Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones

hey, now you can get conditional comments to work in multiple stand alone versions of IE! I'll have to tell Doug over in QA (and by over in, I mean sitting next to me).

Super simple clearing floats

Hey, I bet this would let me get rid of the clearing element from Advoy. It's about time. I'll have to poke around position is everything and figure out what that _height:1%; hack for IE is all about.

South Park: The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers - TV Tome

looking for a copy of this episode.

Jobs @ OK/Cancel: Interface Designer / Front-End Developer, Baxter Bioscience

One day I will be successful at finding good help. It hasn't happened yet, but I can't keep doing the work of two people forever, so it has to happen eventualy, right?

Recent Earthquake - 2 miles away

A microearthquake occurred at 9:08:03 PM (PST) on Saturday, February 26, 2005. The magnitude 2.9 event occurred 1 km (1 miles) SE of Encino, CA.

Faceted Navigation

Hey, this is what the "filter" interface I designed for our next project at work does. It's an Ajax interface that lets you dynamically filter on the value of just about any field of a table.

Skull Ranch Productions - Crispin Hellion Glover's ''What Is It?'' Movie Trailer - Streaming Video

creepy stuff

Backyard Artillery

This is one of the things I miss about living outside of town, having a back yard in which to engage in destructive behavior. Ah, but here's something, an Urban PVC Trebuchet.

Peter Morville’s Honeycomb

weekend reading. via asterisk.

Base London - Unmodel Behaviour

dude. i don't even know what to say to that.

Bright Creative: Brilliant Design Solutions

hadn't visited Dave Shea's professional site since it first launched (bright red on white at the time?) but I was just reading an interview with him and anticipating the new book, so I went and had a look. I'm not sure about the general legibility of the text, but what struck me about the design is the gradient over on the right. Of course everyone's been over-using gradients, it's the next phase after drop shadows and transparent overlays, but I like his twist on it. He's filtered it in such a way that it looks almost like it was painted. From what I've been reading and observing I think there are two directions design is headed in. One is towards clean and flat layouts, lose the gradients and shadows and instead use good proportions and subtle harmonious color palettes. The other is towards more organic design, scripting font faces and organic textures. Dave's gradient is a move towards the later.

Thinking With Type

Perhaps it's time I read another person's take on typography before going back to read Bringhurst again. Though Jeff would probably have me read Interaction of Color which I got for Christmas after the colors I subjected him to today. What can I say, I like a good orange/green clash every once and a while. Of course what I'd really like to read (though it would likely be mostly review) is The Zen of CSS Design.

Planned Parenthood Advocates Anal Sex

Ok, so it's a parody. But they have a point (presuming we're just talking birth control and STDs aren't an issue).

adaptive path >> ajax: a new approach to web applications

If the author is correct that the biggest challenges moving forward are for designers to think outside the normal limitations of the web, the I've already done so in my designs for our next big app at work. The next question is, do we need all this to achieve what I've designed? We've been using 3 of the five technologies, Web Standards, DOM, JavaScript/JSON objects. If all we need is to save data without refreshing the page that's done easily enough within an iframe. It's only if we decide that I need data from the database on the fly that I'll need XML, XSLT and XMLHttpRequest to get that data without refreshing the page. I guess I need to learn more about how this technology works, and then take another look at what I've built.

glassdog: "We're rolling back labor laws to 1911!*"

"...or roughly what their lawyer found between the couch cushions that morning as he was zipping up after being fellated by a small El Salvadorean boy."

That's the description glassdog gives of how much Wal-Mart settled a 24 count labor lawsuit for out of court. The moral: I think my brother's big evil employer is even eviler than my big evil employer. At least Big Daddy B keeps people alive while raping their insurance companies (not necessarily a bad thing) so hard that parents cap out their plans and have to change jobs before their kids turn 18.

Cold Creek Trail Five Days After Rain

I re-visited the hike I took 5 days ago. I took pictures of the same stream crossings so you can see how much water was running the other day. Oh yeah, the link. Here are some photos of Cold Creek Trail five days after the rain.

Distance

3 miles

Estimated/Actual Time

1.5 hours / 1 hour

Depart/Return

4:30pm / 5:30pm

Elevation Gain

300 feet

Location

1 mile up Stunt road off Mulholland HWY, down into the canyon on the right.

Misadventure

Pleasant little hike. Failed to get into any trouble. Staying light later, so it wasn't even getting dark when I got back.

Yum!

now that's a nice photo. somewhere between blueberry pie and sex.

come clean

flash - interactive confession toy. a modern day eliza.

MJ ADVENTURE: Cliff Hanger - Rock climbing above crashing ocean waves

Wow. Now this it extreme climbing. But not just foolhearty like most free climbing.

Suckerfish Dropdowns - HTML Dog

I've got a project coming up that will involve, if not full blown dropdown menus, at least a little bit of similar behavior. I really like the HTML Dog function, but PPK does have a point when he objects to using CSS for modern browsers and JavaScript for Internet Explorer in his article Separating Behavior and Presentation. If one is working and the other is not the whole thing falls to shit.

So it seems for my upcoming project it would make sense, since outside of my immediate team IE is the primary audience, to use a straight JavaScript approach. And the Suckerfish hover function might be just the right idea, although I'll have to write an initializing function and debate whether to apply a class or manipulate the CSS properties directly via JavaScript. I wonder which renders faster? I'm betting the JS, since it doesn't have to ponder the cascade, or precedence or anything.

Cold Creek Trail

Update: photos from a rainy day hike:

Under normal circumstances a pleasant little walk down a heavily wooded canyon ending in a loop around Cold Creek Nature Preserve. But this time it was raining, so I put on head-to-toe rain gear (the gaiters I made in high school still work) and had a little adventure.

Distance

~2 miles (full hike would have been 3 miles)

Estimated/Actual Time

1.5 hours / 1 hour

Depart/Return

4:50pm / 5:50pm

Elevation Gain

300 feet

Location

1 mile up Stunt road off Mulholland HWY, down into the canyon on the right.

Misadventure

It rained most of the day, including the duration of this hike. The trail crosses what is normally a little trickle of a stream 3 times, and then 3 times again on the way back. With all the rain the stream and even the minor tributaries, were raging little rivers. Sometimes I could cross on rocks large enough that they were not completely submerged. Other times I lept across. And at the final crossing (after which I decided to turn back since I wasn't necessarily going to make it back after the sun went down) I scooted accross a slippery wet log on my butt. All in all a fun little adventure. Exciting learning where and where not to use the hiking poles to assist in fording rappidly moving water.

On the 'charset' parameter of the 'Content-Type' header

Mostly posting this so that when I get a chance I can go back and follow his various UTF-8 links.

Red Rock Canyon

Still keeping up with my Wednesday/Friday night hikes. We'll see how many the camera holds before I really have to get it talking to my computer again. I hate USB devices.

Distance

4 miles there and back

Estimated/Actual Time

2 hours / 2 hours

Depart/Return

4:45pm / 6:45pm

Elevation Gain

700 feet

Location

1 mile up Stunt road off Mulholland HWY

Misadventure

The sun went down at around 5:45pm, and then I started hiking back. There was only a sliver of a cresent moon, and the trail was in shadow on the east side of Calabasas Peak. So I hiked back, poles testing the ground in front of me, too stuborn to take the flashlight out of my bag. A hike is not nearly as fun (read: dangerous) if you can see.

Google Maps

MapQuest may now go die and rot in a hole. And this is early in development.

Amazon.com: Music: Schmelzer: Unarum Fidium

Check out the Chiacona A Violino Solo sample. It's 17th century baroque, but actually sounds really modern. Heard it on the radio and had to look it up.

Judge Rejects New York Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

Let's enjoy this bit of good news, there might not be much in the way of positive change over the next 4 years.

Calabasas Peak

Photos to come later, as soon as I can get the camera to relinquish them.

Distance

4 miles there and back

Estimated/Actual Time

2 hours / 2 hours 15 minutes

Depart/Return

12:30pm / 2:45pm

Elevation Gain

900 feet

Location

1 mile up Stunt road off Mulholland HWY

Misadventure

Lunch (mostly carrots) did not agree with me, had a stomach ache the whole way up. Lay down and rested at the top and felt better. A fire road at mid-day isn't the best place to be, with or without disagreeable digestion. Have to be sure to take a valley trail next time I'm out during peak sun hours.

Taletop Trail - Las Virgenes Loop

Photos to come later, as soon as I can get the camera to relinquish them.

Distance

4.6 mile loop

Estimated/Actual Time

2.5 hours / 1 hour 50 minutes

Depart/Return

3:50pm / 5:40pm

Elevation Gain

450 feet

Location

NW of Las Virgenes Rd and Mulholland Hwy

Misadventure

None to speak of. Tucked in my shirt and wore my scree gaiters, so I didn't get any ticks. Made it back before dark, if not sundown.

Folksonomy - Wikipedia

this concept has been kicking around various UE people's blogs. We have this knowledge management project coming up at work, so I'm thinking of how this might be applied.

UK Homeowners can kill burglars in self-defence, Government says

I wonder how this compares to US law? I know Josh did quite a number on some burglars breaking into his place. Knocked one unconscious and chased down the other. But no death.

BitTorrent search engine roundup : Lifehacker

I'm still not fully sold on Gina's new tech blog. The premise is very cool, time saving tech tips. But the sponsor ads are more than a little oppressive, what happened to the move towards text ads? One banner ad is easy to ignore, 4 or 5 make it tempting to not read the site. But that's what feed readers are for, right? A reader lets you skim through the posts looking for anything new to you, like a couple of these bittorrent sites, without having to go to the site or look at the ads.