The HTML/XHTML validator pages at the W3C site were recently redesigned. One nice touch I noticed is that when you’re looking at a results page, the associated favicon is either red or green depending on whether or not the page passed validation. Also, the title tag for the results page includes either “[Valid]” or “[Invalid]” before the rest of the title. For example, check out the results for a page that validates and a page that doesn’t.
It’s Monday morning and the weather widget is predicting a hot, humid, rainy week. These are things that would normally leave me a little grim. But as I walked to my office I noticed that Uniqlo has their mannequins dressed in scarves and long-sleeved grays and blacks - this is the fall equivalent of seeing the first robin of spring, and it always cheers me up immediately. Even peanut butter magnet man seemed happier than usual - he was singing loudly and enthusiastically.
On Friday I finally got around to contributing to The Items We Carry on Flickr, which I’ve spent hours enjoying over the past few days. The What’s In Your Bag? pool is also well worth poking through.
Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her credit-provider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she’d purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy’s advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher’s intimacy with the subject could lead to a loss of perspective. “It’s often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We’re a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”
From Idoru. I think of this passage often.
Some of you may remember my fondness for Jolt Espresso, which I haven’t seen anywhere in about five or six years now. But Chris and I still like coffee soda in various formulations, and last night we tried the Trader Joe’s version (called something like “Italian-Style Espresso Soda”). It’s pretty good, especially for the price, but the taste doesn’t quite match our long-standing favorite: Manhattan Special Espresso Soda. The only reason we don’t drink it exclusively is that it’s somewhat hard to find - we usually end up ordering it by the case a couple times a year. I’m curious if any of you have coffee soda recommendations, especially ones that are cheap, easily obtainable, and not overwhelmingly sweet.
We have tried Coke Blak, by the way. I find it pretty wretched, with far too much cola flavor and not nearly enough coffee. It’s also too expensive.
I’ve had a couple of people ask how I’m liking my iPhone now that I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, so I thought I’d summarize here: I still love it, and have encountered no reason that you should not get one. Two weeks of use have only illuminated even more perfect little details, actually. For example: when you’re listening to music and a new text or email message arrives, the music fades slightly so you can hear the alert sound. Or when you get an incoming call or text from a number that isn’t in your address book, it looks up the area code for you and displays the associated geographic region under the number. Or the way it has swiftly learned to autocomplete my various usernames.
I have discovered that it’s possible to crash the iPhone’s version of Safari if you get a lot of tabs going with a lot of fancy display tricks in each. For example, Slashdot, the World of Warcraft site, and a couple of other Ajax-heavy pages will do it. But when the browser does crash it affects nothing else, and it swiftly relaunches itself while remembering what tabs you had open, so in some cases I don’t even notice.
I guess the only thing that does annoy me slightly is the lack of an iPhone wired remote, like the radio remote I used with my 4G ipod. But I’m sure a whole galaxy of iPhone accessories, both official and third party, will be coming soon enough.
Although the default wallpaper images that come with the iPhone are actually pretty nice, I had a hankering for something a little more suited to my tastes. So I whipped up a custom Calico Jack wallpaper using a vector image from Wikipedia. Feel free to help yourself if you, too, prefer skulls and swords to leaves and flowers.
More excellent pirate supplies! Last night I came home to a large box from Quicksilver’s Pirate Pots, which filled me with glee until I saw that the box was very badly banged up - one whole side of it was crushed (with a deep dent straight through the FRAGILE label, of course). But I needn’t have worried, because when I fearfully opened it up I found my super tankard and warning shots nestled safely in vast cocoons of bubble wrap and newspaper. And they’re even nicer than you might suspect from the photos at those links. I chose black for everything, of course, but there’s a really lovely gunmetal sheen to this black that I hadn’t expected. The tankard has a pleasing heft to it - it’s the perfect size and weight. The shot glasses are, as described on the product page, somewhat larger than traditional shot glasses, but they’re equally satisfying. The fact that they’re nearly but not perfectly identical makes it even more obvious that they’re handmade, with a surprising level of care and craftsmanship. Now I just have to find a place in the apartment where Chris and I can admire them, but the cat cannot.
Predictably enough, the air conditioning unit in my office chose to cease functioning during the most stiflingly humid week the city has had so far this summer. Yesterday, as I sat at my desk fanning myself wearily with a crumpled project plan, I wondered how anyone functioned in this building before climate control. Then several of us escaped to a nearby bar for lunch, to soak up their frosty air and free wifi. I gave serious thought to setting up camp there for the rest of the day.
Today is beautiful, though, thanks in part to the excellent thunderstorm and accompanying downpour we had yesterday evening. I did get caught in the rain on my way home, but it was such a relief to be cool that I didn’t mind being soaking wet instead of merely sticky. And this morning was breezy and dry, if a little too sunny for my taste. Too bad it’s only July, I’m sure there is plenty more misery in store for the rest of the summer.
This weekend, for the first time in a long time, I did almost nothing but read. No work, no gaming, no chores or shopping, just a lot of reading. This was amazingly relaxing, but when I finally closed my book at about 5pm yesterday, I realized that the weekend was almost entirely gone and I hadn’t done any of my usual weekendy things, like clean the apartment or make Sunday breakfast. But I think that’s ok, once in a while.
We spent the rest of yesterday evening watching V for Vendetta, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would based on the trailers. It also reinforced my utter disdain for film critics, as I remember reading a couple of fairly wretched reviews when it came out. This would have been a good movie to watch last Wednesday, with the fireworks booming outside our building while it rained on all the spectators.
