Monthly Archive for April, 2008
I just finished a book that I must reccomend. It is called The Survivors. I feel so down since I finished this book. It is the essence of everything I love about books lately. Adventure, suspense…
I bought The Survivors along with Rendezvous with Rama, another gem from Counterpoint. I mean, it was on the vintage paperback shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Perhaps my greatest find at a used bookstore.
I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same reason I’m obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It’s the unknown, it cannot be contained. We cannot really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sublime. It is beautiful and bleak.
Polar regions have incredible occurrences that only happen at the poles. Auroras? High concentration of meteorites? Yeah! Talk about feeling small. The thought of it all overwhelms me.
The Survivors follows the story of Duncan Craig, who left his job in London in search of something new. He travels to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far different than he imagines. He becomes a skipper of a catcher in a whaling fleet. The circumstances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and speculation of murder and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.
As the story begins to become monotonous, Craig goes into the floes in rescue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This simple rescue escalates and many ships go down, including the large factory ship The Southern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must figure out how to survive without freezing to death or being crushed by the icebergs moving through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how little control we actually have.
And this is the real deal. While researching this post I came across this blurb about the author: “Hammond Innes was a writer who made a point of researching the material for his adventures in great depth. If he was writing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarctic then he spent time in the frozen South.”1 Hammond Innes had personal contact with the forces of the Antarctic. He witnessed the magnitude of the ice. I can’t imagine anything more perfect. This book is “a rousing adventure yarn of derring-do on the Antarctic” written by an author who experienced it first hand.
1 Asto
Hello Internet. Though Internet Explorer is an inferior web browser, I know many people still use it. I think most Internet Explorer users fall into two categories: They don’t know any better, or they don’t have a choice. The fact is many people use it. People who come to our site do. In fact about one fourth of all visits come from Internet Explorer users. Worse yet, more than half of these users are on IE6 or older. I have ignored this fact for a long time. I kept telling myself it was a fluke and to not worry about it. But over time it has remained consistent. So, it is time to reconcile.
About two weeks ago I set out to fix my templates to work and look the same for IE as they would for Safari and Firefox. I did most of this in one long day. Most problems were with css layout, but there were a few others that I had to get deeper on.
- I fixed alpha transparency on pngs. This is only a problem with IE 6 and older. I use pngs for the header images and for the peace button. Before the fix the images looked like they had a white box behind them. Now they have beautiful transparency. I looked at different solutions for this, but iepngfix was the best and had the least effect on performance.
- I fixed the flickering header images. This is another problem that exists in older versions of IE. When the header image was hovered over with the mouse, it would show the hover color underneath. It took a little tinkering to figure out this fix, but the tutorial I linked helped a lot. This was my first time using and understanding what !important means.
- I fixed the extra space on the header images. You know? That ugly gap that ruined the layout and overall design? Yeah. THAT. It took using one style for IE and one for other browsers. Thank you !important.
- I learned to never use EMs for layout. It works inconsistently.
It took me a while to figure out these fixes. A lot of searching around. That’s why I’m documenting it here. To bring it all together for people who, like me, don’t bother with IE very much. This is by no means complete or comprehensive. And again, I apologize to all IE users who’ve had a sub par experience here on the site.
