Category Archives: News

Things, Goings On, and Stuff I write

Crocs is Shoes

Abby has these foamy shoes called Crocs (Crocs on Amazon – for picture purposes, I don’t expect you to be buying these 😉 ). She loves them and she actually gets comments on them at times. I write that to say this: last night we were eating dinner at P.F. Changs and a man was seated at the table next to us. He had a serious looking contraption attached to his left knee. I believe the reason was that his left calf and foot were missing as they had been amputated. His other foot was wearing a Croc shoe.

Abby, not seeing the missing foot (because it was missing, not that she didn’t notice it was missing) saw the other foot wearing the croc and said, “He’s missing a croc.” I love my daughter!

Girls of the Gap

Playboy is looking for more women to be turned into cheap eye-candy. I’m pretty certain that someone at the Gap is willing to throw of their inhibitions, and clothes, and be photographed so that guys can look at them naked, and then once they’ve seen that, a few will see them in person (while hopefully they’re wearing some clothes) and then harras and hound them so as to make them feel awkward. Ahh, but getting a discount on jeans is not enough for some people, they want to show off what their mom and dad gave them so that their mom and dad can be utterly embarrassed. Yeah, that’ll be good for all sorts of morale at the threads retailer… “Why buy our clothes, obviously our employees aren’t wearing them.” You’re fired.

Ascending Mount Grays

Grays and Torreys Labeled
Last week I wrote about hiking up to the peaks of Mount Grays and Torreys. I didn’t make Torreys peak. About 100 yards/meters from the peak I got a leg cramp. The down side of this was that I knew my legs had just about had it. The up side was that it was approximately 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celcius) – I couldn’t feel my leg well enough for it to hurt (I was wearing shorts). I stretched out my calf and then finished the hike to the top. I met my party at the top and then told them that I was heading back down. It was really windy and cold at the peak so I cut out and headed back down to the car. I figured I might have to wait an extra hour or so before they got back given that I was leaving early.

My right knee started to hurt and so I found myself walking slowly. About 2/3 of the way down I turned around to see Laban running down towards me. I immediately realized something was wrong because you don’t run down a 14,000 foot mountain. Of course I was the one that was wrong, he, Brian and Jim had run down from the top because, “It was easier than walking.” Color me a wimp buy I didn’t have the stamina or the leg for continued running so they all walked with me limping along to keep up with their well honed bodies.

It was lots of fun and I’ve uploaded some pictures of the trip to my Flickr account. Enjoy 🙂

Everybody’s Doing It

I’ll be attempting to hike up Mounts Grays and Torreys tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to the exercise, but I’m also looking forward to the fellowship. Hiking up is slow and has little talking but the downward hike is faster and because you’re gaining oxygen you really are able to feel better and talk more.

This will officially be the highest I’ve ever been while walking on terra firma. I’ll have to see what can be done to go to Mt. Elbert some time in the future since it is several hundred feet taller. I’m planning on bringing some food, water, a camera, a tripod and a change of clothes in case we run into bigfoot. Apparently there will be lots of people there because these are the two easiest mountains and there is just a saddleback between them.

Maybe Mount Whitney when I turn 30 🙂

Holy Freaking Cow: iPod Nano

With a color display that is 1.5 inches (3.81 centimeters) wide the new iPod Nano is amazing. It can store 2 or 4 giggabytes of data [depending on the model you choose]. It also replaces the sexy iPod Minis. Therefore you can probably go out and buy a mini for less (less mini?) than $199.00 now, the refurb store on Apple’s site is showing them currently at $179.00. You can also store and view images on the nano, which rocks, well, actually, the music rocks, the images viewing is handy for people who like thumbnails. Jessica even wants one, which made me chuckle 🙂

Request for Clarification: Define Radical Right Wing Agenda

I was just on a website that had the term ‘Radical Right Wing Agenda’ as something they were fighting against. I consider myself conservative, but I don’t feel radical, I don’t lump myself into ‘right wing’ and I don’t feel like I’ve got an agenda [politically speaking]. However, I know that there are people out there that are matching the said title. I don’t know what that title references though, so if you feel like you’ve got a clear definition of this term, please leave it in the comments. I just want to understand if this is an actually small group like the people who put up godhatesfags.com, or are they referring to anyone conservatively oriented in general. The problem with these sorts of generalizations is that they require people to ask deeper questions to try to understand.

In my history classes we would use the term ‘platform’ to describe the agenda that a certain historical politician had. Is having an agenda bad? I don’t think so. Clearly the people whose site I was reading had an agenda, they were against something and wanted to stop that something from being propogated. I think that the talking heads, political analysts and radio show hosts need to be very, very careful when they speak of ‘agendas’ and various other ‘lumping’ terms that reduce people from being people to statistics, ‘us verses them’ or any other thing besides United States (or other country) citizens who hold beliefs that they, by United States Constitutional standards, have a God given right to hold.

So, with that in mind: what’s the definition, and is it a fair definition?

A Night at the Ballpark

This evening Jessica and I joined Brian and Jillia and Brian’s brother and sister-in-law at Coor’s Field to watch the Rockies trounce the Dodgers (in inning 5) 11 to 1. It was like watching a baseball game except that instead of both teams playing it seamed that the Dodgers were on vacation and look-alikes were sent to pretend to play baseball. Actually, from the nose bleed seats we had, they could have been look-alikes and we’d not have known it.

Our nose bleed seats were so cheap that I can’t complain because if I did… I would be a bigger loser than the Dodgers. They were $1.00 each. That’s cheap. What was bad is that in the nose bleed seats there was lots of room for us to pick and choose since the actual seats we were assigned were 6 of thousands that were not being used. We sat in a row with no one else sitting there and just had a ourselves a good time watching the game. There were lots of empty seats to either rows above or below us. However, the Redneck Pharisees came and were quick to note that we were sitting in one of their purchased seats. So we moved. I point out that they were Pharisees because the Pharisees in the Bible were very legalistic and loved abiding by every rule so as long as they got their way 🙂 We weren’t trying to cheat, we were simply watching a baseball game and happened to sit in one seat that was theres – so we moved down two seats just to make sure they had room. One was dressed like a white rapper. Or what I would assume a white rapper might look like who was trying to look like a gangsta rapper who was scrawny… and white. The fake gold chains and the bandana underneath the camoflage hat were priceless. I need to get a camera phone so that I can document these things when I see them. They’re truly fantastic.

Then, during the game a Rocky was tagged out at third base. This caused the Redneck Pharisees to lose their minds as they screamed at the umpire for making a bad call. I don’t know about you, but when I’m hundreds of feet away (my guess is 300 or more – 91.44+ meters for the Metric folks) I don’t get too picky about the ornate details of things transpiring at said distance away from me. In fact, I’d let the umpire, who’s trained and standing within 10 feet of the base, make the call. However, this was totally unacceptable. I thought we might get the other seat back from them they were so chapped, however, they persisted in watching the game. While they persisted to watch the game they commented to one another about how pregnant Jessica looked. Brilliant.

The Redneck Pharisees have either not seen a short pregnant woman, or they wanted to make poor judgment calls of their own. Let me tell you that you shouldn’t constantly point out to a woman who is pregnant how big she looks. Don’t compare her to other pregnant women, don’t compare her to a whale, a super-model or anything else. Don’t compare her to her pre-pregnancy weight… don’t talk about it. Let her pregnancy belly be the 800 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all not talking about. It will be better for you.

We left in the 7th inning because it was obvious that the Dodgers hadn’t shown up for the game – we’d eaten our fill of $6.00 hot-dogs and drank enough $5.00 sodas [one, for the record]. So we left and picked up the Abigator from my parents. The Redneck Pharisees were climbing all over the seats to not have to walk down the isle in front of us since their seats that they were so desperate to claim were in the middle of the row… it was time to move on – so we did.

Good times. Thanks Brian and Jillia, Steve and Nicky and the whole slew of people that found doing the wave during the game was more fun than watching actually live out their namesake verb: dodging the ball instead of catching it and tagging people out.

No Chairs for This Table

I have submitted a table stylesheet to a new CSSZenGarden like site CSS Table Gallery. Their is nothing overly complicated about the style other than it uses some nifty CSS 2.1 selectors for standards compliant browsers (read: not Internet Explorer) to add an arrow next to the download links. In fact, let me outline the code I used:

tbody td a{
background: url(down_arrow.gif) no-repeat;
background-position: top left;
min-height: 20px;
padding-left: 20px;
float: left;
padding-right: 4px;
}
tbody tr th+td a{
background-image: none;
padding: inherit;
float: inherit;
}
/* Fake for IE, argh! Maybe IE 7 will resolve this. */
tbody td a{
_background: none;
_background-position: inherit;
_padding-left: 2px;
_float: inherit;
_padding-right: inherit;
}

The first rule adds the arrow to all links that are children of a regular table cell. This is a problem of course because we don’t want the download indicator next to the author links. Therefore we use the preceding sibling (+) selector in the second rule to find the section that is the table header cell (TH) and then remove the background image and download styling for that link. The third rule is a hack to get Internet Explorer to ignore the whole thing.

I like to style things in orange simply because my brother, Ed, likes orange 🙂 Yeah, I’m weird like that.

I used TopStyle Pro 3.12 to code this and Color Schemer Studio to grab complementary oranges.