March 2003 Archives

Friday Five

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1. What was your most memorable moment from the last week?

Brian's going-away dinner at Kyoto. It's hard to believe one of my best friends is spending most of the next three years overseas.

2. What one person touched your life this week?

I'm untouchable.

3. How have you helped someone this week?

I provided some bug reports for some folks in our east coast offices.

4. What one thing do you need to get done by this time next week?

Get a beta segment of Lighthouse put together for testing.

5. What one thing will you do over the next seven days to make your world a better place?

Support the U.S. efforts against Iraq.

Michael Moore knows fiction

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Friday Five

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the friday five

1. If you had the chance to meet someone you've never met, from the past or present, who would it be?

King Arthur...or whoever was responsible for creating his legend.

2. If you had to live in a different century, past or future, which would it be?

I guess "The Middle Ages" doesn't really count as a century, does it? Let's say the 1300s. I think I'd enjoy the feudal life, but probably not the health care of the day.

3. If you had to move anywhere else on Earth, where would it be?

New Zealand. Friendly people, beautiful country, driving on the wrong side of the road. Can't beat it.

4. If you had to be a fictional character, who would it be?

Roland of Gilead.

5. If you had to live with having someone else's face as your own for the rest of your life, whose would it be?

Michael Jackson. I'd never get bored.

Seriously, I think I'd go with Brad Pitt. 12 Monkeys style.

Who'd have thunk it?

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Reading the documentation actually does help!

I've been fighting with my "empty box" background image that I want to appear on all the pages of this blog. It was behaving "properly" in Internet Explorer, which usually means it's wrong. Netscape and Opera both were trying to center it across the entire window rather than just the right hand div, and Netscape was also scrolling it as I went up and down the screen rather than leaving it at the absolute bottom...which is where I said I wanted it to be.

On my third or fourth pass through the spec, I finally saw this stanza:
If the background image is fixed within the viewport (see the 'background-attachment' property), the image is placed relative to the viewport instead of the element's padding area.

Changing the attachment from "fixed" to "scroll" solved both the centering and scrolling problems at once. It's kind of counter-intuitive that fixed/bottom doesn't tack the image to the bottom, but that's the way it works. I'm just glad I finally stumbled across the answer.

that was awesome

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I just managed to import all my old greymatter entries in only about an hour. It just took a while to get the categories sorted out, as well as getting around the fact that it wouldn't let me log into greymatter for some reason.

It looks like I lost the line breaks in my original posts, but that's stuff I can live with.

There's still a little fine-tuning I need to do with the new layout, as well as transitioning all my other pages over. That will come over the next few weeks. First I need to update kasparfamily with the cool layout Mary Alice came up with.

Many thanks to elphaba for indirectly inspiring me to the new layout. She always has a cool musical tie-in, and that helped me finally get away from my black and white roots.

Also, thanks to Eric Meyer for the css/edge site which gave me some good ideas for getting rid of my javascript and general layout. I also own Cascading Style Sheets by him, but I'm so bad at reading a book before I start implementing things it hasn't gotten much use yet.

The Seinfeld Terrorism Episode

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What's less funny? Watching an aged Seinfeld cast reunited, or listening to their commentary on the "Terrorism Episode"?

Thanks to the randomness of my mind, I got to see both last night. The episode centered around a terrorist plot to put cell members in police and EMS uniforms, thus creating havoc. Hilarity did not ensue.

There was an appearance by some Marine drill instructor type as Jerry's dad, and a "spy captured by the enemy" subplot.

The cast commentary consisted of George, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer sitting around a table saying, "wow, that was a really bad idea." George had hair, and Kramer looked like he'd aged about thirty years. Not a pretty sight.

I had a separate dream about visiting my parents and my dog eating a roadkill cow in the ditch, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Testing layout

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Well, I've got a long way to go until this is ready to go live, but at least I can test it and still keep my old stuff in place.

I really like the UI for Moveable Type, but I have to learn a whole new set of variables and commands, not to mention the bugs I'll find in my new design.

Still having fun though.

argh

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This is why you always test before releasing on the unsuspecting public.
Fortunately I don't have much traffic, but it's frustrating for things to be broken nonetheless.
I think what's happening is that links in the body are totally throwing proportions out of whack, but I have no idea why.
I think I may just go ahead and move to Moveable Type in the great server migration of next week.

If you have set yourself on fire, do not run
Funniest set of captions I've read in a long, long time.

Tweet tweet holla!


I really wish I could figure out why the image is breaking out of its assigned area...

ok, it's time

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Going to try to de-java and css-ify things. Probably won't change the layout much for now because I'm still in love with the typewriter font, but I have a few ideas of sidebars I want to add and stuff.
Wait and see...