Month: October 2005

Iowa

Got back from Iowa yesterday around 11pm and all I have to say about Iowa is… corn – lots and lots of corn. It’s a 4 hour drive from Madison to Iowa City and for about three hours of that trip, all you see are rolling corn fields. Apart from the long time on the bus, the trip wasn’t half bad. We basically swept all of the races we were in and had Bucky pay for all of our meals. The only thing that really kind of sucked were our sleeping arrangements – the cold, hard floor of the Hawkeye field house.
Next week we’re off to Michigan (10hr. drive :P) – at least it’s a nice break from midterms.

My head hurts :(

Horray beer, Horray responsibility! XP
Anywho, tonight is the kick off of Halloween weekend. If you’ve heard anything about UW at this time of the year, you’d know that Halloween means that there are 75,000+ extra people in Madison and only 12% of those are students. Riots on State Street are also a matter of when and not if.

Riots and mass public drunkenness have been center stage the last few years, but things have changed this year. Highly restrictive new rules have been placed on university housing students and the city has brought in over a thousand extra police in addition to the Madison force. Huge stadium lights have been setup all along State St. (it’s as bright as day for 15 blocks) and all housing units have been changed to have only one exit point where there are police scanning IDs. It’s absolutely crazy and I’m sort of glad I’m going to be out of town all weekend at a regatta – otherwise I’d probably get arrested. Thankfully I was able to party tonight without getting beaten to a pulp by police sporting the latest fashion in riot gear, but apparently one of my neighbors wasn’t so fortunate 🙂

This Planet’s looking sexy

No, not earth – TCChat’s RSS feed aggregator (a.k.a Planet TCChat) has just received a CSS makeover. At first I thought the dark blue/grey contrast would look like crap, but as I went along it grew on me. I personally think it’s one of my better simple designs. One thing that I’m really starting to like is the blockquote style. The regular side indention looked too plain (even for this layout) so I made a small, slate-colored image to repeat on the left-hand y-axis. The end effect is a simple yet effective way to make the quote stand out.

The aggregator was really an after thought to the whole TC blog site, but now it’s really proving to be a valuable asset. Not only is it indexed by various different search engines on a regular basis, but it gets blog entries out into the open so members are introduced to blogs they might not read otherwise.

100,000,000!!

At 11:13:40 CDT 10/19/05 Firefox was downloaded for the 100,000,000th time. Only 344 days, 17 hours, and 14 minutes after the release of Firefox 1.0. It’s been a great year of setting the web on fire – here’s to 100,000,000 more!