Wednesday, July 22, 1998

        I don't often comment on other websites, but sometimes one is so completely annoying in design that I can't help it. Right now I'm at a commercial website that is frames-based, with a navigation frame at the left and the main window to the right. Every page of this large website has two IMPORTANT notices appended to it, on in the middle of the page and one at the bottom, saying that if you have come to this page from a link and don't see the navigation bar on the left, please follow the provided link to their home page.

        I'd like to tell them to give up, you can't control the way people view or use your website. People can make a link to an interior page, and there's nothing you can do about it. I often do that, direct someone to a link within a frames-based site. Otherwise, if you can only give them the URL to the front page, you may have to give complicated directions to the page you want them to see--"Go to this URL, then click on "Artisan Papers," then go to the "GHI" section, then click on the "Green Marble" thumbnail"--rather than simply sending them the URL to the page where the Green Marble graphic is displayed.

        I used to believe that you couldn't get the URL for a page within a frames-based site, and complained about it, and someone wrote to tell me how to do it. You place your cursor over a link, and instead of left-clicking the link, right-click to get a dropdown menu with the selection "Open in new window." I don't know what Mac users do, since the Apple mouse lacks the right button . . .

        I've had a quiet day today. I went to bed early (for me) last night, at around 11:00, with the possible intention of getting up early this morning and taking a practice drive down to the new job, to see how long it will take me to get there in rush hour traffic on Monday. I'm not really worried about it, but Bob thinks I should do it. I may do it tomorrow, although I sort of doubt it. Bob was off today and didn't come to bed until around 3:00 a.m., so I knew he wouldn't be getting up early, and I really didn't have any incentive to do so, either.

        I spent the late morning and early afternoon reading (finishing P. D. James' "A Certain Justice") and doing laundry. Bob's mother came by for a few minutes to drop off some books for Bob, and Pyewacket's been fighting her catnip sock to the death, and now sleeping on the table in front of the window with her head on the sill.

        I've been remembering my dreams a little better lately. For awhile there I wasn't remembering them at all, not anything at all, and it was really bothering me. Then for awhile I was waking up feeling like I had been dreaming, knowing that I'd just been having an incredibly detailed dream, but not remembering anything of it. Now I'm remembering fragments. Last night I dreamed about pink and blue kittens playing somewhere where the concrete was broken. They were jumping over the cracks and I was so afraid that they were going to fall in, but there was some reason that I couldn't do anything about it.

        Then I dreamed that I could fly. I had some wooden things that were sort of like stilts, and if I pulled them up against my feet tight, and held onto the supports, I could fly. And I dreamed something about being in a locker room and being accidentally drenched by an automatic shower, and something about a new house being built and I had to walk across a lawn of mud to get to it, and something about an all female sports team of some sort, and they were all blonde. I pointed this out to someone, and they didn't think it was strange at all.

        And there was something about turning on the laptop and getting some strange error message on the computer screen, and being asked a question, which I answered, and then worrying that I had given the wrong answer and trying to go backwards and try again.

        Bob came down the hall a little while ago, holding Pyewacket in his arms. She was leaning against his chest and he had her cradled in his arm, and they looked so cute that I picked up the digital camera and took a couple of pictures. They came out blurry, though, although I had turned on the dining room light. I thought it was probably because, even though I turned on the overhead light, he was still standing in the darkened hallway, but just to be sure that it wasn't some sudden defect of the focusing mechanism of the camera, I just held it up where I was sitting and took a quick test shot. When I processed it, this is what I got.

        I thought it was a pretty cool photograph. The wooden table and chairs in the background look almost medieval, their colors warm, while the computer screen glows eerily cold in the foreground. One of those photographs that I wouldn't even think to set up, but which happened almost magically.

        I went to dinner tonight with some friends that I used to work with. We try to do that about once a month. The group changes somewhat depending on who's available; most of them still work at my old company, but a few of us have moved on. It's nice to keep in touch. I was a little bit early, so I stopped at Barnes & Noble on the way and bought a couple of books--Pagan Kennedy's The Exes, a book about a Boston rock band told from the varying perspectives of its four members, and High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, about a guy who runs a record store in England. They both look like light, fun reading. The book I'm reading now isn't. It's The Light of Falling Stars, by J. Robert Lennon. I started it once and put it down because it was making me feel too weird. Not sad, exactly, melancholy, I guess.

        It's about what happens when an airplane crashes, and no one survives--the effect that the passengers' deaths has on their loved ones, mainly the people who were on their way to the airport to pick up their friends and family members when the plane crashed. Not terribly lighthearted, although the descriptions of family relationships and histories is interesting, and very well written.