The Time Sink

Last night I'd decided to pack it in early; I'm still not over this cold/whatever and I'd just about used up all the energy I had by dinner time. That was proven out by falling asleep after dinner and waking up to finding the family rather well along into a movie!

So I had Daniel relocate from the floor pillow to the recliner and headed back to get my pillows and cover sheet... Easy enough; but while I was in the back bedroom I heard a crash from what sounded like the neighbor's place. ...and then some more noises that didn't stop. By the time I got out to the kitchen, things still hadn't quieted down so I flipped on the security lights. ...and found a dog in the pool. WT???

Yeah, it seems like the two dogs next door must have been after a possum and hit the top of the adjoining fence just right and collapsed a six foot secton. ...and since they didn't know the yard or about the pool, the one was pretty much at a loss to figure out what he was doing!

Such is life: Instead of laying down and passing out, I was helping a dog get out of the biggest bathtub she'd ever seen and doing fence repair with Daniel and the neighbor so we wouldn't have an instant replay...

Hmmm... No shaggy dog stories from last night... A normal Monday at work (no holiday for us; the kids were off though). Just a general improvement in this cold/whatever.

There's not much to say here... I stayed home from work yesterday and just slept. Once the kids were at school, I came home and slept from 0830 until 1300. ...and then I clocked out in a recliner from 1430 until 1730.

It wasn't until I got back from a shopping run today and was checking out a shipment that I realized I hadn't put the correct date on any of the checks I'd written while I was out. ...and not one teller caught on. Either I was in a time warp for a while or things aren't as tight as they have been...

I've decided I would like a Lamborghini. Oh, only for an hour or so. ...and for the CHP to close down the chunks of freeway between my office and my house. ...and that only for about thirty minutes or so.

I had to go back down to the office today... I'd managed to completely forget Shelley's Valentine's Day cards (I stash things there so I don't forget where I've hidden them at home). ...and the traffic on the way home was so light, all I could think about was how much fun I could have with a car that could challenge those thirteen miles. All I'd like is about thirty minutes to get the feel of the car and the gearbox and then another thirty for maybe two runs up and back...

Just a tidbit or two for anyone looking for the trick to the background transparency in that "Walk" I put up on the blog yesterday: I used two background images. There is one background image faded out to the darker grey; you see that one when the page is called. There's another copy of the same image faded out to a lighter grey that's locked into the same absolute reference position.

Normally, you'll see the dark grey background behind the pictures and text. ...but I've added in a class division to each of the text divisions calling for the background for that class to be the lighter grey image. The effect is to have the illusion of translucency as the text box passes over the background image.

Things work very well in the Firebird/Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror and Galeon browsers, but you don't get the effect in IE6 without a bit of javascript to make it work there. If you're running IE and have javascript allowed, I have that bit of code set to load with the page

The technique is covered in the book Eric Meyers on CSS (thanks, Donna!) and on the companion web site (the IE javascript hack). There's a nice review from Linux Journal here. If you're doing much work in CSS, I'd say it's a good investment...

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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