Tuesday, December 9, 2003
I dreamt last night that young, politically hip, beautiful college students had taken over clothing stores, choosing outfits they desired and stacking them on the floor in ordered piles, demanding that Superman let them take their outfits home at no charge as was their right. Superman was real in this dream. He essentially told the students that they needed to figure that out on their own, made some joke about the Eiffel Tower, and took off. I took his joke as a reference to the 1980 film Superman II.—Abs workout. Half a chocolate-covered custard bar and one leftover sage corn muffin for breakfast. Student directory on the web project: more steady progress. thumbnails view layout is complete. Had to abandon using floats because of a float bug in IE, Mozilla, and Netscape 7—the first page or two would appear blank or mostly blank when printing and not all the data would show up on printout even though everything looked fine on screen. Used liquid tables instead, 5 columns, but easily adjusted if necessary. Tricky doing the iterations pulling the data out of the database because I wanted to include alternate row shading as well as index numbers as a th cell at the far right of each row: 5, 10, 15, etc. Got image protection mostly working: images cannot be downloaded if not logged in and cannot be viewed separately from the directory. The directory the images are in lies outside the document root. Need to clean the image URLs and then I'll be ready to prep the images and upload them. Joel and I had a delicious lunch at Pomelo today. Ena, who I noticed hasn't been taking lunch at her usual time—forgetting I think, or otherwise just putting it off—refused to go with us today. She gets to work by 8 AM, if I'm not mistaken, and she still hadn't had lunch by 1:15 PM when Joel and I usually end up leaving. She said she'd eat with us tomorrow, though. Cindy sends e-mail today: the office holiday lunch party will be at Beach Chalet this Thursday. Zazie was my first choice since I know Beach Chalet can get very noisy, but I don't mind. I'd been to Zazie twice in the past 6 weeks and the view is hard to beat at Beach Chalet, especially if you get a table by the window. Went to Trebor Healey's reading of his first novel, Through It Came Bright Colors. Books, Inc. on Market Street was packed—they had only 18 chairs, which were all filled, and another 15 or 20 people were standing. It's always so enjoyable to hear him read. He read a passage about the main character waiting for his lover/friend Vince to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store. Another passage he read was about the main character playing a modified game of Life with his brother Peter while the mom listened in on their game and conversation. This scene was very amusing and had the audience laughing at the absurd situations that resulted. Afterwards we joined Trebor, whom we had met before through Felice, and 10 of Trebor's closest friends at Tin Pan for a celebratory dinner. He's been on tour promoting his book for the past 2 months, still with at least several cities to go after San Francisco. At the table: Trebor, unknown, unknown, Patsy Hatt, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, horehound stillpoint, me, Patrick, Kirk Read, unknown, unknown, and Matthilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore. Kirk's sweater caught on fire from flames licking up from a pan in the kitchen but the restaurant claimed he had set it down on a candle and therefore was unable to provide any compensation. We talked about the recent Lambda awards festival, who won what, how many people didn't show up, that it cost $195 for a ticket. I remember horehound expounding superlative praise upon Trebor's skills as a poet. We'd gotten word that Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez lost the mayoral election to Democrat Gavin Newsom while everyone chatted in Books, Inc. after the reading. Patrick and I are disappointed, having voted for Gonzalez, especially since it appears to have been a very close race. We'd voted for Kamala Harris, who won the District Attorney race over incumbant Terence Hallinan. Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox—very well written. Remember: E-mail is a user interface. Still reading Timeline. I got Patrick to tell me what the reviews have been saying about the film and he says it's not good. So I'm a little disappointed that we probably won't bother seeing the film. But it's better to not have the memory of a bad film in place of the memory of a decent book, I think. Showered before bed, read e-mail and news. Late midnight snack at 1:19 AM: leftover mushroom penne. A long but satisfying day.