Today I can be forgiven if I was in a cranky mood. After a morning of wrestling with CSS, I go into the shop and people talk to me like I’m doing nothing. I was not really nasty, just enough to let them know that my time is not free. A good example is that Jackie lady who has the storage locker full of health spa equipment she wants sold on eBay. Great, except that she disappears for weeks at a time. When she started talking about that today, I told her when she brings in an inventory, digital pictures, descriptions of every item to be sold and shows me she has the ability to ship the things, I’ll take another look.
She looked stunned, like I was supposed to do all that. I said no, my commission is just to sell the stuff, not to inventory it. She brought up that I was originally going to photograph it, so I brought up that she had originally scheduled a Saturday morning meeting to do so, and had neither showed up or called to cancel, then left town for six weeks. That was then, this is now, and I would need some indication that she is serious before I do anything else. She said she’d pay commission but I said no, that I had basically already earned that during the six or seven false alarms over this project. (Besides, my accepting her commission is dependent on nobody else offering me even more commission for the same time period or effort.)
Fred was right, this Ernesto hurricane never happened. It may have been bad weather, however who noticed? They don’t publicize it, but half of all hurricanes do happen at night. It fizzled. So did the new novel I’m reading, called “Countdown” by David Hagberg. It is another Clancey clone about these super-stud types that go into the secret service and whose bosses have dossiers on everybody. I can’t figure out how each side knows who the professional assassins are on the other team. They never explain how these people can be professionals if everybody has them on file. Never, never trust a man whose middle name is Aleksandrovich. Apparently I am the only one who gets suspicious when a forty-year-old six foot three blonde in perfect physical condition applies for the job as a night watchman at my nuclear power plant in the middle of the Negev Desert.
I did make a sale, to Dr. Z and MJ. They’ve got themselves a nice little computer and now some lessons on using it. I was there for several hours, they are good students. JP’s sister and her husband came over to see the new HDTV. Wow, I can tell you it is nice – providing the broadcasts can keep to those high standards. It is really something you have to see outside of the store. There show was animated dinosaurs and where I am normally leery because such productions can be geared to show off the best features, I am now convinced of what is possible. Of course, they should have 3D TV and have colonies are Mars by now.
I showed Fred what I’ve done with CSS, and while he is still not sure it is a giant step forward, he sees that we will have something marketable shortly. It is no longer dependent on Justin giving us confusing specs. Of the 82 links on his donut site, nearly a third are circular and almost half go to the same urls. In one case, 16 or 17 links to used dough mixers take you to exactly the same listing.
This is not the same as different views resulting from the same html code due to different style sheets. That kind of duplication is a good thing. Fred, still a solid believer in tables, was impressed by the two views I showed him. It is to be expected an old data-base hand like me will produce very structured code paths. One link in and one link out. No, I don’t think spaghetti links are “kewl”, “groovy” or “modern”. Such “logic” is just as stupid today as it was a thousand years ago – but each generation of half-wits thinks they’ve discovered some free-thinking mechanism that everyone else overlooked.
I am producing a visual-based catalog. Where Justin’s pages are devoid of photos (they are his early works), mine has very little text. Somebody will pay us for what we have already. Oddly, an old enemy called photo resolution is coming back into the fray. For some reason, it is not easy to find software that takes a high resolution picture that scales it down to the size you want in both dimension and volume.
That isn’t clear. How about an example of the problem? Okay, I want a picture to be 75 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall, in jpeg format and set to a file size that displays well on a 72 dpi monitor. The picture I have to start with is 500 pixels by 750 pixels and is 600 dpi. That is far too much picture for my needs. Since I am taking something away, it would seem relatively easy to set the dimensions and have the software draw a scaled rectangle of what would display with those settings. I know a lot of people will tell me there is software that does this – and I know that. But try to take the pictures they produce and display them correctly on a web page. That’s the part that doesn’t work. If such an application exists, it is well-hidden. Right now I do it by trial and error.
Here’s something unusual. See the metal poles in the picture? They are spotlights for a tennis court. They are hinged so they swing down out of the way when a hurricane comes through. I never said everybody in Florida was a numbskull, just the majority. There are scattered pockets of people who have learned, but very scattered. I was timing my walking when I came upon a crew setting these lights back up. I had earlier guessed that I naturally walked up to six miles per hour (because I remember having done so), but that is really hoofing it. In actuality, the correct rate seems to be 3.7 miles per hour, tops.
