Author Archives: Jerry

Czech Parking

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I was walking up the hill from the corner shop, heading toward the Little Café Near Home, the days provisions heavy in my backpack. I could tell that Martina was working; I recognized her little silver VW out in front of the shop. It is a no-parking zone, but because of the placement of the sign reinforcing the previous no parking sign, locals interpret the small space between a side street and the sign as a parking space. A small car can fit there and only be a danger to people pulling out onto the main road.

That spot was already taken, so Martina simply did what any Czech would do — extend the already-fallacious logic and thereby extend the parking zone. The logic goes like this: If the presence of a side street canceled the previous no-parking stricture on the main street, then clearly the previous no-parking zone ends at the start of the intersection. Therefore, parking is legal within the intersection. She is parked with her car blocking anyone who might want to turn onto the side street, her rear bumper just far enough from the curb so that anyone who took issue with her parking could not accuse her of being parked on the road before it reached the intersection (which would have blocked the turn lane). Of course, for safety she has her hazard lights on.

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fun

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Every once in a while I get a special treat in my mailbox — I will receive a message notifying me that someone has voluntarily paid for Jer’s Novel Writer. (My favorites are when someone with the ability to turn a nice phrase decides to haggle.) In a world of software pirates, there is another sort of person, one who pays for the things that help them for no other reason than it is the right thing to do. I think in general software companies would do a lot better if they used persuasion and value rather than coercion to reduce piracy. I also think people are more willing to pay a company that is recognizably human. I couldn’t change the way I interact with my users even if I wanted to, but I think people respond to it well. I am, quite obviously, just a guy who couldn’t find a word processor that was about writing. (In the intervening years that has changed, and there are a couple of other strong candidates as well.) I have also set up a system where I make people happy by stealing their ideas (‘paying attention to their suggestions’, I call it in official Hut correspondences).

But I digress. (You couldn’t tell it was a digression because I actually started on a course tangential to the point I set out to write. Yes, I’m that talented. But, once more, I digress.) I was enjoying a Saturday breakfast with fuego and MaK, and I began to wonder how much I’ve made so far from JersNW on an hourly basis. It’s impossible to come up with any sort of accurate assessment of how many hours I’ve put into it; there are weeks of furious development with pauses only to sleep, followed by a month without much time invested at all. I did some wild-ass guessing, though, and the numbers came out quite a bit higher than I expected. Its even possible I’ve now earned more than five cents an hour for my efforts, if you don’t count expenses like geek school and caffeinated beverages. If you count tea costs, I have a long, long way to go to break even.

Of course, that hourly rate will continue to climb, which is good, because it takes a lot of juice to run the antigravity generators that keep the Secret Laboratory complex floating in its sky city, the sun glinting off the great glass climate dome, while air cars swirl about, drifting serenely between the clouds over this quiet Prague neighborhood. Plus, anything that buys me a little more time in this life I’ve made for myself, a little more time to build a career as a writer, is welcome. Obviously, though, if it was about money I would not have left my day job. I think one of the reasons people are willing to pay for the software is that they know I’m in for something other than money. You know what that thing is? It’s fun. I enjoy working on the code, making it beautiful inside and out, and I enjoy watching the software evolve and change into something I never imagined at first. I enjoy learning new techniques and delving into new areas of the programming framework. I enjoy writing the dialog box text, and I try to make that fun, too. I think when a creator of anything is having fun, be it a movie or a spacecraft or a computer program, it shows in the product. Stodgy business software isn’t stodgy because the customers demand it be that way, rather because the creators are incapable making it any other way. Software for drones by drones.

Maybe if the big software companies got their own sky cities the resulting increase in morale would show in their products. I wonder how high this thing can go…

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magnificent insignificance

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My spelling checker didn’t like pissant. Stupid spelling checker. It suggested piss-ant. Just to make sure I wasn’t completely insane I consulted my dictionary (oh, dictionary, help me enumerate the ways I love thee…) and sure enough there it was. Origin: the noun piss+ant. So of course I looked up piss. It comes from the Old French verb ‘pisser’, which the dictionary theorizes is imitative of the sound. But then I had “French” and “pissant” in my head at the same time, and I typed in “puissant”, a fine word if ever there was one, and opposed to pissant on more than one axis. Not only do they mean pretty much the opposite, but people who are likely to use one are unlikely to use the other.

A challenge to the muddleverse: a bit of doggerel that will fit in the header above that uses both words, preferably next to one another. You may work individually or in groups.

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Vinárna Jana

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There is an awkward time in the day for a restaurant to have customers. During the slow times in the afternoon the staff counts on not having customers so they can do the preparation work for the evening. When I worked in a pizzeria, it was the time we cooked up the sausage, made the dough, baked the rolls, or whatever else required doing. When a customer came in, someone would have to put down what they were doing and prepare a meal. That’s not to say that customers weren’t welcome, in fact some of our favorite regulars came in during those hours and we would chat with them once we got back to our prep tasks.

I get the feeling they like being disrupted here less than at other places. Then again, they’re czech, and in fact I might have caught them in an especially good mood but they would never let a customer see that.

Vinárna Jana is fairly close to my house, right next to the post office, but most times I pass this way the place is closed. I think that’s because it’s just a bit off my regular track, and I get over this way mainly when everything else is closed as well. The restaurant is divided between a vinárna (wine bar) and a pivnice, which translates literally as “beer place”. (As with the mythical many names of snow, it seems like the czechs have a lot of diffferent ways to say ‘bar’.) I think the two are connected, at any rate.

When I first stepped inside and looked around my reaction was favorable. There is lots of dark wood, floral cloths on the tables, and only a faint smell of tobacco. I took the smallest table in the place — I don’t like to take more than I need, even though I am the only customer. This is not a place where I will be facing communications challenges; I will not be confronted with more than “Yes?” “One more?” and “You’re welcome.”

I just took a break to shovel down some very tasty chicken in a blue cheese sauce. The place is dark on this gloomy afternoon and they are doing nothing about it. Suits me fine. The radio is on a station that plays Glen Campbell and his associates from America and domestically raised. The song playing now is in Czech, occasionally punctuated with a “Goodbye Joe”, while the backup singers are straight out of ’70’s classics like “Big John”.

It’s a good place. My meal out of the way I am no longer disruptive to the workflow of the kitchen — in fact, I believe I was overconcerned before, as they are all sitting around now, enjoying an afternoon meal. The sound of czechs singing to banjo music is pleasant, and there’s still plenty of time on the laptop battery. I think I’ll be here a while.

Thanks!

Rainy Afternoon

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It’s a gray day here in the city of 100 spires, the air chilly but not freezing, perhaps 5C or so. I’ll be meeting up with fuego later to watch the Czechs take the ice against the Finns, but in the meantime I find myself outside my usual neighborhood. I let my feet guide me. I passed up on the Zlatý Had (Golden Snake), traveled one more block and now I am sitting now in Kavárna V sebém nebi. It’s a very pleasant place. I’m sitting by the window, watching as the world drifts past outside — pretty girls with colorful umbrellas, workers in coveralls hunched over with cigarettes clamped firmly between stoic lips, baby carriages with elaborate clear plastic rain covers.

There was something else that it took me a while to put my finger on, but now I have it. They make the coffee quietly here. I think we’ve managed to somehow deafen ourselves to it, but the modern coffee house is a very noisy place. The grinders are noisy, and the steam valve makes a racket. Now I’m sitting here as the guy behind the bar is very quietly steaming up a latté (or whatever it is one steams up), and now that I know it’s possible to make coffee without making noise, I am all the more perplexed by people’s tolerance of all those other loud places.

Right now the music is a funky, almost calypso cover of “Smoke on the Water”. The conversation around me is muted as well, since there is little background noise to compete with. When I got here I was the only one (at least on the ground floor), but other customers have arrived in a steady stream. They know each other, that much is obvious, and the mood is brightening even as the day gets darker.

Thanks!

The Curiously Uncomfortable Couch

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I’ve mentioned the Curiously Uncomfortable Couch before. I rent a furnished apartment (actually, in Czech tradition, overfurnished) and one article is a large two-piece sofa unit that is not pleasant to sit on. I’ve witnessed (even built) some furniture that fell short in the comfort department, but what makes this particular piece unique in my experience is that there seems to have been no attempt whatsoever to make it comfortable.

The thing converts into a curiously uncomfortable bed, as well. There is a drawer that pulls out and a rather clever mechanism that raises a pad to be level with the couch. The raised pad section is far, more comfortable than the rest of the couch. Obviously the manufacturer knew how to make comfortable things, in this case they just… didn’t.

I don’t sit on the Curiously Uncomfortable Couch very often. Last night was an exception, however. I was reading a book, didn’t want to stop, and the couch looked like a good place to be. I marshaled all the pillows I could find and settled in. Almost instantly the sleepies hit me, and rather than haul all the stuff back to the bed, or even pull out the drawer, I turned off the light and rolled over to sleep.

It was one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had in a long time.

Thanks!

Gambler’s Alert

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Tomorrow the San Diego Chargers play in what looks to be a good matchup, and it’s one of the few early games they play this season, which means it’s also on at a good time for me to watch. The oddsmakers are giving the Bolts the thinnest of margins as they travel to Cincinnati, but you may want to think twice about where to put your money this time around. If possible, I will try to alert you ahead of time whether I’m watching the game, the better to document my curse.

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Neither rain, nor snow…

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It’s a gloomy day, and although the spitting rain has stopped, an icy wind is blowing.

Why, then, was I not surprised when I heard the ice cream truck outside?

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glided

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Help me out. Glide is a graceful word, but in the past tense glided is particularly ugly. Glid? Glode? I could substitute floated, and in my context I could even use slid (see glid), but glide is the right word. Or it would be if the past tense didn’t have two abrupt stops in it that undermine the meaning of the word. The word serves as the antithesis of its own definition.

Here we have one of the hallmarks of English, its strength and weakness all in one, that rules are made to be broken. Yet we have a case where an irregular conjugation would vastly improve the word. How could Shakespeare’s inventive tongue ever have allowed glided to happen?

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Mo and Mo

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Man, it’s a good thing I didn’t sign up for NaBloPoMo. (Link too much work (greater than zero) to dig up. we’re looking to gizo here.) I certainly did not need any other responsibilities this month. Buggy pointed me to another NaNoWriMo-derived activity over at Defective Yeti, NaNoReMo, where the author is spending the month reading Moby Dick and is blogging about the adventure. He is an entertaining guy, so you might enjoy popping by and checking on his progress. You might want to check his election guidance over at McSweeny’s as well.

My days have been spent writing and coding. While I am (generally) satisfied with the results of my NaNoWriMo effort, producing a complete and finished work of 50,000 words is a hell of a lot of work. Granted the language I use is loose and conversational, which helps reducing editing and tweaking, but some days finding 1800 words to put in the “done” bin is not easy. Fortunately there are several themes running at the same time (in the absence of a plot, pretty much), so I can work on whichever one strikes my fancy at the time. The time is not right, I think, to point you to the aforementioned done bin, but I’m not sure when the right time will be. It’s out there, an Internet land mine, waiting to blow the leg off one of the unsuspecting goatherds who wander cyberspace.

I will say that there have been some turns of phrase in the Big Pile o’ Words that I particularly like, and most of them are occurring in parts that are otherwise shameless filler. What does it say about the frozen burrito you’re eating when the textured vegetable protein is the best part? (Actually, I miss those frozen burritos that you could buy three for a buck, smother with cheese and salsa, and live for another day.)

Also please note the increased difficulty factor this year is a good thing. NaNoWriMo was starting to fee routine, and while I will always appreciate it as a chance to work on an idea that otherwise would never see the light of day, this year I really have to mean it.

I just thought of a great passage for an Eels episode. I’m going to have to jot that one down, even if it does qualify as planning ahead. The creative juices have been flowing pretty well, fortunately. What’s languishing (even more than usual) is the business end of writing. I’ve really got to get more stuff out making the rounds. In contrast, the business end of Jer’s Software Hut is making steady progress.

Repeat the mantra along with me, please: Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career, engineering: hobby. Writing: career…

Thanks!

Odds and Ends

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The sun has flown south for the winter, and a very pleasant autumn had given way to long dark. There was a dusting of snow on the rooftops yesterday morning, and the temperature was looking upward longingly at freezing. When the landlord came by to collect the rent, he spent a little extra time trying to find out if there was anything I needed. It seems he’s not comfortable with someone who has no complaints. He went out of his way to ask if I was warm enough. It’s fortunate the itchies have mostly cleared up, because it is certainly time to bundle up, but overall I’m quite cozy. No need for the toasty tent yet.

I got my first haggle swag today. It’s a bound galley of a novel by one of the Jer’s Novel Writer faithful. I haven’t started reading it yet, it was waiting on my step as I headed out today. I’m looking forward to it, though. One happy side effect of creating the software is that I have come in contact with a whole bunch of thoughtful and articulate people who love the written word. They are by no means all professionals, but there is a camaraderie that I enjoy immensely. I felt the same thing back when NaNoWriMo was only 1100 people or so (don’t quote me on that number).

On the subject of JersNW, I had a really good day of coding yesterday. I explored a different architecture for part of the database, and the thing clicked into place with ease. I learned a lot while doing it, and the possibilities are really exciting. I just want to tip my hat to the kids at Apple who came up with NSPredicate. (Experienced cocoa programmers are rolling their eyes right now — yeah, big discovery there, Marco Polo — but I could never use the stuff before, because I was trying to maintain compatibility with older versions of MacOS.) Now, things I’ve been dreading coding I can’t wait to get to.

NaNoWriMo. This is by far the most challenging year for me. Not just 50,000 words, but 50,000 publishable words, and the story complete at the end. In other words, a finished product in a month. I have two word counts, one already way up there, the other behind the curve. Finished words take a lot longer. I believe I’ll devote another episode to go into more detail about my NaNoWriMo project, and to share the parts already published.

To my Arky cousin David: if you read this, the Little Café Near Home needs you. The chairs that inspired my thoughts about triangles in architecture are failing. Welds flexed too often are failing, the steel tubing itself is giving up. We need your welding skills stat (what does that actually mean?)! The things just aren’t safe anymore. Bring some triangles.

Right now the TV is on. They’re showing Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Brad Pitt and that actress with the lips that would be sexy if they didn’t feel so unnatural. Mt. Pitt is a talented actor, but a skill more important than acting is choosing the right script. I was surprised at how much I liked that movie, and knowing the plot already, it’s easy to follow in Czech.There’s a concept that must have been easy to sell: Two super-assassins, and they’re married, completely unaware. Each accepts the other’s cover story. Maybe someday I’ll write something that easy to explain. I’ve come close a couple of times,

Thanks!

Episode 21: Cold Water

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Note: To read the entire story from the beginning click here. Continuity issues are probably starting to pile up, but so it goes.

Alice was tied to a chair. Her face was puffy from being hit. Her nose had been bleeding but wasn’t any more. “Mr. Lowell!” She was glad to see me.

“We’re leaving,” I said. Punching Paolo Fanutti in the face right there and then was the most difficult thing I’ve ever not done. I had made a promise, that was enough.

“There’s something you must give me first,” Fanutti said.

I glared at him. “I don’t trust a man who hits girls.”

Paolo squinted at me with his little weasel eyes. He probably needed glasses but wouldn’t wear them because it would undermine his image. Like being blind was good for one’s standing. “You are not in a position to make demands,” he said.

I pulled out my penknife and cut the ropes binding Alice’s hands. Her fingers were purple and cold. She groaned as I helped her to her feet. “I’m not demanding anything. We’re leaving.” I caught Fanutti’s gesture and felt the presence of the meat moving in behind me. I turned, leading with my fist, and put everything I had behind it. As God is my choreographer lightning flashed in the window and there was a crash of thunder just as my fist hit the other man’s face. I caught him square in the mug and broke my hand but I broke his face worse.

The goon dropped like a bag of nickels in Atlantic City on new year’s eve. The room froze as he fell, blinded by the flash and ears ringing. Everyone except me, and by the time I completed my turn my gun was on Fanutti again, reasonably steady in my broken hand. “Paolo, you are a stupid man. I told you I keep my promises.”

He watched the gun carefully. “You will pay for this.” It was his turn for the dramatic thunder crash; the storm was in full fury, trying to wash the city into the river so Manhattan could start over again.

“But now, you see, I am in the position to make demands. And now I must demand that you stop being stupid and let me give you what you want.”

“You mean…”

“I think I should introduce you to your sister-in-law.”

He smiled cautiously. “Perhaps we can do business after all.”

Apparently I’d reached the limit of his vocabulary. “No, Paolo, we can not do business. Somewhere there’s another Fanutti behind you who’s smarter than you are, who doesn’t hit helpless dames, and knows that when two people shoot square then business gets done.” I wondered how this other Fanutti would react when I beat Paolo to a pulp. “We are not doing business, we have a mutual problem that is best solved if I tell you where Lola Fanutti is.”

Alice turned to look at me with an expression behind her blackening eyes that simultaneously said, “how could you possibly sell out your client?” and “it’s about time you got rid of that bitch.” Alice was going to be disappointed when she saw how things went down, but at that moment, she provided the necessary authenticity to shift the negotiation my way.

“Where is she?”

I lowered the gun but didn’t put it away. “Well, see, I knew this morning, but I’ve spent the day tracking down my secretary, and now I haven’t the slightest idea where she is. It’s going to take me a while to find her, or more specifically, for her to find me. If she sees any of your people near me, you can kiss her goodbye.”

“So…”

“So stay the hell out of my way and I’ll contact you.”

He didn’t want to trust me, but in the end he had no choice. And technically, I hadn’t lied at all. “All right.”

“We’re walking out of here now. Give me your card and wait.”

Fanutti frowned, nodded, and provided a card. We followed him to the front door. He opened it to find two miserable guards standing in the deluge. “Umbrella” Alice said. Fanutti produced one and we were on the street, but moving slowly.

It took a while to get a safe distance and at least try to see who was following us. Alice was having a tough time of it; I took her arm to help steady her. We turned a couple of corners and I stopped our little parade. I tugger her elbow to stop her and said, “Let me take a look.” The umbrella was barely adequate, and we were getting soaked as we stood there, but now that we were away from the apartment house I wanted to see just how much I owed Paolo Fanutti. Alice didn’t want to open her mouth. Sure enough, she’d lost a tooth.

“I spit it into my blouse,” she said. “Maybe a dentist can put it back.” She smiled up at me with her swollen face. “I bit him, Mr. Lowell. Hard.”

“Don’t call me Mr. Lowell anymore.”

“But….”

“You’re not my secretary anymore.”

“Y-your’e fining me?” her voice was tiny.

The wind shifted, lashing us with rain. She staggered and in her condition I worried that the storm would be too much for her. But God wasn’t done with his little production yet, and with His next flash and bang, two long black cars pulled up, carefully not splashing us. A door opened on each. “Mr. Lowell,” a man said from the lead limousine, “would you come with us, please?” He was shortish, with dark hair, but there was no Fanuutti family resemblance.

“Sorry, pal, I’m taking the lady home.”

“That’s very noble of you. Please allow Jorge the honor of providing her warm, dry transport, and… perhaps we could provide medical attention as well.”

“I just got her back. I’m not letting her go again.”

He looked me straight in the eye. “Mr. Lowell, when two people shoot square, then business gets done. Allow me to gain your trust by affording your employee care that you cannot possibly provide.”

Alice’s grip tightened on my arm. She’d had enough of strangers. “We’re partners,” I said. “Anything you can tell me, you can tell her.”

Alice gasped. Since she did the books she must have known that she’d just taken a pay cut. She pulled herself together in a moment. “You’re Spanish,” she said.

“That is mostly correct. Maps can be deceiving; within one nation, many peoples can exist.”

Standing in the rain, trying to keep the umbrella where it could best protect Alice, I had a feeling I already knew the answer to my question. “And you are….”

“We are the blood of the saint.”

Tune in next time for: Never on Sunday – Reprise!

Thanks!

Chill

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I was sitting in my accustomed corner at the Little Café Near Home, and having secured permission to unplug the television so I could jack in the laptop I was rolling along. Of course, with any writing adventure, there are the blue times, when you are letting things spin in your head, and typing would be a waste of time. It’s like bottling a cloud. It makes a lot more sense after things have condensed.

I was in such a state, moving the big Lego bricks in my head, a long way from the technical bits, when I was politely interrupted. I had peripherally noticed folk at the bar carefully poring over the labels of a couple of thin bottles. It turns out they were pooling their English knowledge to translate the propaganda on the bottle. Like a team solving a puzzle, they had it figured save for one critical word. “This word, chilled, does it mean a little hotter or colder?”

I answered “zima”, he was thankful, and that was that. Except… chill. It’s a reflexive verb now. (I trust my sister to correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just a guy chillin in a pub.) It’s an adjective. “That guy’s chill.” No matter how you use it, chill is good.

For well you know that it’s the fool who plays it cool, when all you have to do is chill.

Of course, by now teenage kids are rolling their eyes when their parents make awkward attempts to use chill. I’ve been a fan of chill for some time now, which means the the days of chill are long past. So it goes. This is one flash in the pan I will miss. Because, come on, “Take a chill pill, man” is poetry. American Haiku.

Thanks!

A Good Day at the Potraviny

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I go to the market often now. Rather than occasionally going in and stocking up with all I can carry, I try to make a habit of grabbing a few things every time I pass by. This has led to a steadier supply of food in the domicile, but less variety. The cycle goes: buy rice, stay home until the rice is gone, go out and buy rice. Today I had to go down to the bankomat to withdraw rent, so I found myself outside the market when I already had a supply of rice at home. What do you buy for someone who has rice? Bread. If you have bread, you have to have cheese. Cheese requires talking to the woman at the meat and cheese counter.

There are three women with whom I interact while buying sliced products. One of them is almost shy with me, one indifferent, and the third is strict. Now that my face is showing up across the counter from her more often, she expects me to order correctly. Last time I was in there, I asked for one hundred grams of bacon. “Deset deka” she said. Ten decagrams. This time I was was all over it, and she gave an approving nod as I said “Taky patnact deka” for my second variety of cheese. While she measured out my cheese I heard “Dobrý den“, and turned to face a very pretty czech girl smiling at me.

Of course, if a girl smiles at me, she is by definition a member of the food service industry. This fine example of the best the republic has to offer (blonde, curvy, cheekbones, taller than me) works at the bowling alley. On days when I need to get out of the house but I don’t know where to go, she is a definite factor in my decision.

It was a good moment. I had won the gruff approval of the sliced things lady and I had a pretty girl smiling at me, who had just heard my successful use of her language. I took my cheese and got in line. It was a little awkward when she ended up in line right behind me, having received her sliced goods much more quickly. On my way out I said goodbye to the people in the store, as one does here, and I enjoyed my walk home.

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Internet Explorer 7 is officially out.

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Better, but not that great. It renders this page mostly correctly; the deficiencies are minor and overlookable. So that’s good. For Instance, the bottom of the ampersand in the logo is cut off, but while it’s not as stylish, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did before. That is where my adventure began. In the end, my first day with the new version of the software left me befuddled.

Then I noticed that my “Now Playing” section wasn’t working on IE. The way that content is generated is a bit hokey, so I thought it might be a good time to clean up the script. I figured that would probably fix the problem with IE at the same time.

Allow me to interject that the worst language for programming computers ever invented is AppleScript. They try to make it read like “real English”, like you’re chatting with your computer. As mentioned here many times, real English is about nuances, about color and shade, not black and white. As such, it’s not well-suited as a programming language. What Apple ended up with was a syntax that has the same old rigid rules, along with a hell of a lot of verbal clutter and words that don’t always mean the same thing. But I digress.

I cleaned up the script that generates the script that the browsers load to show what music I’m listening to at the moment, and I learned a couple of things along the way. The code is better than it was before, and I will be able to improve it further rather easily. So, that’s cool. I was mildly disappointed that the result still did not work on Internet Explorer 7. I suspected I knew why, but I wanted to see the IE error messages to make sure. I couldn’t find them. I was looking for some sort of window with a list of errors and any other output from the script. I went through all the menus, but could find nothing. I dimly remembered having to set a preference in previous versions of explorer to turn on the Javascript Console, so I…

Wait a minute… where are the preferences?

As far as I have been able to discern, there is no preference window in Explorer. Now, in one sense that’s a good thing. It’s been a design philosophy I’ve been using in Jer’s Novel Writer: put the settings next to the task. But what about the settings that apply to the program itself? Maybe the preferences are there and I just missed them. There were lots of cases where controls were in unfamiliar places.

Which brings me to a lament that is more about other software developers. There was a time when every program’s controls were different. One of the most revolutionary things that the mac introduced was providing a standard way to interact with software. Love the mac way or hate it, it dramatically reduced the learning curve for new applications, and you didn’t have to remember where everything was for each application. The Windows world followed suit, and for a long time computing was just a bit easier. That is breaking down now. I first noticed it on media players for Windows. They look slick, but in many cases important controls aren’t even visible until you move the mouse to a specific area. Menu bar? Forget it. Now it seems even Microsoft is sacrificing simplicity for slickness.

Right, then. One option I did find was to look for extensions for Explorer. The light came on over my head. Somewhere there would be a tool that would let me look at console output from a script. I went to the site, and there was Developers Toolbar. Hooray! I downloaded it, installed it, and discovered several useful tools, none of which were a script console. It was a nice addition, and absolutely free from Microsoft, but not the addition I was looking for. (Having this as a separate download is another design philosophy I agree with. Provide the core and let people add on the parts they need.)

About then I noticed the little error message down at the bottom of the window. Silly me! It was there all the time. I clicked the error icon. Nothing. I right-clicked the icon. Nothing. Now that is just bad design. Microsoft themselves led the charge to make “if you see something you want to interact with, right-click to see your choices” a standard. I concluded that the icon was for informative purposes only, and that somewhere else I would find the explanation of the errors. Only later did I double-click the icon to cause an error window to pop up. More bad design. Double-click is to perform the default action on a selectable item. This is simply a button, and nothing more. You don’t double-click buttons. (You also don’t put right-click menus on buttons, but once the single-click didn’t work I assumed it wasn’t a button, and tried to treat it as an item with more than one action. When the one-action behavior failed, then the multiple-action behavior failed, I assumed there were no actions.)

The window opened up and said there was a problem on line 2 of the file. Line 2 is blank. The “next” button in the little window was dim, so I didn’t realize for a moment that pressing “previous” brought up an error message dealing with line 700. “Object Expected” the error said. There was a “hide details” button, but what passed for detail wasn’t. Could I please just see a list of errors (instead of a little window where I have to click through them) and any debug information I might want to send out? The root error is ultimately my fault, but is it asking too much to make it easier to find, especially since the scripts work on all the browsers whose error reporting doesn’t suck? (Yes, I searched for other downloadable extensions. If anyone out there knows of a solution, I would be grateful.)

I guessed that there must be something wrong with the way I wrote the script tag. Luckily, one of the cool features of the Developer’s Toolbar is a validator. You can do this easily enough anyway, but right there was a way to submit your site to w3c and get back a full report card of your compliance.

I ran the report and had a bucketload of non-compliant code. I wasn’t that surprised, as the original blog template was done a while back by someone else, the comment system is someone else’s code, the Amazon links weren’t compliant, and so on and so forth. There were plenty of errors of my own doing as well, including some stray markup in a paragraph complaining about Microsoft’s non-compliance to standards. When I saw that error my mind was made up. Time to clean house! I went through the template, modifying (almost) all the markup to match standards, paying particularly close attention to script tags. Almost all of them were using syntax that was at best out of date. Not any more, baby! I brought them all into the modern age, something I would not have done were it not for Internet Explorer 7.

The result: users of Internet Explorer will have to use Firefox to post comments telling me what I’ve done wrong, because now all the Haloscan script tags are broken in IE. “Object Expected.”

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Thanks!