Since my last post, I got married (to Elizabeth) and I/we bought a new house. This being my (our) first house, I'm (we're) getting a crash course in home ownership.

Also off-topic: after shovelling the snow from our driveway and clearing an additional 4' extending into the road (thinking this would make it easier to drive in/out), the city snow plough came by and left a 4' wide x 20' long x 1' high mound of packed snow, 3' away from where my driveway ends. *grumble* I hate snow.

On the coding side of things, I continue to cobble together Perl scripts to scrape data from web sites of personal interest ... time permitting. :P

One particular site recently switched to text images (one image for each letter), each image having a unique (likely dynamically generated) URL (i.e., if the letter 'A' appears twice, the first bitmap 'A' has a different URL from the second bitmap 'A'). As a result, users are subjected to longer page load times (i.e., can't fetch cached images), while the site faces increased net traffic. In addition, the IMG tag contains no ALT or TITLE attributes. Fortunately, this change only applies to a small area of text on the web page, and scraping it doesn't require OCR. And while the ADA/Section 508 doesn't apply to the web site, I still think it is a bad example of web design. It is 2005, right?