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domingo, agosto 21, 2005

Ozzfest!

Emoticón actual:  grogui

I went to Ozzfest yesterday. In summary: I had a really good time, it was quite an adventure, and I'm really glad that I went. I saw the following bands: In Flames, Shadow Fall, Mudvane, Slipknot, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath. We wanted to see Rob Zombie, but arrived too late to see him.

It was a long day and quite a bit happened, so I will tell you the entire story if you take the time to listen.

We originally planned to be there around 9am. I told them "Forget that. I'll show up around 5pm in my own car." The last thing I wanted to do was be in the sun all day when water costs $3.50 for a 500ml bottle. We ended up meeting in the middle and showing up around 3pm.

Security getting in to the concert was tight. Let me take that back. It had the appearance of being tight but they let everyone going in know exactly what they were searching for and how they would search. So, of course, everyone did the "put it down my pants" trick. Including myself...I smuggled in a small bottle for storing water and my pocket knife (since weapons are not allowed at the concert and we decided not to go back to the car just to drop off my knife). I'm so innocent that smuggling stuff in to the concert made me nervous. Later on in the evening, the band asked people to light up their lighters, and you could see hundreds of lighters in the audience--even though security isn't supposed to let lighters in.

There were no in and out privledges, and everything inside was expensive. 32 ounce drinks were five dollars. T-shirts were 15 to 35 dollars, depending on the band on the shirt. Burritos (served by a group called Los Nietos) were actually reasonably priced--six dollars. The line to get a burrito, naturally, was 30 minutes long. Then again, a $1.50 agua de horchata was five dollars.

The line to get a drink at a water fountain was very long. I worked around this by just going straight in to the men's room and filling up my bottle and a then-empty 32-ounce cup with the water used to wash your hands. I don't even want to think about what the line to get in to the woman's bathroom was like. Let me put it this way; there was this pretty girl in the men's bathroom waiting to use a toilet there because she didn't want for a stall at the ladies' restroom. She was rather apologetic about the entire affair.

We had lawn tickets, which I preferred because I figured it was be away from the slam-dancing pit and the loud music. I was wrong on both counts. However, there was a lot of excitement on the lawn that the more expensive seats closer to the band did not have.

Because it was a hot day, people were getting heat stroke. The first person I saw get heat stroke was this attractive young lady with long red hair. She didn't look good. Her eyes were rolling in to her face and was was drifting in and out of consciousness. A very nice kid next to me gave her all of his ice to help cool her off. Her friends finally carried her away. She was allright though, if tired--we saw her later on in the day. The second person I saw get heat stroke wasn't so lucky. This was after pits were formed and everyone was squished together. He fainted and lost consciousness and that same nice kid who helped the girl was getting everyone to back up to give him saome space. They ended up getting an EMT to the scene and a couple of concert employees carried him off. He may have been helicoptored in to a hospital--I don't even want to think about how much that helicoptor ride costs!

Speaking of the pit, whenever I'm at a concert, the slam dance pit always ends up being right next to me. When Shadow Down was playing, the pit was right behind me and slam dancers ended up slamming in to me. I'm glad I was with my rather large buddy. Later on in the night, they lit fires and people slam danced around the fire--talk about getting wild!

This was compensated for when it became the girl's turn to slam-dance. Some hardcore (and quite pretty, to boot) girls did slam dance with the guys, but then all of the guys decided the girls should just slam dance with themselves, which they did. This was followed by girls getting on guy's solulders so everyone could see them. The first pair of girls that did this ended up kisssing, which everyone thought was really hot. Then, two girls right behind us, where the slam dance pit was, ended up displaying their very attractive boobs completely naked to all of the guys. They got a lot of attention and were really sweet girls to do that.

Speaking of boobs, a popular fashion statement at the concert was for the girls to wear nothing above their waistline except tape over their nipples; the girls would get this beautiful paintings of butterflys or what not airbrushed to their chest. It was quite a sight!

One thing I wasn't too wild about was that this short girl and her boyfriend started smoking pot right next to us with some other concert buddies. I tried to keep the pot away from me, but I still got a contact high. I didn't feel it at the concert, but I feel this this morning--it's like having a towel around my head. I hate it! I'm so glad I don't smoke pot any more.

We had a good view of the bands for most of the afternoon. After Slipknot played, we left to get somehting to eat and drink, and to get back together with my buddy Victor who we lost contact with for about four hours. We then saw Iron Maiden. The view wasn't as good; I had to stand on a barricade to see the band at all. Fortunatly, you could see them on these large video screens they had set up.

Iron Maiden's singer is quite a character. He has a lovely British accent and really knows how to interact with the audience. He also cusses like a sailer. The only downer during Iron Maiden's segment was that they had some technical problems with the audio, and the audio cut out about three times during their concert. As you can imagine, Bruce was pissed. Bruce was also pissed because someone in the audience was apprantently throwing eggs at the stage. Edde came on stage during "Number of the Beast," and was on stage for a few songs. At the end of Maiden's part of the show, Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy's wife got on stage and said that Ozzy was about to come on, and that Bruce Dickinson, Maiden's singer, can be a real dick.  (Update 2005/08/27: What happened was that Sharon deliberately cut out Maiden's sound and arranged to have eggs thrown at him because she was upset with their behavior towards Ozzy and Black Sabbath during the entire tour)

The final act was Black Sabbath. Ozzy was not running around as much as Bruce, but he was still very live and active. They played a number of Black Sabbath hits, including "Iron Man". I will say that John "Ozzy" Osbourne is a remarkably spirtual man--he has been faithful to his second wife, Sharon, and told the audience he loved them and "God bless". Ozzy finished off by telling people who drank to not drive.

Getting out of the parking lot was very difficult. We sat in the car for about half an hour before starting the engine, hoping the traffic would ease up. The traffic getting out of the concert was still backed up. Since we were at an underpass without an onramp, a lot of people just four-wheeled it and drive over the grass on to the freeway. We saw a cop there having a field day pulling all of those drivers over. We didn't risk it ourselves.

Once getting on the freeway, we thought we were free and clear. Wrong. Once we entered San Diego county, we were stopped by two accidents on the road. The first time, the road was completely blocked; there was no movement whatsoever for about 20 minutes. People got out of their cars even. The second time, movement was just slow--two lanes were closed on the freeway.

I finally got home at 3:30am and went right to sleep.

To be honest, this isn't the kind of music I normally listen to, but it was nice to find out about a lot of heavy metal bands who I wouldn't otherwise know about, and to see some famous heavy metal names. The concert was a lot of fun!

Actualmente escuchando:
The Essential Ozzy Osbourne
Por: Ozzy Osbourne
Fecha de publicación: 11 February, 2003

13:05

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sábado, agosto 20, 2005

Secession was an 80s band

Emoticón actual:  feliz

Once upon a time, there was a really obscure band in the 1980s called Secession. I'm talking you had to spend all your time listening to the radio in the 80s to know who these guys were obscure. I'm talking their records sell for $50-$100 on eBay obscure.  I'm talking didn't even have a Wikipedia article until I fixed that obscure.

Their biggest hit (if you can call it that) was probably "Touch" from early 1984 (and remixed by them in 1987 under the "Noho" monkier). This song had the following chorus:

I really need your touch
I never hurt so much
I really miss your touch
Give your affection to me

Some other notable songs they made were "The Magician", and "Sneakyville." Secession consisted of Peter J. Thomson, Carole L. Branston, Charlie D. Kelly, and J.L. Seenan. Their singer, Peter Thompson, died in the late 1990s (of unknown causes; the band never became famous enough for the members to lose their privacy.)

They only released one album, "A Dark Enchantment", in late 1987. They released a handful of singles before this, including "Touch". Their first single is from 1983: "Betrayal."

This is a complete discography of their music, which was on a web page that went down and currently only exists on a message board:

Compiled by Jon Peterson / InternaL 16 produktions

Additions from:
Matt Herwig ([email-masked])
dayv ([email-masked])
Steven A. Banuelos ([email-masked])
Hugh ([email-masked])
Phil Maier ([email-masked])
Blake ([email-masked])
* ([email-masked])
[email-masked] (corrections/additions)

BETRAYAL

7": 1983 The Garden Label [GAR 1] {UK}
A) Betrayal
B) Reflections

FIRE ISLAND

7": 1984 Beggars Banquet [BRG 112] {UK}
A) Fire Island
B) Fire Island (Instrumental)

12": 1984 Beggars Banquet [BEG 112T] {UK}
A) Fire Island (Extended Mix)
B) Fire Island (Extended Instrumental)

TOUCH

7": 1984 Beggars Banquet [Beg 118] {UK} (Sex Session 002)
A) Touch (Part 1)
B) Touch (Part 2)

12": 1984 Beggars Banquet [BEG 118T] {UK}
A) Touch (Part 3)
B) Touch (Part 4)

12": 1984 ARS Benelux [ARS 3625] {BE} (Sex Session 002)
A) Touch (Part 3)
B) Touch (Part 4)

12": 1987 Epic [49 06817 XSS 176039] {US} (NOTE: Recorded as: NoHo)
A1) Touch (Alternative Dub) [6:29]
A2) Touch (Dub Mix) [5:23]
B) Touch (Extended Mix) [6:30]

MICHAEL

12": 1986 Siren [SIREN 23-12] {UK}
A) Michael
B1) All The Animals Come Out
B2) Helter Skelter

12": 1986 Siren Virgin [VSX 1369] {CA}
A) Michael
B1) All The Animals Come Out
B2) Helter Skelter

THE MAGICIAN

CS: 1987 Siren [SIREN 31] {UK}
1) The Magician (Dub Mix) [5:28]
2) All The Animals Come Out At Night [4:14]
3) Helter Skelter <4:00>

7": 1987 Siren [SIREN 31] {UK}
A) The Magician [4:22]
B) The Killing Season [4:22]

12": 1987 Siren [SIREN 31-12] {UK}
A1) The Magician (Pecky Plus Mix)
A2) Magic Drums
B1) The Magician (Pecky Dub Mix)
B2) The Killing Season

PROMISE

12": 1987 Siren [SRN 48-12] {UK}
A) Promise (dance mix)
B1) Promise (dub mix)
B2) Havoc

RADIOLAND

7": 1987 Siren [SIREN 62] {UK}
A) Radioland
B) Simon Says

12": 1987 Siren [SRN 62-12] {UK}
A) Radioland (Full Length Album Version)
B1) Simon Says....
B2) Everybody's Sneakin'

SNEAKYVILLE

7": 1987 Siren [SIREN 77] {UK}
A) Sneakyville
B) Relections

12": 1987 Siren [SRNT 77] {UK}
A) Sneakyville (Extended Mix)
B1) Reflections
B2) All The Animals Come Out At Night

A DARK ENCHANTMENT

CS: 1987 Siren [SRN MC11] {UK}
LP: 1987 Siren [SRNLP 11] {UK}
A1) Eventide [2:19]
A2) Promise [4:07]
A3) Love Lies Bleeding [4:32]
A4) Sneakyville [3:42]
A5) Winifred [3:42]
A6) The Box That Holds A Secret [5:21]
B1) Ocean Blue [5:01]
B2) Radioland [4:31]
B4) The Magician [4:21]
B5) Love Lies Bleeding (Reprise) [1:01]
B6) The Wolf [4:16]
B7) Eventide (Theme From A Dark Enchantment) [1:58]

CD: 1987 Siren [CDSRN 11] {UK}
1) Eventide [2:19]
2) Promise [4:07]
3) Love Lies Bleeding [4:32]
4) Sneakyville [3:42]
5) Winifred [3:42]
6) The Box That Holds A Secret [5:21]
7) Ocean Blue [5:01]
8) Radioland [4:31]
9) The Magician [4:21]
10) Love Lies Bleeding (Reprise) [1:01]
11) The Wolf [4:16]
12) Eventide (Theme From A Dark Enchantment) [1:58]
13) All The Animals Come Out At Night [2:00]
14) Michael [4:06]
15) Havoc [3:45]
16) Promise Dub [5:19]

Anyway, time to get ready to go off to Ozzfest!

Actualmente escuchando:
A Dark Enchantment
Por: SECESSION

02:27

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viernes, agosto 19, 2005

Life in San Diego

Emoticón actual:  despierto/a

Last night I had a dream that Fry's electronics became a small music store, and that I bought a 65-key fully weighted MIDI keyboard from them for $266.  One problem: The back of the unit didn't have a cover and the electronics were exposed.  Being Fry's, they weren't willing to work around this problem and the salesman who was trying to sell me the unit was already sleeping.

And so the dream ended.

* * *

My buddy's car broke down.  The radiator leak, which was up until now a slow leak became a very fast leak.  I helped him with this leak the other day.  The real solution to his problem is to get the radiator fixed at a car shop.  We went there in my car and asked how much that would be.  $221, said the mechanic.  Which is about 221 more dollars than my buddy has.

So we considered some other options.  The first thing we tried is that solution you add to the radiator to plug up the cracks in the radiator.  To make a long story short, it didn't work.

So, come yesterday, my buddy decides to epoxy the cracks in the radiator.  Of course, his radiator is still broken when his friend calls and asks for help moving Friday (that's today, guys) morning (this guy has to be out of the place by noon).  My friend assures him, on a stack of Bibles, that his car will be perfectly functional to help with the move come tomorrow.  Personally, if I was my buddy's friend, I would be calling up someone else to find help with the move.  (Update: This fix worked and my buddy helped his buddy move just fine)

I have no idea whether my buddy was able to fix his radiator with epoxy, or how the move went.  I'll ley you guys know in a future blog entry.

I think that I, for one, will just enjoy the view at the beach.  After getting some exercise.

11:53

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miércoles, agosto 17, 2005

My last post on my profile design

Emoticón actual:  geek

This, I promise, will be last post on my profile design, until I eventually post an annotated description of my profile at the end of my CSS tutorials. My next geeky post will be the next installment in my CSS tutorial, describing selectors.

The part of my profile that has been the most time-consuming has been my contact section. After doing some tests on dialup connections, I found that the contact images would not always fully load and would, as a result, jump when the mouse hovered over them. I also wanted to, as much as possible, reduce the size of the images.

I pulled this off by replacing the two contact images with a single transparent PNG placed on top of the already-loaded translucent PNG. Since this saves us nearly 6 kilobytes from the page, and I saw someone view my profile with Opera last night, I added a white translucent PNG for the contact mouseovers so that Presto (Opera's layout engine) and KTML (Konqueror's layout engine) can correctly render the page. The PNG is only 125 bytes in size--small enough that it's worth having so that these minority browsers are not left out.

I also was able to get mouseovers to work with the Trident III engine (which MSIE 5.5 uses; MSIE 6.0 also uses Trident III on this page since the doctype keeps MSIE in "quirks mode"), using the proprietary Filter:Alpha tag. I also added a very slight touch of transparency to all of the orange boxes for MSIE users. Again, MSIE users do get a degraded experience; this page is really a showcase of what standards-compliant CSS can do that Trident can't (presently) do.

- Sam

P.S. The following CD is originally from 1984, not 1990, when they digitally remastered it.

Actualmente escuchando:
Building the Perfect Beast
Por: Don Henley
Fecha de publicación: 25 October, 1990

03:34

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miércoles, agosto 17, 2005

Mt. Woodson

Emoticón actual:  calmado/a

One of my favorite places for be here in San Diego (besides the beach to look at all the young women) is Mt. Woodson. It is this beautiful rocky mountain which can be seen from just about anywhere in the northern part of San Diego. Getting to the top is non-trivial: Nearly two miles going up a really steep road; it's the equivalent of running three miles to make it.

The mountain has a large number of large granite rocks on it. These rocks are huge; I can even recognize certain rocks from the USGS aerial photos over at maps.google.com. As you can imagine, this mountain is very popular with rock climbers; I, as often as not, see rock climbers climbing various rocks on the way up. I even once crashed a party of rock climbers there when I was walking up in the moonlight.

The view from the top is spectacular. I can clearly see all the way to the ocean on a clear day; on the rare really clear day, I can even see the islands off of Tijuana over in Mexico. There hasn't been a day that clear since last winter.

I have met many interesting people going up Mt. Woodson. The women walking up, of course, are beautiful--they have to be, since you need to be fit to go up this mountain. I once met a group of hikers and they showed me this rock; some us us jumped on to it. This is just one of many rocks that are easy to get on with spectacular views down the mountain; not recommended for those with fear of heights, however. .. Just this last weekend, I met a bilingual church youth group at the top.

One of things I sometimes enjoy doing is getting on top of a rock and meditating there for a while while looking at basically all of northern San Diego. A wonderful way to spend the afternoon!

It's also a great way for me to stay fit; a lot cheaper than being the member of the gym. And the view is generally better (well, the view at GB3 is probably better when Sam and Hillary are working the front desk there).

I will finish up with a picture of me going up this mountain:

- Sam

01:20

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domingo, agosto 14, 2005

More on web design

Emoticón actual:  aburrido/a

I recently posted that my web design policy is to make a simple, clean design that can be seen on as many browsers as possible with as little bother as possible. Well, based on feedback from my friends, I have revised my policy. My policy now is to make a web page as visually stunning as possible, while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. As I pointed on in my last blog entry, I did this by making two versions of the web page: One for MSIE, and one for standards-compliant browsers.

However, cross-browser compatibility is still not perfect. In particular, there are some features on my profile page which improve things for Firefox and (I assume) Safari users, while making things look slightly worse in Opera and Konqueror.

There is a group of fanatics out there who think that standards-compliance is the be-all and end-all of cross-browser compatibility issues. There are even people who are foolish enough to think that making a page standards-compliant will forego the need to perform cross-browser testing. Such people are naive; browsers have bugs and the each browser supports a different subset of CSS.

There are pages where I keep the CSS real simple, since the main purpose of the page is to present information. On those pages, I use CSS mainly to display a background image, have link mouseovers change colors, and put frames around content. Nice, simple CSS that works on just about anything that has CSS compatibility.

My myspace profile, however, is not one of those pages. The purpose of this page is to have a very strong visual impact. I need to push what CSS can do to achieve this effect. Another reason I have to push CSS is because I can't really change the HTML; only the CSS. This is most apparent with the CSS for the "Contacting Sam" box.

The problem is that Myspace does not have classes for each of the images in the Contact box. Fortunatly, Myspace does have a class for the box as a whole. The workaround for putting in my own image for the contact table is to have this table be a set size, and to hide the images already there.

The next thing I had to do is give this image a different hover image, since the translucent windows effect is done with PNG images. I also had to give MSIE a different, simpler GIF which it can handle.

In order to give these images a mouseover highlight in Firefox, I then set up the hover for the links in the contact table to add transparent boxes on top of the contact image. The transparency is done with -moz-opacity and the CSS 3.0 opacity property. It was easy to hide this CSS from MSIE via the application of the [dummy] hack.

The problem is that Opera and (at least some) versions of Konqueror do not support opacity. This causes a plain white box to appear whenver an Opera or Konqueror user mouses over a link in my contact table; the workarounds are:

Remove the mouseover effect

Replace the CSS with a translucent PNG

What I couldn't find was a CSS hack to make the CSS visible to just Mozilla and Safari, and invisible to Opera and Konqueror. I couldn't even find a CSS hack that works to hide something from just Opera. I don't want to make my users load yet another PNG image. Since my browser logs on my various web sites show that only a very small minority use Opera [1], my solution is to simply ignore them. They can still contact me; they'll just see an ugly white box when doing so.

One Firefox bug I found is that CSS hovers images will not load until the user activates the hover. This results in a visible flash. The way I work around this is to place the hover images as one-pixel images in an inconspicuous place on my profile; this way the images are already in the cache and Firefox users don't get the annoying flash.

As a technical correction, I said in my last blog entry that CSS having a rgba() color value is as likely as having lunch with the girl of my dreams. Well, maybe I'll have a really lovely lunch in my future.

- Sam

[1] The Opera fanatics claim that there are really zillions of Opera users out there whose User-Agent strings claim to be MSIE. I do not see one, not one single line in my web logs showing someone loading an image MSIE won't load with a pure MSIE User-Agent string. The only Opera I see is from my own cross-browser testing.

14:47

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viernes, agosto 12, 2005

My new CSS design

Emoticón actual:  hambriento/a

I have just revised the design to my web page. Based on feedback from some friends of mine, I decided to create a new color scheme which reflects the new area I live, and reflects my personality.

The first step was to come up with a background. I like to use my own original photography on a myspace page; this way the myspace profile is a exibition of my own art.

One of the best pictures I have recently taken is from a year ago, when I was on vacation in Joshua Tree National Park. But the version of the picture I had had a lot of noise in it and the colors were not as saturated as they could be. I fired up The Gimp and removed the noise from the picture with a combination of gaussian blur and selective Gaussian blur. I also increased the color saturation.

These changes also had the benefit of minimizing the size of the picture for dialup users. I was able to make the picture under 40k in size--8 seconds for a dialup user.

The next step was to make the background picture visible. After considering my options, I felt the best way to achieve this was to have translucent windows on top of the image. The usual way to do this is:

Filter: Alpha(opacity=90);
-moz-opacity: 0.9;
opacity: 0.9;

There however, are two problems with this approach:

This really bogs down Firefox, especially on older computers.

The text becomes translucent and harder to read; the pictures become translucent and harder to see.

The ideal solution would be a CSS property called "background-opacity" which would only affect the background, or the ability to specify a color as rgba(219,83,1,64) (Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha), but either one of those becoming part of CSS is about as likely as me having lunch with the girl of my dreams.   (Correction 2005/08/14: CSS 3 has this.  Maybe I'll get that really lovely lunch after all)

This article on mozilla.org describes a number of ways of working around this issue. The approach I chose to persue was to make semi-transparent solid PNG images. I initially tried one-pixel images, but found that those slowed down Firefox too much. 256x256 images are far less CPU-intensive.

One issue with transparency is that, in order to make the background image visible, I have to make the text hard to read. The way I worked around this was to have 75ransparent backgrounds normally, which become 14ransparent whenever the user moves the mouse curser over them. This way the background is visible until the user moves the mouse to a box with text in it, at which point the text becomes far more readable.

:hover is not perfect in Firefox; there is the occassional flash of no background, and the hover effect acts buggy whenever the user scrolls the page with the mouse wheel. Opera 8 on Linux has a problem with flashing whenever the user goes to a box with the :hover element; Konqueror on Linux is really slow and takes 10-20 seconds to perform a hover highlight.

This state of affairs is far better than with IE6, which is still in the stone age. IE6 does not have support for either translucent PNGs nor :hover on anything besides "a" elements. The way I worked around this was to come up with a different design for IE; I made one design visible to IE and the other design visible to Firefox by using the !important hack.

The most frustrating aspect of the IE part of the design was that the glow effect mysteriously stopped working. I finally figured out that IE6 conisders the glow filter on a local file insecure activex and won't activate it until the user allows the activex in question to run.

The IE design is forced to has opaque boxes (since I don't like the Filter:Alpha look), but this is compensated for by having more of the page be transparent. In order to make the text that wasn't in an opaque box more readable, I use the IE-specific Filter:glow effect. There is no Firefox equivalent to this; however, CSS2 does have the text-shadow property, which, alas is only supported by the Safari browser.

This gives IE users a more gaudy effect; the page is definitely more reserved and dignified looking in Firefox/Opera/whatever. This is by necesity.

It is actally possible to emulate CSS :hover with IE6 with some fancy Javascript; indeed, Dean Edward's script makes IE6 far more CSS compliant. If Myspace allowed Javascript, I would have used this script so that IE users got the same experience as Firefox users.

I did some basic testing on older browsers; I've pretty much decided the no one who still uses Netscape Navigator 4 has a Myspace account. But I still don't discriminate against those people---as recently as five years ago I had a computer that couldn't run anything newer (in Linux, at least) than NN4. As recently as three years ago, some public internet terminals at my school's library ran NN4.

This time, I just used the Caio hack to hide the entire CSS from Netscape 4.

Once I had the CSS for the profile page done, I then worked on my blog page. This was fairly straightforward, since I had already done this before. The class for the navigation bar on the blog is called "nav" instead of "navbar"; things like that.

The most frustrating thing about the blog is that only IE correctly centers the "view all blog entires" page; Firefox places this page on the left hand side. This is because Myspace's HTML is broken. The HTML in question looks like this:

<table class="main">

When it should look like this:

<table class="main" align=center>

Indeed, Myspace generates the correct HTML when one views just a single blog entry.

There is no way I could find, with just CSS, to make this table have a center alignment. Fortunatly, Myspace allows me to put in my own custom HTML right after this broken HTML, which I did as follows:

</td></tr></table>
<table class=main align=center>
<tr>
<td align=center>

This causes the relevant section of the HTML to look like this:

<table class="main">
<tr>
<td align="center">
</td></tr></table>
<table class=main align=center>
<tr>
<td align=center>

This creates a single blank table, but allows my blog to have the correct HTML.

My dear friend Dee really likes my new design; I think you'll like it too.

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jueves, agosto 11, 2005

What that Myspace profile pic really means

Emoticón actual:  travieso/a

Have you ever wondered what that myspace profile pic really means? Well, a group of cognitive psychologists have surveryed Myspace users, and categorized based on their Myspace pic. Here is what was discovered:

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lunes, agosto 08, 2005

I've added CSS to my blog

Emoticón actual:  geek

If you notice, my blog now looks like my profile. After leaving Saturday's party, I was up until 4am working on the CSS for my blog, including cross-browser testing. I was even able to get the CSS to look nice in Netscape 4, believe it or not.

After strugging with having my CSS work with the CSS "customize blog" puts in (it would have been nice if Tom set things up to put the blogger-defined custom CSS after, not before Myspace's CSS), I figured out how to disable all of the CSS that the color preferences and what not in "customize blog" generates. The trick is to comment out the CSS.

I made the color of the default font "black /*". Note the comment starter. This is because the default font is one of the first things in myspace's CSS; this way the only CSS that is active is the text alignment, the font family (it's a shame that I can only specify one font. I like to use Verdana but I like to have things fallback to Bitstream Vera Sans for Linux users who haven't bothered to legally install Verdana), and the color.

To end the comment, I made the 'Comment Spacer Color' "*/". This is the last bit of CSS in Myspace's CSS; ending the comment makes things a little easier on the parsers.

Once Myspace's CSS was commented out, I then proceeded to work on the CSS. Getting it to work in Firefox took some doing to figure out what selectors to set up. It was pretty easy to disable, via the Ciao hack, just enough CSS so the page looks quite nice in Netscape 4. I added a margin above the images to get things to look nice in Opera and added a margin at the bottom of the boxes to work around IE's box model.

The way I was able to get both the picture of someone commenting on a blog entry and their comment to look like part of one seamless box was to remove the right border from the td.blogCommentsProfile selector and the left border from the td.blogComments selector.

Here is the canonical example CSS for my blog:

body {
background: rgb(255,255,192) url(http://x.myspace.com/images/blog/blogLogo.gif); /* Change these two values in parenthesis to the color for the background of the page before the background image loads, and the location on the web of your background image. This URL is optional if a solid background is desired. You probably don't actually want to use this example image; use something more tasteful */
}

/* The color for both unvisited and visited links */
a{color: rgb(96,96,64);}

/* This just disables a lot of myspace's HTML junk. Since this bit of CSS breaks NN4, we hide it from NN4 with the Ciao Hack */

/*/*/a{}
table, tr, td {
border:1px;
background-color:transparent;
padding:2px;
}
/* */
/* The reason for the a{} is to work around Opera 5's handling of the Ciao Hack */

a{} /* Empty rule because I have heard the first rule after Ciao's hack is discarded by some buggy Mac browsers */

/* How the tables with text in them look */
table.blog, table.profile, td.blogComments, td.blogCommentsProfile {
border:1px solid rgb(0,0,0);
background-color:rgb(255,255,192);
}

/* Again, hide CSS from NN4 */
/*/*/a{}
table.blog, table.profile, td.blogComments, td.blogCommentsProfile {
margin-bottom:3px;}
td.blogCommentsProfile{border-right:0px; padding:7px;}
td.blogComments{border-left:0px;}
td.blogComments td {border: 0px;}
table.blog table {border: 0px;}
p.blogTimeStamp {
border: 1px solid rgb(0,0,0);
background: rgb(192,192,192);
padding: 2px; }
/* */
/* p.blogTimeStamp CSS puts a box around the date so blog entries look separate when one is viewing all blogs; the other CSS does tricks like make blog comments look like one seamless box instead of two boxes, and add a margin to make it so the boxes don't touch each other in IE and Konqueror */

a{} /* Empty rule because I have heard the first rule after Ciao's hack is discarded by some buggy Mac browsers */

/* The following puts a line around the images so they don't clash with colors */
a img{
border: 2px solid rgb(0,0,0);
margin-top: 2px;
}

Actualmente escuchando:
Speed of Sound
Por: Coldplay
Fecha de publicación: 24 May, 2005

02:47

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domingo, agosto 07, 2005

Carrete!

Emoticón actual:  feliz

Carrete! For those of you not familiar with Chilean Spanish, that means "Party on!". I went to a good party last night. I met some really cool people. In particular, I got to know this really sweet girl who is a lot like me romantically. As I say in my profile, I'm not ready for a relationship. So I didn't ask for her phone number or anything. But it was nice to meet her. There is even a pretty good chance I'll see her again at a party.

Actually, there was only one problem with the party--too many smokers. I confess that I am one of those snobs who doesn't like being around people who smoke. But, since the people at the party were real cool, I put my snobbery on the shelf and had a lot of fun meeting new people.

I also met this really nice guy who invited me to a hangout this coming Thursday.

So, it looks like as though I'm getting in the groove and starting to know people in the San Diego area. I'll also join some San Diego-specific myspace groups and see if I can find parties that way.

12:00

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