The World of Stuff .com

Thanks given

I’m at my grandparents’ house, and it’s Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday that may or may not be about gluttony. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, which means that people get the Friday after off and sometimes the Wednesday before also. Even if they don’t have the day before Thanksgiving off, they act like they do. I’m talking about everyone at my school, which was basically abandoned yesterday. I had one class on Tuesday which was dismissed early because I was one of the only people there. Yesterday, one of my classes was canceled and the other one wasn’t. There were only 8 people there when there are normally 50.

What can I say? People love their Thanksgiving. They love the four-day weekend, and would love to have a five-, six-, or nine-day weekend if they could. That leaves me. I wanted to go to my classes, and I also wanted to work and make that money. With my job as webmaster for the Dean of Students Office, I’ve been working on updating a web site for a biennial event that will be held in the spring. The person in charge of the event keeps telling me that Google’s listing for the page hasn’t been updated. Hey Google, go check out the Florida Hispanic Latino Collegiate Forum 2009. You might also want to see how I replaced an ugly JavaScript drop-down menu system with a beautiful, mostly-CSS, screen-reader-and-search-engine-friendly drop-down menu system. Don’t ask me how long it took to make it work on Firefox, IE7, and IE6. Please don’t.

Ah, Internet Explorer 6, the bane of every web designer’s existence. Fortunately, the percentage of IE6 users visiting the Dean of Students Office web site is at 15% and falling. (For this site, it’s about 12%.) But that’s still a significant number. Most of the computers in the DSO now have IE7, so what is a web designer supposed to do when he needs to test a site on IE6? I once resorted to going to the conference room and kicking someone off their computer to use IE6. But it turns out there’s a better solution. CrossBrowserTesting.com has saved my life. You can get free access to various testing environments for five minutes at a time, usually with little waiting. (You can also pay and skip the wait.) Java is required, but that’s no big. Except it doesn’t seem to work on my Ubuntu Linux setup at home; I think it’s the Java check that makes Firefox hang. Does anyone have a fix? (Please, nothing involving Wine.)

Anyway, right. Yesterday was quiet. The campus was practically dead. I could hear every footstep I took. In class, I could hear every stroke of my pen while I was taking notes. I hardly had to overtake anyone on the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a lot of traffic when there normally would have been. It’s a good thing, I guess. Everyone is with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving. And that’s really what Thanksgiving is all about.

Here’s a blog that’s counting down 1000 Awesome Things. It’s up to #886 right now.

Talk about quiet: the quietest place on earth is unnervingly quiet.

This article gives some insight on why cell phones work the way they do: Peering Inside a Mobile Phone Network.