Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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   IE7 is even suckier than the other IEs
Sunday, February 6 2011
Something approaching a thaw happened today, with highs in the low 40s and the general disappearance of icicles from the eaves of the house. Evidently, despite the abundant meltwater and huge unthawed masses remaining, the roof is not too badly ice dammed, because there were no further leaks in the usual ice dam leak locations.
Gretchen's leg pain kept her more or less in bed all day. And it was up to me to do things like walk the dogs. Since walking in the forest remains impossible, such walks are restricted to the farm road (which has been kept plowed this winter).
With thick snow blocking my access to the forest, I've had rely on my firewood stockpiles. This is the first season where just-in-time firewood gathering wouldn't work, and I'm lucky to have stockpiled an unusually large amount of wood before the snow season began. Still, there's less on hand than would make me comfortable, even factoring in the elm (which must be dried on the stove before it can be burned). I'm not counting the stack of Silver Maple from Ray and Nancy's place, which was green November and is buried in a mountain of snow.

I'm satisfied and understandably proud of my interactive web-based database mapper. But today I went to look at it in Internet Explorer and was horrified by what a mess it made of it. It turned out, however, that only Internet Explorer 7 failed to render it correctly; it looked fine in both IE6 and IE8. In IE7, though, there was problem where the text labels on a representation of a table didn't move with the representation when it was dragged around. The labels sloughed off in an organic manner that suggested IE7 developers never imagined that text and block elements would ever be dynamically repositioned. The problem turned out to be fundamental to an open source library called dom-drag that I was using to provide the table dragability. My database mapper tool relies on complicated javascript and document-object-model (DOM) references, so it's understandable that it might have problems on different browsers. But IE7 is the only one it craps out on. It works fine in other IEs, Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox (which, due to its great web development tools, is what I use as I do my development). I decided not to fret about IE7; it constitutes 11 percent of browser share and is decreasing every day.
Throughout the day, I kept uploading segments of that AVI movie I'd first attempted to upload to a server yesterday. By this evening, I was down to my last several 100 megabyte segments. As I waited for them to make their way up to the server, I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley in one of the many windows on my computer. I'd been reminded of this movie by a piece about Patricia Highsmith (the woman who'd written the novel on which it was based) that I'd heard on To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of the better podcasts to which I am subscribed.


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