Dear Log,
The heatwave continues, breaking all local temperature records, and getting actually worse. Needless to say, few (no?) buildings here in Alaska have air conditioners, nor can local architecture be called "breezy".
The cat's advanced African genome has kicked in, making him even more resolutely sleepy during the day and boisterous at night (even though there's just barely four hours of nighttime at this time of year). He has found the coolest place in the house -- the "tile" (linoleum or whatever) in the bathroom, where he splays out, and presses his head against the porcelaine support for the sink.
On the other hand, my not-so-advanced African genome reacts by leaving me queasy all the time, and antsy but listless. I have a half-dozen programming things that need doing, but I just have no energy for it.
I took the cat's example and looked for someplace cool -- I walked down to the floats and found that for at least a few feet around the water, it's nice and cool. I sat on the floats and tried putting my feet into the ocean water. It's like icewater! As hot as I was, I could barely stand to put even the soles of my feet in the water for more than a few seconds. That, plus the presence of a million nearby jellyfish, kept me from even considering putting any more of my body in the water.
But I did take my mp3 player and I sat and listened to this and that, and watched the occasional eagle skitter by.
I always thought eagles would fly like hawks, but actually the way they beat their wings looks for all the world like computer-animated bats.
Last night I had a few moments of not-quite-languor where I played with XSL. I wrote an XSL for my RSS feeds. I just drop in <?xml-stylesheet title="XSL_formatting" type="text/xsl" href="./smb_rss2html.xsl"?> and voila, they look like this. The XSL turns the RSS XML into HTML, which in turn is styled here and there by a CSS.
Simply using an rss.css like in this feed was nice, but it was a very limited approach.
Meanwhile, I made a homestar.xsl that renders any XML document as a redirection to the Homestar Runner site.
BTW, does anyone have a favorite XSL stylesheet for viewing XSL stylesheets?
