Some tips from the Wonky Traveler:

How to survive a business trip.

1. Passing through security at DFW airport with an expired drivers license is not fun. They have no sense of humor. None.
2. If you notice the pilot is practicing his ‘flying around in circles’ maneuver for more than 45 minutes don’t worry, you’ve already missed your connecting flight. Your screwed.
3. There is no fun way to kill 6 hours in an airport without getting drunk or arrested. I did neither.
4. If the Asian kid next to you falls asleep on your shoulder it’s OK. At least it’s better than the homeless guy with the crazy eyes that sat there gulping Starbucks and chewing his nails through the ENTIRE flight from Dallas to Chicago.
5. If the pilot says they want to ‘reboot’ the airplane by completely powering it off, waiting 5 minutes and then restarting everything, your screwed.
6. If you land in the middle of a ’severe thunderstorm’ you’re better off just getting soaked on the way to the rental car than trying to sit it out. At this point it’s clear that someone has it in for you. Accept it and move on.

Semantic xHtml

In a recent post I spoke of my need to ‘prime the pump’. Well … it’s primed! I’ve been neck deep in world of xHtml and css for the last week and I’m loving it. I still haven’t gotten to the ‘I Rock’ threshold, but I feel I’m well past the ‘I suck’ stage. Today I heard Molly on a BoagWorld podcast (Podcast 65 I think) and I decided to check her site out. It’s really nice. I found lot’s of great content, but the first thing that caught my eye was this essay about semantic xHtml. I’ve heard talk of semantic coding, but to this point I haven’t had the time or the background to really grok it. Molly’s writing really made it clear to me why this subject has been so popular lately. As I understand it , semantic xHTML is the idea that xHtml markup should be used to represent content and not presentation. One of the examples I’ve seen a lot is not using the <p> element to generate space. That’s really the job of css. This is so basic and core to what I’ve been learning about (thanks to Head First Html, xHtml and css ) that I thought it was just the way everyone does it. I guess that’s one advantage of being a newcomer. I didn’t have to suffer through the bad old days when the only way to get the job done was to hack around the intent Html.

I’ll be traveling with work next week and I’m thinking of trying to do some sort of full blown web page to test out some of this book learnin’ I’ve been getting lately. I’m thinking of making a page with a table of links to some of the developer user groups I think are interesting in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I’m hoping to spiff it up a bit with my new css skills.