Monthly Archives: January 2009

The End of January

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The months do seem to fly by lately, various projects churning up my time but not getting done. Life has been a little nutty lately. A few weeks ago, my girlfriend decided she wanted me to teach her how to play World of Warcraft (she’s never played games of this type before), which I’ve been delighted to do. She started out with a character on my account, but now she has her own account so we can actually play together. It’s definitely made a shift in the home-life — I’ve always been a casual player (play for a few days, then leave it alone for a week or two), and now we’re playing at least a little nearly every day. (For the record, no, I still don’t have a 70, err, 80… highest I have is a 50 Druid on Kil’Jaeden, and now a 30 Draenei Hunter on Bloodhoof, both named Nadreck.)

A little over a week ago, Dad had a heart attack. I didn’t write about it publicly because I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about people knowing while it was happening, but now that he’s back home, I’m a bit more comfortable mentioning it. It was his first, and we didn’t know there was a likelihood (we do now), so it had us all a little spooked. Due to the surgery, he can’t lift anything heavy (anything over 10lbs) or overly exert himself for a little bit — given that the house renovations are nearly complete and they’re going to have to start unpacking everything back into the house, I may end up flying out for a few weeks to help out (cross-country tickets are pretty cheap at the moment if you’re flexible on flight dates — I’m seeing as low as $200 round trip). He should be back up to speed by the time I’d actually get out there, but an extra hand never hurts, and it’d be good to see Mom and Dad and Freya (it was also Mom’s birthday two days ago. Happy birthday, Mom!)

There are things in the works that will hopefully be done and in place soon, and I’ll be able to get into a more regular update routine. In the meantime, watch the kitties.

On Web Sites and Harumphs

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So, I’ve been largely radio silent for a while now, as I’ve been pondering where I want to write and about what, and trying to get some new projects up and running. This is currently leading me to designing a new wordpress theme for wanderlu.st, which in turn is leading me to researching HTML5 and CSS3. There are some great resources out there for each, but ultimately a lot of it is moot since no browser actually fully supports EITHER yet. They’re too new.

So why not just blow it off and use CSS/CSS2 and XHTML, you might ask, and rightly so — if even the bleeding edge doesn’t support it, how long before the general public has it adopted? Well, I’ve noticed a little trick in how web browsers render things that (thus far) allows me to adopt HTML5 without breaking anything. Basically, when we talk about a browser understanding an HTML tag, what we’re really saying is that it’s been told how it should render that tag by default, which things it should inherit from, and so on and so forth. So, while it’s a bit of a kludge, you can TELL your browser how to render a given tag via CSS. You just have to tell it a LOT of things, instead of just the things you want to change (you can’t take for granted what things display inline and which things display as a block, or inline block, et cetera, you have to tell it what it should behave as).

Now, I’m sure this will all bite me in the ass as I continue, leading towards getting the design exactly how I want it, and then discovering some major browser doesn’t work like that. But so far, it’s been working like a charm in both Safari (Webkit engine) and in Camino (Gecko engine). Need to test against Firefox (Gecko engine again), Opera, and IE6, 7, and 8. Also need to make sure I’m not using the tags incorrectly compared to how they’re specified in the standard. Until proved otherwise, I’ve opted to be optimistic!

Huh, Who Knew?

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So, I was feeling a bit bummed that I didn’t fulfill my New Year’s Resolution of taking at least a DVD’s worth of photographs each month, but then while organizing and archiving the year’s images, I discovered that I did at least take over a thousand more pictures than I had in any given year to date. So, Woo! Little happy surprises.