I don't actually live on a ranch, but I am back.  Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in Canada lives on a ranch or in an igloo.  We have towns and cities and ATM machines and milk that comes in cartons and all that regular stuff.  Not that I can work an ATM machine without getting confused but we have them.  I am back from my travels and short as they were it always feels like a trip to the Moon.  I hate traveling.  I hate stuffing the trunk of a steel cage with my belongings and hurtling through space at 60 miles an hour.  I hate it even more than I hate Internet Explorer.

I was shocked to find that the law had changed several months ago and it's no longer possible to pump gas without paying for it first.  So I tried to pay for it in the store, but they wouldn't take it.  I had to put my credit card into a slot in the pump and guess how much gas I needed.  That just froze me to the ground in bewilderment.  Guess?  If I couldn't guess the right number the pump would take $100 by default.  $100?!   I'd never given my credit card to a gas pump before and it was not looking good.  A nice lady from the store had to come out and explain it all to me, I was so distressed.  That's how seldom I go anywhere.

Needless to say, I am relieved to be back on terra firma in my familiar block of the world.

Those of my loyal following would remember that I sent my old laptop to a cousin last Fall for him to have his first computer at the age of 67.  He floundered around with it for awhile and concluded that computers are just an expensive way to do email, and since everything else costs money there's no fun at all to be had out here.  He sent me daily rants on the uselessness of computers.  So I sat back and waited.  Something must have registered eventually because at the end of February he sent me an email that he'd bought a brand new one, shopping the way we'd all like to shop - I like that one, pack it up.  A DELL all-in-one, 20" monitor, wireless, bluetooth, built-in webcam, TV, Vista Ultimate, the whole nine yards, and he's ecstatic.  Another digital convert.

So, he sent the laptop back to me, just in time for my travels.  That's always an interesting experience, to see how different two computers can be.  I didn't have time to reinstall the operating system and customize it so I just took an hour to update the security and ran.  Using the laptop again reminded me of what I felt like as a kid riding horses out in the country and then getting on a single-speed bike to pedal myself home.  Stunned.  

While I was away I had a chance to look around the web on this different resolution monitor than what I've become accustomed to.  If the day ever comes that I can learn CSS and redesign my website maybe some, or all, of the problems will go away.  It's not too bad here as I've simplified this website to the point that even Internet Explorer can handle most of it without manglement.  Although I admit, I haven't tested all 235 pages lately.

As a comparative study, here's what a JLiki page looks like in Firefox on a 1280 x 1024 monitor.


Here's the same page in Internet Explorer, 1280 x 1024.  Note the header needs a magnifying glass, and the left menu is oversized.


And here's what it looks like on a 1024 x 768 monitor, where the center graphic is too wide for the screen but conveniently slides under the right-side menu.  The magic of CSS.


And here's an example of the type of thing that upsets me and it doesn't have anything to do with different resolutions, it's just Internet Explorer being a pain.  It's my understanding that a standard font size for the web is '16' so that's what I have it set to in Firefox.  In Internet Explorer I think it's called 'Medium.  This is a screenshot of part of a page in Firefox.  


See how nice that is, with the ads being so unobtrusive, sitting there quietly and politely.  Here's the same page screaming at you from Internet Explorer.


I've fiddled with this before and it seemed the only cure would be for me to change the font to something larger on every single page to get up to speed with the ad-text and then you could set your default for the whole page smaller to keep from knocking your eyeballs out.   Since that would be several weeks work, I hadn't got around to it yet.  However, I just found another cure for this.  All you diehard users of Internet Explorer, if you go to Tools/ Internet Options in IE7 (and maybe IE6?) and click on the General Tab and then Accessibility and untick the box that says "Ignore font sizes specified on webpages" all will be well.  Not as good as Firefox, but much better.  It even fixes the fonts in JLiki.