In an ongoing Usenet thread I’m coming very close to asking someone “what do you mean by semantics?”

But even though I now strongly suspect that the person in question might well mean something completely different than the rest of us I’m resisting the urge to use the above phrase.

This thread has also thrown up the challenge of colouring the squares of a chessboard with CSS, with the artificial constraint of only setting a class on the main table element.

This wasn’t too difficult to do but if you look at the source code you’ll see why people have variously described it as “Very clever!”, “quite entertaining” and more commonly “gross”.

Following a suggestion from Alan Flavell I managed to halve the amount of code but really I’d like to see CSS 3 nth-child selectors because then the massive blocks of adjacent selectors would be reduced to just a few lines. Here’s a demo of the CSS3 technique to check new browser versions against.

Very True Mood:  grumpy

So the Lambeth Borough web site is apparantly “one of the UK’s best”. So why is it so difficult to find out who was elected councillor in my ward yesterday?

From the home page I click on the link Borough Council election results that tells me who now controls the council (Labour, so I’ll expect a Counciil Tax rise next year) and then, For more information visit the elections page where in turn I can follow another link to Local election results 2006. Here I see the same information as two pages ago, plus For more details on the election download the document below which is a bloomin’ PDF containing scans of the paper copies of the returning officers’ declarations for each ward.

So full marks for making copies of the official historical documentation of the election available, but zero marks for enabling me to quickly find out who is actually representing me on the council.

Looking at the results for my ward I see that it went entirely by party lines. Three Labour councillors elected, then three Lib Dems, then the solitary Green knocking the three Tories into last place.

Very True Mood:  annoyed

Right, as I’ve said before Ok Cupid are a bunch of wankers so it’s hardly surprising that their system is buggered up. I noticed yesterday that everyone doing the Atheist Test was being marked as 99% higher on pentagrams (!?!) than other people their age and gender.

Then today I noticed that I was coming out as being 99% higher on every category in every test, regardless of how high my actual scores were. I would report the error to them but as they think I’m a “turdbag” based simply on my choice of browser I really can’t be arsed. I’ll just delete those parts of the results from any memes I do.

But perhaps they shouldn’t have annoyed me…

Via armcurl.

( The Personality Defect Test )

Very True Mood:  cynical