Just finished lunch at work, and am busy compiling a table of research topics of mechanical engineering professors. Anyway, it appears the blurring has been solved. A kind soul in the Moveable Type forums suggested that it might have something to do with the line height vs font size. So I increased the line height by 1 pixel, and it worked.
So it's Thursday night, and I haven't solved the blurring problem (as you no doubt can tell yourselves.) Argh. As well, I discovered when I went to pay for some groceries and photos at Costco that my AMEX card is missing. Wonderful. And a week from tonight I'll be in NYC. I called AMEX and they put a "hold" on my card while I look for it (and they verified that no additional charges have appeared on it since I last used it, which suggests I've misplaced it somewhere.)
I've looked around the house, the car, checked my wallet and pants and jacket pockets a zillion times, even emptied parts of a bookcase, thinking it might have fallen off the top stairs out of a pants pocket. *sigh*
Life is grand. I bumped into Kel at work today. She seemed to be all energy, but said she was tired. I will look for an "I Heart NY" shirt for her next week when I'm there. As for me, I was impatient today. Now I'm annoyed at having lost my credit card, and not being able to solve the blurring problem. Blurred...perhaps it's a metaphor for my life tonight.
More blog coding headaches, albeit minor ones. I (thought I) solved a problem Geoff mentioned regarding how my site looks in different resolutions. However, now when I move the page up and down, parts of various entries are blurring. It's all weird, a test of patience and character building, right? You have probably noticed this already. I've sent e-mails and posted to Moveable Type discussion lists, hoping to get help on this one.
Yesterday brought a nice moment: on Tue morning, I taught a research skills class to third year chemical engineering design students. Yesterday I spotted about 20 of them in the library working on the first assignment based on my lecture. Not only was it rewarding to see them working on it, in discussions with some of them I could sense they realized the assignment was a stepping stone to developing said research skills to help them with their group design projects. In other words, they realized the assignment wasn't a waste of their time.
This may sound boring, right? To me, here is a group of students learning new skills, and understanding why the skills are important to them now and in the future. It doesn't get any better than that.
OK, maybe that was boring. But there was a great sunset, I'm one week away from going to NYC for a break, and things in Calgary may be improving for my brother, who is looking for work. All in all, a good day.
No, not a comment on Viktor Frankel's book, which I haven't read. Someday, maybe. It was a good day, a long day. I was up at 6:00, because I had to teach a research skills and library resources class to a group of third year chemical engineering design students. Less than half the class showed (25 out of 65, their loss, frankly), and the lecture went well. I spent the remainder of the day in a semi-daze, refueling on black coffee, spinach salad, and fruit.
During the day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about blogging. She couldn't see a reason to spend time blogging other than for something subject-specific, related to our profession, most likely. I accept her take on the activity - it's not for everyone. And subject-specific blogs can be of great use to those who require a quick way to check on the latest developments or news in their areas of interests. A subject-specific blog, such as this one on nanotechnology, almost function as a slow-motion crawl or ticker (the name given to the line of news that crawls across the bottom of the screens of tv networks like CNN). Of course, news there changes every few seconds - an active subject blog might change only a few times a day. But the purpose is similar.
The nanotech blog mentioned above neatly indentifies the subject of each entry with a small graphic, each with a different subject name: nanomaterial, nanopeople, nanoevents, nanobiomed, etc. (These serve the same purpose as "category" in Moveable Type.) The challenge for my colleagues and I perhaps is to try to develop a useful blog for the library system.
My good pal and colleague Geoff Harder has created BlogEd, a webring of Edmonton bloggers. The Taz Man has joined, and so have I. So if yer a local blogger, sign up today.
Geoff, I bow in your general direction for your patience and encouragement and help with coding as I continue to immerse myself into the world of MT blogging. It is much fun, and you deserve some of the credit.
