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Luke Melia

12/25/02, 11:08 am – Xmas Morning

The presents are opened and pancakes are on the frying pan. Mom’s got 4 out of 5 kids home and a picture of Willie (the missing one) and Rachel that made her cry through her smiles. (It doesn’t take much!)

I gave the house a second iMac, and just got the router set up on this computer. My stepdad and I will make an extra CAT-5 cable after breakfast and get this suburban home network hopping.

Jeanhee’s got family in town and we have friends visiting, so the holiday festivities will continue for the next few days. As long as no other meals are as substantial as last night’s 5-course Italian Xmas Eve dinner, I think I’ll survive…

12/22/02, 11:40pm- The Non-Mall

After procrastinating Xmas shopping for a while, I finally got to it and completed in an hour. Union Square is the perfect holiday shopping destination, as far as I’m concerned. The non-mall! This time of year, it’s got a red and white tent city of crafts shops. Lots of local artists sell their wares and do quite well, it seems. Surrounding the Square, you have Virgin Megastore and Barnes & Noble, for your non-craft needs. Circuit City and the Wiz, Toys ‘R’ Us, too… And what’s a better way to celebrate your purchase from the Williamsburg ceramicist, then by sharing a table at Republic with strangers and slurping down some salmon, taro and noodles in coconut broth? Yes, I do adore Union Square. I can hardly believe a Whole Foods is going in there too. It’s going to be like my personal shopping heaven on earth….

In some brief surfing before volleyball today, I saw that Zeldman made some notes about Oxygen’s new site. I want to reply and defend our work on the site, but in the design process, I weighed in with the same criticisms he has. I think the pages should validate. And I think our browser detection should be based on document.getElementById().

But the way he describes the browser detection we do is wrong. First off, we don’t exclude anyone, we just message certain popular browsers that we know we’re not testing against. Specifically IE <5 and Netscape/Mozilla <5. There was a bug at launch that improperly cached this browser detection across different user sessions. Needless to say that was fixed pretty rapidly.

It’s also a little weird that Zeldman’s hat tip to Bill Mason doesn’t note that Bill used to work for one of Oxygen’s former web properties, ThriveOnline. I’m not sure if it was Jeffrey or Bill who decided to exclude that tidbit, or if it’s even relevant, but I personally found it lacking.

Anyhow, I’ll bring it up at the office. Perhaps it can inspire some good in the movement towards web standards. This site validates, BTW, as do all the recent freelance sites I’ve built.

But enough on the shopping and geekiness, it’s time to curl up with my sweetie and the Sunday crossword puzzle!

UPDATE: After some investigation, I found that there was a problem with Mozilla users being messaged improperly. It’s a result of .NET’s Browser object labeling all Mozilla releases as “Netscape”. That’s fixed now, so the site only messages pre-7 users of Netscape and let’s savvy Mozilla users fend for themselves message-free. I’d still prefer features-based detection, as Zeldman suggests, but we don’t have the staff to test against a very wide variety of browsers. Or so goes the reasoning at the office, anyway.

12/17/02, 10:19 am – The End of the Era

We lost our finals match, and thereby ended an era of impressive growth and teamwork. It began with me recruiting a bunch of friends with very basic volleyball skills and growing together into a team capable of puting up a considerable fight last night, depite losing 16-14, 15-13. Team picture here.

In other news, a freelance project of mine just went live. My Uncle Jamie manages a ver successful restaurant in Boston’s posh Back Bay neighborhood. He hired me to put the restaurant on the internet, and I think we did a pretty good job. Check out it out at StephaniesOnNewbury.com. Hat tip to Anthony for chipping in on the HTML.

Our website at work just relaunched on .NET, too. Season of change, it seems.

Couple of more…

I share Dave Winer’s thoughts about blogging’s role in the political process. Very inspiring. In the Trent Lott situation, though, the momentum has been allowed to continue from the administration hanging Lott out to dry.

Lastly I saw Adpatation the other night. It was great. Highly recommended!

12/14/02, 12:02am – Lott Should Resign

We interrupt your regularly scheduled volleyball playoff news to bring you a political rant.

The extent of Trent Lott’s racism has been coming to light recently, and it’s disgusting. Talking Points Memo is a blog that’s done an excellent job covering all the dirty details, including uncovering the amicus brief Trent Lott filed on behalf of Bob Jones University back in 1981, when Lott was in the House.

“If racial discrimination in the interest of diversity does not violate public policy, then surely discrimination in the practice of religion is no violation,” Lott asserts in the brief, trying to help Bob Jones U. regain its tax-exempt status despite it’s racist policies.

This may not be as damning as his endorsement of Thurmond’s candidacy, or his association with racist organizations and people, but it’s not too hard to connect the dots.

I think the guy should resign from the Senate altogether. Really, that’s up to the people of Mississippi. I’m afraid that they knew full well what they were getting when they elected Lott, and are more upset at his apologies than his prejudice.

If getting rid of him isn’t an option, his colleagues in the Senate should do everything they can to keep a man with such dangerous beliefs about racial equality out of positions of power.

12/13/02, 1:05pm – To the Finals We Go

We managed to defeat “One Toe Over The Line” in our semifinal match. It was a particularly sweet victory because they were the team that knocked us out of the semi-finals.

Both teams played excellent, scrappy defense and we had some fantastic rallies. It was an exhausting and exhilirating match.

Apparently, our team has a high sense of drama, because we keep our matches very close. We won the first and thrid games last night, and let our opponents come back within 3 points of victory before we won the game. If we were televised, the networks would love us.

Monday night is the finals match. Here in New York, there’s a threatened strike that would shut down the subway and buses as of Sunday night at midnight. This will make getting to the match a challenge.

But I guess it will suit are sense of drama just fine!

12/11/02, 12:25pm – On to the Semifinals

One Team Under Dog, also known as “The Underdogs,” “UD,” “Big Dawgs,” and “O.T.U.D.”, won our quarterfinal match last night against “Dink You, Dink Me.” We dominated the first game, lost our mental focus the second game, and came back to solidly win the third game.

This team’s come a long way.

We’re up against “One Toe Over The Line” in the Final Four tomorrow night.

12/10/02, 3:02 pm – Diversity Volleyball

Lots of volleyball lately. With my indoor team, we ended our season in second place and we have our first playoff game tonight. I’m psyched. This will be our last season all together. The team started as a company team, and most of the team has been laid off.

This past weekend, I fielded a team in a tournament in the local gay volleyball organization. We play with them fairly regularly and integrate the place a bit by bringing in a few women and heterosexuals. Lots of fun, although we usually get our butts kicked.

The previous weekend, Jeanhee and I took the subway to Queens. There, at the curb on Queens Boulevard, we met our fellow teammates. My friend, Celinda, who is half-Thai, half-Puerto Rican (she calls it Thairican!), her boyfriend from Poland, and his friends from Portugal, Ghana & Jamaica. We went undefeated.

Pretty diverse…. A lot of that is just part of living and playing in New York City, but volleyball itself attracts a wide variety of people.

LukeMelia.com created 1999. ··· Luke Melia created 1976. ··· Live With Passion!
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