Year: 2006

WonderCon aftermath

There’s an interesting Wondercon aftermath story up on Newsarama. They mention that the fire marshall closed down the show floor for a little while on Saturday afternoon. I managed to miss that entirely. I was upstairs at panels most of the day Saturday, so I guess that happened while I was listening to Kevin Smith or Grant Morrison or whatever.

yet more Wondercon stuff

Well, I’m pretty much done with the con now, back in my hotel room resting. The stack of comics I bought over the last few days is only about eight inches high, and largely consists of trade paperbacks bought at a discount, so it wasn’t a really expensive con for me.
For some local SF con coverage, look at the SFGate Culture Blog or this page at the Mercury News.

Chop Socky

I caught Chop Socky: Cinema Hong Kong on IFC a while ago. I thought it might be fun to put together a list of some of the classic kung-fu movies mentioned in this documentary, along with links to reviews and such.

  • The Magic Blade (1976)
  • Come Drink With Me (1966)
  • The Valiant Ones (1975)
  • Golden Swallow (1968)
  • The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
  • The Assassin (1967)
  • Vengeance (1970)
  • Heroic Ones (1970)
  • The Flying Guillotine (1974)
  • New One-Armed Swordsman (1971)
  • Dirty Ho (1979)
  • The Thirty-Sixth Chamber of Shaolin (1977)
  • Disciples of Shaolin (1975)
  • Spiritual Boxer (1975)
  • Drunken Master (1978)

    • browsers

    I tried the new design out in a few different browsers on my Mac. It looks fine in Safari, IE, and an old version of Mozilla. Just for yuks, I tried it out in a really old version of Netscape running under OS 9 mode. The CSS didn’t get handled at all, which was to be expected, but the page did show up in a readable form.

    still working on it

    I just did a few more things with the page. I got a little fancier with the layout on the left column, and I pulled most of the stuff in that column out of the Blogger template, and put it into a couple of SSI files. This way, all that code isn’t repeated in every page, and I don’t need to regen all the pages every time I change something over there. The one slight problem there is that I had to turn on SSI processing for all files. I added “AddHandler server-parsed .html” to the .htaccess file, so all the archive files and individual page files will be passed through the SSI parser. If theory, it’s not a good idea to pass every page through SSI, but it’s probably a worse idea to have a big chunk of the same code in every file. There’s a useful page on this at apache.org, by the way.

    more CSS fun

    I just did some fixup work on the CSS, and I think the blog looks OK in both Firefox and IE now. I know so little about CSS, I really screwed a few things up. For instance, I was under the impression that a pound sign at the beginning of a line worked as a comment. That actually works in Firefox, if only by accident, but in IE, the pound sign is ignored and the line is parsed anyway. Oh well. I think I’ve got things to the point where they’re at least presentable.

    CSS and Blogger links

    Here are a few of the pages I referenced in re-doing the design on this site:

    For CSS Stuff:

  • glish.com — some useful layouts.
  • The Layout Reservoir — the design I’m using right now is a variation on their 2-column with left menu design.

    For Blogger template help:

  • Templates
  • Template Walkthrough
  • Template Tag list
  • Template Tags: defined