Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves

After you.

I'd Watch This

I'm Back!

From vacation, that is. Here are a couple of photos from Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, made famous by 1994's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. (Click to embiggen.) The book cover's Bird Girl isn't there anymore, by the way. She was donated to Savannah's Telfair Museum of Art to avoid disturbances by visitors to the cemetery.

The La's

Does anyone per chance have this?

Crickets

Kind of quiet around here...

Continuous Chest Compression CPR

Take a couple of minutes to watch this. You just never know ...

OK, I give up......where are all you assholes?

Report in please.

Good God, I've Been Busy

It's good to know I've been missed, Deighve.

After years and years and years of designing Web sites using table-based layouts (hey, that's how everybody did it back in the day), I have taken the plunge and taught myself to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a much more elegant and efficient way of doing things that separates a page's content from its layout. Why was I a hold-out, you may be asking?

1) Even just a couple of years ago, there were many people in my company still using Netscape 4.x, an ancient browser that was incapable of rendering CSS at all. However, a recent glance at our statistics verified that all my current customers are on board with IE6 (ugh), IE7 or Firefox.

2) I had heard some real horror stories about browser rendering differences with CSS and how the same things that rendered beautifully in one browser looked absolutely shitty in another. Weird indents here and there, odd overlaps where there shouldn't be any, who needs that? The only way around, and this is still true with IE6, is to use various CSS hacks to fool the errant browser into doing the right thing. ("* html" has become my new best friend.)

3) I, like most people, tend to stick with what I know.

I've done this completely on my own, with no prodding from anyone else - or hope of monetary compensation - because it's the right thing to do if I want to be regarded as a serious designer. (The look on my non-techie boss's face was priceless when I tried to explain CSS and its benefits to all concerned.) I've worked through a lot of lunches and even made a trip to work last weekend to figure something out that was making me crazy. (Thanks again, IE6!)

I'm still Johnny Newguy, and I'm relatively certain that my CSS will be a source of secret embarrassment in a few months, but to get a real sense of how powerful this stuff is, check out css Zen Garden and select some of the different designs in the right-hand column. Keep in mind as you do that the content for each page is exactly the same, only the CSS is changing.

Mind-blowing stuff.