Month: June 2007

Microsoft Markup

I just hope that these are typos, otherwise it would certainly look like really weird XML. If they are typos, I wonder how many there are in the spec? Surely the guys at Ecma had enough time to review this? Why am I now suppose to act as a junior sub editor? I would understand if it was a missing quote or full-stop here or there. But 3 quite major glitches within consecutive 3 lines? Thats quite scary.

VML the undead, and the depths of ms office xml

free Gas Traffic

Allstate found that that drivers in Flint and Warren, Michigan were some of the “most improved” when it came to reducing the number of car crashes. The insurance company rewarded motorists in those towns with 37 free liters of gas. What was the result of the Allstate promotion? Total traffic chaos.

oh the irony

Ground Conditions

In an image that makes me want to cry it’s so cool, the basements of some 19th-century San Francisco homes weren’t basements at all… they were the hulls of lost ships. “As late as Jan 1857,” we read, “old hulks still obstructed the harbor while others had been overtaken by the bayward march of the city front and formed basements or cellars to tenements built on their decks. Even now [1888] remains of the vessels are found under the filled foundations of houses.

parts of sf are built on sunken ships. go into an embarcadero basement and you may be in one.

Retirement tourism

Norway is now “exporting its elderly and infirm to the Costa Blanca” of Spain to save money on retirement costs. Essentially, a welfare state is exporting its citizens and its services to a place with lower labor rates, cheaper land, and better weather.

How long before national health systems in Europe open their own clinics in Africa, or American insurance companies buy up a few hospitals in Costa Rica?