from XHTML to HTML

Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 at 12:55 am

I decided, after reading an old entry on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents the Daily Report that I’ll switch all of my websites from XHTML to HTML.

I don’t even remember why I chose XHTML over HTML. Possibly I thought it was the wave of the future. Or maybe I thought all the cool kids used it. (Not really. :))

I guess I started using XHTML about five and a half years ago (“validation”). I didn’t even know what it really was! I still don’t. People commented on Jeffrey’s blog about the extensibility of XHTML, and while I’ve heard the term before, I never knew exactly what that meant, and I still don’t.

I know a little about XML; I had to do a small XML project for school and I thought it was nifty. (Although in my major it was more about JDF files, or job description flows? Something like that. A file that would travel with printing jobs and would contain information about how to print said job.) But beyond that I never got into XML and this extensibility gig. I didn’t understand how XML changed or could even make a difference with HTML.

Because of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really shouldn’t keep up with something that I’m not using to its fullest potential (and I should definitely take the mention of it off my resume o_o). All the work that I’ll have to put into removing trailing slashes from [every webpage I wrote (link to iat)] (including inserting some code into WordPress headers to strip the slashes out) is not a good enough reason for me to keep using XHTML.

I’ll get right on that. After I finish moving all my protected blog entries to a private blog, after I retag and recategorize all the remaining entries, after I tag all my Livejournal entries, after I tag all my dreams, yup. (Some projects that I’ve been working on for ever.) At least I’ll have a few years before HTML5 becomes a reality and I have to buckle down to transition to that.

Friday Five—dreams

Sunday, 31 January, 2010 at 9:41 pm

1. What did you dream about last night?
Usually I post it in my dreamlog.

2. Do you record your dreams in your blog or a journal?
Already answered. :3 Yes, I’ve been writing down dreams since the mid 90s; I thought I had a few really interesting dreams and considered turning them into stories. That never happened though. Mid to late 90s I physically wrote them down in a notebook, then I transferred over to an online log in 2002 or so.

3. Do you think dreams are messages our bodies are trying to tell us? If so, are you real big on trying to interpret all the details?
I believe some dreams can be messages, but I don’t interpret every single dream I have, much less every little thing that happens in a dream. I don’t think dreams are literal, or strictly symbolic. Mostly I pay attention to the feelings in dreams, and any patterns that come up over time.

4. Do you remember your first nightmare?
The earliest nightmare I can remember having is recorded in my dreamlog, but I don’t know if that was my first nightmare.

5. Have you ever had a recurring dream? If you did, what was it and what do you think it meant?
I don’t think I have recurring dreams in that the same exact thing happens. I’ll have dreams where I think, ‘This happened before’ or ‘I saw this before,’ but when I wake up I can’t remember the dream (or real life experience) that made me think that. I know I dream about malls a lot (hee), and airplanes crashing, but I’ve never dreamed the same exact dream.

Friday Five (LJ) December 25 version

Wednesday, 30 December, 2009 at 12:04 am

I was never good at doing Friday Fives on Friday, but here’s the latest one (from Livejournal).

1. What one food most reminds you of your childood?
Is Japanese food an acceptable answer? If not, then probably udon. Or maybe homemade chow mein with scrambled egg strips in it, that was how Bachan made it. :3

2. How old were you when you learned how to ride a bicycle?
I was nine years old (or maybe ten, it was during the summer anyway) and I taught myself! Without a scratch. I even remember my bike, it had a teal paint scheme and pink handlebars and seat and white wheels.

3. How old were you when you stopped believing in Santa Claus?
Eight years old, third grade, I remember some classmate was talking to other kids at his table saying he saw his mom doing Santa one night. Er I mean doing Santa’s job.

4. What was your favorite television show/cartoon when you were little?
First answer that comes to mind is Ren & Stimpy. :P I could also say Rugrats or The Simpsons (that one has lasting power, wow), but R&S was the first I thought of. That might have been the first show my brothers and I would watch regularly on TV in its scheduled slot (Snick!), rather than whatever we had on VHS.

5. What is the youngest age you remember being and do you have a specific memory of when you were that age?
Preschool age, three or four, and a memory from preschool: the teacher and his aide had just put us down on the carpet for our nap and drawn the curtains so the room was dark. The aide asked the teacher if he’d like a Coke, she was going to grab a Coke. I thought, ‘Lucky, they get to have soda whenever they want.’ :P I’m an adult now too but I can’t have soda whenever I want! I have to remember all the sugar and carbonation and, depending on the soda, the caffeine that’s in those things. Ugh.

so this is Christmas

Monday, 28 December, 2009 at 1:54 am

I’ve heard that this time of season is the most depressing for a lot of people, and while I believed it, I’ve never had a bad time during December. That is, until now. Can I list all the things that were wrong?

I was partly sick from Thanksgiving to maybe a week ago. Mostly it was a middling coughy and phlegmy sickness, not the normal sickness of runny nose/sore throat/inflamed inner ears that I have every year. But still very annoying and I couldn’t do much all those days I wasn’t feeling well. (Barely managed to play with my cousin’s dogs while she was on vacation.)

My brother’s cat kept biting me. (I’ve been trimming her claws lately so she can’t scratch, but she’s decided to use her teeth instead. Argh.) That resulted in a swollen right finger (almost an infection?) for which I had to care for a day and almost made me miss a trip to Disneyland! On my left hand she gouged my palm and left an inch-long cut which is just barely vanishing now. It’s really annoying trying to dress oneself when one’s hands are injured and bandaged, I’ll have you know.

Someone did something unexpected, not exactly pleasant. That’s all I’ll say.

Again felt lost and unsure of what to do with my life. Still no drive to get a job. ._.

My computer was running a bit sluggishly while using Adobe design programs. I’m used to that, never was able to run InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator all at once. But the fact that I couldn’t paint in Photoshop with both Firefox and Seamonkey open on Flash-heavy sites was such a pain. (I tried to ask for money for Christmas to buy more RAM for my computer, not sure how successful I would have been if two people hadn’t surprised me with lotso cash. :3 I think, though, that part of my problem was that I had left old SQL files on my desktop totalling over 5 MB. I realized that today when my aunt was explaining virtual memory to my mom, haha! Hopefully moving them off my desktop will speed things up. Then maybe I won’t have to spend so much on RAM!)

I lost my hairclip. This shouldn’t be so bad, but I really don’t know where I lost it and it bugs me. How can I be sure I won’t commit the same mistake again if I don’t know what I did wrong? Also it was a really good hairclip, it lasted me a good few years whereas before I went through hairclips every year. And it was pretty. Then another hairclip that I owned broke. $16 for a really pretty hairclip and the metal busted on one side so it’s kaput. Who said having a lot of hair is envious? I think it’s a bother.

For a few months now my laptop would have times where the Backspace key wouldn’t work. After a while the H key would go out too. Recently the G key joined the random moratorium. Even more recently, shutting down and starting fresh would not get the keys working again. I spent a couple days depressed thinking of my little baby that got me through college just being a useless lump of ancient computer parts. After a trip to Fry’s I had the brilliant idea to just buy an external keyboard. I don’t use my laptop much anyway. Just to listen to music and to use WordPress. But today! Today I started up my laptop and the keys worked!! I’m not holding my breath for this being permanent, but it gave me hope.

On said trip to Fry’s I was wondering why my month sucked so much, and I was beginning to blame it on aforementioned Someone, but I gave myself a hard shake and realized it was mostly my state of mind. Both bad and good things happened this month, I was just in a poor mood, likely because of cold temperatures and ill health, and I was focusing on the bad things. I managed to buck up and wrap Christmas presents and have a great Christmas with my wonderful family.

I wrapped my dad’s present, a JAG hat, in a huge box (“Did you remember to put anything in here?”) with tons of bows and ribbons on it. I noticed there was a serious Cinco de Mayo color scheme because I couldn’t choose among the red, green, and white on the wrapping paper, but no one else commented on it. :P

One brother’s present I wrapped in lots of newspaper ads, trying to make it look less like a DVD, the other’s I put in an empty Scotch tape refill box.

One cousin’s present I had to make a box for, so I used a Robitussin box (my sickness came in handy?) and the other I sandwiched money between two old Dragonball Z VHS cassettes.

Everyone had comments about how I wrapped their presents, so all in all I think it was a successful venture. XD

When? Johnny Comes Marching Home

Saturday, 28 November, 2009 at 11:12 pm

I’m listening to old Civil War songs on Youtube. (Why? I don’t know. I like music is the only reason I can come up with.)

Some videos have montages of photos from past wars, some have video footage from past wars, some are mere reenactments. But they all make me stop and think. How can we send our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, off to war?

I think, any war after the Vietnam War is stupid, after such horrible warfare. But World War II was the last “good” war, wasn’t it? And then there was “the war to end all wars,” what happened with that? (I don’t really know what that war was about or how it was supposed to stop future wars.)

But then I saw photos of battlefields from the Civil War (USA, just to be clear) and remembered the tragic losses we suffered in that war, so many families who lost brothers, fathers, sons. We learn about the end result of those battles in school and yet we still go to war.

I don’t know why we keep getting involved in wars. Aren’t we supposed to learn from our past mistakes? Isn’t this supposed to be an intelligent age? How does people killing other people “win” anything?