light vessel automatic

There’s another typhoon coming. The last one was fairly mediocre as typhoons go – two or three hours of howling, and then it just suddenly stopped. This one, though, is scheduled to hit tomorrow, and it’s so huge and slow moving it might last twenty-four hours. So far, the typhoons I’ve experienced, while noisy, have failed (sometimes laughably) to live up to people’s predictions. This time, though, a lot of people seem genuinely nervous. This is an especially big, powerful one, they say. Wind speeds of 50 metres per second, which (if my maths is right) translates to 180km/h (about 112mph). Might not be able to leave the house for most of the weekend. Might lose electricity. Hoping my windows hold out, because horizontal rain whipping through the house would be a real pain in the leg.

Incidentally (and nothing to do with typhoons), in Kobe I was using a pretty new Apple Macintosh in an internet cafe, and so I checked this website to make sure it looks ok – and I found that it’s a bit screwed-up in Mac Internet Explorer. Readable, but messy. However, since this is IE’s fault (this website rigorously complies with web standards, I’ll have you know!), and since I don’t have a Macintosh, there’s nothing I can do to fix that. To anyone reading this using IE on a Mac, sorry is all I can say. But since Microsoft is no longer developing IE for the Mac, and since IE is a pretty terrible browser on any computer, you’d probably do well to use a different browser anyway – Opera or Mozilla Firefox, for instance. If you want to know why I keep going on about what a bad thing IE is, then have a look at this article.

While I’m on the subject, several very serious bugs in Internet Explorer have been discovered this week. To quote the afore-linked article’s self-summary:

What this means in reality is that if you click on a malicious link in an email or on the Internet, a malicious user can very quickly have complete control of your PC. And there is no patch available.

Which would also make it a very good idea to get hold of a different browser as quickly as possible.

Incidentally, I found that story through today’spapers, which looks like a rather interesting news-amalgamation thingy (and which I found, in turn, through metafilter)