Oh the neighbours we’ve had in this place, I tell you. First there was the ‘maestro-wannabe’. This guy had the gall to induldge in his own little piano concerto every Sunday at 6am! One hundred and fifty six Sunday mornings that brought him no closer to being able to play Amazing Grace than the day he began. The housewives of the neighbourhood might have enjoyed hearing his insights on which fabric softner was in fact the softest, or which dish-washing liquid was more gentle on the hands, but everyone ran for cover when he took to the road in his battered Volvo. If wasn’t busy playing chicken with the plastic trash bins in front of the building, then it was the wall of his parking bay.
Things didn’t improve when a rowdy French family moved in. Their hobbies included slamming doors and drawers at every occassion, and dragging chairs across tiled floors day in and day out. The wife wasn’t far better behind the wheel of a car than the previous occupant: the wall of the parking bay was subjected to further punishment, and she backed out in other parked cars on at least three occassions. When the kids weren’t busy screaming their heads off, you could find their footprints across the roof, windscreen, and bonnet of your car. They didn’t last long.
About six months ago, a 50-something-year-old Israeli moved in. He takes great pleasure in blasting his Elton John albums on saturday mornings. Weeknights he has a go at hammering his headboard through the wall, spurred on by the moans of the $5 hookers he finds in the park — two minutes tops.
Ever have any interesting neighbours?
The list of things to do around here is growing by the minute. Why I didn’t think to do some of these things a month ago I don’t know. I apologise for neglecting to post more frequently — I’ll try to get a handle on that — but preparations for moving to Canada (just over two weeks to go) are consuming more and more of my time. Well, that and the memory of last month’s $170 telephone bill incurred solely for time spent on dial-up isn’t helping either!
I’ve found solace indulging in some light reading. My usual existentialist, or conceptual physics-oriented fill is tucked away at my US apartment, so I’m making do with whatever non-romancy paperbacks I can salvage from the boxes in the study here. I burned through Contagion, The General’s Daughter, A Touch of Frost, and The Brethren at the rate of one a day — the first took nine hours to conquer, but now that I’ve found my rhythm they’re a snap at around seven hours each.
To my friends Lucian and Mirella who leave Romania to take up landed residence in Montreal today, I wish you a safe journey, good luck and everything of the best in your endeavours. I know you’re both going to love Canada!
Much to my continued amusement, my monitor went blank and started making clicking sounds while I was working in front of it this morning. There’s still 18 months on the manufacturer guarantee, and I took it in this afternoon, but it’s likely to be the middle of next week before they are able to provide me with a replacement.
In the meantime, I’ve managed to get a loaner from the office. Sadly, it’s a primitive old thing with a maximum resolution of 800x600; I’ll be seeing the web from a different perspective for the next few days.
Al Sparber shares a great tutorial for creating CSS rollover menus with ‘swappable’ background images. It’s a refreshing alternative to the simpler background color CSS menus buttons we’ve been seeing quite a lot of recently. Not quite a replacement for javascript image rollover buttons though — possible, but at the expense of needing to add an extra class for every added button.
* edited for added meatiness
As if it’s not bad enough that I can’t get cable where I am, both dial-up ISPs to which I have access have been blowing goats for the last 36-hours. Logicnet denied that their server was on the blink when I called them on Wednesday, then they pretended the problem had only just sprung up (it started Tuesday afternoon) and gave their usual ‘it will be fixed in an hour speech’. You know what I’m going to say. Their service is still down. I suspect they failed to pay their own ISP this month. At least the Connex server seems to be operational again though.
Freebies from Papa John’s (just my favorite out of PJ’s, Domino’s and Pizza Hut), Jason’s mouth-watering inventory, and thirst-inducing snapshots from Pinder. You people are making me seriously homesick for my well-stocked kitchen back in the USA, and all my favorite delivery joints. Shame on you!
It’s a sweltering 35 degrees Celsius in my bedroom this afternoon! I made this discovery when I opted for some fresh air, shutting the A/C off, and opening the windows. Within 12-15 minutes the temperature had shot from 26C to 35C. Ughh! Not good.
Getting by during the day is simple enough: I have the A/C going, and do a good job of putting back as many iced drinks as I can, but it’s a real bitch at night. I avoid sleeping with the air conditioning on because this particular unit leaves me with a throbbing sinus headache in the morning. Most Bucharest nights demand that you keep the windows shut too, or choke on the chemicals that factories all over city pump out under cover of darkness.
A 28-30C sweatbox is not the ideal sleeping environment. I’m a rather restless sleeper most nights — I sleep soundly, but my body moves around a lot — but when the temperature gets above 25C I might as well be doing the hokey pokey.
So I finally have a decent chess program on my PC. Eager to improve my game, and stimlute my mind, I tried A few months ago I tried ChessMaster 7000, but the damn thing wouldn’t run on WinXP, or Win2k, even in compatibility mode. Today I got hold of the latest version, ChessMaster 9000, and it works — a little too well actually.
It’s been years since I last played… 10th Grade in South Africa (1996), and it shows: 1800-ranked opponents are squishing me like a bug. Unacceptable. The fault is my own of course: far too excited to be playing again, rushing my moves, not thinking them out enough, mistaking queens for bishops etc. It’ll be a good long while before I’m ready for the real thing: Junior 8.
A hearty “Thank You!” to Steven and the rest of the team at InsiderHosting for your patience this month. They were completely understanding when I had some trouble with my credit card this month (it had reached its expiry date at the end of May, and I wasn’t able to have the new card couriered from the USA in time to activate it for paying my monthly hosting fee). They just sat tight until I could get things sorted out. Great service, great team — you are #1!
Is it just me, or does ‘floating’ a div element in IE6 seem to double the values of any margin rules tied to that element? Take any old div, give it a margin of 10%, float it, and boom(!) you’ve got yourself a margin of 20%. Anyone else notice that?
In this piece on new measures being taken by film studios to counter film-piracy, an MPAA spokesman states:
“It’s estimated we lose between $3bn (£1.8bn) and $4bn (£2.4bn) a year to this problem despite strong anti-piracy actions by the movie industry.”
Not so fast bub! You didn’t lose three to four billion USD. No one came to your office and emptied out the safe. What you are actually referring to is that the value of pirated materials may amount to that sum. Whether the majority of persons who obtained those works would actually have purchased them, if they had not received the bootlegged versions, is another question altogether. I wasn’t paying for every one of your products before I could download/rip them, what makes you think I would be now.
For those seeking a little guidance in the world of web design, Douglas Bowman has drawn up some guidelines on the process he used for creating his recent CSS Zen Garden contribution, Golden Mean. Hopefully you won’t find Doug’s process radically different from what you’ve already been doing, but will see it as a reinforcement of tried and tested methods.
