Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 12 March 2002

# 4:30 AM

smash!

Pyrex drinking glasses are nice in a lot of ways. They take heat well; they stand up to abuse well. However, eventually they decide that the next time someone looks at them funny they're going to fragment violently.

I just had both my Pyrex glasses shatter, mostly on the kitchen counter, but quite a few shards were flung outward to land on the kitchen floor and even into the hallway. It's a horrible, razor-edged mess. I'm not even trying to clean it up now. I swept all the shards on the floor into a pile under the sink, which will prevent me from gashing my feet tomorrow morning while I'm blearily trying to make breakfast. The rest of it can wait. I'm going to bed.

To make matters worse, while I was trying to deal with this disaster, the sink faucet started dribbling continuously, and I had a brief moment of panic... one of these days the hot water tap will become impossible to turn off, again, and it would have been just so perfect for it to happen now. It turned out that I just hadn't shut off the cold tap properly, thank ghod.

# 3:30 AM

No furniture shopping for me. Had to wait hours for the damn CDs; by the time I got to leave Wind River, they were all closed. And I didn't even get all the data I needed. The remainder is downloading now; it'll take a couple hours, but it'll work.

Loaded up goodwill.com in Mozilla to see what it looks like with a browser that understands kanji. I still couldn't read it, of course, but somehow it seems really cool that the computer has no trouble splatting a bunch of Japanese text onto the screen, as text, not pictures—I can select it and paste it into Emacs, and Emacs understands it too.

# 12:30 AM

Oi, anyone know how to do crossed out text so that Netscape 4 renders it properly, but without using deprecated HTML tags? It doesn't know what <del> means, and <strike> is deprecated.

I wonder if <span style="text-decoration: line-through"> will work... hey, it does, cool; pity it's about ten times the typing.

# 12 AM

Good furniture has not yet been bought, although I mean to stop at IKEA on the way back from work just in case they have something which is exactly what I want. However, crap furniture has been gotten rid of. The people at Bed Bath and Beyond were very polite and helpful. "No, we don't mind that you had to put the cabinets together before you discovered they were too small."

I also dropped off a bunch of old clothes at Goodwill, and a bunch of old computer hardware at the Alameda County Computer Resource Center. It's amazing how much lighter I feel not having these things anymore.

Right now I'm sitting in my office at Wind River, waiting for some CDs to be burned, so that I can take them home and start on the next big project.

(While link hunting for this entry I discovered that goodwill.com is some Japanese concern with pictures of people in hard hats on its front page. No idea what they actually do, the site is entirely in Japanese. Well, little square boxes. I am just assuming it's Japanese because some of the links are images of kanji.)