I spiffed up the blue alternative stylesheet and now it's called <a href="css/alt-blue.css">Night Blue</a>, and I created a new green one called <a href="css/alt-green">Bean Green</a>.

Yahoo is debuting their new homepage.  Sad to say, they went with a table-based layout.

TD stands for "table data", according <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.6">to the W3C</a>.

I learned two new Chinese expressions today, qi3ren2 you4tian1 and ren2zou3 cha1liang2.

There is a topic I've been wanting to write about for a while now, just to get it off of my shoulders.  It really bothers me when I hear Americans say "it's not real!" in regards to manufactured and possibly pirated goods.  What does that mean, "real"?  What conditions does something have to meet to qualify as real?  For example, I bought a pair of Levi's at the Silk Market, and Shirley kept trying to convince me that they probably weren't real.  They have the leather-like Levi's tag on the back of the waist, they have the "authentic Levi's" notice printed on the inside of one of the pockets; in all likelihood they are either seconds (defective, not up to standards products) from factory that makes jeans and sells them to Levi's, or perfectly fine jeans from the same factory that runs overtime to make some extra money on the side.  So what makes those jeans "not real"?  

A reasonable objection based on the above would be to ask whether they are really made by a Levi's-endorsed factory.  Based on this article in Business Week, "<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_27/b3790136.htm">Clear Sailing for Pirates</a>", I would say that yes, these clothes or other commodities are produced in corporate-backed factories.  How else would Safeguard soap be showing up in the Middle East?  Or "bogus" Duracell batteries be passing for the "real" item in the USA?  My beef is not with the main point of the article, I respect the right of corporations to defend their copyright laws.  But please don't go calling these products "bogus", "fake" or "not real" and brainwashing the American public into thinking that a signature from your CEO and a few extra dollars on the price-tag makes something more "real".

On an unrelated note but on the same topic I think it's interesting that, for example, you can find Safeguard soap in the Phillipines.  I don't ethically endorse pirating goods (disclosure:  I've bought my share of pirated CD's), but as a starting point for another argument you could draw parallels between Napster and the "manu-pirates", in terms of bringing quality products to "users" who wouldn't have it otherwise and preparing them to be consumers in the modern market sense.