Month: May 2010

jQuery and CSS


I’ve been doing some client-side stuff at work recently, and I’m realizing that I don’t know nearly enough about some of this stuff. So, I picked up a book on jQuery, “jQuery: Novice to Ninja”, and another one on CSS, “CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions”. The jQuery book is pretty good, and a pretty easy read. I haven’t started the CSS book yet. I’m somewhat chagrined to admit that I’ve kind of been “faking it” with CSS for the last few years. I’ve never actually sat down and read a book on CSS or taken a class, or anything like that. I know enough to get by, usually, but I definitely need to learn more.

Meanwhile, I’ve put off my attempt to get through any more ASP.NET exams for now. I’m just letting work needs dictate my independent study time. At some point, hopefully, I’ll be up to speed on enough of the stuff at work that I can get back to the certification exams.

Oh, and as an example of how little I know about CSS, I really don’t know how to style a div so these two Amazon link boxes will line up horizontally instead of vertically. If I messed around with it for an hour, I’d probably figure it out. But I should probably know how to do something like that off the top of my head.

Big Bambu


Big Bambu
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I went into NYC yesterday, and spent some time at the Met. I went up to the roof to check out Big Bambu. It’s pretty cool.

I did not realize at the time, though, that Big Bambu is also the name of a Cheech and Chong album. This is funny, because, as I was looking at this installation, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this thing was all planned out in a CAD system, or if these guys just smoked a lot of weed and lashed a bunch of bamboo together at random?” So, the name would indicate the latter. But I think they did plan it out, at least to some extent, and were probably not high while climbing around in the bamboo, and lashing it all together.

WordPress

I like this post on converting from Blogger to WordPress. I was thinking about doing this myself, when Blogger announced that they were discontinuing FTP support. I decided to stay with Blogger for now, rather than learn WordPress, but I now need to learn WordPress for work, so maybe it’s time to look into this again. WordPress has a nice admin interface, and it’s kind of cool that you can run your own install, and do whatever you want with it.

My brother Pat’s old blog used Movable Type, and I was always impressed with MT’s admin interface, and plug-in support. WordPress is similar in many ways.

Eh, who am I kidding? I’ve been on Blogger for almost ten years now. I’m probably not going to change, unless Google shuts it down, or does something really weird with it.

Halloween 1976


Halloween
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I think this is from Halloween 1976. I would have been only 9, and so still at an age where making a cardboard Liberty Bell costume, and painting it red, white, and blue, would have seemed like a good idea.

I finally finished uploading all the slides I had scanned in by ScanCafe. There are a bunch of good ones in there. Some very nice photos from Japan, though some seem to have picked up some mold or something that couldn’t be removed by their digital ICE.

a fun project at work

I’m starting a project at work right now that’s going to involve integrating content from a WordPress blog and Picasa Web into an ASP.NET site. I’m a little leery about this, since it seems that this could all be done directly in .Net, and would be more efficient that way, but I’m game to give it a try. It should be fun. (Yeah, I know, now that I’ve said that, I’m doomed.)

Newsweek

I’ve had a Kindle subscription to Newsweek for a while now. I’m pretty far behind on my reading right now, but I am still reading it. I was disappointed to hear that The Washington Post is putting Newsweek up for sale. It’s actually a pretty good magazine.

It’s always possible someone interesting will buy it, and the quality will remain (reasonably) high. I’m worried that it will be bought by someone who’ll close the magazine, fire most of the staff, and just use the name for a generic news portal of some sort. Or it could get bought by Rupert Murdoch, which would probably result in a change in tone that would make the magazine much less interesting to me.

I guess if it goes under, or changes too radically, I’ll switch back to reading The Economist.