A few comments about my little experiment ...

Welcome! So what's this site really about, anyway?

(Aside from being still under construction, that is. I am not finished with the design, but I feel comfortable enough to take it out for a spin.)

As you may have guessed, this site has very little to do with predictions, astrology, or anything like self-improvement platitudes. I'll say more on these below. The real purpose of this site is an exercize in Javascript and programmed randomness. It's dead easy to make a function select from a list of values randomly, but as soon as you reload the page two or three times, it's really obvious what's happening. My goal was to use functions with some random elements, but ones I could reproduce easily. I also wanted to play with CSS layout a bit and use a different CSS based on the time of day.

There are many useful resources in print and on the Internet for XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Here are just a few of the ones I find particularly useful:

About the verses: why astrology-type bullshit?

Let me be clear from the start. I consider astrology, Nostradamus, psychic predictions and other such things to be complete claptrap. It's not real, people. Your local paper's astrology column may as well be written with some sort of random generator; it wouldn't be any more or less accurate. I find it a bit depressing that people still gobble up this crap.

In high school, I once ran an experiment on my fellow students. I made up a selection of horoscopes, one for each astrological sign, with identical text on each. I asked that the students read the page and rate how accurately I had described them and how useful they thought the given advice would be to them in the coming week. Oddly enough, my little column was well received by everyone. Unfortunately, those that were inclined to believe in this sort of thing were little discouraged even after I explained the trick.

The verses and lucky colored object generated here are my own little poke at this sort of mysticism. I hope you enjoy them, but please don't take anything you read there seriously. Now the quotes at the bottom? Those may have some deeper hidden meaning, but most likely they're just from various forms of entertainment that I find enjoyable.

A hatred of Internet Explorer.

On the Predictions site, there's a short section slamming Internet Explorer, which of course you'll only see if you access the site using IE. It suggests, in a rather forceful way, that perhaps IE is not the best choice of browser one could make and then procedes to list a number of alternatives that are much better. (Really, this could be a much longer list -- there certainly aren't any worse browsers out there!) I basically hate Internet Explorer, but with good reason.

It's slow, buggy, and clunky. It completely fails to support CSS standards and no one should use it, nor write XHTML / CSS code using it as a test bed. It's a broken browser and there's no excuse for using it. I've heard the argument that it is the most popular browser in use, but I think that is more a function of people not knowing there is an alternative. In any case, it doesn't make it any less broken and continuing to code around it's problems instead of following proper CSS and XHTML standards isn't going to help the situation.

OK, I'll stop ranting about that for now! Thanks for visiting!

Fred McDonald is a programmer and database developer living in the US state of Wisconsin, midway between Chicago and Milwaukee. He is currently attending ITT Technical University so he can finally get his IT degree after almost twenty years of work experience. He tries to keep his LinkedIn profile up to date, but often spends too much of his copious free time tinkering with projects like this one or playing Plants vs. Zombies.

•  The Glorious Predictions 

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