Author: josh

Indico

Sometimes Steph has something to do outside of the house, maybe somewhere else in the Valley, and so she leaves me alone at home for awhile and I sit in a quiet room and cry softly to myself.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, what with the agony and the weeping, and the “Oh, nice lady, come back to your humble abode!” But as she has already mentioned, she went bowling on Tuesday night and left me at home with nothing to do. So I sat around and thought about my options. I went through several until I recalled an article I had read in (the print version of) The Metro about a local gaming place called Indico Gaming. Apparently they’ve got all the latest games and the atmosphere is really great for gamers, so I decided that I would actually leave the house without Steph by my side. Something I very very rarely do, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit.

Continue reading “Indico” →

Indie!

I’ve had the extreme pleasure recently of communicating with many close friends. Last week I had phone conversations that were each over an hour long with three different friends (one in Colorado and two in Minnesota) on three different nights. Crazy! But frankly, I love that stuff. Keeping up with buddies is always a very good thing, so, hey, if you haven’t called, now’s a fine time. And no, I’m not posting my number on the Net. Email me.

Anyhow (Segue!), not all the recent conversations I’ve had with old buddies have been via phone. It’s a little-known fact that Neal and I chat probably every other night on AIM if we’re both around. It’s good stuff.

I ran into another friend of mine a couple nights ago on AIM. A man by the name of Aaron Hintgen. Many of you don’t know him since he didn’t go to Bethel (though he was there often times). He worked alongside me for Apple both as a Campus Rep and as a sales guy at the Apple Store in the Mall of America. It had been months since I had talked with him, and many more months since I had seen him (I honestly don’t know how long it has been) and he just popped up on AIM asking how I’ve been. So we chatted. And for a little while I felt like I hadn’t missed out on as much as I really have. You know, that “in the loop” feeling. The illusion of closeness chatting can sometimes create is wonderful one. 🙂

Oh, he’s in a band called Rocket Science. And they just put up a website with downloadable samples of their music. (Check out Drain Pipe. Children of the 80s will love it.) And they’ll be at the Nav Talent Show at the Coffman Memorial Union October 30th for those of you who can figure out where the Coffman Memorial Union is. So now you know, and knowing is half the something.

Break a leg, Aaron!

An Admission

OK, I think it’s about time that I just come right out and say it. If I keep hiding it, it’ll be more difficult for me later, and I think you all deserve the truth.

I need Windows 98.

Let me do a little damage control here before anyone loses their head and goes screaming for the hills. As I’ve mentioned, I’m spending a lot of my free time doing web development and design (although you all have seen very little of those efforts at this time since I sometimes grossly underestimate how long some of this stuff really takes when you only do it in your free time). Well, it’s possible Stephanie and I may have the chance to actually make some money at it on the side, and it’s important to me that my sites look good on all platforms. Basically, Windows 98 can run both IE 5.5 (which I need to test because it renders pages so poorly) and IE 6.0, which is the most popular browser on the planet. So I’m going to load Win98 into my Virtual PC program on my Mac and test the sites that way. I’ve heard it works well.

So I need y’all to do me a favor and see if you or your loved ones have a copy of Windows 98 laying around that you no longer use as I am interested in purchasing it from you! Cash money! Also, no, I don’t want any illegal copies. If Bill Gates himself walked into my house, the only thing I want to get arrested for is giving him the punch I owe him.

Speaking of IE 5, if any of you out there on Windows are using IE 5.anything, please please please for the love of the Internet go straight over here and upgrade that sucker to IE 6! It’s free and it’s faster and better, so do it! Also, if you’re looking for an alternative on Windows to IE, look no further than Firebird . It’s also free and it’s only 6 MB to download, so give it a try today! Those guys really know how to render.

OK, enough Windows talk for now.

Did I mention that Panther is totally awesome?

CSS Wowsers

I understand that not everyone here knows what CSS is. If you don’t know what CSS is, this won’t be extremely impressive until you have a little more understanding. In short, CSS (short for Cascading Style Sheets) is a language that allows a web developer to tell the browser how their page should look, and it is much more powerful than HTML for describing page layout and stuff like that. Usually it works hand-in-hand with HTML. CSS allows you to create invisible boxes in your page inside which you can put content, like this text you’re reading right now. Those boxes help to give the page structure. And those boxes can have different background colors, or different kinds or borders and margin sizes and padding, and… you get the idea.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Look what somebody made CSS do: 3D Border Demo 2 by Chris Hester

I don’t know who Chris Hester is, but he is certainly a master of CSS. There are no images on that page. There are no GIFs. There are no JPGs. If you know web source well enough, go ahead and take a peek. It’s incredibly impressive.

That house was made up entirely of little CSS boxes with different border shadings. My guess is that every single brick on that house is a separate CSS box, and they’re all aligned with each other down to the pixel. The window frame, the door, those are all separate boxes.

I should be clear that this was not at all what CSS was intended to do. Chris Hester must have sat for hours and hours in front of his computer trying to get that thing to work. And for that, he deserves our admiration. 🙂