CmdrTaco's Journal: AnimeNext, A2 Dining, CSS

Looking forward to visiting AnimeNext this weekend. Anime Fans in the NYC area should definitely look into it.. Kathleen & I had great fun last year, so it will be cool to see whats up again this year. Plus, a trip to New York is always fun. Catch a show. Eat some food. This time around I hope to actually have some touristy time in to spend... might go visit the Statue of Liberty. I've been to NYC dozens of times and never visited either the gugenheim or the statue of liberty. It seems like I should try to do at least one of them!

Anyone who knows me knows that I seek food like a homing pigeon. In fact our decision to move to Ann Arbor was at least partially swayed by the huge number of excellent restaruants in the area. Of course, as is human nature, over the last 2 years Kathleen & I have fallen into something of a rut, finding a half dozen favorites, while leaving dozens of places untried. Recently I've decided to chagne that so I've tried to eat at a new place at least once a week. Last week we tried 'Eve' in Kerrytown... it replaces the Kerrytown Bistro (which I never ate at) and was quite surprised at just how good it was. I've eaten at countless fine places, and this one stands right at the very top of the list. It's a pretty small place, but the service was great and the food was knock-my-socks-off good. If you're in the area, check it out.

Long have I postponed getting familiar with CSS. I've poked around with style sheets here and there over the years and always found them to be nice, but not necessary. If I were to design a new site from scratch today, I would undoubtedly implement it using CSS. To actually get more familiar with it, I decided last week to start to port CmdrTaco.net. Since I removed the link to the site from the left hand menu of Slashdot, traffic has dropped off quite a bit, so people don't complain when I break things as much. I still haven't totally removed tables from the site, but I've stopped (for the most part) using them for the old layout tricks that you needed to use circa 1997 in order to get nice layouts... now I can redefine my H1s to have a background color, a nice font, an alignment, and suddenly I don't need a table and a font tag every time I want a header. Man do I wish this shit was available when we originally designed Slashdot. Someday I hope to redesign Slashdot and make everything nice and compliant, but it seems that hacking an old site to use CSS is far more work than creating a new site from scratch. Ah well, someday I guess. By then maybe CSS will be more consistent over safari/mozilla/MSIE so it won't be impossible to make the site look good to all readers.