Ultranormal

  • Um, ha?

    A woman is suing Walgreen’s because of some remarks the pharmacy staff (unintentionally?) put on her pill bottles. Read about it here.\
    This makes me chuckle and remember when I was trying to get a prescription of valium filled and the pharmacy kept me waiting over 2 hours. I kept thinking to myself, “Do they know what the prescription is for? Shouldn’t they try a little harder to get it to me?”

  • He’s not smart enough or right enough to decide for me.

    I can’t believe the governor of SD just signed a law making abortion illegal except in cases to save the mother’s life. WTH? While I am personally against the idea of abortion, I can’t imagine forcing a woman to gestate and deliver an unwanted fetus.\
    The thing that confuses me the most is that this issue is questioning “when life begins,” which is a spiritual issue. (I think life = dna + soul. I am not sure when the soul enters the body, but I don’t think it happens at conception. Hence, a spiritual question, not a scientific one.) What happened to the idea of separation of Church and State?\
    I am also personally against: open-marriage, separate checking accounts in a marriage, gambling, bottle-feeding, divorce, spanking, working mothers, motorcycles, alcohol, skipping immunizations, coffee, and many other things, but that doesn’t mean I am against their existence for others.\
    Also, I know how the LDS Church feels about this issue, so I don’t need to be reminded. 🙂

  • Conferences, Conferences

    Just a little reminder… I’ll be moderating the How to Convince Your Company to Embrace [Web] Standards at SxSW 2006 next Tuesday. If you’re going to be at the conference, please show up, even if it’s just to heckle. We’ll have our presentation online by the time we actually sit down to give the panel (but probably not too much before that). If you’re planning on attending our panel, please leave a comment!\
    ~~Also, I just got the e-mail that Shawn and my proposal for X-Tech was accepted! That means that I get to stay in Amsterdam for an extra week after the CSS Working Group meeting in May.~~\
    UPDATE: We’re apparently not presenting at X-Tech. I’m not sure if we got the wrong e-mail first, but it certainly looked like an acceptance notice, but then came another much later in the day saying our proposal wasn’t accepted. Oh well. We can re-submit for “late breaking”, but I don’t know that I really need to bother with it.\
    UPDATE Part 2: I am presenting at WWW2006!! I’m helping Bert out on the CSS part with a presentation on architecting CSS for syndicated content (and for the site including syndicated content). It should be fun, and another chance to show off some of the cool stuff we’re doing over in AIM land.\
    We also submitted a proposal for the Developers Track at WWW2006, and may be helping out with the CSS piece as well.\
    I can’t wait for SxSW. I just hope this jet lag/sinus infection combo is better by Thursday.

  • The Sun Sets Over Mandelieu

    Time-Lapsed Sunset

    Time-Lapsed Sunset\
    I finally got the pictures off the camera and will try to get them all up before leaving for Texas. I think this is my favorite one so far (I haven’t look at all of them yet – I have to work and stuff). It’s a two second exposure of the last moments of sunset on the day I arrived. I was really tired (didn’t sleep on the plane) and just waiting until a reasonable hour before crashing. I was so happy to be back in France, yet entirely exhausted. I love Mandelieu. I got to know the area a little better this time because I rented a car, and it hasn’t made me love it any less. The people are friendly. The food is amazing, and the scenery is breathtaking. You should go.

  • Close, But Not Quite

    (I wrote this in the Frankfurt airport yesterday… just now getting around to posting it)\
    You know, you’d think I’d remember how weird watching familiar TV shows in different languages is. But, I’m an idiot, so of course, it’s a shock every time. I didn’t want much TV this week, but when getting ready in the morning, or more often, when in the transition from “nerding out” to “good gravy, I’m exhausted and ready for sleeping, brain shut off now” and needing something to distract me from vertical text, mixed left to right and right to left text interspersed with vertical text and all the problems that poses for CSS (and the world in general – is it too late for Esperanto? And no, Richard, I’ll never join the Internationalization Working Group… one day was enough).\
    Where was I, oh yeah, TV. In the hotel, they had a collection of stations:

    • a bunch of French channels
    • a station from Monaco in Italian
    • Eurosport – where all the commentary is English, but the ticker and commercials are German
    • BBC One – If you don’t know what the BBC is, umm, you need to get out more.
    • CNN International
    • Rei Uno – Italian
    • RTL – German
    • and Russian, Chinese and Arabic stations.\
      For some reason, I was drawn to Rei Uno because they had the Italian version of Big Brother, you know, Grande Fratello (it might have been Fratello Grande, I can’t remember – I’ve been up for a long time). It was funny as hell, really. I didn’t need to understand anything they said, the situation was easy to figure out. We’ve seen the situations all before, and there seems to be something about Italian TV that even if you turned off the sound, you could tell exactly what was going on.\
      And, the kings of reality TV, the British, have put together another absolute winner: Millionaire Mansion. You know those shows where people bring in old crap and some tweed-clad aristocrat tells them that it’s really a Victorian bowel de-obstructor and is worth, wait for it, eight thousand pounds!!! Hooray for worthless old crap that turns out to be treasure! The BBC has taken that rather stuffy premise (I watched it getting ready one morning, and wow, it is), and turned it into a reality game show!! I couldn’t turn it off… People off the street, in family teams, have to pick the most valuable item out of three, and then answer some really ridiculous pop culture questions in order to win a vacation in Barbados. Yeah, it’s just as good as it sounds.\
      It’s good to be heading home. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the business lounge in Frankfurt, catching up on TV from last week that I didn’t have time to watch (because I was pulled in by virile Italians trapped in a house crying and then confessing, and then making out).\
      More to come…

  • Since I Can’t Put Up Photos…

    Look at Daniel’s – I forgot the USB cable for my camera at home. Silly me.\
    I did document several of the courses we had at L’Ermitage du Riou, which was, as usual, amazing. We’re winding down, and will end up closing down the joint as one of the last two working groups still meeting. We CSS folk just don’t know when to stop.\
    I have more stories, but we’ve just had a breakthrough that when it’s implemented will change the way we write CSS. Gotta pay attention!\
    This isn’t it, but if you’re a designer or use CSS, please please please go read the new Advanced Layout CSS3 module and post your feedback. This module is very important, and could change the way we build web products if we ever get the browser folks to implement it.

  • Hanging Out With The Elite

    You know how I said I was more comfortable this year than last at the Plenary It’s true, but it’s also still enlightening to be reminded, again and again, how much I don’t know. Today, we spent two hours talking about text direction, and the issues it presents to CSS and other web standards. I was completely lost. Here’s just a taste of the vocabulary:

    • grapheme clusters
    • Boustrophedon
    • glyphs
    • diacritics\
      That’s just the beginning. It was a enlightening as it was confusing. It makes me long for selectors, adjacent siblings, shrinkwrap, specificity and the box model.\
      The other funny thing is that as brilliant as all the people here are, they’re an extremely diverse group. It’s fun to see so many different types of people interacting so well (usually). Everyone has been very friendly, even thought a lot of us are competitors, we all seem to get along. There is, of course, a lot of friendly needling, but overall, it’s been a very collegial experience. I love nerds.

  • What about me!?

    Some UPN and WB bigwigs flew out several bloggers to the San Diego set of Veronica Mars so they could meet with Rob Thomas and the cast and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this awesome show and then blog about their experiences afterwards. How come I wasn’t chosen? Huh? Huh? I blog about Veronica Mars! I’ve written about how hip the show is, how awesome the music selection is, how Rob Thomas is a genius for his ironic use of That’s Amore alone, how superb the acting is, how Jason Dohring and Harry Hamlin deserved Emmy nominations, how charismatic ALL of the actors are, how sublime the cast chemistry is (hello! something you can’t teach or write or even direct), how ballsy the writing is, and how crafty the storytelling is. I so should’ve been picked! Is it because my husband doesn’t get enough hits on his half of the website? (HA!) Is it because my husband works for Time Warner? (Well pooh on that!) Is it because I am a lesbian? (A cookie for everyone who gets that reference!)\
    Anyway, it sounds like it was a neat-o experience and I am wicked jealous. Read one account here: duckyxdale (scroll down to March 1, 2006).\
    For all those who’ve read my previous VM pimpage, tell me if you ever started watching the show and if so, what you think of it. Thanks.

  • I am such a bachelor

    My fridge is empty except for diet soda and milk. And I just dropped my dinner on the floor. Guess I’ll be eating cereal instead.

  • The Sin of Jet Lag Pride

    I had a fool-proof yet self-destructive method for surviving radical time zone changes. Here’s how it goes:

    1. Don’t sleep on the plane. Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.
    2. Stay up until a reasonable bedtime hour in the destination city, eat a light dinner, take Tylenol PM and go to sleep.
    3. Second night, more Tylenol PM
    4. Repeat until returning home.\
      I broke the pattern and didn’t take anything last night, which meant I didn’t sleep. There are few things as painful as arguing about punctuation in CSS for twelve hours on no sleep.