I'm not really sure why, but the Flash people at work updated the Spang Makandra display at work with an FLV background of wavy grass. As if the 1920x1200 resolution wasn't killer enough, we now have coarse VCD quality grass animating at 10fps.

I eased the pain by watching the demos from ASD and Excess from last weekend. I really ought to get around writing some incensed article explaining my absence at Breakpoint -to my chagrin I had to explain the situation ad nauseam even DURING the damn event.

Greetings from Limp Ninja and Lemon

Note to non-demosceners: You probably won't get this.

Facet is in the country for a couple of days to seal some business deals here. It's been a while since the lovable Amiga graphician made me feel like I'm the least funny person on the planet. Moreover, it's good to see a familiar face. Who knows, I might catch him so piss-drunk that he can be persuaded to pixel a naked woman on a serpent. With a volcano in the background.

Sunday was pretty much uneventful

I spent most of the day preparing food, doing laundry and idly checking the last bits of the trainees' last assignment... I had some rice and beans from the fridge, played a bit of the regular HL2 (since yes, the rest is now updating like no tomorrow).

The weather was decidedly random. This is killing my intentions to tan up a bit more :(

The hardest thing about the course

"There is no such thing as just one solution."

It was like telling Apple salespeople I wanted the US International layout. The trainees were beyond batshit insane when it came to the very idea that they might just do things wrong -as if it wouldn't fit the pattern of the trainer.

The dismay in V's eyes when I confessed I never had expected anybody to come up with a solution like hers was tangible enough to tether wile horses with. I had to explain that the approach was unconventional, but a great way to resolve the problem. It was also one hell of a time to get through to R that this solution was sound in theory, but that Internet Explorer demands certain stupidity only reserved for the experienced.

I hope that all of the trainees will come out of this ordeal with the ingrained reflex to question the norm and try to improve on the challenges at hand. They certainly know that they need to ask "why?!" but they fail to open their mouths far too often.

Work slow, food great, music too. Must sleep.

Slow day at work. I was supposed to be discussing the results from yesterday's assignment, but one of the absentees from yesterday (medical reasons) was doing the same material and it felt wrong to discuss thethingl while she was slaving over it.

Instead, the others also got the table-less "revenge of the coloured boxes" practice to deal with and I got delightful results -one of the wallflowers in CSS did an awesome job using only negative margins to get everything to fit into place. She only asked help when IE6 was being an utter retard, and she fixed that on her own after being told where to look. People more busy with floating tripped over what I'd hoped for -the retared IE float bugs. I had to intervene with one of the great ones from the training, and he diligently started thrawling the Web for more scenarios concerning hasLayout and IE being nothing short of a bad joke.

It doesn't go without saying that the straggler was not just late with a lame excuse, but also needed help to finish the practice. Where help means copying things verbatim from one of the newcomers how to solve the puzzle. One of the people who is technically supposed to be at least 4 weeks behind straggler's experience. You know where I'm going with this. Straggler will utterly fail the test at this rate.

VK opted out of the fire-and-brimstone speech about the trainees getting very lax with attendance, bandwidth discipline, phone calls and what not. Next week, maybe. I did feel somewhat left in the snow when I was vehemently trying to bansish the students' youtube usage (we're using a shitty 256k line with a 1/20 upsell ratio for 18 people) whe the next thing I get is a mesage from VK with an amusing youtube video.

Sent to all.

Extended stay

Yes.

Today I got the word from AJ that she could postpone my stay until the 29th, which is awesome. I need to check out my possibilities to travel inlands and get eaten by some underwhelming-looking predator or catch malaria. I'm pretty pleased with this development, since it means I get to witness Independence Day here in Paramaribo too boot.

Today I gave the trainees the whole day to do an assignment, though I warned them I'd expect them to finish sooner. Four out of fourteen pulled it off after six hours. Unfortunately I had to become a serious hard-ass with one of the less-motivated trainees and I am not exactly expecting a lot from this one. It's especially troubling because the potential is definitely there, but a lack of discipline, concentration and maybe even interest make it impossible to focus on the project at hand.

On one hand it is extremely frustrating to see someone fall behind like that. On the other hand it's been made perfectly clear that you can't keep dragging people over the finish line just because they won't run for themselves. It's a pretty unpleasant realization, but we have to remember that only half the crew will pass the whole ordeal…

PWNED!!11!1 :)

So yeah, this is a day to remember: I screwed up a practice for the trainees :)


A stupid, innocent little mistake, really: In order to make them play with CSS filter hacks, I made a practice XHTML file that they needed to style in certain ways in certain browsers. I mixed up the conditions a little to get a fresh test case for them, and made the following mistake:

"I want my text to blink in Internet Explorer 6 and Opera. In the rest of the browsers it will be nice and quiet"

…and that's not possible. IE6 doesn't support text-decoration: blink;. I should have noticed that slip-up while rearranging the conditions in the page, but I didn't. The trainees found it staring at them like a bleeding carcass.

That was a damning moment right there :)

Probation!

The Eldar of project management gave the green light -I can stay to spend some leisure time in Surinam after my time slot in the training ends. Good times. I've come to appreciate the country, it's people and the things I can do here.

Now to see what my plane ticket might afford in terms of flexibility.

All your base are belong to Firefox

One of the more beautiful early consequences of bad planning in CSS is that trainees make beginners' mistakes. Like trying to amend for default margins with absolute positioning and negative margins for child elements of those that cause the margin to begin with.

However, one of the guys managed to present me with a wonderful challenge I've yet to replicate: he managed to use the following element:

<base href="/" />

Yet he managed to make this work on a mini-site while navigating on his local filesystem and only found out he was in trouble when he looked in IE6. It's nice to be subjected to insanity like this. Trainers really should be more fallible :)

My ticket for hell is booked

This morning, I started out with giving the trainees a practice lesson in unusual box shapes. People familiar with Eric Meyer would probably recognize the experiment, except I didn't give them one example layout -I gave them three.

This is the "intermediate" box they have to deal with:



Right now, the over-courageous trainees easily finished the first and are now in one hell of a quagmire. One of them is almost done, but only pulling in by the skin of his teeth.

I am such a jerk.

CSS Paradox

This post will only tickle web developers with the kind of interest in cross-browser Cascading Stylesheet hacks that I tend to exhibit, so people who have no idea what CSS means, go away now and wait for a new post.

During work today, one of my trainees managed to do something that actually delighted me: he made a quirky mistake that was so logical and weird at the same time that I really needed to share this with the rest of the group to see if people understood the contradiction in terms. I then shared it with my colleagues, peers and friends. I might as well post it on my Blag and share it with the world:

* html>body { margin: 0; }

This is a wonderful combination of hacks and theoretically solid logic that will never, ever work, unless somebody will deliberately introduce a bug into an opensource browser to "get" this.

The poor guy seemed embarrassed when I showed this to people, but I honestly love this utterly logical, yet impossible declaration in CSS. He made my day with this one. I ought to name the paradox after him.

Day 12: Where did the last week go?

Right, enough lallywagging. I've spent a week under what can be considered interesting circumstances. Right now, I'm at the apartment, making up for some lost time.

Sunday evening ended in a surprise. I was enjoying the mild weather in dry clothes (my clothes never really got to dry out properly during the cookout) on the porch when all of a sudden the gate opened. The three guys from last friday entered and proceeded towards my table for a chat. I asked if they had rented a place here, they confirmed. They then switched the subject over to the location of my laptop. Oooo-kay. I told them it was over at the office and excused myself for a night's rest. Feeling pretty weirded out by their presence. It later turned out that they had not rented a place at all. How they got in was anybody's guess. As a precaution, the owner replaced the locks on monday. Apparently they were spotted at the gate the next day by my neighbours, who had trouble getting convinced to let them in. That very same day, they passed the offices where I work. Whatever all of these chance meetings are for, it sure felt pretty unsettling.

Then, on wednesday the unbelievable happened: I came home around 17:00, went to the laundry room to wash the pile of clothes I collected and came into a bare, squeaky clean room. Turns out that both washing machines were stolen. During the daytime. In plain sight.

I mean, damn. The police came over to file a report, drove off and I spent most of the evening with the doors barred and locked. I did not feel particularily safe.

The next day was my big x20 day (birthdays, another thing I rarely keep track of) and talked this through with VK, since the safety of that place was really beginning to look incredible. In the meantime, the internet connection also had given up the ghost, so the place felt more and more like a crappy prison where people had a hard time keeping unsavory people out.

It was decided that unless something positive would happen about the situation, we'd switch places. Since VK would have a hell of a time to find a suitable alternative (something long-term and roomy where people could stay overlapping segments of time), he suggest I'd stay somewhere temporarily. I chose to to take a kind offer of one of interns working on the grounds, E. She offered a spare room in the house she and three other internes were staying. The place was in a safe neighbourhood, there were people around the place pretty much most of the time and it was actually a place where I could sleep like a log. I didn't miss the airconditioning for a second. The interns were friendly but so preoccupied in their schedules that we never really talked much.

At the time of writing this, I'm at the original apartment. The owner has been busy boosting security a bit, and it looks like the weird times here have subsided a bit. I've never seen this much of the owner as the two times I've been back for things, and it looks like my long-term neighbour of apt. #1 will be coming back tomorrow. That's pretty reassuring to hear, building on the stories of Wouter. Looks like I'm good to go and stop being the weird guy in the spare room over at my benevolent saviors' dorm.

More later, as I've actually done things outside being a paranoid recluse.