the corner office

I had a mishap with a glass of Creme Soda yesterday, and my keyboard's a bit gunked up. Especially the qqqqqqqqqq, xxxxxxx and 444444444 keys. I'm not sure if it's worth opening up this keyboard to degunkify it - I've had this cheapo keyboard for over 2 years, and by now a couple of the keys' labels (like s, c, m and n) have completely worn away. If I didn't touchtype, I'd be lost. My left-shift key has an indentation worn into it, like a sandstone sharpening tool. The reason I haven't replaced it yet, is that I absolutely love the feel of this keyboard. I'm dreading having to find and break in a new one.

I also ran into a Firefox-unfriendly site today, for the first time in ages. I was buying a few books from Kalahari.net and their checkout page wouldn't let me proceed - very obviously some Javascript brain-deadness. On a whim, I went to Ronwen's machine, fired up IE and was able to get the order through. I'd do my civic duty and ask 'em politely to consider the IE-free masses, but they've yet to respond to my first "your page don't work" email to them, from last night. Shoddy customer service, but they're a fair bit cheaper and apart from this incident seem to be more on the ball than anyone else, so we endure.

Finally, I solved a really stupid font-rendering problem with Gnome that's been bugging me for ages. Firefox (which uses GTK2), wouldn't render text properly on certain websites - particularly some of the more common blog templates (a la Blogspot and the like). For certain pieces of text (like headings), only the first word of a line would be rendered, and the remaining words from that line would be missing. If you selected the text, then it'd display, but it'd erratically disappear again as the screen was redrawn. After ages of Googling and trawling the Gentoo forums, I isolated it as a problem relating to my particular Gnome configuration. In a nutshell: it was always a problem in Gnome, but it wouldn't happen in something like fluxbox, until I fired up the gnome-settings-daemon. The problem would then manifest until I killed the daemon and the gconfd daemon that got fired up as well (all these keywords for Google). After some more fiddling, I found out that changing Gnome's font rendering options in the 'Font' control panel fixed it. I'd been using "Monochrome," but switching to one of the other options made the problem go away. Far too obscure!