Category: Interests

Strangely enough, this is could be a combination of Academic and Professional with a bit of wood working, motorcycle riding and miscellaneous commentary threw in.

Categories
Interests

Rollover dynamic text with CSS

Ok, technically it’s not dynamic because you have to enter the text in the html so it’s not “created on the fly”.  This is still a cool feature if you wanted a list of terms and have the definition pop up on the page as the visitor rolls over the definition.  And the best part of this it’s pure CSS, no javascript.  Once again, this is dynamic so it scales to the size of the page and it has been tested and works on IE, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on a Win7 box.  Your mileage may vary.

Without further ado, here’s the HTML and CSS as well as a link to a working example.

Continue reading “Rollover dynamic text with CSS”
Categories
Interests

Road Rage part 2

First off, wow, been a while since I posted anything!  And second, told you there would be another post about road rage (see previous post).

Just for the record, I’m not a perfect driver, sometimes I do *ahem* stupid things.  Having said that, I feel it’s fair to comment on other drives and what stupid things they do.

It all started out rather fun, my brother and I was taking a motorcycle trip to see an Aunt and then we were going to put a few more miles and states on the bike (so far I’m ahead with 11 states under my “motorcycle” belt, at some point I hope to have all 50).  The first day’s itinerary was to get to my Aunt’s and I would like to say it was without incident, but that would be a lie.  It’s also a story for another day because what I’m talking about today happened on day 2 of our 3 day trip.

We were in Illinois on Route 1 when it happened.  Route 1 for the most part is a two lane highway with sections that are four lanes.  The particular stretch at the start was a four lane highway through a town with a speed limit of 35.  My brother and I were traveling at about 50MPH and keeping up with the flow of traffic.  That’s when I noticed a guy coming up behind pretty fast in an burnt orange mustang.  The lane to the right was clear but he stayed right behind my brother and I.  I decided to be nice and moved over to the right lane at which point he sped up to right behind my brother and started honking the horn.  When my brother moved over I heard the engine rev and he took off like a speed racer only to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car that we were following.  I immediately thought to myself “what a jackass”.

As we traveled through several smaller towns the guy was never more than two or three cars ahead.  We eventually got to a stretch of two lane road and ended up behind the same Mustang.  It seemed like it was hundreds of miles, but it was probably only 20 or 30 that we followed this guy.  The whole time he was weaving left and right, speeding up and slowing down while following the Chevy truck that was in front of him.  At one point, he even had his right hand turn signal on for probably five miles.  I told my brother at one point (probably at one of the crossroads with a stop sign) that the guy was just looking for someone to race because there were plenty of opportunities for this guy to pass, but he stayed behind the truck and continued to drive erratically.

Finally I told my brother “we have to stop and let this guy get away or pass him, I can’t stand this much longer”.  So, the next good clearing where my brother could see clearly (it was very hot day and the heat from the road was creating an hazy heat wave affect) my brother pulls and passes.  He then pulls back in between the Mustang and the truck because he sees a car coming towards us (his original intention was to pass both).  I follow my brother’s lead and pull out, as I get even with the Mustang, I hear him kick it down and speed up.  (Did I mention the word jackass before?)  Well, that just sets me off because it proved I was right about this guy just wanting to race.  He probably bought the Mustang to compensate.  At any rate, Mustang or no, my brother’s in front of him and my bike is no wimp.  As I kick it down a gear I flip the guy off passing him and my brother and pull back in line behind the truck.

I’m sure you can guess what happened next right?  Yeah, he’s revving the engine and good to go so he pulls out and guns past us.  I see him coming and flip him the bird the whole way past.  As he’s going past he’s staring at me and flipping me off as well.  So he goes past us (remember the car?) and goes past the truck diving back into the right lane almost clipping the front of the truck and I’m sure giving the folks in the oncoming car a fright.

Regardless, he’s gone and I’m happy to sit behind the truck cruising at 55 because now I don’t have to deal with an unstable erratic driver in front of me.  It made the rest of the trip seem so peaceful!

The amazing thing about this is that I usually feel guilty about doing “stupid” things, like flipping off that guy in the car.  Really, it wasn’t necessary and I’m sure it didn’t help the situation any.  However, this time I didn’t feel the least bit of guilt.  This guy was an idiot at best and how he was driving was creating a hazardous situation.

Stay safe, stay sane and keep the rubber side down.

–ServerGoon

Categories
Interests

Press 1 for 1337, press 2 for English

Kids these days.  Spelling doesn’t matter, as long as the other person gets what you’re talking about.  If you don’t believe me, just ask my 17 year old son, he’ll tell you all about it.

Admittedly, I don’t think kids should be graded harshly for grammatical or spelling errors on math papers, computer program comments (I actually had a teacher that took off points for not having complete sentences in the comments for a program), physics, art, etc.  Now all bets are off when it comes to English class, because that’s what it is all about.

However, if you publish a game, write a paper about your physics experiments or create anything that is made for general population I would suggest making sure your grammar is correct in the final product.  Trust me, it’s tough for me and I’m just waiting for someone to point out a mistake on this post.

Prime examples of when it is important to use correct grammar:

  1. When you are trying to make a point or trying to sound intelligent.  See
    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=274685879861 http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=260098416437
    and the list goes on I’m sure.  In fact I had great fun pointing that error out to my son when he joined the group “Parents call it talking back, we call it telling them there wrong”.
  2. When you are trying to sell something.  This is what originally prompted this post and I want to make it clear I have *nothing* against these guys or their site (notice I used the correct version there).  I was reading about Blue Collar Bobbers when I ran across this quote. “and ride into the sunset with there comrades”.  Now for some reason, this just glares at me.  Maybe it because I’ve struggled with it myself so I’m hypersensitive to the use of “there, they’re and their”.  Does that mean I won’t buy from them? No, but it does give a certain impression of the type of people running the store.  I’m also going to make the assumption that, based off of the design, they didn’t do the work themselves.  Chances are someone just wasn’t fully awake and didn’t catch the typo, let’s hope so because I’d hate to be paying someone for a finished product that wasn’t correct.

So, having said all that, I would suggest a remedial course.  If you don’t want to do that, how about spending a little time to get it straight in your head in whatever manner works best for you.  There’s even web sites out there to help.  I googled “there their they’re” and the top hit was a wikihow page, how convenient!

Up next is a rant about “you’re, your and yore”… no, not really, but I’m sure there are plenty of examples of that as well.

–servergoon