Year: 2004

Hitting that slow down part of my day. This is went I should change tasks and do something Not Urgent and rewarding to me. Instead I’m likely to build up a good anxiety attack as I try to figure out how to accomplish all the remaining tasks if the day.

You may now boldly comment where you’ve never commented before!

I like Haloscan but for along time was thinking I’d write my own commenting system. Today I decided to support the system I like so I’ve made a donation to Haloscan (and encourage others to do the same). The benefit to you is that now you may comment up to 3000 words (comment spammers rejoice) and no advertisements appear in the comment window. Domestic Psychology is also the same way.

Type away!

Sometimes it feels like we are on Prime Time.

Here’s a “that happens to other people” event: One of our neighbors and father of our daughter’s good friend just got deported to the Philippines after a 7 year battle to try to gain citizenship. Apparently INS just “showed up” yesterday and took him away.

Wow! Did he have time to pack? What happens when he arrives back at the islands? Could you imagine?

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.

– — Alistair Cooke

There is an expression “I want it so badly I can taste it.” So, just how badly have you ever wanted something?

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you hurt?

So badly that it distracted you from everything else?

So badly that you were physically ill?

What of trust?

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you were willing to lose someone’s trust?

What of sacrifice?

Have you ever watned something so badly that to have it briefly you were willing to give it up forever?

When it comes to wants, needs and cravings, what factors into self-restraint versus self-indulgence? Is it simply a matter of strong versus weak? Survival of the fittest? Moral versus immoral? What gives the preacher will power and the drug addict none? What allows one child the steal candy from the store and another child to ask for desert and happily accept no as an answer?

Where are our boundaries and how are they built?

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Strangely related:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected $end in filename.php on line 23

I think the compiler would be more efficient if it was a little less detailed in these error messages

I rang in the Mystery Credits on Blog Explosion yesterday! Won 25 credits rapidly followed by 2 and 2 for a total of 29 credits. The only problem was I didn’t have an interesting blog yesterday. Nothing to say to a sudden influx of visitors.

This tells me I need to model myself after my wife, Tim, and South Knox Bubba who all have nicely formatted sites with great content and a psuedo-regular pattern to their posts.

Ah! Let’s not forget Big Orange Michael, Hula Dula, and.. wow.. there are so many! I shall have to create a huge list during my next break.

How would you judge a person with the following traits:

• Has the shakes
• Spends enourmous amounts of money on their stuff
• Sacrifices friends and family for their stuff
• Gets irritable when they don’t get enough stuff
• Always wants better stuff often researching in great detail techniques for better stuff
• Loses sleep for habit
• Has caused relationship problems resulting in therapy or divorce due to habit
• Often thinks of giving up stuff
• Frequently has bloodshot eyes
• Talks to their stuff
• Wants a bigger pipe
• Honestly believes they can’t have enough
• Always thinking of new ingenius ways to use their stuff
• Alienates self to only relating to other junkies

If you haven’t checked out Tim’s tips pages yet you should have a look at Spy Journal Excel Tips, Spy Journal Blog Tips, and Spy Journal Tech Tips.

Below is a reprint of a Spy Journal Blog Tip that I contributed. The tips found on Spy Journal Blog Tips are all well written and worth checking out by all bloggers.

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How do I change my cursor?

Note: The techniques in the article should work in most modern browsers. To see examples in action hold your mouse over any word with text that is not in a regular font (such as emphasized or bold)

In CSS Positioning the acronym CSS has a faint line beneath it and placing the mouse pointer over it changes the cursor (in most browsers) to an arrow with a question mark. How was this done?

First I should comment that I am amazed to find that in nearly a decade of coding websites I still find basic HTML elements that for one bad habit or another I either do not use or have overlooked. I now make an effort to periodically review the basics. The W3C has invaluable reference material concerning Internet specifications and W3Schools is an absolutely wonderful place to review a skillset or develop a new one for free.

What is the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym? Dictionary.com gives the following definitions:

abbreviation

A shortened form of a word or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the complete form, such as Mass. for Massachusetts or abbr. for abbreviation.

acronym

A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women’s Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

The W3C in section 9.2 Structured Text devotes a sub-section to Phrase elements. These include: EM, STRONG, DFN, CODE, SAMP, KBD, VAR, CITE, ABBR, and ACRONYM. In this article alone I have made use of EM, STRONG, DFN, CODE, CITE, ABBR, and ACRONYM.

Now that we have learned or relearned some basic HTML, let’s combine it with some CSS to create a working example. Let’s use the acronym CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as our example. Since this is an acronym and not an abbreviation we will use the HTML <acronym>:

<acronym>CSS</acronym>

That changed the appearance but didn’t give us text. The text is added with the title atttribute.

<acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym>

Now if we hover our mouse over CSS for a second or two the words "Cascading Style Sheets" appear. What about the cursor? The cursor needs to be done with, ironically enough, CSS. We will use an inline style in our example and discuss alternatives in a different article.

<acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets" style="cursor:help;">CSS</acronym>

Abbreviations (definitions etc) can all be done the same way.

<abbr title="Street" style="cursor:help;">St.</abbr>

In upcoming articles, I will discuss:

• different ways to define the style for this method
• pointer options

The inspiration for this article came from frequent visits to Terreus who uses this technique and inspired me to ask "How does he do that?!" Terreus has to be one of the most exceptional well marked up sites I have visited in recent times. Kudos to the developer!

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Student: I am tired.

Master: You think you are tired.

A New Day!

Let’s start the day off with a PayPal donation link:

This Morning

Have you ever been so tired that you wanted to cry? I probably need exercise more than sleep but I cannot have either right now. At least I’m up at 4:30 like I wanted to be.

Student: How do I control my yearnings?

Master: Satisfy them.

I hate my line of work sometimes. Imagine Monet working in a shared studio on a team project. You have the draft canvas where you work out ideas and as they are finalized and approved they are moved into the museum for display. Now imagine another artist on the team accidentally works in the museum instead of the studio and to fix the problem decides to throw away all the studio canvases and copy the museum canvases into the studio.

That’s what just happened to me. Effectively a two day set back…or, two days of my life thrown away for naught. And this happens all the time in the technology business.

Short of breath