Here’s why I always like to carry a camera with me. Ideally one with a LONG telephoto zoom.
This critter was sitting on our front lawn as I arrived home from work. Surprisingly, my car pulling into the driveway didn’t spook him at all. I got off a couple of shots zoomed all the way in with the FZ7, shooting out through the open passenger side window.
Of course when I tried to walk around the car to get closer, he hightailed it out of there.
Playing with perspective, scale, a Ford Pinto and Mr Potato Head. Some fairly savage cropping to avoid having to clone out the tripod Potato was standing on and more importantly to avoid having to Photoshop in some shadows below him.
The retro, grainy black-and-white look would have looked right in a newspaper back when the car was new; “Exclusive! Well-known celebrity, Mr Potato Head, photographed at the grocery store! Turn to page 4 for the juicy details!”
Well, that’s my story anyway. The real reason is PH was so much closer to the camera that I couldn’t quite get enough depth of field, even with the Panasonic stopped down as far as it can be. The grainy, grungy B&W conversion helps hide that somewhat, and makes the Panny’s prodigious sensor noise look like the grain on fast film.
A few days late, I know, but better late than never. 
Another pet portrait of Lucy, looking intently at something outside the window.
Lucy rests on the back of the recliner, one paw stretched in front, the other tucked beneath her chin.
Why you shouldn’t run with scissors while swigging energy drinks?
So, it’s been awhile since I last posted here. Truth is, I haven’t had much to say that I’d feel like putting online, or that anyone sane would want to read. I know some blogging types will quite happily post about how they just broke wind, crosslinked to Wikipedia’s pages on flatulence and the history of toilet humor. I’m not one of those people. Some things just aren’t meant to be let loose on the world.
Anyway, lately I’ve been feeling an itch to improve my photography skills. Digital has been great for this already, in the 9 years since I first held a digital camera I’ve definitely moved forward. Being free to experiment wildly without having to think about how much it costs each time I trip the shutter has been liberating, to say the least. But there’s only so much you can do to get better without objective feedback.
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The position CSS property was my friend today, along with it’s co-conspirator, z-index. It helped me out with a situation where I have a footer which extends upward into the content area (a web-2.0-ish gradient to white) and the content partly overlaps. IE was as usual being contrary, displaying the footer on top of the text while every other browser had the footer behind it (The real irony here is IE’s behavior seems to be more “correct”, as the footer comes after the content in the HTML).
Giving position and suitable z-index values to the footer and content allowed the page to appear the way I wanted it to.
There’s a great writeup of these CSS properties titled “Give Me Some Zzzzz’s“) which by coincidence showed up today in one of my RSS feeds.
Especially useful was the note about how position works, and what an absolute positioned element is positioned in relation to.
Another byproduct of adding position:relative to an element is that the element now becomes the “containing block” for further positioned elements. This would allow you to define absolutely placed elements in relation to that newly created stacking context. The “containing block” of an element is defined as the nearest ancestor that has a value set for the property “position” other than static (e.g. the parent should be position:relative or position:absolute or position:fixed). If no parent exists then the containing block becomes the root element which is the HTML (or body outside of margins set), which effectively means the viewport.
Making a block position:relative has no impact on positioning (unless you specify top, left, bottom or right also).
The PowerBook we have for site testing at work, and my old Dell Inspiron laptop, both had something in common: lousy battery life. The PowerBook claimed around 1 hour remaining with a fully charged battery, while my poor old Dell could barely reach 40 minutes away from a power outlet!
My thought, of course, was that the batteries, being old and used in laptops that were mostly on AC power during their lives, had simply lost most of their capacity, as li-ion batteries are prone to. Then I found out about “recalibrating” the battery.
Modern laptop battery packs are usually “smart” batteries; they have built in charge-monitoring circuits and can report their charge status to the computer. However, over time, the accuracy becomes suspect. By periodically bringing the battery to full charge, then allowing it to discharge to the point where the laptop shuts down or goes to sleep, then fully recharging again, the circuit is “reset”.
Naturally skeptical, I tried it out.
The Powerbook, at 100% charge and freshly disconnected from AC voltage, reported just over 1 hour remaining. After about an hour, it was reporting 1 minute of run time to go, and then…it kept running. It showed 1 minute for a while, then decided it could no longer calculate the remaining time and just said “calculating…” instead. Finally, two hours after going onto battery power, and over one hour after the Mac had started it’s dire warnings of lost data and could I please plug it back into the AC outlet now, thanks, it dropped into standby mode. One recharge later, back to 100% capacity, and now the battery run time says 2 hours! Running it down to standby again took about two hours, with the battery status reflecting this pretty much all the way. Not bad considering the thing is about 7 years old.
So, I tried it with my Inspiron. 40 minutes in, the battery status was at rock bottom, and again, it kept on running. I’m not sure for how long, but when I checked on it a few hours later, it had made like a bear in winter and gone into hibernation. Back on the power, back to 100% charge, and now it reports about 1 hour 30 minutes of wire-free power. Still not great, but then even at it’s best I could barely squeeze 2 hours on battery from this PC.
I don’t use the laptop on battery power often, but it’s nice to know I can rely on it a little better than I thought I could, without having to buy a new battery. On a more confidence-inspiring note, the Dell used to stay stuck at 98% or 99% and charging for hours, prompting me to remove the battery entirely lest it overcharge and become another one of those “hey look at my melted laptop” stories that have become all too common lately. Seems like that problem also went away.
