Concern

Seagate CEO: I help people “watch porn”.

At times I feel like a failure, now that I’m 27, have never ___ ___, am overweight, don’t have a girlfriend, aren’t married, don’t have children, and am stuck in a nowhere job.

I went to another lunch that the kind folks in the Google open source office held for summer of code participants on Monday. The turnout was a lot lower than the one during the summer, but it was cool to see Chris and Leslie again, and I got some neat swag: t-shirt, hat, and lava lamp

Today I gave a presentation for my project for class this quarter. In spite of my demo going completely haywire (portmap wasn’t running on my laptop, and there wasn’t time to launch it, so the demo showed off the UI and nothing else) I felt really good about the presentation. I went quickly, spoke clearly and loudly, and didn’t just read the slides to the audience. I didn’t even really practice what I was going to say before hand (it was a 10-minute presentation, so there was very little space to say too much). People seemed really interested in the presentation, and asked a lot of questions. It was especially good, I think, because I put a lot of effort into the project, and knew it and the issues up and down and could fill the time with a lot of good info. This is especially important, I think: if you don’t really know the field you’re talking about, and are not enthusiastic about it, you’ll falter, and people will be able to tell.

There’s also some work-related junk on Wednesday, and I may be going to see a U2 cover band (yeah, like wha?) on Friday. Thursday is free right now, but you all, dear Internet, are welcome to join me for a beer at the Red Room in Santa Cruz.

I’ve revised the front page of my website, so the main contents table looks much better (at least in Firefox; the spacing is a little wonky in Safari and Opera, but it isn’t awful). I’ve cleaned the output up so now it should (in general) be valid XHTML.

I’d like to know why the vertical spacing goes awry in Safari and Opera — I could use your XHTML/CSS necromancy, if you are reading this. It likely has something to do with image input elements. I’m marginally interested in how this renders in MSIE; it’s 100% valid code, so this probably means it looks like ass in MSIE, or crashes your computer, or something.

This script is interesting in some respects. For one, it is the default directory listing (using DirectoryIndex /index.php in the .htaccess file), and is meant to be a nice-looking replacement for the directory listings Apache presents by default. I don’t know if there’s a way to get the same effect by hacking Apache instead of writing PHP, but this solution works nice enough. Also, this may be crazy, but the source is available, and is linked to the live version. So what you see in that file is exactly what gets parsed to write code to the browser.

I’d like to modify the table headers so they work a bit like the table headers in apps like iTunes: you click anywhere on the cell, and that selects that column for sorting, or reverses the order of the sort. Then, the arrows only appear to tell you which column is the one being sorted, instead of having each arrow be a functional element, and you will have a well to actually tell what column is being sorted.

The Wii is almost enough to get me excited again about console gaming. I won’t buy one, because it would mean also buying a television, and becoming even more anti-social than I already am, but I like what Nintendo is doing.