Re: Coming up
Sun. November 16
....oh yeah....you might wanna bring something to snack on while you're in the stand and something to drink. It has to be quiet like a juice box/sandwich. And a pillow and sleepinng bag/blankets. Call...
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Jack Handey Visited My Website!
Nov 17
The other day I got an email sent from my contact form on my website. It was from a comedian known as Jack Handey who has been featured on Saturday Night Live dozens of times, and who has written several books. Now it wasn't a good email but interesting nonetheless:
You have to take my Deep Thoughts off your site right away.
It's copyrighted material. You giving away my property for free hurts my book sales. Is that concept difficult for you to understand?
If you'd like, I'll have my attorney contact you. But then that'll cost me money, and he'll have to get that money from you.
Again, please remove the Deep Thoughts immediately.
Sincerely,
Jack HandeyWhile I hoped I would hear from Jack Handey in another fashion it's still cool that some famous person visited my website. I of course removed all of the quotes I had of his, on my website. Being the Google Analytics freak that I am I wondered, what sort of computer setup does Mr. Handey have. Using GA's sweet new segmentation feature I can find this out pretty easily.
Mr. Handey did a Google search for the phrase "message president jack handey outside" which really doesn't make any sense as is, but he ended up on my site where he proceeded to view 9 of my pages. That's sort of the fun thing about web analytics is I can make assumptions, and find out what people are doing on websites that I have analytics on (at work or at home). People generally assume that what they do online is private but it really isn't and crazy people like me can figure those things out assuming we have the data to do so. I always laugh when some idiot gets caught using a proxy to do something illegal online (like hacking Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account).
Anyway's here's Mr. Handey's computer setup:
- ISP: Comcast
- City & State: Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Browser: Safari 523.12
- Operating System: Macintosh
- Screen Resolution: 1680 x 1050
- Flash Version: 9.0 r19
- Java Installed: Yes
- Screen Colors: 24 bit
- Visited My Website: 2 PM, November 9th for about 8 minutes and 48 seconds
I'd like to apologize to Mr. Handey who I admire and find very funny. I essentially just copied a bunch of his quotes from some other website that probably did the same thing. It seems that too often people search Google for one of his quotes and ended up on my website (which they can't do via his books because books are not searchable). Either way I didn't profit from this other than answering some random person's question.
And now deep thoughts...by Jack Handey...
...View Comments (1)
Message Board
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Re: Coming up
Sun. November 16
6 sounds good. Maybe you could have your stuff ready the night before? We'll get up to the cabin around 7 then. Dad likes to go to bed early b/c we wake up at like 4am or something....
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Re: Coming up
Sun. November 16
Hey Kate, I get out of work at 5 pm. I could get to New London by 6 pm. Is that soon enough? Let me know. Also I'd need to get home on Sunday (time doesnn't matter)...
Poll: Has The Economy Had Any Effect On Your Life?
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Yes
67% -
No
0% -
What's The Economy?
33%
View Comments (0)
Tech: How To Add Image Loading Icon To Large Images Using CSS
Oct 27
I ran into a problem on my website recently with slow loading images. The images weren't actually very large, the reason they were slow loading was because I was using ASP.NET to dynamically create thumbnails for my images off of a larger source image. I guess I'm just too lazy to resize 75+ images in photoshop and I'm very clean when it comes to throwing more files on my webserver. My solution was to have one file and just resize it with ASP.NET. That worked great but some pages had 20 or so images and could take up to 20 seconds to load them all. I started searching for solutions to this problem with JavaScript but for the most part I dislike JavaScript and I was looking for something better than "if (document.browser.support.some.random.method)". I found my salvation in CSS once again.
Apply Ajax Style Loading Image To Your Images Without JavaScript
It's really simple, in fact it's too simple I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. Simply add the .loading class to any of your IMG elements.
.loading { background: url(loading.gif) no-repeat center center; }But wait, that's not all
I would also recommend adding dimensions to your images via the Height and Width properties in CSS. This will ensure that your loading.gif file appears completely. My images we're dynamically added to the page via an ASP loop so this was easy enough to add.
height: 125px; width: 150px;Alt Text?
The only drawback to this solution is in FireFox (and possibly other browsers, other than IE) the alt text will cover up the background-image. A workaround might be to give the IMG tag a title attribute instead of an ALT attribute. I know this isn't ideal but it's the best I can think of. Since my images didn't need any SEO treatment I was fine with this.
To view a demo of this view my wallpapers section of my site.
Sources:View Comments (4)
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Looks like a blob still but its kinda interesting.... Kate Hu (1)
Review: SPORE
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Sep 30
SPORE is the latest game from the creators of The Sims and Sim City. Having played both of those games and enjoying them, I thought I'd take a chance and buy this game as well.
The premise of the game is to evolve from a cellular organism to a full blown species capable of space travel. The game starts out by allowing you to customize the look of your cell. After that you basically run around eating other cells and then you earn the ability to to upgrade your cell, either with weapons or friendly features. I of course chose weapons every time to start my conquest of conquering everything in the game.
After awhile of that, which is probably the only boring part of the game, you move on to walking on land. There is a great deal of customization in this part of what your species looks like. With this stage you can start attacking other species and also add members to your gang of warriors.
After this the game zooms out more and allows you to control multiple members of your tribe at once. This part of the game is similar to real time strategy games. I found this part to be quite a bit of fun but not to hard to manage like some other games are.
After that you move to outer space. If anybody has watched Star Trek this part of the game is a lot like the original series. You travel from star system to star system contacting alien life forms and either helping them or conquering them.
I slowed down a bit at this stage and got a bit friendlier trying not to aggravate too many other life forms.
The game has got a rash of bad reviews on computer nerd sites due to its' anti-piracy DRM that is included with it. While DRM is evil and all, the game is really great and I would probably only care about the DRM if I owned the game but didn't buy it.
The only complaints I have about the game is there is no way to reverse evolve or return to stages earlier in life (other than starting a new saved game) Sometimes I'd like to go back and be a tribe again. I give SPORE a 9/10...View Comments (0)
Video: The Only Funny Political Commerical Ever
I saw this political commercial on TV the other night. It struck me as strange since it was one of the few campaign commercials I've seen that uses sarcasm in a light hearted way. While I don't support either of the candidates I still thought it was worth posting on my site.... Neal Grosskopf (0)