Ntuple Indemnity

Admit it: you’ve queried your own name on a search engine at some point or another. I unashamedly do it every now and then, and am pleased to see that I have recently become the #1 Nick Tam on Google. However, my long-standing position on top of the search results for Nicholas Tam has fallen a slot to second place, despite over two hundred hits’ worth of past Scrabble statistics.

Unfortunately, despite all of its benefits, Google will still produce an entire generation of people who don’t know how to spell the word “googol”. At least they have a talent for puns.

I spent much of last night trying to adapt the current design of this page from HTML 4.01 Transitional / CSS1 to XHTML 1.0 Transitional / CSS2, and there are a few quirks I can’t seem to work around, so any help would be appreciated. Right now I have stylesheets controlling the typography and colour scheme, but my ultimate aim is to move entirely off the conventional table techniques and do the layout with CSS-defined boxes alone, so I can mark up the main page with a couple of <div> tags and not much else.

The problem is that I can’t set a minimum width such that scrollbars will appear and the page will stop compressing horizontally if you knock it under the width of the title image (currently 700px). So the whole layout goes nuts when it’s any narrower on that, not that anyone in his right mind still uses a 640×480 display. Right now the CSS2 attribute min-width isn’t doing a damn thing, and the float:right I’ve got going on the big list of links there tends to float screen-right, not page-right.

Tables it is for the time being, I suppose.

I went to a Stampede Breakfast this morning. They served the best flapjacks I’ve had since, well, the last Stampede Breakfast I attended. They were of the golden, moderately crispy, CD-ROM-size variety (i.e. a diameter of 5.25″ plus or minus a negligible irregularity), and didn’t congeal into messy flattened blocks of flour upon immediate contact with maple syrup.

The entertainment itself was passable, though it hardly attracted my attention, other than that one band playing a country hoedown cover of “Johnny B. Goode”. Nobody got pied.

Thursday is my Scrabble night at the Calgary club. It’s a great place, full of friendly people who could probably wipe the floor with you unless you’re already an NSA player. Well, mostly friendly – I say “mostly” because last week, there was a major altercation between two of the top players that resulted in copious shouting and foul language, and seemed to imply that fisticuffs were not entirely out of the question. In the club’s 22-year history, this was the first incident of the sort; in fact, founder Siri Tillekeratne is a former NSA Director of the Year, and just last week he was commended by Joe Edley (renowned multiple champion and editor of Scrabble News) for running arguably the best club on the continent. (“Then this happens,” he said earlier tonight.)

As I discovered tonight, the whole incident was over a tile that was accidentally spun off the board in the second turn of the game. Anyone who thinks this game relieves stress, think again.

Another notable event tonight was when I played MARRIEDS for a whole whack of points. Yes, it’s a word. Its significance is that only two weeks ago, a number of us at the club were signing a wedding card for Shannon Burns, fellow Calgarian and Scrabble’s best cartoonist. Anna-Marie wanted to say something original, so I suggested that she write “MARRIED takes an S.” She loved it.

Overall, though, I didn’t do well tonight – only winning one of three games. I actually played well enough to post a nice high losing score of 410 against Siri, but was docked 30 points for going several minutes overtime. My win-loss record in club play has been abysmal this season – my win percentage is 0.414 – but I love this game anyway.

It’s not exactly a well-hidden fact that for several years – since around 1999, I reckon – my handle on various messageboards and services such as ICQ was “IronParrot”. In fact, it is still my active handle on Entmoot, which is the only messageboard from that era that has survived the winds of change without descending into unbearable oblivion like some boards I know.

So it must be a rather cosmic coincidence that pretty much the only Google search result for that name that isn’t me is actually the Xanga site of someone I knew in junior high. I do wonder from whence she decided to take on that handle, since I am at least somewhat certain that she didn’t know I used it. It must be something to do with memetics, one of those words that triggers me to immediately open LeXpert and discover that MEME is only playable in SOWPODS, while MEMETICS has yet to make an appearance in any dictionary despite over 72,000 Google hits.

The real reason I used that name has nothing to do with the fact that The Maltese Falcon is a favourite of mine in both literature and film, despite the apparent connection.