Author Archives: Patrick Blackstone

Dept Free Is The Way To Be

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I just finally paid off the last of my credit card debt that I’ve had since 2001.

In 2001 I got a Discover Card with a limit of $7500, I then apparently proceeded to lose my mind and within 3 months I had gone over my limit on that and my other credit card that I had with a limit of $750. At one point the most I owed was about $9500 and what really made things worse was the fact that this happened in the middle of a rather long period of unemployment.

So with some help from my tax refund I just now paid off the last $1500 that I owed. It’s going to be so nice not to have to worry about that crap any more and have some more money to spend on the things I want.

Site Updates and New Camera

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Once again I’ve been mucking about with the site design, unfortunately I didn’t bother to check if it looked alright in Internet Explorer 6 so it looked kind of messed up in that browser but it should work fine now. Granted it won’t look or work quite the way I’d like it to but at least it isn’t horribly messed up. (sorry to anyone that may have visited in the last few weeks)

Some older news: I got myself a digital camera near the end of November. This is my first real camera. (unless you want to count my cell phone) It’s a Canon PowerShot SD750 and it’s a pretty sweet little camera. Since this is my first real camera I’ve been taking a lot of pictures and trying to do some artistic shots. I’ve been posting most of them on Flickr so check them out if you want, and feel free to leave comments on them. (as long as you’re not too mean)

Flickr

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I made a Flickr account to upload my photos to since keeping a decent photo gallery on this web site was to much of a burden. I’ve deleted some of the photos on this site (like my Yosemite photos) and moved them to Flickr. I’ll probably be uploading a lot of the random photos I take with my cell phone now.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrick1978/

Hiking in Yosemite

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My best friend John and I went to Yosemite on Easter. We did the Upper Yosemite Falls trail which is a 7.2 mile hike with an elevation gain of around 2700 feet. We did it in a little over 9 hours, I probably could have done it faster but John is hecka slow. My calves are still fairly sore, but at least I’m not limping around like I was on Monday and Tuesday. I took a bunch of pictures with my cell phone that I’ve uploaded to the site. (moved them to Flickr 7/22/2007)
Yosemite Pictures

While I was working on that I redid all of the thumbnails for my picture gallery’s so that they have rounded and feathered edges. That required me to use PNG’s with alpha transparency, so now they won’t look exactly how I would prefer in any browsers that don’t support PNG’s w/alpha. (like Internet Explorer 6 and below)
So basically I ended up re breaking (but this time intentionally) something I recently fixed. To me the trade off was worth it, especially since it doesn’t look that bad in IE 6.

Site Updates

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I’ve made some changes to this web site that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. The one thing that was keeping me from doing it was the fact that most people were still using Internet Explorer 6 which didn’t allow me to easily do the things I wanted to do. Now that enough people are using IE 7 or Firefox I can finally make those changes.

Here is a list of the changes I’ve made and how they will affect those that are still using IE 6

  • I am now using semitransparent PNG images
    Yay!!! (I’m such a nerd) I can finally use the best feature of my all time favorite image format.
    IE 6 users should see a dark gray instead of the proper transparency.
    I say should because IE 6 should use the background color specified in the image file, however that requires me to actually set a background color in the images, and I can’t be sure if all versions of IE & Windows will do that or not. So if I haven’t set a background color or IE isn’t using the set background color you’ll see either a light gray (in older versions of Windows) or light blue (in Windows XP) background on the images .
    However for now I won’t be changing most of the main graphics on my page over to PNG simply because I want to come up with a new design for them, and I don’t want to just use PNG versions of the images that I’m currently using.
    What the heck are PNG images?
  • My Navigation Bar stays at the top of the screen instead of scrolling with the rest of the page
    In IE 6 the navigation bar will scroll with the rest of the page. Also the background image for the navigation bar has some space between it and the edge of the page, I’m just to lazy to try and fix that for IE 6 since it works fine in newer browsers.
  • Small Code Cleanup
    In IE 6 one way to get tables to center is to wrap them in a div and set it so content in the div is aligned to center. The proper way to center a table using CSS is just to set it’s margins to Auto, but that doesn’t work in IE 6.
    I’ve removed the centering div’s when all they were centering was a table, since this always felt a little hacky to me and it serves to clean up my code just a little.
    IE 6 users will just see some things aligned to the left that were meant to be centered.
  • Fixed Photo Gallery Thumbnail Images
    Due to an oversight on my part the thumbnail images on my photos page didn’t have the proper transparency in IE 6. I have now fixed that and they should look the way I intended in IE 6.
    This is one thing I wanted to work right in IE 6. Problem was I didn’t check to see if it worked right, so they haven’t looked right in IE 6 for at least a couple months.

For those of you still using Internet Explorer 6
If you can, I highly recommend updating to the latest version of either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox

Promotion

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On August 7th I got promoted to Supervisor at Great America. Which is cool, but because my area would have 5 supervisors if I stayed, I’ll be moving to Top Gun starting on the 14th . Not sure how that’s going to be yet but I’m gong to miss all the cool people at AFX, and the wonderful darkness and air conditioning.