Welcome to today's YALBEAVTSIWTLTWASEAT blog entry (for the curious, that means: yet another long blog entry about various things since I was too lazy to write a single entry about them).

First up: another update about my proposed pseudo-replacement to HTML frames. I was thinking about it, and I saw another potential problem: do the files that you reference in an INCLUDE tag have to be valid HTML files, or can they just be a bunch of text that is HTML without having to be complete, valid HTML files? On the one hand, it would be nice to make them be actual valid HTML files, since it would be kind of non-standard to just allow any old text file that includes HTML to be linked from an INCLUDE tag. On the other hand, though, if they are valid HTML files, then you end up with more than one HTML, BODY, and HEAD tags in the same document, if you treat INCLUDE tags as simply replacing the INCLUDE tag with the HTML from the referenced file.

I think the obvious solution here would be to make them similar to frames: you need to reference valid HTML files, but using the INCLUDE tag is not exactly like replacing it with the referenced file... it just renders the HTML file in that include-frame, and your actual document is rendered around the include-frames, just like a regular HTML frame document is. Not such a big deal, but an interesting issue nonetheless.

Next up: lightning. Did any of you catch that freaky lightning storm that occurred this past Monday? It was so weird: I had my window open, and was doing some stuff on the computer, and I saw these white flashes in the corner of my eye. I was wondering what they were, but it never occurred to me they were lightning; I just thought it was some sort of event happening at Shoreline or something (even though it was still really weird that I could see the white flashes way over here).

Anyway, I ended up looking out the window for a bit, and I actually saw one of the flashes of lightning. It was so bizarre. It wasn't raining or anything (just overcast), I couldn't hear any thunder (so it must've been pretty far away), but I could see the lightning flashes really clearly and it seemed that they weren't THAT far away (judging just by what I could see). It was really cool, though; I wish I had caught a picture of it. I just sat there watching for a bit, since it went on for a while.

It's not often that we get thunderstorms around here -- the last one I remember was fall quarter of my freshman year at Stanford. Although that time I could hear thunder and it was raining; funny that just seeing lightning by itself is kind of disconcerting.

Some things that have been really annoying me lately:

-- people in their cars who don't stop when I'm trying to cross the street on my bike; NOTE TO DRIVERS: I hesitate to cross because of SAFETY, not because I don't have the right of way.

-- emoticons that don't actually resemble the smiley that they're supposed to represent, by any stretch of the imagination; NOTE TO AIM USERS: NO, ^^;; DOES NOT COUNT AS A SMILEY.

-- one aspect of Safari's tabbed browsing implementation (this probably affects other browsers as well): it records the window size, but doesn't remember if that's with or without tabs. So, when you next open a new window, it opens a window without tabs, but it's the same height as your previous window with tabs -- thus, when you open a new tab, it adds a bit of height to your window. The annoying part is that if you do this, then gradually, over time, your Safari windows will keep growing in height, so every once in a while you have to shrink the window vertically to your preferred size. I could solve this by enabling the preference to keep the tab bar visible all the time, but I don't like that. :p

-- feeling useless. Lol, this sounds incredibly vague, but it's actually because just about all last week at work, I had about nothing to do. My boss left for a conference in San Francisco for the whole week, and hadn't given me anything to do. So I basically biked to work to twiddle my thumbs and browse websites. Sounds fun, but it actually gets quite annoying and boring, especially when I have to make the effort to bike up there just to do nothing. Sometimes I feel like I'd rather stay home, even though I wouldn't get the money for my "work". Ah, well. I actually had to do some stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday ('cause I had to renew my badge), but that's about it. Hopefully it'll be better, now that he's back from the conference.

Last thing: do you like brain puzzles/teasers/riddles? If so, then you'll absolutely love this website. It has a whole bunch of clever puzzles of varying difficulty. No solutions, but you can often find them in the forum, if you really want to cheat. But no one would EVER want to do that, right? ;)