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Betty the spider, and my conundrum

September 18th, 2010 2 comments

I would like to introduce you to Betty:

Betty is the affectionate name I’ve given to the lady spider who has taken up residence in my open patio window. The silly lady, while I’m sure is doing the best that she can for herself and her little ones, has made a severe error in judgment. Building her web in my open window has put her in danger. Closing that window will result in the certain destruction of the home she has laboured for. To compound the dire situation she is unknowingly in, she has placed her eggs in the crevice of the window track! I doubt that even one of her eggs would survive if I closed that window.

This leaves me in a bad spot. Its going to get cold. I will get cold, and my hydro bill will go up if I have mercy on Betty and her unborn offspring. But I see all that she has put in to her home, and her babies’ incubation spot. How can I willingly destroy all that!

What should I do?

What would you do?

Categories: Random Thoughts Tags:

How to be alone

August 8th, 2010 2 comments

Have you seen this adorable video by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis? It is very heart warming and sweet. Well worth the four and a half minutes it takes to watch it.

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How come: Another Google Suggest that makes you go hmm

July 13th, 2010 No comments

I came across another Google Suggest that certainly makes me go hmm, I’m not sure what it will do to you.

“how come” lends itself to some interesting suggestion on Google. A couple are dirty, while others are sad. But one stands out with “how come a cupcake is not a mineral”. To my surprise, many of the the answer sites out there offer answers to this question that must be nearly as old as time.

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Make Flash sit behind HTML elements

April 19th, 2010 1 comment

In the coming up version of List Central users will be able to include embedded content in their lists, including youtube videos and the like. In testing this feature with video contents I noticed a serious problem with the way the flash content of the videos interacted with the List Central Interface. Specifically, my Ajax style pop up forms would be partially behind the video content, making the edit list item form next to unusable. Not good!

With the help of John Oxton I was able to figure out how to get the flash content to stay behind my floating html content. Essentially it took two steps:

  1. Add a wmode parameter to the embed code, as well as a wmode attribute to the embed element, both set to transparent. The Perl code I used to do this is:
  2. $EmbedCode ~= s/<embed/<param name="wmode" value="transparent" /></param><embed wmode="transparent" /;
    
  3. Set the z-indexs in the CSS, giving my floating HTML content a higher z-index than the div containing the flash content.

2 easy steps, and voila! Everything is layered just how I intended. Beautiful!

Categories: Web Development Tags:

Writing reviews: Is it for me?

April 13th, 2010 2 comments

Earlier this month I wrote my first book review on Serendipity: A Novel by Louise Parker. Essentially, I gushed a bit about a book I really enjoyed. I was absolutely honoured, and quite surprised,  when the author took the time to thank me for my review of her novel!

@LouiseShaffer‘s tweets really made my day!

Over on my other blog, Road 2 Nowhere, I tend to gush about music I love. I absolutely adore music. I’m no good at making it, no one would ever accuse me of being a musician! What I am is one hell of a music appreciator. What I love about Road is that I have a place to share all the awesome music I love so much with anyone who will listen.

While loving something is great, and telling people about things you love is grand, it’s really not reviewing. Thoughtful criticism is the most useful offering you can give to a creator, be she an author, musician or artist. I don’t know that I’m the person to offer such insights. My motivation to write about another’s work always comes from that same place, the desire to share something I enjoy. I do not have the drive to write about things I don’t enjoy, and usually I don’t get through entertainment that I don’t enjoy. Reading crappy books is not for me. I may start a bad book, but once my interest is lost, I’m not going to be picking that book back up. My apologies to all the crappy books out there. Listening to sub-standard music is not for me either.

So, I’ve made a decision, to admit to what it is that I do, and what I enjoy doing: giving recommendations. I’ll leave the reviews for the critics.

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