Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Saturday, 26 January 2002

# 8:30 PM

I've applied a hack to prevent Netscape 4.x from loading the style sheet for this page—it has serious bugs in its CSS implementation, such that the page comes out looking awful. Much better to ignore all the styling and have the page come out looking plain.

The hack, in case you're curious, is to add media="all" to the <link> tag referencing the style sheet. This trips another bug in Netscape 4, causing it to ignore the style sheet.

I'm not going to stop using modern markup, such as &mdash;. Have you considered upgrading to Mozilla?

# 8 PM

Yesterday was a busy day... back to work, after having moved furniture the night before and not gotten enough sleep. (I guess I'm too old to sleep on someone else's floor anymore.) Made some progress finding the bug in that 13-page debugging dump I mentioned before. I now know what is wrong, but not why it happens.

For dinner, went to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Restaurant on Pier 39 in San Francisco with the gang from work (Mike, Mike's wife Bets and baby son Edward, Todd, Thomas, and this guy named Jim who turned up - apparently he used to work for Wind River). Good company; decent food; I didn't care for the restaurant's style. But then I wasn't that impressed by Forrest Gump (the movie).

Afterward, we watched the remake of Planet of the Apes at Todd's place. This is worth seeing for the makeup, which does an amazing job of turning human actors into believable apes, with individual faces and a good range of expression. Unfortunately, that's not enough to produce a good movie. The plot is difficult to believe and the characters are of the finest cardboard (with the possible exception of the villain).

Must now watch the original and see how it compares: I expect not so good makeup and much better plot.