As I may have mentioned earlier, my profession is medical technologist. I’m one of the guys who figures out if you’ve got some nasty bug growing inside of you. As such, I occasionally get emails from my certifying agency The American Society for Clinical Pathology or ASCP. I rarely take the opportunity to read these emails as I frankly find little of value in them. Today, however, I did take a peek at it and found something a bit peculiar:

Figure 1: Complete ASCP Calendar, eh?

Gee, that looks familiar! Now where have I seen something like that before? Oh right, I know! Right at the bottom of my screen in my Dock!

Figure 2: Our Beloved iCal

So, they swapped the palette to blue and removed “JUL” from the top. They didn’t even bother changing the date. How very, very sleazy! You know, with all the money I’ve given them in test fees you’d think someone could have found the cash to, you know, buy an original calendar icon instead of stealing one from Apple.

To add insult to injury, when http://ascp.org was redesigned last year they blocked browsers like Safari from even visiting the site with a lame assed user agent sniffer. While looking for some necessary forms I got only a terse “This site doesn’t work in your browser” message. They’ve since fixed that, but it still annoyed the piss out of me. I guess whomever they’ve hired to design their web site and email correspondence must really have contempt for Macs.

I’ve had a couple of requests for a pattern for the Happy Mac cross stitch I did a while back and it got me to wondering if I could make a convincing simple chart with just CSS. Answer: for the most part yes.

Caveat: I haven’t really checked this exhaustively in your browser, unless your browser is Safari. If it doesn’t look right, well that’s why I included the PDF version.

Check out the Happy Mac chart

Jump straight to the PDF version