TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In Sicily, the word “mafia” once meant beauty, charm, excellence, or boldness. In its modern usage, both in Italian and English, none of the old senses of the word have survived. It refers to organized crime, and conveys a sinister mood. I encourage you to identify a comparable thing in your own life, Taurus: a situation, influence, or relationship that was formerly a blessing, but that has now degenerated into a source of darkness. Is there anything you can do to resurrect its original glory? If it’s even remotely possible, now is the time you’re most likely to accomplish it.
Author Archives: David Crampton
Freakin’ out about Buddy.
Buddy is fine. He was staying at
Once again, sorry for making people worry. :)
Horoscope from 30 Nov 2005
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1953, Ena Bridge got engaged to Tony Baker in their hometown of Kent, England. But they broke up and lost touch with each other until recently. Now they’re engaged again, planning to go through with the marriage they shrunk back from 52 years ago. I regard them as your good luck charms, Taurus. Soon you, too, will be returning to the site of a long lost dream, or revisiting a desire you abandoned years ago, or exploring a potential union you gave up on in the past.
Buddy
I miss my dog.
Back on the radar.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
—
So, after I was done officiating the funeral,
So, what now? How do I go back to the day to day after a week like this? I told
I have more catching up to do than I have all semester, but somehow I don’t feel daunted by it. I don’t feel overwhelmed. I feel like there’s a reason to be doing what I’m doing.
What a god damn week.
Horoscope
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In ancient Greek myth, Prometheus stole the gods’ fire and bequeathed it to human beings, allowing them to cook, stay warm when the weather was cold, and make tools and bricks and pottery. According to my reading of the astrological omens, a Prometheus-like influence is now hovering at the peripheries of your world, angling to provide you with a boon that’s pretty damn good, even if it isn’t as monumental as fire. There’s a catch, however. This benefactor will not be able to bestow the gift unless you aggressively ask for it and unless you are alert for its arrival from an unexpected direction.
Reconstruction
This chapter ties all the others together. It takes the layout, stylistic, coding, and graphical elements – not to mention the special effects – and wraps them together by showcasing six layouts and analyzing both the artistic and scripting components.
Hedges shows us how to blend background images with a dynamic foreground. Radio Zen breaks my horizontal scrolling pet peeve, but uses my favorite nifty CSS trick in a sweet way – the fixed background image. South of the Border shows how to trap content properly (and with slick hacks) in fixed and fluid layouts. Corporate ZenWorks is just a damn nifty idea. Open Window once again makes me shake my fist at Internet Explorer. Otherwise, the extreme re-ordering of data and content earns the thumbs-up. Mnemonic is all about choice and how a small one can completely change the design of a site.
All in all, this book was far more helpful than the reference text. I am now fully armed against the dreaded auto-suck.
Special Effects
In this chapter, the authors finally roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Here, parsing order is addressed, specificity, inheritance, and the actual “Cascade” that makes up the “Cascading Style Sheets” acronym. Not to mention layering. And that’s all inside of This is Cereal.
Having been a coder in the past – forced to learn machine language on Sun SparcStations, machines that are designed so that you don’t ever have to use machine language, I might add – this chapter was kind of a breeze. These sort of tricks have been long needed, and widely-used, by previous scripting languages. JavaScript, for example, used to perform the duty of detecting which browser was being used, and would feed the proper page to the proper browser. Germination uses Internet Explorer’s lack of CSS standard compliance to feed it a completely different design than other browsers.
Of course, once IE7 comes out – standard compliant AND tabbed browsing? Trying to be Firefox much? – it may pick up the proper page, and half of this design’s code might become out-dated. But then, that’s what future-proof design is all about. The page will still work.
Bonsai Sky is SLICK. All of its tips and tricks simply don’t show up in older browsers, but the design is solid without the bells and whistles. This one is a masterpiece. It really ties it all together. Graphics, layout, special effects, browser compatibility… I’d really like to shake Mike Davidson’s hand.
Tulipe has HORIZONTAL SCROLLING! Argh. *Shakes fist at the heavens.* The design is extremely pretty, and includes nifty tricks, but it tweaks that horizontal scrolling pet peeve, so I won’t say a word more. Heh.
Door to my Garden does absolute width the way it should be done. I know the chapter is all about backgrounds, and how to deal with background tiling, positioning them with ultimate control, and keeping your style simple, but the positioning in this design is what caught my eye right off the bat.
Somebody actually named their design Elastic Lawn? Uh, okay. The name aside, this is what I was talking about before with combining absolute positioning and liquid positioning to get the best of both worlds. The chapter also focuses a bit on the way repetition was smoothed out with graphics and such, and that’s cool, but once again I dig the layout work with the positioning.
Okay, that’s enough blathering from me.