Category: Me Myself And I (Page 6 of 15)

All Quiet On The Western Front

6/14/'07 / moonbug

New look — one that I can actually live with for a while hopefully. I admire people who grab or design a template and then stick with it for the next ten years. Not me. Had to jump some hoops though to keep everything in place. All the drawings and photos posted here have been uploaded at 490px wide since I kickstarted moonbug dot org. Having switched to this 435px (content) wide layout — images sporting a 3px border — I had to find a way to display them accordingly. CSS to the rescue:
#mainCol img {width: 429px; height: auto;}

In plain English, that rule says: “make anything that is an image 429px wide and adjust the height accordingly”. Fine and dandy except for IE 5.5 which in its blatant ignorance chooses to give the middle finger, which is fine by me because if you’re reading this with IE 5.5, listen: your grandkid wants to play; get off the net already. Caveat: what happens to images that are smaller than 429px wide? Ha! This. Which is in fact the very reason why I am posting this: to have that entry wiped off of the frontpage. :-)

I’m also happy to have brought some of my favorite links back into the frontpage limelight. They were sort of buried away in the previous “Hemingway” theme. What else… Oh, you now get a chance to listen to my Last.fm radio station! Hurrah for sidebar widgets that nobody ever uses! And those Google ads to the right? Ignore ’em.

Apart from this lousy update, there is one thing that I am dying to tell you — but editorial restrictions are keeping me from doing so for now. You’ll just have to wait, won’t you?

Stay tuned.

Weirdo Valentine

2/15/'07 / moonbug

Valentine’s Day at our little pet project, Weirdo Cards:

On to Christmas! :-)

Crunching Numbers

2/12/'07 / moonbug

At work, I spend a fair amount of time taking phone calls from French customers. This often entails writing down phone numbers. One particular range of numbers tends to drive me nuts: 70 through to 99.

Take the number 78 for instance.

Let’s have a look at how this is written/pronounced in other languages that I’ve more or less mastered:

Dutch: achtenzeventig
English: seventy eight
Spanish: setenta y ocho
German: achtundsiebzig

Pretty straightforward, right? A seventy and an eight or an eight and a seventy. Now for our French friends: they thought it would be better to conceive it thusly:

soixante-dix-huit

That’s a sixty, a ten and an eight. To write the number 78 you have to start at sixty, and then add 18. It’s the equivalent of saying “sixty ten eight”.

But wait! How about the number 97! Here, the number is broken down into quatre-vingt-dix sept. In English that translates to “four twenty ten seven”. Yes: the number 80 is composed of 2 numbers itself. Having established the 80, you then add 17 to that, and you’ve successfully processed 97 in your mind, and are now ready to write it down.

Except of course, at this point the person on the other end of the line has already rattled off the last number. Which was 94. Or 79.

The funny thing is that in the French language there are other perfectly legal ways of naming a number within the aforementioned range: septante (seventy) and nonante (ninety). Walloons (the french-speaking part of Belgium) use this.

But the French? Noooo. As the English refuse to drive on the right side of the road, so the French refuse to name numbers the way the rest of the world had envisioned it.

Now if you’ll excuse me: the phone is ringing…

How Not To Reinvent The Wheel

2/3/'07 / moonbug

So how do you like my new diggs? I was terminally fed up with the old theme — you know the one with the scary close-up of my face. Rather than to start from scratch, I had a look at some WordPress themes and instantly fell in love with the Hemingway theme. Its minimalism is refreshing, and the black/grey colour combo really brings out my drawings a lot better. See for instance:

Now all that’s needed is for me to get into the habit of posting a bit more regularly. To my defense, and without going into much detail, January has proven to be a pretty shitty month for both Gaby and me. Things are looking up now though.

And with that said, I’m off to admire my shiny new theme for a couple more hours. :)

Yes, Actually

1/27/'07 / moonbug

“Is this how you feel today?“, she asked.