CelticBear’s Musings

Weird. I work on my blog on two different machines: A WindowsXP Pro with Firefox and IE 7 beta, and a Fedora Core 5 with Firefox and Opera, and my current blog layout has always looked fine. But I had someone tell me recently, and show me screenshots, of my blog’s layout completely wacked. I had no idea. And, I couldn’t find a browser that would recreate the problem, but hey, you can’t argue with screenshots.

So, I did something I should have done from the get-go and check the site with a CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ . (If you do any Web work and don’t constantly use a validator to make sure your code is good, you’re a putz. Well, so I’m a putz now and then as well.)

Well, indeed there were a few small problems. But all is good now, so, we’ll see. =)

As for my writing, if you’ve noticed up in my progress graph up in the top left, it hasn’t gone up much recently. That’s becuse the weekend before last I spent my time (aside from family time) doing research. I’ve reached a point in the story where it’s time to lay some exposition down and really set up time and place. Since it takes place about 300 years in the future and in some near star systems, I had to really research some of our nearby star systems and the likelihood of them having life-supporting planets (with or without some terraforming done.) Come to find out, we have a lot of dark dwarfs around us that ocassionally flare up now and then with fatal doses of radiation. Yikes!

So, stellar research (which is certainly fun, my being an amateur astronomer in any case,) figuring up a plausable method of faster-than-light travel that hasn’t been done to death already (so far I can’t find any reference to the method I came up with) and can be believeable without crippling myself by sticking in too many crunchy bits, and solidifying my timeline of events from now to when the story takes place 300 years from now. I love that kind of work, but it can be time consuming.

So (man I start paragraphs with “so” way too often,) I got a couple thousand more words done this last weekend, and hope to do about another 4 thousand this coming weekend. (I hate that I pretty much only have time/energy/brain-power to write on weekends.) At this rate I’ll probably be half done around late September. Nertz.