Or not, such as the case may be. Anyway, here’s an interesting write-up of the holiday’s history, from the History Channel.

Googlewhacks so far:

• mitochondrial teetotaling
• polysyllabic flamencos
• anticonstitutional raven
• polyurethanes lexicography

I was starting to think it was easy but after re-checking the Googlewhacking rules I found out four of my “whacks” didn’t count (one matched a page that was a list of words, the other three had words that weren’t in dictionary.com‘s database).

Just tried my hand at “Googlewhacking“. Basically it’s a game or challenge that involves finding a two-word search that turns up exactly one match on Google’s search engine. Harder than you think!

Fixed up some of the style definitions that had been causing the problems I’d noted below with Internet Explorer. Specifically if I set the height property of the div element for the sidebar to “100%” then IE (but not Opera 6 nor Netscape 6.2) doesn’t display the sidebar’s background image. That’s one IE bug; the other bug is that moving the <!DOCTYPE> tag to the second line of the file causes IE not to recognize the document type as HTML 4.01, so it doesn’t apply the stricter compliant layout rules.

Long story short, this website now looks great under Internet Explorer 5.x/6.x, Opera 6.x, Netscape Navigator 6.x, and Lynx. (Okay, I wouldn’t say anything looks “great” under Lynx, but it looks fine.)

I’m not an HTML/CSS purist or snob as I may seem; since I only redesign my web site once every 3-5 years, I just want to get it right.

AOL has put in more anti-Trillian countermeasures. Latest news is that a fix has been implemented and a new version of Trillian is forthcoming. (For those not familiar with the Trillian vs. AIM saga, see the story at CNET News.com.)

I think I would be willing to put up with ads if it would make AOL happy with Trillian. I mean, prior to Trillian the ads never bothered me much; my two main motivations for using Trillian are:

1. Using one IM client instead of four (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN).
2. It’s not ICQ. ICQ is the most bug-ridden, poorly-designed piece of bloatware I’ve ever used (second only maybe to Lotus Notes). Unfortunately it’s what most of my friends use so I have to connect to it.