UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

OK, I had several ideas for the title of this entry, all of them lame. The one I chose was no more or less lame than the others. Anyway…

We spent last night at a hotel in Baltimore. A convention happened to be going on at the hotel. A convention the likes of which I had never even imagined could exist.

It was Bells Galore in Baltimore! This was the 2006 convention of the American Bell Association. Yes, bells. These people collect bells. They talk about bells. They dream about bells. And they most certainly ring bells. Throughout the afternoon and evening, the sound of ringing bells could occasionally be heard wafting through the halls.

Now, the range of ages in attendance spanned from teenagers upward, but I would have to guess that the median was somewhere around 83. And it just so happens that the East Coast has been hammered for the past several days with heavy rains from a stalled front. Last night the rain was particularly heavy, and around 10 PM the power in the hotel went out. It was rather odd, since all of the adjacent buildings, including a large mall across the street, still had power. Luckily, it was late enough that we just decided to go to bed, but around a half hour later, the fire alarms started going off. Disturbingly, the hotel had no emergency lights, so the hallways were completely dark. Several of us illumated our own path with our cell phones. (Ah, the wonders of the modern age.)

Well, halfway down the stairs we were met by the hotel manager, who informed us that there was not an emergency and we did not need to evacuate; the alarms were simply malfunctioning due to the power outage. Of course, the hotel was filled with octagenarians; not the best time for such a fandango. So a while later the fire department arrived (formalities), and they had to go door to door knocking and asking if anyone needed medical assistance.

Fortunately we didn’t, although the fire alarms continued to sound about every 10 minutes for the next half hour or so, spaced out just perfectly to wake up our 3-month-old daughter each time just as she was falling asleep.

As usual I’m sure these will be of no interest to anyone besides me and the two and a half people who read this (and only marginally interesting to them), but why not take the opportunity for a shameless plug?

I’ve added a couple of new items to the Room 34 Store, including a Tai Chi & Chai Tea coffee mug and a Rosie the Riveter infant “creeper” (known to those of us not afraid to commonize brand names as a “Onesie”). Be like me! Deck out your infant in 60-year-old war propaganda!

My mother-in-law bought me the 2-DVD Rush concert set “R30: Rush 30th Anniversary Tour” for Father’s Day. (No, I don’t think she knows about my prog rock obsession, she’s just good at selecting from my Amazon.com wish list.)

Anyway, I was watching some of it today, and it was nice to see how the boys have loosened up with humor in their concerts. (OK, the humor’s always been there; it’s just more blatant now.)

In particular, I was stunned to see what was on the stage behind Geddy. No, it wasn’t a pair of Marshall half-stacks. It was a pair of Maytag half-stacks. Yes, he had two Maytag clothes dryers behind him on stage, spinning nonstop throughout the show. And next to them, one of those rotating sandwich vending machines from a cafeteria. (Well, I didn’t get the best look at it… that’s what it seemed to be, although it might have been a pie display case like those often seen at lowbrow coffee shops.)

Clearly this made quite an impression on me. It wasn’t enough to tell a pair of coworkers plus SLP, as well as emailing two old high school friends who were also Rush fans back in the day. (And when is anyone more of a Rush fan than in high school?) I had to take it a step further and share it with the two and a half people who actually read my blather.

You may be familiar with mashups, but this has to take the cake. It’s a mashup from three music instruction videos.

http://curved-air.com/bitties/kels.mov

And just so I don’t seem like a bandwidth hog, the original page in context is here. (Even though I’m being less of a bandwidth hog by linking straight to the video because I’m not forcing you to download three long QuickTime movies simultaneously! But don’t get me wrong; all three are worth watching… as long as you have broadband.)

Very cool idea. Gets a little stale (and not as well-executed) by the end, but still impressive. And of course, Beaver Felton is the guy who sold me my Music Man StingRay 5. (True, I bought it from his shop, not him personally, but I did have direct contact with him personally both by email and on the phone. Not that that makes me cool or anything.)

First, a qualification: Since I got a flat-panel display at work, I no longer have my PC connected directly to the display; I view the PC’s video output via Remote Desktop Connection on my Mac. I’ve learned over time that RDC does not provide a direct, unaltered feed of the PC’s video. For understandable reasons (faster screen refresh), but by perhaps unjustifiable methods, RDC re-renders parts of the video display. The result is that you do not see a pixel-perfect (or even simply downsampled) representation of the actual PC video; it appears to be redrawn completely for network transmission.

In particular, this does funky things with Internet Explorer’s output. Last year I spent a few hours trying to figure out why borders around my buttons were extending by one pixel both down and to the right, until I realized that on the actual PC’s display this wasn’t happening… it was just an RDC quirk.

With that out of the way, I have to admit that perhaps my current problem is an issue with RDC and not with Internet Explorer. But either way, it’s a Microsoft problem.

After making some CSS adjustments to a page I was working on, I noticed that the main body seemed to be extending 3 pixels wider than it should be. Further testing revealed this only happened on certain pages, and after resorting to commenting out each CSS class one-by-one, I tracked this down to an inline class that simply italicizes text. So, for whatever reason in the grand Microsoft scheme, a word or two in italics can cause a much larger section of the page (at least 2 or 3 levels up in the document tree) to expand by 3 pixels.

Again I ask… WHY???

And again my cry for explanation goes unheeded. Time for another lame workaround?

Addendum: As it turns out, in this particular case a workaround will not be needed. I went to our test PC and confirmed that this is an RDC glitch, and not an Internet Explorer one.