Caution: Singularity Ahead [DEFUNCT]

I remembered to add "Go looking for those white science-y books I borrowed from the library a lot as a kid; you know, the ones about robots, or future cities, and such. Maybe by Osborne?" to my TODO list today. And unlike the last time, I found one! The Usborne Book of the Future, by Kenneth Gatland, illustrated by David Jefferis, Usborne Publishing, 1979. Even better, found scans of the whole thing online. Skimming through it, I vividly remember pretty much every page. Wow. Apparently, this book taught me everything I know. I'm sure I sailed through many classes in elementary school simply by regurgitating what I'd learned from it.

Reading Light - we've gotten Caspian a reading light for his bed. He usually gets about 20 minutes after we tuck him in (after half an hour of family story time) for him to read by himself. He's really, really into it. He'll read a few chapters of whatever book he's working on at the moment, and often say "just three more pages!" when it's time for lights-out. Sleeping with the Fish – we did a sleepover at the Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39 , since it's just a 10 minute walk from our house. Overall: meh . Cool to camp out in the underwater tunnel and watch fish and sharks swim overhead, but lots of down sides too. Kept the kids up later (lights out around midnight); Caspian was the youngest there (we cheated - although we preferred he dodge the question, he "rounded up" and said "5" when asked; when cornered, he said he'd turn 6 on his next birthday); activities were a bit dry and scattered. Bathrooms were an elevator ride ...

I built myself a shiny new avatar for SL. Check it out.

So... I thought I'd have a go at seeing what you can do with DHTML (a.k.a. HTML where you monkey with the contents via script, like most modern interactive sites) in Pocket IE (a.k.a. Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile) so far as animation goes. The short answer appears to be: not much.  The CSS position property is not supported. In fact, the best (only?) documentation of the supported CSS properties is an entry on the Windows Mobile blog from 2004 . So no absolute positioning. You can set a margin on divs to position them (well, position one of them). However, this only works when PIE is set in "Desktop" rendering mode. It doesn't work in "Default" or "One Column" - I normally use the latter to force pages to reflow. (For WM6 you can specify a meta tag to override this - see this blog post ) If you set margin-left , it takes away from the width of an element. So a DIV with a width of 50px and a margin-left of 10px ends up with an effectiv...

Various photos taken via my phone camera arond the Bay Area. "We Are No Longer the Knights Who Say 'Ni'" - this was tied to a tree in a grove on the Berkeley campus, along with several other variations of the phrase. It was obviously part of a puzzle hunt. I'd sat down to read some books I'd picked up nearby and there was a regular flow of students coming past to take notes. "This is Your Utopia - It Sucks" - sign seen by a garbage can on Columbus "Space Invaders" - saw this Atari 2600 cart in front of the Crystal Towers apartments on Taylor while walking the dog. Moments later, the next person to walk by stopped and picked it up. "Red Tailed Hawk on Jansen Street" - it was hunting a pigeon that was trapped with a plastic bag around the neck. An onlooker freed the pigeon, and the hawk hung around for a bit looking disappointed. "Meow" - sidewalk graffiti "Cruise Ship" - seen on my walk home. ...

Out at dinner a few weeks ago, we were talking about where we might want to live. So we asked Caspian. That's a difficult question. I think.... I'd want to live where there are coatis . In other news... My sister Gillian has gone home now. She was with us for the month of June At the end of her trip we took her to Disneyland for 3 days. What fun. I even remembered to bring Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom  this time. (Yes, yes, I could have just read it on my phone before.) Although I was pining for a "Ping My Whuffie!" shirt while crowd-dodging and those few times we waited in lines rather than going to walk-ons. The trip came in handy a few days ago when, in SL in my pirate av, a resident asked "so what does a pirate do in SL?" - easy to respond "We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot..."

So we're visiting my parents in Calgary for the last time (they're moving to Nova Scotia) In May. And of course, it snowed. Wheeeeee.