(no subject)

Today is Setting Orange, day 59 in the season of Confusion, 3269.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/07/23/nixonian/index.html

For a day or two the talk-radio morons roasted Kofman, but he will suffer no permanent damage. More sinister was the attack on former Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose recent revelations about the Niger uranium fraud badly damaged White House credibility. In a July 14 column about Wilson, Robert Novak revealed that the ex-diplomat's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA operative working to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Novak quoted "senior administration officials" about Plame, whom they seem to blame for sending her husband to Niger on the mission that proved so embarrassing to Bush. This attempt to damage the wife of a White House critic by revealing her status as a CIA operative is not only nasty, it puts her at risk and is very likely illegal.

And boy does the new press secretary sound outraged about the whole thing. *cough*

(no subject)

Things I have accomplished today:

• Sent out another (and hopefully the last) template draft to get feedback on site redesign. I have no design background, and interface design is not something that comes naturally to me. This was hard to get the right mix of "appeals to folks who like flashy stuff" and "doesn't piss off people who don't, or who can't upgrade past Netscape 4.8". I decided to go with coding to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2 (with a hack that will let Netscape 4, bane of my existence, get a CSS 1 stylesheet instead), and Javascript drop-down menus which are not at all required to get around the site. Mrfle. We'll see how this one goes over, but I'm not really inclined to go through another complete round of redesign, this has to get finished. Luckily, going the style sheet route makes it easy to make changes.


• Got some useful feedback from said message already.


• Joined ACM and SIGGRAPH and SIGMETRICS while I was at it; I'll join SIGCHI later I think since that's really where my interest lies.


• Plotted out where to take my certification exam, and said location is conveniently halfway between my house and work. Now to do a little studying and figure out when exactly to schedule it.


• Came home and promptly proceeded to continue to work. Must stop that now.


• Answered one of those emails that's been waiting for *mumble* weeks now, have two more and a recent party invitation to respond to. Need to do that tonight while watching "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", then I can get on with the more recent email that needs answered. Perhaps I'll send that "Am I reading you correctly when I think that you want me to shove off?" email too. (To head it off at the pass, not going to discuss it here, thanks.)


• Got my "to do" list organized in the office, so hopefully I can start crossing stuff off at a more rapid pace.


• Got really bummed that my favorite pair of pants has started falling down. They're not unwearable yet, but they may be soon if I keep up with the weight loss. I do not own a belt, and I might have to change that situation.


• Decided I need a tshirt with the lightswitch rave on it. ("The Cheat is grounded.")