tjameswhite.com

If you ever wondered, here’s a quick idea of the difference between my race tires and regular old street tires. (Keep in mind that the race tires are actually DOT street-approved tires.)

• Street tire treadware: 480
• Race tire treadware: 100

100 is the mean - larger numbers have a longer life

Also, I took the new race tires to a local dealer to have them mounted, but to no avail. The sidewall on the old race tires are so stiff that they couldn’t get them the rims. Guess I’ll just have to try another dealer.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Eric Meyer on CSS. While the projects in the book are a little goofy, the practicality of them is indispensable, and sneaky. Sneaky because I have found that they have worked their way into my daily coding — and that is a good thing.

For example, I recently retooled the e-newsletters that I produce at my day job. I had eight very similar, yet subtly different templates. They utilized several different classes, which were applied to various paragraphs throughout. Over time I had tweaked the templates, but the tweaks didn’t always get moved from one to the next. So I had to remember which newsletter had the latest code and try to copy it to the one I was working on.

Yes, it was a pain.

With the retooling, I’m down to one template and only one or two classes. All other styling has been moved up to the highest parent element possible. This means no more classes for each paragraph — just create a paragraph and, depending on where it is, voila! it’s styled correctly.

I was able to reduce 8 into 1 because all of the newsletters have the same layout, just different header images and color schemes. By added a <div> that wraps the entire content, I just have to change the id of that <div> and the color scheme changes throughout.

There are two further bonuses to the improved coding. For one, the new layout degrades better in non-compliant e-mail/browser clients. Also, I have implemented semantic markup and replaced image-based headers with text. Now when I create text versions, using NoteTab Lite, all of the headers are in place and there is less clean-up for me to do.

I went to work this morning and then remembered I was going to take today off. So I worked a half day and came home. It’s not really a big deal, I didn’t have any plans or anything, it’s just that today was “bring you kid to work” day. I try to make it my personal holiday every year and stay home.

I forgot about it because I’ve been so busy lately, at work and home. I actually had some stuff that had to get done this morning, so that worked out well.

Yesterday I worked my full day, and then came home and worked almost another half day on my freelance work. My contractor called me and asked if I could have a new page created last night - upping the timeline from delivery this weekend. I was planning on putting a couple of hours into the work anyway, so I just kept slugging along until it was done.

Now that frees up some weekend time so I can get work done on the race car and make Jack’s game on Saturday.

Yesterday was also Delivery Day here. We had multiple packages arrive, including a new Compact Flash card for Herman and four new race tires (Toyo Proxes RA-1 205/55-14s if you care). My new seat belts arrived last week, so it’s time to get busy. I’ll get the new belts mounted and try to get the tires mounted this weekend.

If I don’t forget any more…

I often wonder what people are thinking when they put ads and fliers together. For those of us in the web-building profession, we see all sorts of web sites that just make our heads hurt.

But here is a special treat from the bulletin board at work:

So, if you are looking to have your house giving a jaunty lean, here’s who to call. I only wish you could see the full flier. The distortion of the house comes through much better. And for sake of size I didn’t include the full list of what this “handyman” can do for you — it is a nice little list with the last item vertically truncated. You’d think that our intrepid builder would at least notice that when photocopying.

Here’s a few more of my favorite shots: