31 May 1998: Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

Sunday, 31 May 1998:

Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

We had a whopper of a rainstorm last night; wind, thunder, lightning, cats cowering under the bed, etc. etc. I got up to shut a window and Newton followed me around. I held him for a while and he was very happy about that. Jefferson was nowhere to be seen, probably too scared to come out.

My cats are pretty bold, but thunderstorms are a little too much for them.

After I woke up and got dressed I played around with the SF3 account, slapping a stylesheet on the home page. Some of it turned out to be simple and powerful, but other items listed in my book (Peachpit Press' book on HTML) didn't seem to be working. For instance, font-weight did nothing, and for font-size only the alphabetic mnemonics ("small", "large", etc.) and the percentages worked; exact point or pixel sizes did nothing.

A little investigation suggests that Netscape isn't implementing all the features my book says exist, since Internet Explorer does seem to handle font-weight properly. How irritating.

Well, I'll keep at it. I need to find some good examples, but unfortunately it seems that I can't, say, load someone else's .css files in my browser to examine.

In the afternoon I walked down to State St. where I had a gyro for lunch, and took advantage of Pegasus Games' 20% off sale (they're doing inventory tomorrow). I bought a copy of 1870, which is yet another railroading game system. Didn't see much else that caught my fancy. I still have several games at home I haven't yet played.

I also bought some film for my camera, to make sure it still works. I'd like to have it along for my Bay Area trip next month. I had to ask if they carried 12-exposure film at Walgreens, and they did, but it was hard to find (behind the counter, not on the customer-accessible display).

When I came home, my building was having a fire alarm, which spooked the cats no end. Apparently someone had not only pulled but damaged one of the alarm levers in the building, and we had intermittent alarms for the next hour as they tried to fix it. Ack.

Then I went for a bike ride around Lake Wingra, through the UW Arboretum, taking photos of things as I went. Hope they turn out okay, as I think I got some good ones! I sat and read in my favorite spot for such things in the middle of the Arboretum, and nearly finished Jack Faust. Then I got a sundae at Michael's Frozen Custard and came home. It was a good ride, and it seemed to get progressively less humid as the day wore on.

Oh, and as I rode through Vilas Park at the very end I passed a couple of guys who were playing with their ferret in the park. They let me hold him, and he was very soft and friendly, very cat-like in some ways. It would be kind of neat to have a ferret, but I bet my cats would disagree. Boy, it was fun to see the critter take off after a couple of ducks, though!

Back to the old grind tomorrow. I didn't get as much sleep this weekend as I would have liked; I kept waking up right around 9:00. Hmm, maybe I'm just not as tired as I thought.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)