Ntuple Indemnity

I smell Hawaii envy, and it fills me with a burgeoning desire to put on the Beach Boys:

MP backs lobby for a sunny 11th province

A Canadian Alliance MP wants Canada to investigate the possibility of annexing the idyllic Turks and Caicos Islands.

Peter Goldring, MP for Edmonton Centre-East, has drafted a motion asking the federal government to study the practicality of “a union” that would see the islands adopted as “Canada’s 11th province.” He plans to introduce it when the House of Commons reconvenes this fall.

Canada has twice rejected the idea of annexing the archipelago in the past 30 years. But Mr. Goldring says it might make sense to reconsider in “this new day and age of international terrorism.”

“Maybe it would be good from a secure aspect of having a little piece of Canada in the south that Canadians could travel to with a greater sense of security than some of the other islands that are commonly visited,” he said from Edmonton.

Believe it or not, I think these guys are serious. More information, including maps for those of you who (understandably) have nary a clue where Turks and Caicos are, can be found at A Place in the Sun.

From the Simply Ridiculous Files comes this little gem in the National Post:

‘A few things slipped through’

The first issue of PureCanada, a magazine published by the Canadian Tourism Commission to lure tourists north, includes maps that, among other gaffes, omit Prince Edward Island and Yukon Territory.

Drafted by Fodor’s Travel Guides, a U.S. company that has worked with the federal commission for years, the maps also neglect the cities of Halifax, Fredericton and Brandon (while identifying some smaller towns), misidentify Newfoundland and Labrador (the province’s official name since 2001) as simply Newfoundland and spell Canada’s newest territory “Nunavit.”

Certain regions of Canada were ignored completely, among them northwestern Ontario.

Northwestern Ontario — from the Manitoba border to Lake Huron — isn’t referred to once in the magazine’s 185-odd pages, even though it is home to a growing eco-tourist industry.

Somehow I get this image of a similar article about Atlantis inscribed on a papyrus. Read the full article.

Have you stormed your Bastille today?

Admit it: you’ve queried your own name on a search engine at some point or another. I unashamedly do it every now and then, and am pleased to see that I have recently become the #1 Nick Tam on Google. However, my long-standing position on top of the search results for Nicholas Tam has fallen a slot to second place, despite over two hundred hits’ worth of past Scrabble statistics.

Unfortunately, despite all of its benefits, Google will still produce an entire generation of people who don’t know how to spell the word “googol”. At least they have a talent for puns.

I spent much of last night trying to adapt the current design of this page from HTML 4.01 Transitional / CSS1 to XHTML 1.0 Transitional / CSS2, and there are a few quirks I can’t seem to work around, so any help would be appreciated. Right now I have stylesheets controlling the typography and colour scheme, but my ultimate aim is to move entirely off the conventional table techniques and do the layout with CSS-defined boxes alone, so I can mark up the main page with a couple of <div> tags and not much else.

The problem is that I can’t set a minimum width such that scrollbars will appear and the page will stop compressing horizontally if you knock it under the width of the title image (currently 700px). So the whole layout goes nuts when it’s any narrower on that, not that anyone in his right mind still uses a 640×480 display. Right now the CSS2 attribute min-width isn’t doing a damn thing, and the float:right I’ve got going on the big list of links there tends to float screen-right, not page-right.

Tables it is for the time being, I suppose.