I woke up this morning. That in itself is noteworthy, as I’ve been waking up after midday most days this week. Today, I opened my eyes with a good fifteen minutes of AM to spare, which is something of a minor victory. Having woken up, I instantly regretted it, because although most of my throat felt numb and swollen, the parts that weren’t numb were really painful. I wonder if too much seasonal cheer has weakened my immune system. I hate having a cold. Still, I’d rather have a cold on holiday than when I’m at work and have to talk all day.

After some coffee, I felt a lot better. I managed to make it out and spent the afternoon wandering around Denden Town, helping a friend to pick up various computer and electrical bits and pieces. It occurs to me that I am entirely too familiar with that place. I found a second hand 10Mbit PCMCIA Ethernet card for JPY 500, which will actually fit into my notebook’s bottom PC card slot at the same time as there is a card in the top one, unlike my fancy 100Mbit card. It was something I actually needed, and you know how I love a bargain.

I found a really useful site for web developers the other day. It was after I spent about 8 hours straight trying to convert my site layout from HTML tables to using CSS <div>s instead. I almost succeeded, but moving the mouse over a link caused the bottom of the page to disappear in Internet Explorer. CSS is alleged to be a great advance in making websites usable, by separating style from content. Unfortunately, like all such technologies, the hype is better than the implementation. A lot of it doesn’t work like it is supposed to, and you still have to take account of the desired presentation when marking up the HTML. Not to mention all the buggy implementations. Come to think of it, maybe it was all that stress that triggered my cold...

Here’s the site in question: A List Apart. Their colour scheme is rather horrible, by the way. I can’t even adequately describe the colour of the right hand portion of the page. Mustard-lime-green?

Although I won’t be taking many aesthetic hints from them, I found some really good tips on page generation. I might be able to speed this site up quite a lot based on that, as well as fix some of the ugly code behind it. Time to refactor, perhaps.