Symlinks created. The following URLs now all point to the same place:
- http://www.the-cantina.com/warpath/
- http://www.the-cantina.com/cls/
- http://www.the-cantina.com/reverend/

The site is now live! Please let me know about any bugs
with html, links or scripts. Also, if anyone’s got Mozilla installed and
wants to provide some feedback on how well the pages render, that would be
excellent.

Sections complete: Home page, Rants, Tidbits, Lists, About, Files, Thoughts,
Projects, Links, π. That’s all but one!

The feedback section still needs some work. The guestbook is kind of broken
and the polls script has a long way to go. π still has a bug, but it works
most of the time. Additionally, I’m working on a script to automagically update
and archive the news file. Since those are all scripting issues and not
html/layout issues, I’m going to consider the site ‘complete’ and move it from
the test directory to the live one.

UPDATE: I’m scrapping the polls and may reconsider the guestbook.

Forget about the cowboys… Where have all the ninjas gone? I can
almost hear Paula Cole singing her soulful ballad about missing all
the ninjas that we grew to love in the late 80s.

I was playing Shogun:
Total War a while back, and after my ninja successfully gutted an enemy
Daimyo…. it struck me how cool the whole ninja thing really is. I had
forgotten, at least a little bit, about how much fun the
shadow-warrior-assassin-guy-in-all-black-with-kick-ass-funky-weapons concept
is.

Then it suddenly occurred to me… we have a major deficiency with
regards to our Ninja Quota in our media these days. Back in the late 1980s was
they height of ninja glory. Some might say that the ninja’s heyday was back in
the 1500’s, but allow me to take a moment to refute that…

I think it’s safe to say, the evidence is overwhelming. It’s obvious
that the ninja was much more popular in the 1980s. I don’t even have to
point out how many comic books featured ninjas in some way or another.

Where are they now though? I encourage you to go to the IMDb any see
for yourself. Search on ‘ninja’ in the 90s and you will see an alarming
decline in movies and television shows about the well-loved assassin. Those
movies and shows that due turn up often treat the ninja like he’s some
cute cuddly guy who kids should pal around with… not the eye gouging,
sword swinging, shuriken throwing badass assassin he should be.

Why? Why has mainstream media forsaken the once adored shadow-warrior?
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect it has quite a bit to do with the
rise in popularity of Kung Fu movies and TV shows.

I like Kung Fu as much as the next cat. I mean, any martial arts with
style names like “drunken monkey”, “flying tiger” and “big fat alligator”
is just cool.

But is it cooler than ninjas? No way! Jackie Chan has never, to my
knowledge, killed anyone with a shuriken or blowgun! Bruce Lee never
disappeared in a puff of smoke. When is the last time you saw Jet Li
carrying a grappling hook and rope as standard accessories?

I want my ninjas back, dammit.

I just tried out Opera 5 on my PC. It correctly displays IFRAMES… yay! It
doesn’t quite render the html table on the main page correctly. I will have to
see if I can fix that in the html without ruining the display on every other
browser. I feel a little better now.

Update:Fixed the table. Itw displays correctly under all non-sucking
browsers now.

iCab mostly works. It views IFRAMES, which is the important bit. It doesn’t
seem to want to deal with fonts nicely though. Bummer. Oh well.

I filed a bug against Opera at their site about not covering all of the
HTML 4.0 tags. I guess now I will find out how responsive they are… I may
send them a mail too.

I must admit… I’m sorta disappointed that Internet Explorer is doing the
best job of correctly dealing with the HTML standards. My friend, Mike, is
coming to the same unfortunate conclusion at his company… so I know it’s
not just me.

I’ve had an epiphany. I know this may sound a little arrogant, but…

I am a god. No, really. Stay with me, this isn’t an ego
thing. Allow me to explain how I came to this conclusion.

This weekend I was using my brand new Black & Decker Leaf Hog. It’s a leaf
blower/vacuum power tool. I was walking along my lawn, using my “high
performance blower vac” to assault the grass with 200mph winds.

It launched leafs (my chief target), dirt, rocks, bugs, worms… anything
lighter than a VW Beetle into the air, propelling it pretty much wherever
I desired. (I didn’t have a VW Beetle to test with…)

It occurred to me, as I directed my portable mini-tempest at a passing
airborne insect, that to these little creatures this must be the storm
to end all storms. I mean, they don’t know much more than the present
really and the present had to suck for most of them. I’m sure the worms and
whatnot survived the assault from above… but some of the smaller life forms
had to perish in the disaster.

It was like a few weeks ago, when I was clearing my lawn of the evil
that is mushrooms.

I would reach down, grab the mushroom and give it a light tug, thereby
plucking it neatly from the lawn. From my perspective, it was a fairly gentle
process. Of course, the mushrooms probably didn’t think so and I am sure
the Smurfs who lived in those mushrooms never saw it coming… or, if they did,
all they saw was a giant gloved hand reaching from the sky to pluck away their
homes and any Smurf unlucky enough to be inside.

Any Smurfs who survived probably refer to the whole thing as
Smurfageddon or Smurfnarok.

All those earthquakes and hurricanes that tend to kill us and flatten our
cities and what not really wouldn’t be so scary if we were, say, a thousand
times bigger than we are now.

You see, what I’m getting at is that it’s all relative. Everything. To my
neighbors I was just some guy with an annoying yard appliance but to the
worms and smurfs I massacred, I was like some vengeful deity.

Ok, IFRAME work in IE 5, but not Netscape 4.7 or Opera 4. That bites
it’s not even an IE specific TAG! It’s in HTML 4.0! Ok, maybe NS 4.7 is too old
to adhere to HTML 4.0? I’ll give 6 a shot…

I’m really disappointed with Opera tho. That’s my prefered browser on
Windows. I really thought they’d cover all the standards…

Update: IFRAME works on Netscape 6. I wonder about Mozilla?

Update: Works splendidly on Mozilla AND Chimera.

A coworker told me about the <IFRAME> tag in HTML 4.0 Strict. It’s
how I’ll be displaying this news file on my page, I think. Thanks Smittie!

Update: Nifty! It works! I’m going to use this to do the Nav Bar at the
bottom too…