01/18/2001

Some real punishment

First off, I want to thank Shelley for coming to my rescue in terms of my HTML. As you know, I suck at HTML. She took one look at my pages (those that she could get to because of all the bad links) and set me straight, letting me know what worked and what didn't. I fixed the errors that she told me about. This enabled her to get to more of my pages and, of course, discover more errors. I think I have every thing fixed now, but if anybody sees anything else wrong or not working, let me know. Anyway, thanks to her for helping me remove the big "L" from my forehead.

I'm trying to learn how to write all these pages by hand at first. No, not because of the "pussies" comment. I fully intend to move over to a HTML editor in the future. But I wanted to know how this stuff worked. I mean, I want to be able to look at raw HTML code and know what it means without being "handicapped" (for lack of a better word) by the crutch of needing to have my HTML program. The only way to figure this stuff out is to dive right in. Once I have the basic knowledge down, I will move on to some HTML editor so I can spend more time on the actual content. I'm using a HTML book by Laura Lemay. Over and over again she says the same thing: Test your designs in more than one browser. That should also be amended to say "on more than one platform". Well, I made a token attempt. I looked at the pages using the latest versions of MS Internet Explorer and Netscape running on Win98 machines. And the site looked fine. I checked it locally on my system and over the Internet from my work connection. No broken links, all the images were present, nary a problem. I was all smug. Thank god, Shelley looked at it through her Mac OS 8.6 system. I'm going to have to stop being so Wintel-centric. But really, Microsoft is doing people a disservice (ok, more than one, but I'm only talking about one right here.). Most of my errors were putting backslashs in the links instead of forward slashes. But my system never showed any errors even though it was clearly wrong. Why would MS (and/or Netscape) build in the ability to allow you to enter incorrect code? It certainly didn't help me.

We had to really punish our 4 year old today. And I phrase it that way because we haven't had to really come down hard on him yet. Usually he listens well and behaves himself. Well today, he just blatently lied to us and when caught in that lie he just kept going with it. He was sticking to his story and was going to go down, guns blazing. The problem is twofold; first, he is a bit of a smartass. One of the fine, fine characteristics of a smartass is testing their limits to see just exactly how much they can get away with. Second, he is still relatively young, so that any story he might tell to get out of trouble, could still be considered "cute" and "fantasy". Well, this time the lie was so blatent it was almost insulting that he expeected us to beleive it. So we firmly established his boundary. We knew we really had to punish him this time - not just "go stand in the corner" or "go to your room". So for the first time we had to actually take away TV. "Gasp", I hear you TV lovers gasp, "how extreme!" But it is only for two days (you know, first offense and all). Actually part of me is bothered by the fact that TV is so important to him that it even is able to represent a punishment when taken away.