May 7, 2002
Spent four days in Beijing with Shirley's mom over week-long Labor Day vacation; included a visit to Beijing University (hello Alicia and Justin).
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Spent four days in Beijing with Shirley's mom over week-long Labor Day vacation; included a visit to Beijing University (hello Alicia and Justin).
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I happened upon the Weekly Web Poll, which happens to be about music this week. After choosing electronica/techno/industrial as my second-favorite kind of music, I got to thinking about the coolness mix CDs I made my senior year at Caltech. In fact, I brought them with me to China, I'll listen to them tomorrow. Right now I'm enjoying an mp3 of Laura Fabian - Love Again (Hex Hector remix). Good Stuff.
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So what I figure is that I've got something like blog envy: everyone else's weblog is cooler than mine. Do you feel the need to redesign yours every week? Add the fact that the ugcs server doesn't do php; I'm going to have to get me a real host when I get a real job. I think the idea is that a group of friends is all supposed to read each others' log every day, and you get to know each other better. Blogless friends, sigh.
Anyhow, I came up with an interesting perspective on my resume, which by the way, is available in [ HTML ] and [ text ].
On the homefront, Shirley mentioned that somebody was thinking of organizing a 5-year reunion for the Brea Posse crowd at the least. It's true, it's getting to be about that time. We thought either my family's backyard, or Craig Park.
I'm not the only interested person! Chinese revolutionary posters.
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When I'm bored I read Frank Yu's China/Jpn/Twn newspage. Today I was reading an article called Spate of mishaps tests limits of Japanese TV's wackiest game shows I found this:
The obstacle-course genre dates back to a late 1980s show, "Takeshi's Castle," in which eager contestants — clad in plastic helmets and knee pads — screamed a hearty "I'll do my best!" before leaping onto swinging vines or wobbling through a field of giant rolling pins. Most ended face down in ubiquitous water traps for slapstick laughs, but there were some serious injuries as well.
Sound familiar? Humor Amarillo! Or "Yellow Humor", a show I used to watch as a kid in Spain, dubbed over by a couple of wacky Spanish announcers. A Google search turns up that it was pretty popular all over Europe. I found good links from France and from Spain (recommended).
Also, interesting trivia: the Takeshi from "Takeshi's Castle" is Takeshi Kitano, Japanese actor who went on to make super-violent shoot-em-up gangster movies, including the ultra-gruesome "Battle Royale".
On an unrelated note, don't you hate it when you over shoot Mozilla's Close Tab and hit Close Other Tabs instead?
I started a thread at Evernight Games called "Weblogs" to see if anybody else had one. It's getting a pretty enthusiastic response. Tomorrow I'll post a list of identities and URL's.
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In response to a question on the Practical-CSS discussion list, I ran up some web pages to check the order in which linked and imported style sheets are applied. Here are the Linked vs Imported Sheet Precedence tests. The conclusion: imported sheets are applied last, and sheets that are imported from a linked sheet are applied before the rest of the sheet (as I understand it, they must be imported on the first line, so I only tested this).
My brother Aaron changed his page to use more CSS, and quit his job. Hooray!
Update: Aaron, are you getting re-hired?
Sometimes you find the answer when you aren't looking for it. When I spent a summer in Beijing in 2000, I found that the New York Times website was blocked by China's Great (fire)Wall. A simple host lookup, and I was off to visit http://www1.nytimes.com. When I arrived last August, I was pleasantly surprised to find the NY Times freely accessible. How so? An Associated Press article (which I can't find now) tells us that the block was removed after a newspaper official mentioned it to Jiang Zemin in an interview last year. Neat!
The article I was reading was about China recently unblocking several foreign news sites. More importantly, they've unblocked Geocities! Alas, Caltech's ITS website is still inaccessible (it hosts the Caltech Falun Gong club website).
Update (May 25): Geocities is not accesible.
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Adam Kuehn said it beautifully:
1. By source, for !important styles: a. user; b. author; c. default. By source, for all others: a. author; b. user; c. default.
2. By specificity, more specific wins.
3. By markup order, last occurring wins. Treat all styles arriving via links and @imports as though they occur, in order, at the point the tag occurs in the markup.
That puts the discussion to rest.
I upgraded this page to XHTML, and redid the perl and HTML for the URLer. Plus I'm getting some pants tailored. Sweet!
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You (and your compliant browser) too can have Bruce-Lee-in-a-can thanks to Mozilla's DOM* Sample Code. Just copy this link to brucelee-poised.gif, and use it on the 3D resize / clip demo page.
* DOM = Document Object Model
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The font-sizer goes live. Things I learned while making it: a little bit of Javascript, and that IE won't let you put padding on an image. The script sets a cookie when you leave the page, so that when you come back it will be the same font-size you left it. Except for cookie-handling (thanks AListApart.com), this script is entirely my creation; no copy-pasting. Woot!
As always, only tested in Mozilla RC1 and IE 5.0 on Win95. I believe it'll break in Opera, because that browser has trouble updating DIV positions when Javascript messes with objects. Let me know of any bugs/ugly things. Positive comment are appreciated as well.
Using Mozilla has changed my browsing habits. Since I can group bookmarks in Groups that open in several tags at once, I find myself doing less random browsing. I appreciate that. My Bookmark Groups are: Daily Bread (Slashdot, Memepool, Zeldman and Pleasant) and Daily Bread 2 (Daypop Top 40, What Do I Know, Scott Andrews and Sweetcode).
Tomorrow I give my first graders their Unit 7 written test.
What do you want?
I want pizza.
Do you want fish?
No, I don't. I want pizza and ice cream.
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I wrote up pseudo-code for a weblog engine to use with this page. This is more and more fun every day. The About page is up. It's actually not a bad piece of writing. I wonder if it's time to update my biography.
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Today I woke up around noon, emptied and took out five trash cans, washed a set of dishes, cleaned the top of the fridge, said good morning to Shirley, mopped the kitchen and hallway, took a cold shower, worked on a puzzle, went out with Shirley to order some T-shirts, had a dinner date at Ali Babas (rosemary chicken, pizza and garlic bread), worked on the puzzle some more and finished about half of the weblog code. It was a full day, felt like Sunday but I still have another day of weekend left. Quite a relief.
Tomorrow we pick up my tailored pants and go buy more fabric. Sweet!
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I'm in the middle of bug testing this new weblog engine. I get to watch as it munges my index page. Ahhh!
There was a promising article on A List Apart today that totally disappointed me. Simple Content Management turned out to require REBOL, some obscure content sharing language. Blah, it was mostly a templating program anyhow, something you can do with Radioland, Blogger, or Moveable Type. Or roll your own in PHP or perl. Most of the readers on the board expressed similar feelings.
Today I went to Binjiangdao with Shirley. We bought more cloth, had an ice cream and stopped by the tailor's on the way back. Picked up my sweet slacks, dropped off corduroy for a pair of shorts (woo!), and bought an old school red plastic Chinese thermos. Seriously, you see these things everywhere. No wonder, because it cost me 10 RMB (about $1.20).
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AListApart's styleswitching Javascript is good if you only have two stylesheets to switch between. But what if you want multiple sheets? For example, I want the user to be able to use any font-size from 7px to 24px when reading my main page. For this, I modified the original styleswitcher.js to fit my need. The only requirements are that all of the sheets be linked in the document header, that the default sheet be placed first and that all of the sheets to switch between have a "title" attribute (to distinguish them from the always-active sheets). I haven't put it up yet, because it makes ugly html and I haven't figured out how to make it work with my font-switcher div.
In the meantime, I'll be working on a better solution.
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Today was 英语大世界 or Big English World day here at CRIS Elementary. The students spent the last couple of months memorizing dozens of conversational lines for the six different stores that were up and running for the two hours between 9:00am and 11:00am. Over the past week, each class went to the fourth grade bank on a specified day at playtime to change their 人民币 (renminbi) into "CRIS dollars". The first graders (woo!) were just their cute selves, customers at all of the stores and belting out their lines to buy all kinds of goodies. The second graders, lead by Shirley and Roger, ran the CRIS #1 Hospital (Is it serious, doctor?). The kids were so cute in their doctor and nurse uniforms; Shirley made sure that girls and boys were equally represented in all facets of the staff, if you know what I mean. Patrick and Austin were in charge of security, holding hands and letting people in one-by-one by passing under their London Bridge. Austin loved belting out "stand in line!" and Patrick was so proud of himself for being in charge. The third graders ran the toy and book store, which sold out incredibly fast and turned to selling drinks. Shirley's fifth graders ran a fruit and vegetable store with Kathy as 老板 (boss), while my fifth graders sold popcorn, Japanese nuts, 果冻 (jellies) and candy at the Snack King. The most popular shop by far was Cris's fast food restaurant, put on by Julie and her sixth graders. They quickly ran out of french fries and nuggets, but sold hamburgers and ice cream until I left at 11am.
At 11am I went with Lawrence and a few other staff members to a high school in the TEDA Economic Development Area, where we were part of a recruiting fair for schools in that area. It was interesting to see the young parents looking for a school, and I learned some new words. We took a drive through the construction site of the new school too. I really wish I could be around to see it completed; they plan to move in October or November of this year. I hope they can put some pictures up on the web.
Oh, and I had some inspiration for stuff to do on this site: it's turning into a full Movable Type in my mind. I'll probably move the posts into a directory, and write several scripts to generate the index page, an archive page, generic pages, and a script to enable perma-links.
My internet usage this month will soon reach 300 RMB. Yikes.
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Micah Sittig's Chinese improves and worsens with the phases of the moon. He enjoys non-fiction books, bicycling, foreign languages and ethnic restaurants. He is an inveterate globetrotter, but can always be found at micah@earthling.net
