Three things, not necessarily in order of importance or interestingness:

1. I have just placed an order on e-bay for what will be my first real pc mod, if putting an aftermarket GPU cooler into a system I built myself from stock parts is considered a pc mod, and I’m not sure it is. My 4870 is, not surprisingly, running hotter than is ideal, so I have ordered an Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev. 2 with the turbo module for it. I’m looking forward to getting back into the case.

2. I am apparently nerdier than 99% of all people.

   
   

   That’s saying a lot if “all people” is understood to mean “all people who have taken the test”, but then, we don’t really know how they’re calculating their statistics, do we? In any case, they’re not controlling for gender, so I figure I can be extra-proud of that score, given that I am a cisgendered female.

   On v2 of that test, they do control for gender:

   
   
   

   Which leads me to my final point…

3. I am very thankful to have learned about the internet at the point in time in my life when I did. I grew up around computers to the extent that I am very comfortable using them. The first time I remember using a computer in school was in first or second grade. I used them a lot in school and after school hours in the library from then on, and took my first “programming” class in seventh grade (in Apple BASIC, and thank you, Jared Housh, for teaching me all that fun sparkly stuff—perhaps it was you who set my feet upon on the path I walk today!). We got a computer at home in 1989 or so, a Tandy, and then I remember doing some gopher searches in the computer lab in high school, but it wasn’t until my first year of college that I really got seriously involved with computers.

   I am glad I had some time in my youth when I wasn’t connected to the ‘net intravenously, because if computers and the ‘net had been so omnipresent when I was growing up as they are today, I would never have managed to built the tenuous grip on the social world that grants me the “cool” part of that nerd rating above.

   And I would write more, but I’ve been up and on the computer for a huge number of hours now, and have promised my (internet-won) husband that I’d go to bed at the same time as he does tonight.

I hope. It required changing one line in the CSS. Why didn’t I do it sooner? Durrrh. Anyway, let me know if something isn’t working.

…from a long vacation in the US. Hopefully I’ll be updating a bit more now. I’ve been incommunicado for a while now, so if I haven’t been answering your e-mails, take heart that you’re not being singled out or anything.

With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it’s a piece of something else.

From A List Apart: Articles: Exploring Footers.

I’m not too happy right now. I’ve got the new design for my blog worked out. It’s just the same as the old design, although I hope the code is a little more robust. Getting it to work as a theme in WordPress has not been fun, however. WordPress seems to be considerably more difficult to customize than MT. Like, I actually am having to read the documentation. Which really sux.

So I’m gonna try to get this done tonight. Beware:

I hate it.

So I’ve been working on a new design for this thing since I converted to WordPress. I came up with a new design, but I didn’t like it. So I decided to go back to the old design. Which I have to recreate, since when MT crapped out on me I lost all the templates and HTML pages. So I’m recreating it, and I get it to work, then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, despite the fact that I didn’t change anything. Also the pages where I got the basic layout (footer bottom, even when the main text is shorter than the viewport), pages that used to work, no longer work. In Mozilla or r IE. Or an online example page will work, but when I copy it exactly to a page on my computer, it won’t work.

Why have web standards not progressed since, like, 1999? XHTML, which is really not any kind of an improvement, was 1999. CSS2 was frickin’ 1997. That’s almost 10 years ago. And we still have to use hacks like this:

#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
height: 100%;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
height: auto;
}

html>body #container {
height: auto;
}

to get things to work. I mean, WTF? This is the frickin’ web, people. How can the building blocks of the web have stagnated so much? I mean, we don’t use wattle and daub for making houses any more. Why do we still have to resort to crap like tables for layout in order to get decent cross-browser compatibility?

People are actually reading this blog now. I feel like I’m having visitors over and there’s dog hair and dirty dishes all over everywhere.

I’m in the midst of developing a new design for the blog now, so things might look a little wonky at times. Forgive me–it oughtta be done sometime soon, as I actually have some motivation these days.

WP apparently doesn’t allow me to have a non-deprecated Atom feed or to shunt my feed info to xml files. So, you’ll have to point your news aggregators to a different feed address again: http://brodwall.com/sarah/blog/feed/. Sorry for the trouble.

I’ve gotten everything moved over to the new server and imported into WordPress now. During the import, I noticed a bunch of new comments that people had written but I hadn’t received notification about. If you’re one of the commenters, know that I just found out about your comments right now, and I’ll respond soon. I promise I’m not blowing anyone off! Damned MT. I hope both WP and the new server prove to be more reliable.

Blog’s going to be down for a little while while I switch servers and upgrade to WordPress.