Posts from — February 2007

In case you care, I’m going to be tweaking the site a bit which will probably result in it being unavailable from time to time.

Thanks to all of you who wished me well.  I did my 3rd ascention of the John Hancock tower in Chicago yesterday.  The offical results are in, and my time was 20:04.  A little slower than I’d hope (my PR is still my first try which I did in 19:45), but I’m happy nonetheless.  The event continue to be a whole lot of fun, and extremely well run.  Every volunteer I dealt with was great and lines for everything (elevator ride back down, gear pick-up, etc.) moved very quickly.

Overall results for 94 Floor Climb.

Via the Get Rich Slowly blog, I watched a potion of Steve Job’s 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford University (I want to watch the whole thing, but time is tight these days).  I have to say, the content seems inspiring, but for someone who is often heralded as one of the better presenters in the tech world, he reads the speech off of letter paper, which sort of ruins the message a bit (I would have probably been better with just hearing the audio).  Granted he doesn’t have the trademark turtleneck and jeans with a huge video screen behind him, but given he is telling some stories from his life, couldn’t he have memorized this?

John Harrington has a great post entitles The Problem with Doing Nothing.  Though John’s blog is geared toward professional photographers, you could easily remove all of the photo specific information and insert whatever field you are working in – software, design, photography, whatever.  It is another take on a quote I picked up from a Jim Rohn program I listened to years ago:

Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.  If you work hard on you job you’ll make a living, if you work hard on yourself you’ll make a fortune.

(I believe Rohn attributes that to his mentor, Earl Schoff.)  I firmly believe in that philosophy, and by “making a fortune” it isn’t always monetary.  Getting good at your chosen profession or vocation is very fulfilling.

So what have I been doing while I’m not working?  Beyond family duties, I recently picked up some books on CSS and web graphics (specifically, how to use Photoshop from a web point of view as opposed to a photography point of view.)  My development skills for what goes on behind the scenes are fairly decent (I’ve been surprised at how fast they’ve come back after being out out the game for a number of years), but my knowledge of what goes into the presentation layer of a web site is sorely lacking (as evidenced by this very site).

What do you think about on your commute home?

This video spoof of 24 is pretty amazing.  They match the editing style, and the guy that plays Jack Bauer totally nails it.

It’s so good, I’m sure the takedown notice from Fox and Realtime Productions is already on it’s way.

A timelapse shot from the game Tempest by Rosemarie Fiore. Link.

I remember playing this game a few times in my youth.  The artist notes that this is a 4ft x 6ft print.  That would be pretty stunning to see, especially since Tempest was one of those vector graphics arcade games (as opposed to the more typical raster graphics displays), so I would imagine the graphics should scale well. 

The project I’m working on uses an ASP.NET calendar control for a major screen element. We hook the DayRender even and spit out some links on certain days. Our PM came to me and said we needed to make the header look better. The default settings on the calendar did not look pretty when you stretch it out to a full page. “No sweat,” I thought. I’ll just tweak some of the style tags on the control. Everything prettied up nice, except the freakin’ month text. I’d set the TitleStyle tag on the control, but nothing seemed to stick. Then I found this discussion thread via Google.

Turns out the ASP.NET Calendar control has a known bug due to where it renders all the style information for the title. IE ignores it. A quick check confirmed Firefox handled it correctly. The hack described in that forum post describes taking advantage of the fact that the header is rendered in its own table element. By setting the CssClass of the whole calendar I can then use the following CSS to tweak the title table:

.calendar TABLE TD { FONT-SIZE: large } 

Caveat: This is a v1.1 project – I haven’t had the time to see if they fixed this in v2.0.

This stopped me in my tracks today.  Makes you remember just how bad war is – whether old or new.

The iTunes Repair Tool for Vista did the trick.  My four year old can bask in Curious George Soundtrack goodness again as well as “Testment to Youth in Verse” (better know to him as “The Bells Song”) by The New Pornographers.

While I’d maintain Dilbert jumped the shark a while ago, many people I know can relate to this.