Midsummer punting madness Despite threatening weather we made our way to Cambridge for this year's Midsummer Night Picnic. There we rented punts from Granta Punt Hire, manhandled them onto the upper river and tacked towards Grantchester. Sadly, our three punts could field only 2½ punters at any given time, so progress was slow if not actually leisurely. We moored and feasted before reaching fabled Grantchester Meadows, and scraped back in to Newnham Millpond for the 10pm curfew. Although we drove through heavy rain both coming and going the only water that fell on the boats dripped from punt poles. Fortune favours the boat.
We got our Mayor back He might well be an old-red loony, but he's the only politician who's had the courage to tackle our city's congestion, for which he had to risk seriously pissing off a lot of people. I still don't know if congestion charging is the right answer, but I know ithad to be tried. So we chose him again. "Do you really need to drive into the centre?
" Hooray for "Turn-back" Livingstone, our Mayor of London.
Picked up the 1200-page Professional ASP.NET 1.1 on Thursday and am now immersed in a 3-day gulp of new technology that — at last! — unites APL and web building. ASP.NET compacts the source code for dynamic web sites, abstracts away detail I was hand-coding in PHP, and lets me use Dyalog APL as a scripting language, giving me a double hit on the code compaction.
For example, Visual Basic:
sub Page_Load (Source As Object, E As EventArgs)
If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
list.Items.Add 'Apple'
list.Items.Add 'Orange'
list.Items.Add 'Pear'
End If
End Sub
versus APLScript:
Page_Load
:Access Public
:If ~IsPostBack
list.Items.Add¨'Apple' 'Orange' 'Pear'
:EndIf
Jennifer governs A woman character in Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government is talking to another other woman, who might be a prisoner. She asks the other woman to do something, but is refused violently. She pauses and looks thoughtfully at the floor. "I might have made that sound too much like a request.
"
Financial success I measure my financial success by how little time I spend thinking about it.
Italy 2005 Some of us gathered last night in Hampstead to drink prosecco and compare venues. Anne Tupker brought photos from the Bisol vineyard in the Veneto, whose prosecco she imports at Bouquet Wines; Miki and I told stories from Peralta. The dream continues.
Art for Society's sake Religion continues to answer the question of What to do? but few of us listen these days. In An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, Roger Scruton argues we should use high culture to supply the mythopœic deficit. The argument sounds feeble to me, and Scruton acknowledges it as faut de mieux, but I'll keep reading.
Magyar Magic Thanks to Nick Sowicz, found myself last night perched on a chair in a packed room at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Maiden Lane, listening to fabulous jazz by Arnie Sornogyi (bass), Béla Szakcsi Lakatos (piano) and Winston Clifford (drums & percussion) of Improvokation.
» Magyar Magic
Let’s face the letters and type Looking for study materials on italic handwriting I discovered Gunnlaugur Briem's excellent website on type design, typography and handwriting.
His remarks on web typography make me wonder: will CSS let me limit the measure of my main text column here to, say, 40em, rather than a fixed number of pixels?
OK, we're trying it. IE6 ignores the rule, but Opera and Netscape leave a column of whitespace, which varies with the text size you view at. Do I like this? Do you? Or should I leave you to set the browser window to whatever width suits you? Comments, please.
» The CSS Zen Garden