Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

Imprisoned.

A short story, in which an imaginative journey occurs. Yeah, it’s moderately poor, but I wrote it in about 40 minutes (as though it were an exam), so there we go. My excuses end. The story begins here.

Imprisoned.

Imprisoned.
The grey walls surround me. A shaft of light falls – at this moment – towards the door of my cell, the beam emanating from a narrow hole in the ceiling.
I sit against the door, in this ray of warmth which pierces the cold concrete surrounds, and begin to drift towards sleep; the first for days.

A field.
My son is running, in the golden expanse. He chases after the dog, yelling as it barks. I smile, and lean back into my chair on the verandah. Turning left, I see my wife sleeping peacefully.

Awake.
Cold has returned, the sun has taken its gift of warmth. I move to the bed and sit – the wall does not change, yet I continue to stare at it, as though it may do so at any moment.
Hours later, my eyes close. Screaming pierces the cell.

Home.
It is dinner. My wife and child sit at the table, near a fireplace. I hear the rain outside, beating against the windows hidden behind curtains. I leave the room to fetch a drink – the house is cold, apart from that room, and so I close the door behind me as I leave.

Awake.
My screaming has stopped. I don’t understand why it began. The wall is still the same.

Home.
Water flows into the first glass, into the second. The flow shudders as I fill the third, but runs still. It is dark in the kitchen by now – illuminated only by light of the storm beating outside. I did not bother with the light as I entered, and do not consider it as I leave the room.

Still.
I observe the wall still, tracing the imperfections of the slab over with my eyes. The lines blur, fading to be imperceptible against the endless grey expanse of the cell. Again, dreams come.

Home.
Carrying drinks, I leave the kitchen, walking in the cold expanse between rooms. My feet sound against the storm, softly on carpet.
The door. I swing it open, anticipating warmth, light, noise. Cold, dark, still.

Open.
My dream stops. I am awake again, my eyes open, my body upright (as it was when I slept). The room is no longer so dark – a diffuse light fills it from outside. Morning has come. Seeing nothing else, I close my eyes again, opening them to the dream.

Doorway.
I stand at the entrance to the room, as though it were a sheer precipice. The fire has been extinguished, curtains blown open by the wind coming through gaping windows. Wind tears around the room, displacing objects.
My wife and the boy cannot be seen.

Light.
Again, I awake. The sun creeps towards the point at which light enters my cell directly – its azimuth, for me. Not quite. Sleep comes upon me once more.

Entry.
I enter the room. Placing glasses upon the table, I walk around the room. Both seats, empty. The fireplace bears not even embers – it is cold, the charred wood as dry and ashes undisturbed as though it were the end of a long summer.
Frantic, I yell from the window. A noise from behind me. I turn, to observe nothing but two of the glasses fallen, blown horizontal by the wind.

Their water runs red.

Windows slam and lock fast behind me, and as I turn, they harden, darken, becoming opaque before my eyes.

Once more, I turn. My cell forms before me.

Cell.
The beam has arrived – I feel it, now attuned to the room and its changes. My eyes open – the wall which once had borne the entrance has changed.

I walk through the now-empty space, to observe the sun glowing golden against a field.

Leaping from the verandah, I chase my son, shouting, running, across the golden expanse.

Clemenceau amuses me.

Despite being struck by the freedom of expression permitted in America when he visited it in the 1860s, Clemenceau was later recorded as saying this of America:

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Amusing, but hardly consistent.

Internet Explorer, bane of my life

I haven’t whinged about Internet Explorer for some time now, at least, not on this website, so I feel justified.

The background property in CSS has the attribute fixed for a reason. Internet Explorer supports this, but fails to interpret it in the same way as every other visual UA on the planet — the background is fixed relative to the element, not the page.

This is specified in the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (Level 1) recommendation (Yes, it is a recommendation, not a standard. If “web standards” people are going to obsess over geek semantics, you’d think they would care a little more about the meaning of real words, as well. Apparently not.), which Internet Explorer claims to have full support for.

That part of the specification appears a little ambiguous on first reading, but seriously, what makes greater logical sense, in terms of the actual applications of the technology?! Keeping in mind this is a recommendation, if there is ambiguity (which is clarified by contextual reading and general understanding of the material at hand), then it is the responsibility of any recommendation implementors to apply their own best-practice policies to this, in order to clarify it.

Best practice at Microsoft, it would seem, encompasses flawed “full” implementations of a technology, with an eye firmly set in the past. Comments such as those made recently at IEBlog excusing these failures anger me, especially given the blatant irrelevance of defences used in relation to poor support of W3C recommendation technology.

<\/rant class=”off”>

Pain

English teachers should not use the symbol for “at” (namely “@”) in place of the characters “a” and “t” for anything but denoting email addresses. Not when working with print media, and not when writing on paper. Please.

I already have too little respect for certain members of the St. Andrew’s teaching staff. You don’t need to reinforce my opinions.

HSC Stimulus booklet: The most confusing thing this side of UAI calculation

I’m currently trying to negotiate photocopying the HSC 2005 English Stimulus Booklet. This has to be the most challenging experience of my schooling career. Folded without any sense of order, and with margins not large enough for my copier to happily accept it being haphazardly thrown onto the plate, I wish this were an assessable task!