing with page layouts that just don’t want to behave, or for killing time between lunch and knock-off time.

Mark points out the fine galleries of John Brownlow. Some great street photography to be had. Be sure to take a tour of his Human Traffic portfolio.

For some time now, I’ve been meaning to offer up an extended diatribe of sorts on my dislike for trying to digest copious quantities of reading material via my monitor. I admire the web for the learning opportunities it offers, but I just can’t stand sitting here in front of this screen trying to read masses of subject matter — I’d much rather sit down on a nice comfortable couch, and read the book. More later.

Today when I wanted to cover the intimate details of CSS2 spec, I resorted to copying the text version to Word and then printing it all out, so that I can consume it at my leisure — pity it’s such an awful waste of paper, ink, time, and money. Don’t you just love the feel of warm paper direct from the printer though?

I will be doing something very much like this in the coming months. For about two years now I’ve been yearning to just grab a few bare essentials (like a camera, shirt, and socks), and take off in my car for who knows where. A Canada-USA expedition will do very nicely come June.

The move was my opportunity to update to MT 2.63 — I did give TextPattern a quick go, but it’s clearly still in the beta stage, I enjoyed experimenting with it though; and I have a project in mind for which it’ll be just perfect. I also took advantage of John’s latest release of SmartyPants - a commendable plugin for automating HTML punctuation entities like curly quotes, ellipses etc.

There are also a few ‘under the hood’ changes which might be worth a mention. I’ve shifted towards using contextual selectors where possible, a good deal of sorting out still needs to be done though. In the interest of structural correctness, the navigation on the left, and the thumbnails, playlist items, and links on the right-hand side are now unordered lists.

Mozilla users, you’ll have to forgive a few small hiccups that I’ve yet to resolve. The way the underline (border) cuts into “syndicate” on the sidebar for example. For some reason, everytime I’ve been in Mozilla 1.3 for more than five minutes today, my system shuts down. Bizarre! I’ll uninstall, and reinstall it when I get a chance. So there’s been very little testing on that front.

As if that wasn’t enough, things got a little frantic around here when I realised that my current hosting contract expires tomorrow —NOT— next week like I had somehow imagined! The result was a flurry of e-mails requesting DNS changes, fist-waving at the suggestive invoice from my old host, a panic attack of trying to backup everything that was on the server, and the furious scribbling of e-mail account aliases and related details. Phew!

Ok, so this is it. The site is now hosted with InsiderHosting. They came recommended for their friendly, speedy service — and that’s just what it is. Thank you David.

I signed up for their ‘Corporate’ package because it offers tremendous flexibility, but whatever am I going to do with 750mb of space, and 15gb of transfer? Why take over the world of course… Oh dear! I wasn’t suppossed to mention that just yet. I’m hoping to embark on a number of projects in the near future, but more about that later.

In the meantime, I hope the DNS updates soon, so that I can strip out the butt-ugly numberical IP that you see floating around. If you happen across a broken link, or find something missing, please draw it to my attention.

I’ll be switching the site over to new hosting this weekend, so you might experience a slight outage depending on how nicely my old host decides to play! Details will be posted as soon as everything is good to go on the other side.

Just typical! I go and upgrade to Mozilla 1.2.1 yesterday, and today 1.3 final comes out.

I hadn’t been spending time in Mozilla lately, and thought I’d upgrade to 1.2.1 while I was at it. I have to reiterate that there’s no substitute for tabbed browsing, I use IE6 plenty, and XP’s taskbar grouping function is a worthwhile feature, but it’s so much quicker to click on the tab you want, than to sift through a column of grouped taskbar items.

With tabs I can organise my browsing/thinking by dedicating separate windows to specific functions/topics - e.g. having one window just for the news sites, or another window for all the blogs, or one window for everything related to certain item I’m researching.

Backgroud loading of links is also a time-saver. Clicking on links while you’re reading through an article/site, and having them load in the background, without popping up new windows that will have to be dealt with before getting back to what you were doing, is definitely helpful.

One of the areas where Mozilla just doesn’t cut it for me is with browsing image galleries like DeviantArt, or Intertia. Here I like to stop the page from loading as soon as the basic layout is done, and then load just the thumbnails of my choice by left-clicking, and hitting ‘h’, and then decide if I want to click through to the full image (in Moz you only have the option of loading the full image). This way I don’t spend time downloading ad banners, or buttons images that I’m not going to need. Ahh yes, the joys of life on 56k!

SMH reports on a rare heriditary disease that makes people smell like fish. Apparently sufferers’ livers are unable to metabolise a chemical produced by intestinal bacteria, and the chemical is then ‘sweated out’, as well as being discharged in other bodily secretions, making the person smell like decaying fish.

Excuse the pun, but that’s rotten! In such a case it might just be better to go around smelling like cheap cologne. Just imagine how having this would torment vegetarians!

When you go to the kitchen to grab a snack, and take the TV remote with you, it might be an indication of control issues, but when said remote is left in the fridge upon your return, that’s a sign of senility!

Apparently the Norwegians have their own issues too. The BBC reports that:

“Nurses and doctors spend so long kissing loved ones goodbye outside a Norwegian hospital that they are causing traffic jams…”

What is this, 10th Grade?!

Dennis figures this war needs a Kenny Loggins theme song for good measure. ever wonder if Kim Jong-Il rockin’ it to “Last Resort” by Papa Roach, and if just maybe the French have a soft spot for the Barney PBS Kids theme song?! “Anything can happen — anything can be, anything can happen in the land of make believe…”

Matt has a fresh, wholesome new design going. He also points to this little gem of a resource - a collection of stylish patterns suitable for use on sites and other design initiatives.

While we’re on the topic of music, my ears have gone all droopy from the lack of new input. If you’ve stumbled onto something hot, uncovered something new, or found life in something old, please suggest it.

I’m no ‘neat-freak’, but I like to have certain things ordered in a particular manner. My bookshelves need to be arranged ‘just so’, the documents and folders on my hard drive must be archived in a very neat, some say regimental, fashion too, and woe betide he (usually she) who jumbles the order of my CDs in their storage albums. Maintaining the order is achieved fairly easily, once you have decided upon your chosen system of course.

One area where I haven’t yet had much success is in cleaning up the titles of my mp3s. It’s a quest that first took shape in 1999 when I began using Napster - it wasn’t long after having downloaded hundreds of files that I realised I would need to rename most of them if I ever wanted to be able to sort through them. Initially, I opted to have the first letter of each word in a filename/title in uppercase - e.g. “Rolling Stones - Paint It Black”, “Counting Crows - Atlantic City”, “Mobb Deep - Hell On Earth”. In April ‘02, however, I changed to the ‘everything lowercase’ approach - it just seemed less messy.

Somehow, I managed to rename around 3,000 files without too much hassle… doing it peace-meal over the course of a few months, and since then each new file downloaded is immediately renamed before being transferred to the corresponding genre folder in the music directory. The next battle on my hands is that of editing the ID3 tags in Winamp. This is a far more painful exercise, it’s no longer a simple matter of hitting the F2-key, typing the artist, title in lowercase, and hitting ‘enter’. No, now it’s: alt+3, click, title, tab, artist, click ‘copy from ID3v1’, click ‘update’, select next entry… it’s hard to find a good working rhythm when moving between keyboard and mouse all the time.

Bear in mind of course that my collection has now grown to some 5,000+ files - of which, only about 15% of those are titled correctly! Boy, oh boy, do I know how to waste my time! One thing’s for sure though, there’ll be no more changing, this convention’s gonna stick!

A bad day at the office for Ferrari today. Barrchello wiped out early on, Schumacher said goodbye to the lead when he pitted for the third time in the race after pieces of the car’s moulding broke off. Oh well, you win some you lose some, glad we’re back in the swing of things though, and can’t wait until the next Grand Prix. Right now though I’m making a ‘pit stop’ of my own and getting some much needed shut-eye!

The February-March edition of Bucharest’s Foreigner’s magazine - targeted at expatriates - has the most ridiculous plug in their healthy & beauty section for a certain massage parlor here in the capital. I was quite taken aback at the audacity of the last paragraph.

“Sakura Massage is the only place in Bucharest where you can find those rejuvenating and deep sensual techniques of the Japanese Male Sacred Spot Massage. A gentle digital technique is used for contacting the prostate gland, a place with increased receptivity. This massage feels better when you are somewhat erect and excited, and it will produce a very thrilling orgasm if it’s done during lingam massage. The important thing is that you will be given a safe environment to feel and express whatever needs to come up. It’s a loving, spiritual expreience that will be transformative and unforgettable.”

That’s a little forward wouldn’t you say? Especially for something that’s not in a sex mag, or a classifieds column. That’s Bucharest for you!

Dear old Eric has been semi-generous enough to offer some free Cantonese lessons. Useful to anyone who, like myself, might be interested in seeing their best friend’s reaction when using it on their sister - easy Michael, easy! When can I expect lesson #2, #3, #4… Eric?

From an e-mail I received yesterday, enjoy:

• GW Bush - We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.
• Pat Buchanan - To steal a job from a decent, hard-working Americans.
• Martin Luther King Jr. - I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motive called into question.
• Saddam Hussein - This was an unprovoke act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.
• Captain Kirk - To boldy go where no chicken has gone before.
• Bill Gates - I have just released eChicken 2003, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important document, and balance your checkbook — and internet explorer is an inextricable part of the chicken.
• Bill Clinton - I did not cross the road with that chicken. What exactly do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?
• Colonel Sanders - You mean… I missed one?

That last one is my personal favorite, hehe!

What’s that line of Pierce Brosnan’s in Dante’s Peak, ‘if you drop a frog in boiling water it’ll jump right out, but if you drop it in water, and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll stay there and boil to death’? Taken literally, that describes my winter shower habits to a tee!

When I get in the water temperature is just about luke warm, but then I start adding more hot water to the flow every few seconds. When that no longer has any effect, I gradually reduce the amount of cold water in the mix. By the time I step out, my skin is pinky-red all over.

Fortunately, I’m nowhere near as bad as people like my father. You know, the ones who shower/bath with water ready to boil an egg in, and come out a slight shade of tomato!

If you think about those days at the beach too - you know, sitting there on the beach roasting away under the sun’s rays - you gotta start asking yourself, why do we like trying to cook ourselves?!

The streets of Manchester, New Hampshire are safe again, following the apprehension of the ‘notorious’ Pillow Fight Bandit!

“The victim, a 47-year-old Amory Street resident, said she had left the store and was nearing some pay phones when she noticed a teenager, now identified as Grondin, get out of a van. Grondin then yelled “Pillow fight!” and began hitting the woman with a pillow, police said. Meanwhile, the van’s driver filmed the attack with a video camera.”

Like Kyle said, ‘it’s hard to make stuff up this good’.

Foreign Faces really caught my attention in the March issue of 28mm. It’s one of those pieces that remind you of the countless details you overlook in the world around you each day. Pieces of that sort always inspire me to take a fresh look at things, and search for new details.

Also featured in this month’s issue is Chrys with his 5,000 miles gallery. I love interesting ‘journey’ sets. I’m glad to see that there’s been more to his recent leave of absence than just packing, hauling luggage and dealing, with surly customs agents!

I had my sights set upon the Canon EOS D60 as my next camera, but then they went ahead and discontinued it. Fortunately, Canon replaced it with the EOS 10D - basically a revision of the D60 & replacement until the next ‘big thing’ arrives.

It might not be the 11 megapixel, full-frame champion its big brother (EOS 1Ds) is, but its got street smarts (you’re sure not to attract nearly as much unwanted attention on the streets with the 10D as you would with the hulking 1Ds). The D60 was hailed for it’s ultra-low-noise 6 megapixel CMOS sensor, the guys at Canon have managed to improve on that quality, and add ISOs up to 3200 in the process - amazing! The new magnesium alloy body is sure to prove more rugged, and the new DiGiC processor offers lower battery consumption, better image quality and faster processing.

The feature that impresses me most about the 10D, however, is the price! You can pre-order the new D-SLR body at RitzCamera for just $1500! Of course the real costs come in when you start thinking about buying 2GB Compact Flash Cards, extra batteries, and, more than anything else, lenses. How will I survive the 2-month wait until I’m back in North America and can lay my hands on one?!

I’m itching for next Sunday’s start to the 2003 Formula 1 racing season in Australia. It’s hard to descrive how much I miss race-weekend routines during the off-season. Suffice it to say that since I was a little tyke, I’ve spent Saturdays watching qualifying sessions, and stocking up on drinks and snacks before the racing on Sundays. Of course there are those less than spectacular weekends when you need to haul your ass out of bed before dawn if you’re a ‘purist’ and want to catch the racing action live. There’ll be a lot more of those 4am starts when I move to Calgary.

This season promises to be ‘different’ from previous years following FIA’s dramatic shakeup of rules and procedures, introduced to attempt to curb the decline in viewer numbers - a result of the lack of any real challenge to Michael Schumacher and Ferrari’s complete dominance throughout the season. Although I agree that something needs to be done to ensure the survival of the sport, I worry that a good deal of the changes are simply knee-jerk reactions that may end up turning the season into something of a circus.

I’m looking forward to racing action nevertheless. In the meantime, The Observer has an article on five-time world champion Michael Schumacher.