nocto

an interesting opinion seen on a mailing list:

september 11th shows us another reason why working from home makes good business sense

a couple of years ago i was interviewed as part of an audit by a customer looking to buy software from my company. one of the questions they asked us was how would the product be supported if a plane crashed into our building. i suspect this question has become more than hypothetical to a fair few people now.

i live in fear of getting to the end of my life and discovering that i missed out on doing a whole stack of things that i wanted to do. one of the problems is that i forget exactly what it is that i want to do. sometimes i find out afterwards that i could’ve done something magical if only i’d thought of it at the right time. and once you’ve done a thing it’s easy to forget that it was one of your must do things.

one of my must do things is to see the northern lights.

i’m just thankful that the internet wayback machine doesn’t store images too. take a look at loquax, december 1998, loquax, november 1999 (“often copied, never bettered”. we were more upfront then. it’s refreshing. i like it.) and loquax, june 2000. i’m getting a data retrieval failure on my homepage, 1997 right now. that’s the furthest back example of my attempts at web “design” that i can (or can’t) find. i can’t find any of the precursors to loquax listed.

update: my 1997 homepage wasn’t the really hideous one but it did link to an archive of the an older version. you lose all the naffness without the graphics. a couple of hideous machine crashes mean that i no longer have the gifs. that’s the good thing about computers. you can lose all those horrible old things that you’re fond of but can’t stand without the physical wrench of taking them to oxfam. imagine if my spare room just crashed. i’d be sad to lose some of it. but energised by the empty space to fill with new and now things.

i’ve just discovered that it’s possible to include multiple stylesheets for a web page and allow the user to switch between them. this works pretty damn bloody aceily on netscape 6 anyways. if you’re using the great browser but hideously slow mailer that is netscape 6 then under the [view -> use stylesheet] menu you’ll find a list of all the stylesheets i’ve made up for this page and can flick between them at will. groovy stuff! [update: it led to hideous problems on windows & ie5 so i've removed the multiple stylesheets for now until i've figured out how it's supposed to be done as i seemed to have done it wrong.]

courtesy only of the magic of css. you can now swap this page about to put the sidebar featuring mainly my book writeups in the main part of the page and condemn all this weblog rubbish to the sidebar. cool trick huh?

and i’ve gone quite monochrome with this style sheet.

the other day i posted that two of the interesting character sets included in unicode were ogham and unified canadian aboriginal syllabics. it later occured to me i had no clue about either language.

ogham is the ancient alphabet of the celts. its name is derived from the name of the celtic god of literature. the main surviving examples of it are personal names written on boundary marking megaliths.

canadian aboriginal syllabics were developed from the ojibwe syllabary invented by james evans in 1840. they are used to write a number of canada’s indigenous languages including inuktitut, which is an eskimo-aleut language.

a survey on sleep shows some perhaps surprising facts about us britons. we’re more likely to sleep in the nude, more likely to lie in and more likely to think we sleep well. i think the last point is probably a result to some extent of the first two. i recommend the new begonia pillows i got from ikea yesterday (despite having, like everything else from ikea, a weird name for a pillow) and i agree entirely that:

the traditional nine-to-five working day does not suit the majority

i want an afternoon nap too.

the more i hear about windows xp the more i think linux and osx have going for them.

admittedly i haven’t yet been in a situation where it’s more than a hypothetical question, but am i the only woman who find the idea of having major abdominal surgery far more terrifying than the idea of giving birth as women have been doing, mostly successfully, for all of time? i’m glad dying in childbirth isn’t a common occurence any longer and that we have plenty of choices for medical assistance. i wonder how informed some of the women who elect to have caesarian sections are:

one of the things that is often said is that if you have a vaginal birth you have the pain before the baby, and if you have surgery you have the pain afterwards.