Friday, 06 December 2002

My future in-laws live next to a national forest, on a secluded lot with lots of trees and bushes. They feed the birds in their back yard; some of the local kookaburras, when they get hungry, will sit on their window ledge and tap on the glass with their beaks. (It's hard to tell this from photos, but the kookaburra is an unexpectedly large bird — in my North American scale of Sizes That Birds Should Come In, kookaburras should be about the size of a bluejay or robin, but instead they're crow-sized with big puffed-up feathers. If I remember my ornithology correctly, puffy feathers are some kind of water-collecting mechanism for desert birds.)

Flocks of wild parakeets also come to visit. This is going to sound silly, but until I came to Australia I didn't realize that parakeets came in flocks: When you spend your whole life seeing them one at a time in pet store birdcages, you sort of assume they must be solitary birds. I was amazed the first time I saw a flock of brightly colored wings flapping past in downtown Sydney, and then I learned first-hand what happens when the "talkative" Australian parakeet gets down to serious conversation with a few hundred friends and neighbors. (There are peaceful, tree-lined parks in Australia where you can't hear yourself think for a couple of hours before sunset. Chatty little birds.) The backyard parakeets aren't as numerous or noisy, but they're very colorful and unusual to a Midwesterner like me.

The only problem with the idyllic scene in my future in-laws' back yard is that the neighboring suburb is on fire at the moment, and we're anxiously watching the news to see whether the wind shifts direction and the bushfire heads their way. My in-laws' home isn't in any immediate danger, but they're definitely at risk.: Perhaps two dozen homes around the outskirts of Sydney have been destroyed, and the whole city smells of smoke. We're praying for rain, but Oz is having its worst drought in ages this summer, and the firefighters have their hands full.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:39 pm. comments.

Friday, 06 December 2002

More fun with CSS: I've added three more style sheets to the pull-down menu in the sidebar, and cleaned up the others to make them more cross-browser compatible. (I'm testing on Chimera 0.6/Mac and MSIE 6/Win, mostly because those are the browsers I use at home and work, respectively.) The new stylesheets may look vaguely familiar, but they're 100% CSS; the Blogger templates they resemble are HTML based. Choose your favorite and enjoy.

(MSIE still has a few bugs that make these pages less attractive than they should be: The USA/Oz graphic in the corner has a transparent background, but you wouldn't know it from the way MSIE displays PNG files. It looks especially bad with a dark background, as some of the style sheets demonstrate. MSIE also crashes a lot when it encounters the CSS2 first-letter tag, but only under certain bizarre circumstances that are difficult to isolate.)

I'm also having a problem with Blogger inserting non-conforming HTML markup into my updates, though; if I can't find a way around it, I may have to remove my "HTML 4.0" badge. (Blogger inserts unmatched <p> tags into my text whenever I start a new paragraph, and it has a nasty habit of mangling the HTML em dash ("&#8212;") when I edit an article.) No one said complying with standards was easy, I guess.

Actually the problem is more pervasive than I realized: Blogger's editing function converts any HTML escape sequence into the character it represents. If I type "&lt;p&gt;", publish, and then edit, Blogger silently converts that string to "<p>", and then the re-published article contains HTML markup instead of the characters I wanted to display. I should talk to the Blogger folks about that, or (more likely) roll my own editor and use it instead.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:02 am. comments.