An old subject

So let's say I'm coding some fairly detailed CSS. I take back anything I ever said about Internet Explorer and CSS as Gecko's interpretation is really... sad. It makes all sorts of silly assumptions and has a hard time making relative items stay properly relative. One specific case I've encountered is when positioning items with border styles exactly next to eachother. Gecko seems to assume the border is outside of the item's bounding box while IE appropriately assumes that it is inside. Gecko also makes a line break before a heading tag even if it's the first one inside of an element... why would anyone want that? It makes it very difficult to make a tight layout without unnecesarily tweaking your heading tag definitions and therefore make (already) divergent style sheets.

Then again I should be happy because I don't really have to worry about Netscape 4.x anymore. I can only equate the feeling to having an annoying old family member finally croak and leave you in peace.

Now THIS is a rant

Holy shit, the whole week has flown by with me sick in bed. Ok, so I've been on the computer lots too (surprise!) but they're like 3 feet from each other.

I'm starting to think that other than my rather natural state of gaseousness maybe I'm host to an infection. I googled food poisoning and much to my surprise food poisoning can actually last upwards of a week with many infections. It was my understanding that food poisoning often caused violent but brief illness, apparently I was wrong.

I'm getting quite disappointed by my access to a Doctor these days. I told my prospective new family Doctor (my previous closed her practice in a change of lifestyle) to take a hike last time I was there. I'm usually pretty easy going on people but her secretary is enough for me to leave. I was 5 minutes (no lie or exaggeration) late because she has an office in motherfucking Dundas which has terrible bus service and because of which I was to be put back on the waiting lists. I really don't understand why the majority of family practices in this city have to be in some yuppie small town suburb with little public transit access in a location furthest away from the majority of the population. To me that's a real accessibility to health care issue.

But that's Hamilton for you, it's about as auto-centric and upper-middle class as you can get. "Urban" is a swear word and the mall is Mecca, except when you buy your "urban" fashions at the mall but the irony of that situation isn't generally observed. There were six car dealerships near my old house (now there are eight!) but I had to walk 20 minutes to buy milk! How fucking Byzantine is that?! The psychological effect of not being able to walk around the place that you live without the obvious aggression of surrounding automobiles is really harsh. I am of course a proponent of new urbanism and mixed zoning. It's my belief that the effects homogenized residential suburbs have on our psychological and physical environments are profound. It's not about demonizing the suburbs or auto industry, we have to get around and have laces to live. My beef is with the way we do things because it effects my health and quality of life.

I don't want to live my life under a shroud of credit debt surrounded by purchases that meant something to me at sometime. I've been subject to the anecdotal evidence of far too many acquaintances who've been down that road and found it was really unfulfilling. So much that I could say in my short lifetime I've even put together a little qualitative analysis in my head that generally indicates the quality of life the standard 20-something men and woman I know ain't so hot despite access to massive capital and credit relative to the rest of the world.

So where do you pick things up? I'm not sure to be honest but it's all a matter of what makes you happy. Human beings, despite what our capitalist consumer culture lifestyle bibles dictate to us, have very simple needs. For instance; my general well-being is vastly more affected by consistent sleeping patterns than the purchase of a SUV. One costs approximately $35-40 000CAD while the other is theoretically free given enough volition. Of course alternatives to hard work are peddled to us as if they were valid for those without clinical diagnosis of a sleep disorder. Don't get me wrong, I have faith in medicine but have a distinct belief that an optimally functioning human being is far better engineered than anything we can come up with. That is to say; if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Ok, atttention span reached.