Ree’s musings

There's something that has been bothering me for some time. I haven't written about it before because I don't know how to say it without sounding snarky and smartass, which is completely not how I mean it. I'm just confused and angry with myself for not being able to figure it out. There must be a reason. People don't do things without a reason, right? It might not be a reason that seems convincing to me, but to somebody else....

Anyway, this what's going on. I've been noticing a whole bunch of sites, more in the last month or two, that use HTML marquees in the navigation. By "marquee" I mean <MARQUEE>>...</MARQUEE>, the marquee tag. You put text or any HTML code you like in there and Internet Explorer will make it scroll across the screen, starting from a point where none of the marquee content is visible. Note I say IE scrolls it, not "the browser" -- Opera 7.23 does not handle word wraps within marquees, which seriously breaks your site if you put links within the marquee.

Why is this done at all, much less for navigation? Shouldn't a user be able to click any link at any time? I just don't get it. I see site announcements in marquees too. If something is worth announcing, isn't it worth keeping on place long enough for a visitor to read the whole thing at once? (In my case, I read very fast, and get annoyed with the marquee forcing me to stop and be bored until the next line becomes visible. It has a similar effect though, as it means I lose interest and find something else to do instead.)

Can somebody please help me to understand this? I'm trying to understand or at least work my own way around it. The only thing I can do to make Opera stop scrolling marquees, though, only stops marquees from rendering altogether. If the sites I visited had merely pretty images in marquees, this wouldn't bother me, but if I am going to navigate a community-oriented site I need to be able to see pertinent links and site news. It simply isn't optional.

Most frustrating. I am missing -- no, probably overlooking -- some vital and stupidly obvious bit of information. Once I unearth that fact, this will all make sense and I can stop obsessing.

So what is it?!?!

"I'd be willing to bet a large majority of Americans would become vegetarians if forced to raise their own cattle and slaughter those animals themselves for that Sunday bar-b-cue steak, then die of starvation from their inability to grow their own tomatoes once converting to a plant-based diet."

Would you? Heh. Possibly the majority, sure. I'm not sure South Dakota would look so very different though.

I have been a bad blogger, vanishing without notice. Oi. Sorry folks. There was additional family around and annoying diagnosis -- lots of dreck.

Thanks to the people who replied to my question about marquees. The discussion has helped shape my ideas on website design, which I enjoy so much.

As a final non sequitor, I have been learning to incorporate bad SF humour into my programming. I've taken up a scripting language where the syntax for generating a random integer from x to y (inclusive) and saving as the variable VARONE is <RANDOM VARONE xy>.

I liked the character of Random in the Chronicles of Amber, so I named my internal variable Corwin, after this brother. Random, Corwin, hahahah? No? Dangit.

• Homework


• X-Men Legends for GameCube


• At long last, downloading Knoppix and getting my crappy BIOS to run it


• Wondering what the hell I do with Knoppix now that I have it -- then finding the Mozilla and GAIM buttons!


• Kludging up Escapade scripts


• The SciFi Channel Farscape marathon (I've forgotten what it's like to tune in weekdays and not find Aeryn, honestly)


• Chores I don't do chores. Stop saying that I do. It's ruining my slacker rep!


• Contemplating website design for myself and possibly for prophet non-prophetic profit

The end.

Usually I don't like those memes that use LJ friends lists. I have a squillion people on my list whom I do not know in the slightest, and only a few people who are my friends outside of LJ. This makes those memes suck, because they tend to produce reams of names of no special meaning to me.

There are exceptions:

I am madly excited right now. My brother and I have been checking out Knoppix -- well, mostly I have. I keep hogging the Knoppix CD. Oops. Squirt's been looking at it too though.

Sidebar: Knoppix is Linux that runs from a CD without any installation. You can use it to run Linux on a computer that normally runs pretty much any operating system, and when you end the session and eject the CD, your computer can run Windows or whatever exactly the same as before. It's fucking sweet. It also comes with a heap of open-source software.

Of all those programs, Mozilla made a big impression on Squirt. He has decided that tabbed browsing is incredible, which is kind of a "well DUH" to me, an Opera girl of several years. (He also hates the GIMP for some reason.)

However, Opera doesn't natively support profiles, which sucks on shared computers like my current internet comp. And if Squirt likes Mozilla, then Mozilla he shall have. The download just finished, so I'm going to install it and set up a profile for him.

I'm not sure I like Mozilla. Don't get me wrong; it's a browser that supports web standards and that is glorious thing, which I deeply appreciate. Proper browsers make learning CSS soooo much easier. I have no idea how people can stand to use IE as they learn this stuff. It's just that before I first tried Opera, years ago, I tried Mozilla. It sucked. I wanted to configure stuff and the menus were full of notes saying "This still need work -- any takers?" and the like. Obviously it's much better now and I hear a lot of good about it, but now I'm acclimated to Opera. Once you know the joys of typing "g gnusto" in the address bar to Google "gnusto", you never want to go back. I haven't had to load the Google front page for months, and that was just to check on Gmail. Heh.

Enough browser babble. I need to get to installing. And then I need to figure out why Knoppix will mount my USB drive but not read any files.

Hehehehehe. "Mount." I am a total perv. *snickers* Right, install time. Gotta go.

I hate Mozilla. Installation attempted to use legacy Netscape 4 profile data (which I cannot find to delete), including a home page that has not existed since 2000, and insisted on writing its own profile data to a different directory depending on which user was logged in on the computer -- meaning that there is a specific combination of login name and Mozilla profile name that must match in order to access data. No using your prefs without logging out whoever used the computer last! That may be fine for a computer lab, but --

Forget it. This stupid program still rubs me the wrong way. Thank God I have my Opera or I'd go stark raving mad. Hey, did you folks know that Mozilla is not upgraded? When there's a new release, you must backup your profiles, uninstall the old version, install the new version, and restore your data. Manually. I've worked with programs that have similar methods before, but those programs are all copyrighted prior to 1992.

Stupid stupid Mozilla that sucks.

Lovely day. I've spent most of it doing two things: whipping up a little toy for my website (more of a feature than a toy, but a very amusing feature to me) and checking out local banks online. The latter task is a favour for my mother.

I can't even find the data I need for half these banks, and where I can find it, I can't make head or tail of it. Few things make me feel stupider than finances. They turn to digit soup in my brain.

And that nifty new toy of mine? I checked my work carefully in several browsers and they all worked. I validated my code without any problems. I should be golden. But I missed one, and it's a doozy -- my toy doesn't work in IE. There's no indication I did anything for IE users. (Which really seems fair, since they're using antiquated insecure crap for their browsing, but I can't understand why IE would fail to render perfectly valid code. Wait. It's IE. Neverfuckingmind.)

So yeah, happy birthday or some damn thing.