cos

Last June, near the beginning of the roadtrip, I reached LiveJournal's 750 friend limit. I had to start removing LJ's to friend new ones. Every few months I'd remove a bunch, and add a bunch I'd been waiting to add, and be at 750 again. But earlier this month, LiveJournal changed the limit to 2,000 (or 1,000 for unpaid accounts). Yay!

For the past couple of weeks I've been on a friending binge, adding a few new LJs every few days from my list of people I wanted to add but hadn't gotten around to making space for yet. Now at 763, but I'm not quite done yet...

P.S. I've been using LJ's classic "Dystopia" style ever since I recoiled with loathing at their first redesign in 2003, but I just switched to their newest style, Vertigo, and I really like it. Try it.

The Dead Bunny Conjecture.

What is it? You get to make it up. Explain or describe it to me.
(post your entry before reading anyone else's, unless you're stuck)

Last week, at Rami's, the Israeli falafel place in Coolidge Corner...

background: The guys who work there mostly speak fluent English and Hebrew. I'm not sure if all of them speak Hebrew because sometimes I see them talking to each other in English, so I usually approach them with English, but when I do try Hebrew (usually after hearing them talk to each other and confirming the person at the counter speaks it), they're usually delighted.

Esther, Kat, and I are sitting at a table eating. A group of three women walk in and start ordering in reasonably good but imperfect English. They're talking among themselves and ... oh, that's Arabic! One of them, however, apparently has very good Hebrew, so she starts talking to the guy behind the counter in Hebrew. He's delighted, the communication flows, and soon the other two Arab women are doing it, except their Hebrew isn't that good. Little do they know, however, that the guy behind the counter also has reasonably good Arabic... until one of the women asks the other how to say something in Hebrew (asking the question in Arabic), and the Rami's guy answers her. Now they're even more delighted, and the conversation continues in a mix of Arabic and Hebrew, full of "how do you say this?" and "where did you learn Arabic?"

I just listened in amusedly, and told Esther & Kat what was going on after we left. It made my day happier.

mzrowan's post, "Linguists: XOR?" asked whether there were languages which have different words corresponding to the OR and XOR operators in formal logic, since the English word "or" can be either. A common rumor has it that Latin had words "vel" and "aut" corresponding to these two logical operators, but

blk debunked that.

In fact, the English word "or" is not a logical operator. It rarely plays that role when used in natural language. However, it can be used in ways that resemble almost any operator in formal logic, not just OR and XOR! Over on Rowan's post I got into debates with a prescriptive grammarian who seems to believe almost obsessively that English "or" is equivalent to formal logic's XOR, and that got me thinking about the various ways we use the word "or" and the logical operators those uses most closely resemble...

Logical XOR
aerynne gave a good example of this: "Do you want to go to a movie or stay home?"
To a typical native speaker of English, the meaning is clearly that you have a choice of two alternatives - you could go to a movie, or you could stay home instead. Which one of those two alternatives do you prefer?

( It isn't exactly a logical operator... )

Logical AND
"You can take a bus or a train to get from Boston to New York"

This is a short form of "You can take a bus to get from Boston to New York or you can take a train to get from Boston to New York", and if I make this statement, what I intend to communicate is that both are true. A typical native speaker of English would understand that intent without spending any thought on the matter. Here, "or" really is acting almost exactly as a formal logical operator - in this case, AND

( Detailed dissection, discussion, and rebuttal of silly claims... )

Logical OR
"Mind if I put on some music?"
"Sure go ahead, if you have some jazz or blues. Otherwise, I'd rather you didn't."

Logically, if ( [you have some jazz] OR [you have some blues] ) then put some on. If you have one and not the other, that's okay. If you have both, that's okay too. I don't care. Heck, if you happen to have a compilation CD of alternating jazz and blues tracks, that fits just as well as an all-jazz CD or an all-blues CD. The value if the if clause is false only if you have neither.

Logical -> (implication)
"Go to the store on your way back, or I'll have to take the car tomorrow."
"Look both ways or you might get hit by a car."

You could make the case for these being XOR. In fact, as with the first example, these aren't exactly any sort of formal logical operator, and might resemble more than one. But when someone makes a statement of this form, what they mean to communicate are the consequences of the negation of the first part of the statement. IF you don't go to the store THEN I'll have to take the car. The logical operator "or" most closely resembles here is implication.

In English, "or" can be used to connect phrases, clauses, and words in many different ways. Some of these resemble logical operators - many different logical operators. Usually, the meaning is clear to a typical native speaker, from context and semantics. The word "or" by itself is not sufficient to convey its meaning. That doesn't make it any different from many other English words with varying meanings.

Rowan posted about it because sometimes, "or" is ambiguous. Most of the time, though, it's not. And trying to "solve" the ambiguity by tying "or" down to a specifical formal logic operator doesn't work - all it does is make you misinterpret some otherwise clear statements and questions, and make you label others as "bad grammar" when they are not.

[ Edit: ( Or works on three levels: grammatic, logical, and semantic. ) ]

Last weekend, I watched Barbarella with a bunch of people, including several who had never seen it before. One person, trying to convey to some of them what the movie is like, came up with the perfect way to explain it:

James Bond

Plan 9 From Outer Space

I'm running some usability testing for a Boston based web startup I work for part time, HeyLetsGo. I kept bugging them to do usability testing when they redesign the site, they're redesigning the site, and they asked me to do the tests :)

Would you like to come in for a usability test? You'd come to our office at Downtown Crossing, sit at a computer, and do some simple things that people do with the site (like sign up for an account and fill out a basic profile, or search for an event). I'd give you the list of things to do, and talk to you about each one to find out what was clear or confusing about how our site works, what made you pause and think, what could be better, etc. It'd take 60-80 minutes and we'd pay you $25.

We're looking for women in their 20s who use the Internet socially and like to go out to clubs, shows, comedy, concerts, etc. in metro Boston, and who do not yet use HeyLetsGo. Oh, and right now, I want to find at least one person who can come in this Friday during the day, and one who can come in on Monday either during the day or early evening.

Wanna do it? (comment here or email me)

1. Arisia: I'm going, of course. This will be my 12th in a row. For almost the first time, I'll be a panelist this year (I was on 2/3 of a poly panel two years ago). My definite plans for con programming so far (bold for the ones I'm on):

Friday, 7pm: "Why LiveJournal" - I'm not on it, but I wrote the panel suggestion & description
Friday, 9pm: "The Annihilation of Distance"
Friday, 10pm: polyamory coming out / explaining polyamory panel
Saturday, 10am: superfinemind's dagger demo (if I wake up in time)
Saturday, 2pm: "LiveJournal and your Social Life" (I'm moderating)
Saturday, 3pm: LiveJournal meet & greet
[edit] Saturday, 4pm: tisana's bellydance thing, perhaps?

2. Concerts: Two of my favorite bands from other places have shows coming up around here over the next month.

Friday, January 19th: Värttinä: 10+ piece Finnish folk band

Thursday, February 8th: Dry Branch Fire Squad: an all-star bluegrass band with a witty & hilarious storytelling frontman

Follow the links for my posts about both of them on

cosmusic - the posts include sound clips, if you wanna know what either band sounds like.

Wanna come?

One day last year, a friend asked me if I were going to her party that weekend. What party, I asked? It seems she'd posted about it on her LJ, twice. I read her LJ regularly, but had missed both of those posts, and she hadn't sent out email invitations, but was surprised I didn't know about the party.

Another person on my friends list (several, actually) sometimes posts on LJ to call a Dim Sum outing. He just wants some people to come, not any specific individuals, and expects to sometimes be surprised by people he wouldn't have expected to respond. LJ is the perfect tool for that.

People write on LJ for a mostly consistent readership they expect to know, so unlike with most blogs, LJ writers often don't think about newcomers or casual surfers when they write. This can fail, too, because even the people you know haven't been there for every post since the beginning, usually. There are some people on my friendslist who sometimes talk about "BPAL". Presumably, at some point, this abbreviation was defined, but I've never seen it in the year or so since I've seen it being used. On most non-LJ blogs, an abbreviation like that would be explained in each post it's used in, but on LJ, how long do you go before filling your new readers in?

barmaidblog is a well-done hybrid: she writes in LJ style, but with a "typical" blog audience in mind. One of her adaptations for that audience is that every reference to a person or event she expects her readers to be familiar with, is a link the first time it appears in a post. Links lead back to earlier posts so new readers can drill back as far as they need to build up as much context as they want at the time.

( ... and then there's the classic case of "breakup via LJ" - I've seen a few of those ...)

What are some ways people you read use LiveJournal that don't quite work? Or that do work, in LJ-specific and interesting ways?

I think I'm going to Louisville for New Years. And then, possibly, a short trip to Colorado with

emilyrose Jan 1-5. Normally, Louisville to Colorado is a trip I'd do in one day, but since it's winter, I think it would be wise to split it in two in case we have to go a lot slower. So... who do I (we?) know in Missouri, not far from I-70, for possible crash space on the night of the 1st?

Splitting up the drive to Louisville might be good too. Any of you living somewhere about 3-6 hours from Boston in that general direction (NYC, Philly, Albany/Troy) want to have me over on, say, Friday night?

Coloradans: How bad (or okay) is it likely to be, getting to the front range from the east via I-70, early next week? Weather report for Limon, CO calls for snow on the weekend but clearing up Sunday and clear on Monday...

mzrowan inadvertently reminded me of this NPR program I posted about which is really funny even if you're not Canadian! I was taking a Canadian roll call but it was long enough ago that I'm sure I have some new Canadians reading my LJ, hence this reminder post. Comments disabled here, go there.

I signed up to be on some panels at Arisia this year. I don't know for sure which panels they'll approve and which ones they'll put me on, but the ones I want most are a poly panel, and these two LJ panels that I proposed. I'm supposed to write a short "bio" they could put in the panelist blurbs section of the program booklet (500 character limit). What do I write?

Are these like the silly blurbs you see in community theater play programs, or background relevant to the panels, or random info about the person? I'm stuck about how to start. Comment some suggestions for me? Or if you want, write a whole proposed mini-bio I could use if I like it.

[ Boston people: Amanda Palmer solo show at the Paradise tonight, 18+ ]

I haven't posted on

cosmusic for so long, some of you may not even know (or remember) I have it. I have a feeling I'm going to start posting there again now, occasionally. Just now I wrote a story, actually a couple of stories, about the first time I saw the Dresden Dolls and the first time I saw Amanda perform solo. Starring

amadea and

electricube and peripherally

dietrich. Hop over and read it.

Who wants to go see Amanda's solo gig at the Paradise tonight?

Update:

mzrowan, who decided to come along, posted about some covers at last night's show.

queue also posted... and now I wonder at how many people think of Everybody Knows in terms of the Concrete Blonde cover.

Buffy musical episode at the Coolidge Corner Theater this Friday night at midnight. Who wants to go?

( Edit: ... )

If you use a @yahoo.com email account, I can't send you email. Nor can a lot of other people.

Yahoo either likes it that way, or is totally uninterested in fixing it.

Sometime this past weekend, the servers that receive mail for @yahoo.com addresses started deferring email from most IP addresses, as far as I can tell. For the geeky among you: Connect to any of Yahoo's MX's, and you get "451 Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.50" before you even get a chance to EHLO. For the non-geeky: Yahoo's basically saying "go away, come back later and try again", over and over and over, without even trying to find out what you're trying to send or who it's to. Ever since then, any email I've sent to an @yahoo.com address has just waited, deferred, for days. It seems that sometimes, on rare occasions, it gets through - but usually only after a day or longer.

Yahoo isn't doing this to everyone. I tried connecting to their mail servers from a number of places, and while I got immediate deferral from most, it didn't happen when I tried to connect from world.std.com. I'm not sure what exactly they're doing. Maybe they have a list of known major mail servers they allow through. Maybe they're giving special treatment to the companies that pay them for better email service (you might remember the brouhaha about that from this spring). Whatever they're doing, they're not telling, and they don't wanna talk.

I tried submitting requests through their online help form, twice. No response, days later.
I tried calling their corporate office, and their customer care number. I got dead ends.
They insisted I pay them for support or they couldn't help me. No transfers to managers (unless I know their full names). No messages for someone to call me. No tickets opened. Just a few hours wasted making phone calls.

If you use Yahoo for email, please leave them.

And if you want to get any emails from me, let me know what your non-yahoo address is.

sexy, intense, bits of creepy, totally hilarious
Fantastic (ambiguity intendend). Cute model of New York City. Lots of sex (gay, straight, other, and variations)
"characters and story developed with the cast"

See it.

[Edit:

amare wrote: "[my husband's] comment about the movie was that he didn't know whether it made him want to fuck or cry and I think that just about summed it up for me too, except I think it made me want to do both."]

I tried out LiveJournal's new LJ Talk, a jabber server integrated with LiveJournal - mainly because it was so easy! In iChat preferences, I added an account of type "jabber", username cos@livejournal.com, with my LJ password. You could do the same in Trillian, GAIM, or any other IM program that supports jabber [edit: apparently the free version of Trillian doesn't do jabber, only the paid version]. My favorite things about LJ Talk (besides not having to create a new account) are:

I can talk to people on gmail/gtalk without having a gmail account: I add user@gmail.com to my buddylist.

Since LJ's jabber server automatically treats mutual-friend links between your LJ accounts as approved buddy links between your jabber accounts, it adds a "who's online" feature to LJ for mutual friends.

You can now chat with LJ users as soon as you mutually friend them without having to find some other way to traid AIM names first, via comments or email.

So this post is my way of encouraging my LJ-friends to use LJ Talk. If you don't already have an IM program that supports jabber, LJ provides one for Windows or OS X (it seems to be a skype competitor).

P.S. Massachusetts people: Deval Patrick rally tomorrow on the Common, 2:30pm.
Also, The Nields at the Iron Horse in Northampton this evening (comment/email if you're going?)

"Quakers: pretending to be your friends since before LJ!"
--

mzrowan

Yeah, two posts in one day. Congress is about to legalize torture.

The US Senate will vote today or tomorrow on, and probably pass, the Republicans' torture bill, which has already passed the House. Congress goes into recess after tomorrow, and Bush is eager to sign this bill quickly. The bill will:

Give Bush the authority to decide what is and isn't torture (and we already know his opinion on that defines a lot of turture as "not")

Deny noncitizens (including permanent residents w/green cards) the right to ever go to court, at all, if the military or the Bush administration labels them "enemy combatants"

Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich summed the bill up as "Everything we don't believe in" and a letter from over 600 law professors sent to Congress says,

"Taken together, the bill's provisions rewrite American law to evade the fundamental principles of separation of powers, due process, habeas corpus, fair trials, and the rule of law, principles that, together, prohibit state-sanctioned violence. If there is any fixed point in the historical understandings of constitutional freedom that help to define us as a people, it is that no one may be picked up and locked up by the American state in secret or at an unknown location, or without opportunity to petition an independent court for inspection of the lawfulness of the lockup and of the treatment handed out by the state to the person locked up, under legal standards from time to time defined by Congress. This core principle should apply with full force to all detentions by the American state, regardless of the citizenship of detainees."[ Edit: Here's Senator Russ Feingold's address to the Senate. "The key problem is in the definition of 'cruel or inhuman' treatment. [...] The way the provision is drafted, it even seems designed to grant immunity to senior officials who authorized coercive interrogation techniques." ]

A lot of Democrats are going to vote against it, but some are not, and they're not holding together to try to block it. Even if they can't actually block it, if they hold together, they can make a point of it in the elections, and change the law if they win control of Congress. But just like Kerry couldn't effectively campaign against the Iraq war in 2004 because he'd voted for it, so Democrats who vote for this will have a hard time campaigning against torture.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) says that some Senate Democrats tell him, "We can't oppose this, look what happened to Max Cleland," and "We have to go along with it because we'll never be able to explain it back home."

Make sure they know otherwise.
Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121 - ask for your Senators (2 calls)
Harry Reid: 202-224-3542 - ask him to hold the Democrats together to oppose this
Patrick Leahy: 202-224-4242 - deserves a thank you call
[edit: Russ Feingold: 202-224-5323 - deserves a thank you call ]

Pass it on!

P.S. Read

aroraborealis's post about Guatemala

Edit, Thursday evening: ( Passed, 65-34 )

I have a mental quirk about remembering where people live: I have two separate indexes, one keyed by person, the other keyed by location. The first one updates when I find out someone has moved, but not the second - that one usually only updates when I see the person in that location (sometimes, if I meet someone for the first time who lives somewhere else, I enter them in the second mental index correctly, but sometimes I don't). If I want to remember where you live, I can. But if I'm visiting somewhere and try to remember who's there, I often miss some people simply because I've never hung out with them there. It can go on like that for years, and through multiple visits.

Help me by filling out this poll! If you want me to remember where you are, that is :)

After a week or two, I'm going to "backdate" it to the future, so it'll be near the top of

cos and you can easily find it and updated it if you wish. [Edit: actually, nevermind - I'm just linking here from my top-of-journal post]
( LJ Poll: Where are you? )
[Edit: If you checked "somewhere you didn't list at all", leave it in a comment?]

I wrote last month that I've been blogging for John Bonifaz, and I've posted links to some of my blog posts on

coslinks, which only a few of you (comparatively) read. I've spent so much time trying to make the blog interesting for other readers, but I wonder whether many of the people I actually know have seen much of it. So...

Yesterday, Arizona's house minority leader, Phil Lopes, told me his story of running for office with public financing:

The fiasco with computer voting in Maryland in last Tuesday's primary:
I'll probably have another post on this later.

A story about a spoiled election here in Boston less than three years ago, when an elected office went to the candidate who got fewer votes; and the recount I participated in, which turned on a couple of ambiguous write-in votes.

Gerrymandering in Massachusetts - Should Voters Pick Candidates, or Candidates Pick Voters? (crossposted to Blue Mass Group):

Massachusetts vs. Microsoft - the Open Document Format:

(unrelated to Bonifaz) Rep. Tim Toomey's editorial on in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants:

The special election in California's 50th district, to fill corrupt former Rep "Duke" Cunningham's seat, was a mess, the vote count hard to trust. But a few weeks ago, a court ruled that it couldn't be challenged, Catch-22:

My post about dreams_of_wings's voter registration led me to write, Same Day Registration - Not Just For New Voters (crossposted to Blue Mass Group). I followed up with a series of posts about election day registration:
- A story I picked up in CT while volunteering for Ned Lamont, about voters denied at the polls and the effort one of them went to to vote.
- The former head of MassVote wrote about how Bill Galvin blocked same day registration legislation in Massachusetts.
- Town Clerks want same day registration and studied it in 2004.

Watch on YouTube

link to this video

I hope you find some of these fascinating, and send the links around. Today, I'm working on a post about how our incumbent Secretary of State Bill Galvin is considering bringing Diebold touchscreen machines to Massachusetts, so look for that later. In the meantime, you can watch the video of John Bonifaz answering questions about the Ohio recount and computer voting machines.

[ Massachusetts people: Today is the deadline to register to vote. Every city & town's elections department or clerk's office is open until 8pm today for people to register in person; mailed forms must be postmarked by today. ]

I'm a paid blogger.

Since the spring, I've been working part time as the campaign blogger for John Bonifaz, running for secretary of state in Massachusetts. The Secretary's most important responsibility is being in charge of elections - you may remember Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris who caused the debacle in Florida in 2000 by refusing to allow counties time to hand-count the votes and insisting on certifying uncertain results; you may remember Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell who tried to suppress voter registration in 2004, and also prevented a full count afterward. In fact, his opponent in the court battle over counting the votes was the very same John Bonifaz, who flew to Ohio the day after the election and was lead counsel for the candidates who went to court to ask Ohio to count all the votes.

Bonifaz is a national leader in advocating for voting rights and election reform, and an amazing candidate for this office:

He founded the National Voting Rights Institute in 1994 and has led it since then.
He was the lead counsel in the court fight to count the votes in Ohio after the 2004 election.
When the MA legislature tried to not fund a voter-approved clean elections law in 2002, Bonifaz successfully beat them in court and got clean elections candidates funded.
He proposes a voters' bill of rights as the core of his platform.
For his innovative legal work on campaign finance reform, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a grant, commonly known as "the genius award"
He's also the co-founder of the After Downing Street coalition, and was the lawyer who sued the Bush administration in federal court in early 2003 saying they had no legal authority to invade Iraq - the court agreed with his arguments but decided a remedy was not possible so threw out the suit, and he wrote a book about it, Warrior King.

... but despite his tremendous qualifications, he's expected to lose to an incumbent who's been asleep at the wheel. ( why? ) A lot of voters will see a familiar name and an unfamiliar name, and vote for the former.

Galvin has been avoiding Bonifaz, and every invitation to a debate or forum with him, all year - until this week! If you're in Boston, please come to the candidate forum tonight at Medford City Hall:

Democratic candidates for Secretary of State

Medford City Hall

Even though he's running for a Massachusetts office, I joined his campaign because I think it's of national importance. You may know that in 2004 I helped organize a press conference about electronic voting machines, registered voters in Ohio, then went to Florida to volunteer for Election Protection. I'm convinced that we've got a serious voting rights & election integrity crisis, and to fix it, we need to elect reformers to office. Most especially, we need to elect some great Secretaries of State all around the country, who will show some real leadership.

So, I've been blogging for Bonifaz since late March, promoting him online. I've made the blog interesting to readers from out of state by covering hot topics in election reform, such as renewing the Voting Rights Act, the Busby/Bilbray special election in California, the protests after the Mexican election, Verified Voting's call for volunteers, an editorial about Diebold voting machines in Utah, the Vermont campaign finance case in the Supreme Court, and an excellent report on CourtTV about election integrity problems.

If what happened in Florida and Ohio disturbed you, if you know (or fear) that things like this are happening all around the country, if you'd like to see some national leadership on these issues, this is my invitation. Watch John Bonifaz' speech at the state convention. Wherever you are, read the Bonifaz blog and make comments (seeing comments will make other readers more likely to return). If you live in Massachusetts, make sure you're registered to vote, and vote on September 19th. Whether you're in Massachusetts or not, spread the word, send or post links, contribute (we need to get TV ads up or voters will have no idea who Bonifaz is), and comment on the blog.

If you're nearby, come to the forum in Medford this evening! See you there, I hope. [Update: Galvin didn't show up in Medford, and says he never planned to. He didn't come to the forum in Worcester the following night either. The press still isn't reporting on this, but most of the blogs are pissed. ]

[a meta-post, and possibly my most boring post yet... :)]

Until recently, I had never removed anyone from my LJ friends list. Mostly, I only added people I met in person, though there were a small handful of journals of people I talked to a lot online, or that I just really wanted to read because they wrote great posts. I've been using filters to read since long before LJ added "Default View" (which I don't use), so I shuffle people on and off my reading filters to adjust which ones I read regularly, but I like seeing names on bold on userinfo pages to indicate who I know.

Earlier this summer, near the beggining of the roadtrip, I reached 750 friends, LJ's maximum. I was meeting new people on the trip who I wanted to add, but couldn't, so I dropped a few communities I don't read much anyway, and soon I was back to 750. I kept a list of who I wanted to add and when I got home and had time to deal with it, I went through and found old inactive syndications (RSS feeds) and communities and removed them, added everyone I wanted to add... and I was right back at 750.

So this week, I combed through and removed journals from my friendslist, of people who:

I don't know, or may have met once or twice but never knew well to begin with,
I've had little or not contact with in the past couple of years,
and who don't have me friended.

There are actually I few more that meet those criteria who I left on, but now I have room for 12 :)

I'm going to this tonight.
@Ovation, 869 Atlantic Ave (between Washington & Vanderbilt), Brooklyn, 10pm to late (I hope to get there ~9)
Come!

I've been making web sites for candidates and political groups this year, and the longest part of any new design is making Internet Explorer 6 show the site the same way that it looks in pretty much every other browser. I've run into so many bugs in the way IE6 interprets CSS, and so many hacks and workarounds for them, I have a hard time even keeping track of the ones I've solved. Usually, it's just a matter of spending some time googling and reading, or asking some of my friends who have a lot more web design experience, and then experimenting with the information and tricks I get.

This time, though, Google isn't helping, and my web designer friends have never heard of the problem and have no idea.

The CSS property white-space lets you control how web browsers deal with white space in the HTML source of a bunch of text. Normally, browsers collapse all strings of consecutive whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) into single spaces, then wrap text to fit within the box or window - that's white-space: normal, and is the default for most tags. If you apply the style white-space: pre, then the browser will display all white space exactly as it is in the source, preserving your newlines and extra spaces and tabs - that's the default for <pre> tags. A third possibility is white-space: nowrap, which is not the default for any tag. If you apply that style, the browser will still collapse all consecutive whitespace (including newlines) into a single space, but it won't wrap text, so linebreaks appear in the display only where tags like <br /> tell the browser to put them. (CSS 2.1 adds two more values, pre-wrap and pre-line, but I don't know how many browsers support those)

I have a list on a web site where I want to prevent the browser from wrapping text, so I applied white-space: nowrap to the list's class, and that works beautifully in every browser I tested with. But then, I needed to add a few paragraphs in some places inside this list, that should auto-wrap. So I applied the style white-space: normal to just those paragraphs. And in most browsers, that works - the list (the container block) is still "nowrap", but the paragraphs (blocks inside the list) are "normal" and autowrap.

But not in Internet Explorer. Whether I apply white-space: normal from the stylesheet in the .css file, or explicitly in the tag (<p style="white-space: normal">), IE seems to ignore it. The "pre" style of the container tag gets inherited, and the paragraphs stretch out several screenwidths to the right.

Have any of you encountered this? Do you know of any workarounds short of brute-force splitting up into lots of little separate blocks? Do you know any web designers who are good with CSS that you could send this link to?

Update: ( the solution )

I'm heading down to Connecticut either tonight or early tomorrow morning, to volunteer for Ned Lamont, running against Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Election day is tomorrow, Tuesday, August 8th. Anyone wanna tag along and help?

Schedule depends on whether the Lamont people find a place for me (us) to stay tonight, and/or tomorrow night. Probably spending the day in Willimantic (east of Hartford) and going to Meriden later. If you wanna come, text me, email my pager, or IM my phone. Or If you live in CT and wanna put me up for a night :)

Wish us luck!

Update: I'm in Willimantic, east of Hartford, for the day; in the evening I'll go to the press center in Meriden to blog. Watch for a post from me on MyDD.

Morning rush at this polling place, 8-9am, we had 18 voters - I think that's heavy turnout for a primary.

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English "or", logical OR/XOR

Barbarella

participate in my usability testing? (Boston)

Arisia, and some concerts coming soon after

Using LJ

roadtrip question

Who's Canadian?

a bio?

Amanda Palmer

Buffy musical on the big screen

No Yahoo Email

Shortbus

LJ Talk

American Friends

"Everything we don't believe in"

Where are you?

Election Stories

John Bonifaz

first friendslist cleanup

New York people

CSS problem: IE6 ignores "white-space: normal"

Help beat Joe Lieberman