Dude, he didn't stand when they played the anthem before a movie he was watching. BAD MOVE SUCKA. We even stood for the anthem when we saw a midnight showing of "World's Fastest Indian"--and we were the only people in the theater. An usher waited at the door and watched us nervously while the previews started, and I swear he looked relieved when we stood as the song started :)

The guy claims he wasn't looking to start a fight, but Thai people LOVE the king, and there's no greater way to show your ambivalence than not standing during that song, because it's a video basically celebrating his life and relationship to Thai mythology. It's VERY Thai, and this guy was probably exposed to it all his life, so he had to know that he was really stirring the pot, esp. for older Thais who might see him.

Thai Man Charged with Insulting King : NPR

And as soon as IE8 is out, PLEASE STOP USING IE7!! I know I'm about the last person to board this particular train, but bear with me. I just designed some pretty basic HTML report layouts using CSS. IE6 is unconscionably awful in it's lack of proper CSS support. When all I had to worry about was IE7, my reports looked wonderful with transparent PNG files, proper page breaks, and repeating headers and footers in the print stylesheet. After I was forced to rub IE6's taint all over the project, I soon ended up with conditional comments pointing to bastard.css for all things IE6.

I know there are a slew of other important things to web developers, but if you need to print something from HTML and you only have IE6, just say "it can't be done" to your BA, because whatever you end up with is just going to suck. The fact that fixed positioning affixes an object on EVERY printed page in IE7, while being completely ignored in IE6, is the difference between "Hey developer, please marry my daughter!" and "I'm tempted to fire you now, developer". The fact that transparency isn't supported in pre-IE7 PNGs is just...It just doesn't make any sense (there are a million hacks to get around this, including the infamous DirectX transformation, but they all suck, run terribly slowly, and none work for printing). I found an MS employee on the IE6 team who blogged about how it was OK because you could just use the directx hack, and that people should "complain to the PNG people about making transparency optional in their spec." That left him with about 400 foul-mouthed, sarcastic replies about MS and standards.

IE7 is no panacea either. What's with not supporting empty cell styles in IE7 tables? No data URIs? C'mon, Microsoft, Mozilla had these basics knocked out in Firefox 1.0.

Maggie was interviewed for a segment called "Inside the Box" on WCCO last month. For SOME reason, she didn't tell us, but my mom happened to catch it on TV and called me tonight. Maggie is the beautiful, sassy lass in the yellow hat.

Inside the Box