At right, a random woolly sheep from the 2005 Sheep and Wool Festival.

Annie and I met with my pastor tonight and set a date for our wedding: 29 Apr 2006 6 May 2006 21 Oct 2006.

At work recently, I was given the green light to create a CD-ROM/print presentation for my organization’s annual Open House. Naturally I chose XHTML as my format. Yesterday morning, I spent four hours in virtual bliss and left muttering under my breath: I can’t believe they’re paying me for this… I’m having so much fun at work; it reminds me of those enthusiastic employees in the Microsoft TV/print ads…

What a difference five days can make. Up until last night, I’d been completely cynical about the state of the movie industry in 2005. Some friends of mine wanted to go out to the movies, to see nothing in particular. I suggested Kung Fu Hustle and it turned out to be astoundingly good. It started out as almost noir-ish, but quickly progressed into a surreal, heavily styled comedy. It wasn’t a particularly “smart” movie, and it never got pretentious. It’s in Mandarin (most likely) with English subtitles, but I found that for some scenes, I didn’t really need the subtitles to know what the actors were saying (as strange as that may seem).

I’m still in the middle of watching War and Peace. I think one has a greater chance of completing a doctorate degree than of sitting through this entire movie on one’s own time.

Dude… I’m no. 1 on Google Images for the keywords small kurd.

Ok, I know I haven’t updated my favorite movies for 2005 yet, but can someone give me one major-release movie from this year that is worth seeing? I used my veto power last month to prevent myself from sitting through Guess Who. The only two movies I wouldn’t mind seeing now are Millions and Downfall.

I’m getting about 16% Firefox penetration at City-Gate.org. Hooray for the Moz!

Dear Mike~

In the article “Apple, Microsoft prepare for war with new systems“, you mention that The name Longhorn just doesn’t get people very excited — unless they live in Texas. Actually, people from Oklahoma, Kansas, Mexico, and Cuba also have the potential to get excited, as longhorn cattle exist in those areas.

Let’s turn the argument around:
The name Tiger just doesn’t get people very excited — unless they live in China, the Russian Federation, North Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bhutan, Nepal, or Bangladesh. Hmm.

I will be editing web pages for the Energy Library and Law Library and need to check my work in multiple browsers — more specifically, multiple rendering engines. Internet Explorer doesn’t adhere to web standards as devised and recommended by the W3C — it doesn’t fully support XHTML or CSS2, and has numerous page-rendering bugs, most notibly the box model problem. IE 6.0 is a stale, flawed product and hasn’t had an update in over five years. The Firefox codebase is constantly being honed and improved, and has richer support for web standards — most noticably XHTML, CSS2/CSS2.1 and parts of CSS3.

From a developer’s standpoint, Firefox comes with a standard set of developer tools including a powerful JavaScript and CSS error/warning console, and an optional Document Inspector that gives detailed insight about your pages. Coding and fixing web pages is easier with Firefox because it’s more strict and less forgiving if you throw mal-formed code at it. Web designers find it easier to code in Firefox, then check their work in IE, rather than the other way around.

From theage.com.au:

Microsoft has hampered standards support in Explorer for five years with its go-slow campaign against the web. Standards-oriented page layout is not possible on most versions of Explorer (CSS box model). Explorer has never met standards for web document identification (HTTP MIME content types), or if one is supported, then simultaneously the other is not.

Security:
Secunia.com reports that IE has 79 security alerts, 33 of which are rated highly or extremely critical. In comparison, Secunia.com reports that Firefox has 4 unfixed security alerts, 0 of which are rated highly or extremely critical.
http://secunia.com/product/11/
http://secunia.com/product/4227/

I also seriously recommend a Department-wide rollout of Firefox to supplant IE6.0.