Out of touch

I took the Guardian's Iain Banks quiz and scored a measly 4 out of 10. Shame on myself. all I can say in my defence is that the quiz included books that haven't made it to our library yet.

Sleepless with CSS

My sleep irregularities grow ever more intriguing. This time I went to bed at 2 a.m. (a fairly normal time for me) then woke up bright and chirpy at 4 a.m.. Yes, chirpy. So for lack of anything better to do, I decided to see if I could mess up the Perl script I'd just uploaded to provide a forum for September's Matrix course. It was working fine, but it looked boring. "I need Cascading Stylesheets!" I thought.

First I linked to the stylesheet I use for our department's website. Still boring. So I went to the good old W3C website to sniff around. Everyone should do this once in a while. I found a great page called the CSS Zen Garden - a challenge for CSS designers to come up with the interesting and aesthetic ways of changing the look of the page without changing any of the actual HTML. Click on the style on the right and you get a completely new look.

I then downloaded some of the stylesheets and uploaded them to my forum page, adding some div tags here and there while I was at it. Of course the results were usually a complete mess, but it was fun. It also convinced me how woefully inadequate my CSS knowledge was, so now I'm rereading the excellent Complete CSS Guide and watching the sky get lighter.

Matrix haiku

The Matrix has spawned a lot of writing, from philosophical essays to political rants to "God, I need Agent Smith to take me now!" blog entries. But this is the first time I've seen Matrix haiku. Needless to say, I contributed my own little erse, after commenting pedantically on the folly of applying syllable rules to a stress-based language.