No lectures today! Wheee!
So I've been working a bit on a redesign for Das Bandt's (my little brother's band) website. Not because Markus asked me to, but because I'm at least partly to blame for the current design (though Markus has made lots of strange changes since I made it a few years ago). As usual when working with any fun design, I want to put in images with transparent parts and as usual I am stopped by IE's lack of support for PNG transparency (GIFs suck, just look at the poor jellyfish in the upper left corner). Just about every other browser supports it by now, but MS keeps making life difficult. There are workarounds, but they require scripts and all kinds of annoyances, so I've never gotten around to using them. If you've also run into this problem do sign this petition.
If I was designing for myself I'd feel tempted to just ignore the IE users out there and go ahead with using the PNGs anyway. It's not good webdesign of course, but if good webdesign means my pages have to run on a dinosaur "good web design" can go hide in the same hole as IE. I'm not a webdesigner.
Ah, a good rant makes me feel better. I'll just take my pretty ideas down a few notches, it's just a website after all.

Yesterday night, when I finally went to bed around two am I noticed very clearly the well known fact that darkvision is much better in the periferal vision. I've an actual size ceramic skull on my bookshelf, got it from dad when I was about eight I think. It's painted with fluorescent paint so it glows after I turn out the lights and I've often used it as a beacon to find my bed in the dark. But now the paint is getting old (or maybe it's my eyes that are getting old) so I can't actually see it if I'm looking straight at it. It's a pretty neat effect to have this disembodied glowing skull that can only be seen at the edges of your vision.
This has nothing to do with anything, but I wanted to mention it anyway.