Tomorrow morning, my parents and I leave for Mosport International Raceway for a weekend of racing, featuring the American Le Mans Series and Speed World Challenge. This means I won’t have access to anything even vaguely resembling the Internet, so there won’t be any posts for a few days. Of course, next week is QuakeCon, so I’m doing a lot of travelling in the near future; however, QuakeCon should have Internet access, so I’ll be able to blog from there.
TTFN…
Finally, the post you’ve all been waiting for (ha! I crack myself up), the complete, true story of how we got two free laptops (totalling about $2500) from HP/Compaq. Click “Read more...” to see the story.
Read more of The Great Laptop Saga…
Doug Bowman recently wrote an excellent article advocating CSS-based design, where he rebuilds microsoft.com without using tables for layout (which would save Microsoft nearly 329 terabytes of bandwidth a year). Shortly thereafter, Jeffrey Zeldman offered his comments on the article, where he praises it for being short and full of useful content. Unfortunately, he misses an opportunity to simplify the message even further. Stealing an idea from Fark (which stole it from a movie), I have managed to reduce Doug’s article to a mere seven words. Here they are:
Old and busted: tables. New hotness: CSS.
Photo Matt recently joined the cult of the Mac. I’ve considered doing this before, but it’s hard to justify the expense of a PowerBook—or even an iBook—when I already have a perfectly usable laptop. Also, I’ve heard many nasty things about problems with Apple’s hardware and tech support, plus the whole shamozzle surrounding Konfabulator/Dashboard, plus the whole scary cult thing. I’m no Windows advocate, but XP Pro seems pretty stable, and you can hack it to make it look almost exactly like OS X if you want.
Even so, I’d still want a Mac laptop except for one stupid, little thing: they only have one mouse button. If a computer doesn’t have two buttons and a clickable scroll wheel, I can’t use it. Command-click is not a right mouse button. Click and drag is not a scroll wheel. The arrow keys are not a scroll wheel. I know, this is absolutely the oldest and possibly dumbest reason people give for not using a Mac, but you can’t just replace the mouse on a laptop, and a mouse without a scroll wheel is like a keyboard without a space bar. I can handle Mac OS X and find hacks to make it work how I want, but I can’t change the hardware, so I’ll stick with my current laptop for now.
While I’m on the topic of computer hardware, I’m considering replacing my old Samsung SyncMaster 950p monitor with a new CRT or LCD. The problem is, I happen to be a fairly avid computer gamer, and I play first-person shooters a fair amount. These games depend on the ability to react quickly to what you see, and to do that you need a very responsive monitor that doesn’t have smearing issues, which rules out all but the most expensive LCDs, and I can’t really afford the models that are left over. However, instead of dropping a lot of money on a high-end LCD, I could spend a lot less on an even higher-end CRT which would be a better monitor and would definitely not suffer from the quirks of an LCD, but it would take up a huge amount of desk space, be difficult to transport, and be very heavy. Does anyone know of an LCD under $500 that is a 4:3 aspect ratio (remember, 5:4 ratio is bad), does at least 1280x960 resolution, and can handle a modern shooter like Unreal Tournament 2004? If not, it looks like I’ll be looking for someone with a forklift to borrow.
You may notice that wadny.com is slightly wider. It seems that everyone’s websites are wider now, and the content column has always felt a bit constricting, so I made it bigger. While I was at it, I switched so the columns are now specified relative to the font size, so if you make your fonts bigger the line length will stay the same—this is referred to as “elastic design,” hence the title. I was considering a larger-scale redesign, and may still do one later, but this was enough of an improvement for me to hold off on any major changes. I’ll probably wait until after QuakeCon (which is also after my co-op should end), at which point I plan on starting a new windows install on my desktop, and then I’ll go ahead and do a more significant website redesign. I’ve considered switching to a packaged weblog system, but I probably won’t. We’ll see what happens.
What brought this on? Well, Garrett Murray is vying for Justin Goodlett’s title by redesigning again. Relatively minor changes, but his site still looks excellent. I notice he now uses relative dates on the front page and actual dates everywhere else, the same as I do, although he did it intentionally, whereas I did it because I was too lazy to go mucking around in the archives script again, but as long as someone else thought it was a good idea, I’ll stick with it. I’ll definitely have to steal that quicksearch thing he has and work it into The Multisearch Box™.