This is the 2nd installment in the Israel/Palestine series. We left the story in part 1 just after the Romans destroyed the second temple, kicked many Jews out of Jerusalem and renamed the area Syria Palaestina.

People getting married seem to think it's a lovely romantic thing to release butterflies at their wedding. I personally don't really see the relevance, but then, I can't really fathom all the mushy sentimental nonsense most people think passes for romance anyway, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

My students had their mid-semester test last night. It was a practical programming test, held in the computer labs from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.

My sister is getting married next March, and I am already sick of this whole damn wedding thing. I can't believe what an enormous, expensive rigmarole it is.

I don't really like experiencing major life uncertainty. And I've been going through some lately, although pretty much vicariously. The uncertainty I have is only a pale shadow of the uncertainty my flatmate, Stephen, is experiencing, but I'd like to whinge anyway :)

I wrote the other day about my tension between wanting to respect the beliefs of others, whilst not agreeing with those beliefs and not condoning the actions that arise from those beliefs (although, I'm not sure I explained it so succinctly). Today I came across ReligiousTolerance.org, which has some very well thought out ideas on this.

So, what's going on in the middle east? I've been fairly ignorant about world affairs. I've been trying to educate myself recently, but if you know more about this than me, please enlighten me. What follows is my understanding of the ancient history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I will add more in future.

I quite often come across badly designed websites. But I always wonder, should I do something about it? Should I send an email to the company and politely tell them about the usability issues I encountered?
How would someone react getting an email out of the blue telling them their site sucks? Even if I could phrase it nicely, would people take this as an insult? Or as constructive criticism?

One important part of designing websites for user interaction is creating effective and usable forms. There are several main cases where users will have to fill out a form in an ecommerce site: (1) completing the checkout process, (2) registering with the site, and (3) contacting you for information/quotes etc. In addition, depending on your site, you might have other functions that require people to fill out html forms.

For someone who is researching how people organise stuff, I've got a very badly categorised set of posts. Almost everything is categorised in Other (including this post, ironically).