Random Thoughts
What is a blog? It stands for weblog. I can actually publish this from any browser, so no HTML coding-knowledge is necessary. However, I tend to write my entries in something with a spell checker and a strong search-and-replace feature.
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I’ve gotten feedback on both the essays that I put up here, and that is encouraging. Thanks for your comments. I think that I’ll be including those essays on Creative once they disappear from the recent entries list.
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If they ever held a contest for the Most Superficial Cities in America, no doubt Las Vegas would win, as it works very hard to earn that title, but I’d be more interested in the runner-up. My nomination is Orlando, Florida. I just visited a very nice, newly commissioned hotel there. The service was great, the rooms comfortable, and the amenities were top notch. But the hotel, not being attached to any of the theme parks in the area, had to come up with a reason to entice tourists to stay there, so they decided to make the hotel a microcosm of Florida. Part of it looks like Key West, part of it looks like St. Augustine, and another part looks like the Everglades, complete with misty swamp and fake alligators. It is very pretty, moderately entertaining, and excruciatingly superficial. A perfect addition to Orlando.
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I love randomness. On my Portal page, I’ve included two random features. The first is the logo, which changes color and tag-line on every reload. And the other is the Random Weather, which displays accurate weather description for a random city in America (or American Territories). Or, at least, I thought it was accurate. Both of these random elements were scripted by me with PHP, and since I am a beginner, bugs were inevitable. I know of a couple in the Random Weather generator, but it still caught me by surprise when I found out that Nome, Alaska, was at 85 degrees at about 1 pm (EST) today. It then dropped suddenly to 33 degrees by 5 pm. Believing that my code was more suspicious than Mother Nature, I checked into it, and sure enough, I never considered what may happen when the temperature drops below freezing. This is what I forget by living so far in the south. My code simply ignored the negative numbers and gave a nice warm morning to Nome. What all this meant of course, was that Nome was extremely cold in the morning (something like 22 below zero), but then broke just over the freezing mark by their local noon. Brrr!!
Posted by Jonathan at 09:45 PM, 19 February 2002
