The Beauty of Randomness: 3/31/04

While going through my logs again, I found that a random link generator at altavista had referred a bunch of vistors to my art gallery. So I plugged in the link myself and was taken to a bunch of interesting and odd ball graphics pages. You should try it out: Altavista's Web Collage.

Tableless CSS: Same day

When looking for my current job, many employers wanted "tableless CSS" so I figured it was the current coding/design technique that I'd need to add to my bag of tricks. Sure, I knew rudimentary CSS and have been using it for years but I hadn't heard of tableless CSS. I know what it means now and I'm slowly working towards a fuller understanding of it.

Now that I have a job and it fortunately allows me time to improve my skills, I've been learning as much as I can about CSS. A lot of that new knowledge is reflected in this site. Now out of curiousity to see how far behind I was with CSS, I've been looking at the source code of my peers (just other web designers with websites) and I'm shocked at how few are using any CSS! It's maybe 2% of my sample size but as I look at more sites, I'm sure it will drop below even 2%.

Post Script: Still the Same Day

My silly accomplishment for the day is finally setting up my web site to serve a custom 404 page. Go on, type in any random page name and you'll see it.

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Death to Spacer.gif! : 3/30/04

My CSS conversion continues. I have turned my header from a complex spacer.gif table involving 20 lines of code and seven images into one line of code and two images. That frees up valuable bandwidth and is easier to maintain. Happy Dance!

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Roses are Red; Violets are Blue;
Here's a Mouse from Me to You : 3/27/04

My favorite animated film, Gay Purr-ee (1962) is finally out on DVD. I received my copy today and promptly had to watch it. I can now retire my old copied off of television video tape that is getting close to 20 years old.

I love this film so much that I convinced one of my film professors to let me write a term paper analysis on it. I earned an A for my work!

My son is crazy about cats as much as I was at his age so I'm thrilled that I have a good (and widescreen) copy to share with him.

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The Best Time of Day to Have a Migraine:

Is definitely not first thing in the morning! I hate waking up from a really good night's sleep only to find my head pounding. I've been awake since 6:30 A.M. and it's now 1 P.M. and I still have my headache. At least it's not as bad as it was first thing.

If I have to get a migraine, I prefer it to happen late afternoon because it won't get really bad until I'm already home from work. I can usually just sleep it off then.

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I Don't Want to Go Fishing in my Toilet: 3/25/04

Don't get me wrong; I love my son but last night he managed to push all my buttons. He got into things he's never done before. Of course at age 19 months, he hasn't had the time or know how for very long to get into things. I guess he's making up for lost time.

First it was trying to rewire the electronics on the exercise bike. That meant standing up on a chair on his tippy toes.

Then it was the usual near bedtime toddler grumpiness. Grump. Grump. Whine. Slap. "No!" Etc.

He finished off the night by filling up one of our two toilets with every interesting thing he could find: 1 towel, 1 sock, 1 book mark, 12 safety disposable razors, a paper towel, a wine bottle cork and some random change.

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Color My World : 3/24/04

Going through the logs, I see that my color mixing tutorials are the current most popular pages on Puss Reboots. I will have to think of other color theory tutorials.

If you have suggestions, you can email them to webmaster at this website.

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CSS Saga Continues : 3/23/04

I'm now the proud owner of Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide published by O'Reilly. I'll be reading it on and off as time permits at work and on the weekends. As I continue to revamp this website I plan to move more and more towards good CSS.

Speaking of updates, I have finished my initial redesign of the Bryce Freebies section. I'm now rendering and exporting Bryce 5 goodies to add to the site in its own section to help Bryce 4 users avoid downloading items they won't be able to use.

In the meantime, my next redesign goal is the Fine Art Gallery (Paintings) which is currently sporting an ugly design. I don't know what possessed me to design it that way!

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Birthday Madness: 3/22/04

Saturday was my husband's 30th birthday.

We started celebrating on Friday with his office mates and their significant others from Berkeley. It was fun but exhausting because we had to keep our son entertained an extra hour while we waited for most of the party fo show up at the Chevy's. They had gotten lost and were coming on foot after having gotten off BART. No big deal. My complaint is with the restaurant that basically ignored us while we waited. No water refills, no new chips or salsa. Nada. Zilch! Sometimes that restaurant is great and sometimes (like Friday), it's terrible.

Saturday we drove down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to spend the day with Ian's folks who were visiting for the day. We had a wonderful day at the aquarium and Sean really enjoyed seeing the fish and the sea otters. I think the sea otters reminded him of swimming cats.

After the aquarium we drove to Salinas to meet up with my parents. So it was a caravan of two cars. We were all going by a Yahoo Map that had for some stupid reason had decided to obliterate the destination address because we had chosen the "printer friendly" view. Thank goodness for cell phones! I ended up being the operator between my parents who were already arrived and my in-laws who were trailing behind us.

By the time we got home at 9:00 PM, Sean was asleep. Normally he wakes up when we carry him up to the apartment from the car, but not that night. We could hear him snoring on Ian's shoulder! All we could do was take off his shoes and tuck him into bed with his clothes on. He slept the whole night through dressed in his day clothes and jacket!

Sunday we had a final goodbye breakfast with Ian's folks and then went home to recooperate. I think we all napped that afternoon!

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Hot Pussy: 3/18/04

Hello Google and AOL Searchers! I've found that I rank #3 among the searches for pussy. Although my site doesn't contain the hot pussy that I'm sure most searchers are looking for, my log files show that the average searcher spends half an hour to an hour at my site looking at my 3D art and paintings. So thank you for stopping by. Comments (0) Permalink

Kipling and the San Francisco Examiner: 3/17/04

I read in this month's Writers' Digest magazine that after having a story published in the Examiner, Kipling was unable to sell any more to the paper. They had decided he was a hack writer and not up to their fine standards.

A hundred or so years into the future and the Examiner is a free daily paper and hardly the prestigious paper it once was. Meanwhile, Kipling's works are considered classics.

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Mousaka: 3/14/04

I made Moussaka for dinner tonight and it was delicious! Here's the recipe:

1 lb lamb
1 small egg plant (I used the Asian variety)
3 or so cloves of garlic to taste (diced)
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp cinnamon
handful of pine nuts
16 oz can of spaghetti sauce
2 or 3 eggs
1/2 to 1 cup of milk

Cube and brown the meat with the garlic power and diced garlic cloves. Add in the cubed egg plant, cinnamon and pine nuts. After the pine nuts start to turn color and smell really good, add in the sauce and let simmer for about five minutes.

In a bowl beat the eggs and milk and set aside.

Move the meat and egg plant mixture to a lasagna baking dish. Pour the egg and milk mixture on top of the meat mixture. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes. You won't need to cover it. When it's done, let it cool for about five minutes.

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Beep Beep: 3/13/04

Last Saturday my car need a major service. That's the joy of having a three year old car that gets driven ten thousand miles every six months. Today the same car needed new front brakes. So that's two weekends of having to get the car to the mechanic early in the morning when I'd rather be having a lazy breakfast with my family. This time I brought my son along to check the car in. He was fascinated by all the different cars and noises.

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How not to design: 3/11/04

If you're just starting out with a web site or you're an old pro and want to laugh yourself silly, I recomming "How to Make an Annoying Web Page." It brings back memories of some of the awful stuff I created in the name of design.

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Excuse the Mess: 3/10/04

Two years is too long to let a web site go to pot. I'm now cleaning up this mess of web site. Some of the older pages make me blush. Boy are they ugly! At least I'll spare you the cliché of putting up one of the those "under construction" animated gifs.

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Finally Caught Up: 3/8/04

I've finished putting up the bulk of my artwork for 2001 - 2003. Now I can keep my gallery up to date as I create new artwork. Working on the gallery has reminded me of the fun I had created the various pieces and I've been finding the time again to create new pieces. Now I just have to make sure not to completely forget my reading commitments that I have with my buddies at Book Crossing.

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Grumpy: 3/7/04

I think we've officially hit the "terrible twos." Sean was cranky all of today. I don't know if it's the growth spurt that's making him so grumpy or if it's something else. In the course of a week he has out grown most of his T-shirts. He's only 18 months but is tall in the torso and now wears 2T or even 3T shirts. Anyway, he's normally a jolly kid but not today. Lots of temper tantrums and lots of saying "No!" to everything.

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Gray Skies: 3/4/04

We've been having a lot of rain which is good. We need the rain. All the hillsides are turning a healthy green. Last week we had an impressive electrical and hail storm. Unfortunately it was on a night when Ian teaches night school and he was stuck in it trying to get home. We don't have a garage so he had to find parking on the street and walk home in the middle of the storm.

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Thing One and Thing Two: 3/3/04

Thing One: Yesterday would have been Theodore Geisel's 100th birthday. So a belated happy birthday to Dr. Seuss.

Thing Two: Writers or would be writers should read a style guide. The guide doesn't have to be a bible but writing well (or at least minus obvious errors) will make your writing stronger and better received.

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Giggling like a School Girl: 3/2/04

Excuse me while I giggle. I've finally had the time to dive feet first (or maybe feet first) into cascading style sheets. Damn! CSS can do a lot more than it could when I was first introduced to it. I'll be required to do some heavy duty CSS coding at work so I'm playing with this site again and I love it!

I also have to admit to being piqued by the recent Book Crossing redesign which is heavily driven by CSS.

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Rejection: 3/1/04

On Friday I received my first rejection notice for a short story I had submitted back in January. Everyone loves to tell me the story of Stephen King's rejection letters and how he stapled them to the wall. I've read On Writing too. The problem is, I can't staple mine. I deleted it before I even got a chance to fully read it. That was an accident. It got caught up in my spam filter and I saw the subject and from as it was deleting. I promise to staple the next one up somewhere.

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