S.KRAUSE

Drainssss ... DRAINsssssss

So cry out zombie plumbers.

A woman at another picnic table at the Union (not part of our group) was imitating a plumber, and really needed to find a way to pull her pants up in back. It was fitting as we were talking about Turkish toilets.

Pictures of the day:

• Worst Logo Ever: Michael Jackson, you out there?
• The Picture of Everything
• Venice: he claims to have done it just with MS Paint and a Photoshop filter for blurring ... true or not, it is rather nifty

HTML:

Yesterday afternoon I was made aware of a small error in yesterday’s entry; Mozilla worked around it, so I did not see it until it was pointed out to me ... an improperly closed anchor tag. I decided to validate that and other pages in this section.

Earlier in the week I validated the main page for the first time in ages; it went smoothly. Try as I might, though, I could not get the pages in this section to validate. The first issue I noticed was that I did not have PHP including my DTD file, so I went through the whole directory and edited the files to include it. While I was at it I switched to XHTML style non-container tags (IMG, LINK, BR, etc.)—that is to say, things like <br> became <br />. I remembered that I needed to remove all my border=0 attributes from images; border has long been deprecated. Still, however, things would not validate. I kept getting comments about character data not being allowed after the tags I was using, so I suspected a syntax error. I was using HTML 4.x strict, but tried XHTML strict ... also a no-go. Then I tried HTML 4.x Transitional, and suddenly things worked. I realized it must have been a matter of using a deprecated tag ... and I was right, to my disappointment.

<blockquote> is no longer to be used. Instead one should use a <div> and set a proper class or style (margin-left: 3em, for example), so I had to change a few dozen pages in my talk section to bring them up-to-date. In the process I decided to validate all the pages in the talk section; I will get to other pages on this site in the future. Most of the sections are rather small, but the humor section contains more than a hundred pages.

Lesson learned: do not use <blockquote> anymore.

Afternoon in a nutshell:

• 3pm: department—pick up mail, chat with a few people, notice how dead the department is after the semester ended, print out a few documents, forget to print a few others
• 5pm: Memorial Union Terrace—GSC “Happy Hour” (get a burger and water, meet Julia and John, chat with Katja and the other John when he shows up, share stories about Turkish toilets and proper backpacking protocol)
• 7pm: Memorial Union Lakefront Cafe—MadLUG meeting (get ice cream, make bad jokes, rejoice at the arrival of Martin Brown and Mark Tinberg, discuss plans about our upcoming election, doodle with Sebastien while Heather reads the paper)

Retro Music Playlist:

• Helium Vola (Ernst Horn): two years ago or so Staci provided me with some songs by Helium Vola (eponymously titled album) ... light techno/eletrconica meets medieval texts. It is highly addictive in a way, but one has to wonder whether the “musicians” went this route in order to avoid commissioning new texts or paying royalties on existing ones.
• Die Toten Hosen, “Unsterblich”: I retain a soft spot for this album, particularly the third track, “Warum werde ich nicht satt?“ It has a certain swing feel to it, mixed with a little heavy-handed punk yelling. Unlike most pop songs, the lyrics of most of their oeuvre are socially critical rather than me-centric.
• Dschinghis Khan: disco goodness/badness ... it is a very guilty pleasure, but the type you sort of want to sing along to. The video, too, is out of control ... a student provided it (the video) to me on CD at the end of the semester.

Recent Entertainment:

• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: I watched it last night. Much fun, but I would describe it as an interesting failure. As with Alone in the Dark, I will write more about it later.
• Alias: I watched the four more recent episodes, two last night, and two this afternoon. Wow ... it will be one hell of a season finale.
• Trailers: I watched a teaser for The Da Vinci Code (coming out next year), as well as trailers for Ladies in Lavender (Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Natascha McElhone), The Legend of Zorro (sequel to the A. Banderas / C.Z. Jones vehicle from the late 90s), Lipstick and Dynamite (documentary about women wrestlers), Milwaukee, Minnesota (a rather curious looking drama featuring a lot of ice fishing), and Must Love Dogs (a formulaic romantic comedy, but one with a good cast).

—May 20 2005