Entries this day: KTRU XML hardRock

KTRU

6:56pm CST Friday 8 December 2000

All day today I had my radio at work tuned to 91.7fm, waiting for KTRU to come back on the air. The plan was for it to come on at 4:05pm, but I listened all day, just in case.

World Radio Network (www.wrn.org) had been broadcast for the bulk of the week that we were off the air. At about 3:30pm, KTRU stopped broadcasting WRN and just "played" static. At 4:05pm there was a slight cough or blorp sound as the transmitter was turned back on.

Kristin spoke "KTRU Houston" and the MRA on(*), then played the Miles Davis song that had been cut short last week. She prefaced the song with something like, "you've been listening to an 8 day silent remix of Miles Davis, now we return to our regulary scheduled broadcast," or something like that.

(*) In perfect college radio fashion, she mispoke our wattage at first, "with an effective radiated power of five thousand, fifty thousand watts..." Very cute.

I listened to the rest of her show and then to the KTRU news show while I read about XML.

XML

7:07pm CST Friday 8 December 2000

Karla mentioned that we might want to begin getting smart in XML, which is used by some HR departments to exchange data. I pretty much knew nothing about XML, so I read the XML Faq.

Very interesting. I think HTML is an example of an SGML, and XML is a subset of SGML. XML allows one to describe a protocol, such as HTML, and a whole lot more.

I might begin to write HTML as "well defined" XML instead of my somewhat sloppy but passable HTML. I started with the previous entry about KTRU, and have kept it up through this entry. I haven't gone through journal.cgi to make it produce well defined XML, which I know it does not.

Then again, I might decide it's not worth the effort.

It is, certainly, interesting to learn about SGML and XML, even if I don't know them per se. I wonder how/if we will actually begin to use XML at work to transfer data with HR departments.

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Oh, and I downloaded DocZilla (www.doczilla.com), but it didn't seem to be nearly stable enough for me to use it instead of Netscape, which is hardly completely stable itself.

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OH!!!!!!!!! And today we ordered a new computer for me at work!! A PIII 1GHz processor with 512 Meg ram, 40Gig HD, 10/100T, 48X CD, speakers, 17" monitor, Natural (curved) keyboard, mouse, etc etc for $1784 from Dell!!! It should be in around 14 December. Yay!!!

Wende has just arrived at home; we are about to go meet peeps from our investment club for our holiday gift exchange party.

hardRock

10:57pm CST Friday 8 December 2000

Hard Rock Cafe was loud and fun. We spent a pretty long time at the bar waiting for our table to be available. On the flat wide screen TVs (not projection TVs, but the new digital 9x16 aspect ratio hang on the wall TVs) videos were shown, including Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Quite entertaining to see how bad the dancing was, and I'm not talking bad. How did he make 50 zillion dollars?

At the table, Taresa got a big giant pile of whipped cream on ice cream on some brownie. I gave Wende a big forkful of whipped cream and she was surprised to find that it wasn't ice cream!! She made funny gross see-food for us all to enjoy.

Super special thanks to my Cynthia, my secret santa, who gave me great stickers for letter writing. I got much better stickers than I could have imagined!!

Wende and I walked Taresa to her car by way of the ice skaters, skating on a sopping wet crowded little rink. So freezing must have been the people who fell and got their bums all soaked!! But maybe not too freezing if they had some good cardiovascular skating going on. But still... eewwwwww!

I'm thankful to have inline skates and all of downtown upon which to skate.