I stayed up late Friday to study for the course and then couldn’t sleep. Ended up sleeping from 4-6am and then drove to Milwaukee and did the whole class on only two hours sleep!

Anyhow, life is busy. Tomorrow I head to the Milwaukee Yacht Club for a one day course in sailing race management.

A couple of weeks ago I had a trip to Singapore for work and got to sail in the National Catamaran Champs.. Photos from the regatta are here, and some photos from my hotel (actually two hotels) are below -

“When you look at private-sector debt that was over and above what can be explained by G.D.P., you are talking about $6.5 trillion beyond the economy’s capacity to handle that debt.” That debt will have to be either written off or paid back. People will have to stop spending, he said; they’ll have no other choice. “The problems are deep, widespread and intense.”

If that’s true in the US it’s at least as true in NZ.

Here’s something kind of cool – a company called Vectrix is selling plug-inelectric scooters for just US$11k. They’re being trialled by the NY Police Department, run for 35-55 miles on a charge and recharge in 2 hours. Just the thing for short range commuting. I think they could be a winner. Main disadvantage I think is the lack of storage space.

I love knowledge and so I’m naturally attracted to books, but when I see so many of them and consider how little time I have for actually reading, I wonder whether the information needs of humanity are so diverse or the ability of people to consume information so vast that there is actually a good reason for all of these books to be written.

Problem #1
There is a bug in Internet Explorer that means that if you float a div left with a left margin and there are no preceding float lefts in the containing box, the margin will be doubled! Great! . Same thing happens with right divs.

Two fixes are known. One is to add a “display: inline” to the div style. This apparently works because of another bug in IE. Therefore I’m reluctant to use it. An alternative is to put the floated div inside another div and float that one left with a padding. That way you don’t have to put the margin in the inner div and it doesn’t get doubled.

Problem #2
In the process of making the above fix I discovered another problem, which is possibly a bug in Firefox. It looks like you can’t do a float left and a float right on the same line. Firefox puts the second one on a new line. This is at least true if the width of the divs is not explicitly specified (actually now I think about it, don’t floated divs have to have an explicit width? – must check that).

The solution I used for this was to just float left both divs. They end up next to each other and I used padding to ensure that they had the right separation between them.

All nasty stuff. So that’s how I spent most of my Saturday, apart from figuring out how to move a template I had created on my laptop to my server.

Also bought a half a terabyte of external disk storage for 150 bucks. I think my internal drive may be close to failure, so time to back-up.