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Well, that was unfortunate. According to the logs, it looks like my server rebooted on Nov. 10, and because I'm an idiot, I don't have my webserver and database configured to restart automatically. That, and the fact that on Nov. 9 I left the country for 12 days sans computer, accounts for this site's dowtime.

The good news is that Mary and I are happy to confirm that Italy is a wonderful, beautiful place to visit. Pictures and words on that note to follow shortly.

So, anything happen since the election?

Notice Anything Different?

No? Good. I spent a good chunk of yesterday updating the HTML and CSS of this site, not to change the design, but just to put into my personal blog what I've been learning recently with my work for clients. These changes will also, hopefully, make me solid with IE7 when it's finally released to the masses.

Of course, if you see anything wonky (content aside), let me know.

Getting Ready for IE7

With the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 on the immediate horizon, folks like me who build websites for a living have some work to do. In a nutshell, IE7 fixes lots of bugs in IE6 and earlier, and ironically, the tricks we used to keep these earlier versions looking good have the potential to make the newer, better browser look bad.

So what to do? First, don't panic. Second, read Tantek's take on hacks. It was written last year, but it's still dead-on. Third, conditional comments are your friend.

So for now, I'm keeping my much-used box model hack, and making a surprisingly small number of modifications, mostly involving moving a few rules into conditional comments. Of course, all this effort is for client work — no time to worry about this old site for now.

Update: If you are using conditional comments, but also have multiple standalone versions of IE on a single machine, you need to read this how-to guide to get conditional comments working right in the older versions.

Update 10/19/2006: After installing IE7, conditional comments in older browsers will be broken. You will need to redo the procedure in the update above to enable them again.

Cleaning Up

I just finished cleaning up the Errata section, and added an entry on installing Fedora Core 3 on a Thinkpad T41, my latest laptop. If you're into that kind of thing, have at it.

A New Look

What should you do after a heartbreaking electoral loss? I have no idea, so I spent some time spucing up my website and writing a little code. After my year-long experiment with grey and darker grey, it felt good to add a bit of color to the design. And some of the backend and admin features that you will neither see nor care at all about have been reworked as well. For the curious, though, I'll be updating the credits page soon with the details.

…And Back Up

Some of my more dedicated fans might have noticed that this site actually popped back online last Tuesday, after a two-week absence. Without going into details, let me just say that after Speakeasy screwed up my DSL order, leaving me without service for an extra eight days, I don't like the company nearly as much as I used to.

Going Down…

Because of my move tomorrow, I expect that my DSL connection will be down for at least a few days. See you all when I get back online!

New Look

It all started with a simple redesign, but after a little extra tinkering, it ended up being very little about the design, and much more about the backend database.

So give me a little time to work out the look and feel, but in the mean time, I now have comments enabled for this site. Not to say I won't turn them off later — I've never been a real fan of comments on blogs — but for now, what the hell.

Down and Out

Well, it looks like I was down for about 6 hours this morning due to a "regional outage" on Speakeasy's network. Funny that they didn't seem to know about the outage until I reported it 4 hours in. I wonder how "regional" it was?

Email Still Broken

To the uncounted tens of people who are trying to send email to my old address, two things:

1. Email is still broken. Hopefully the DNS changes I made today will show up tomorrow.
2. I'm abandoning my old secret address in favor of a new secret address; I'll let those in the know, know.

In the meantime, send your emails glowing with praise to my work account.