I’ve got a header graphic at the top of my blog. I’m happy with the image. However when I first modified my blog template to use that image instead of the stock blog title, I also lost the ability to make the header a clickable link back to the main page of my blog. So when you’re reading a specific blog post and you want to head back to the main page of the blog, clicking on the graphic won’t take you there. That’s bad form and it annoys the hell out of me. I’ve tried a few things but I’m caving on this one. Can anybody point me in the correct direction towards a solution?

The image is referenced in the CSS portion of the template as the background property of the #header id tag. Here’s the code snippet from the template:

#header {
/*width:660px;*/
margin:0 0 0;
/*border:0px solid #468;*/
padding:0 0 8px;
background: url(“http://home.primus.ca/~rico.jd/rm-header.jpg”) no-repeat center top;
 }

Where in my template should (or can) I put the tag to make that sucker link back to the main page of my blog? Or maybe it isn’t that easy?

Jon Udell has written an Infoworld article about the Distraction Free Desktop. In it, he describes a free Mac app called WriteRoom that provides an ultra simplified environment to write within. I can hear the Emacs crowd chortling just about now. But anyway, there is a Windows alternative for those of the XP-ilk. It’s called Dark Room and can be found here.

I’m fairly well focused while I write. Mostly because I only spend a small part of my day trying to write. So I take the time when and where I can get it, and try to make the most of it. To me, the distraction of email and pop-up notifiers isn’t a big issue while I write. Still, I always have a soft spot for PC related nostalgia, and working in Dark Room’s stark, green on black environment reminded me of computer lab in high-school, programming simple things on the Commodore Pets we were using at the time.

On a nostalgic note, I still think the editor I was using to code with during graduate school was still at least as nice looking as anything on my 19” LCD looks now… and that was 12 years ago!! We were using Sun Sparc Stations with the OpenWindows environment. I’m not sure what the monitor resolution was back then (they were 21” CRTs I believe), but it sure seemed quite nice at the time. Maybe it’s the tint of rose-coloured glasses, but I don’t think I’ve seen an IDE yet that can match it’s display of black 6pt Lucida Console text on a white background. That was truly magic.

Five years from now I’d love to be where Matt Inglot is in his life. Not in specific terms, but in a more general sense. His post Developing a Detailed Vision and Having It Become Reality is an inspiring and worthy read. In some respects, I’m where Matt was 5 years ago. The only difference is, I don’t have a detailed plan. Maybe that can change.

There are several things I am not. I am not an SUV guy, nor a minivan guy. I am not a pickup truck guy, nor a luxury sedan guy.

I am however, a car guy. And a ‘big fan of good engineering’ guy. I value performance but not stupidity. (Ok, I did have the obligatory Lamborghini Countach poster -with the hot chickie- on my bedroom wall growing up - right beside my Eddie Van Halen poster). So to me, the 16-cylinder, 1000+ bhp Bugatti Veyron is both obese and cartoonish, no matter what the performance.

At the ChampCar race Toronto this past weekend, while perusing a display of hotted up cars in the trade centre during a break in the action I happened to find my ‘dream car’. The Lotus Elise. It seats only two (and I’d likely have to drop 20lbs to be comfortable in it) but it uses light weight - and not gobs of horsepower - to attain some pretty great performance. How is 190 bhp and a sub-5 sec. 0-60 mph time? Kind of like a McLaren F1 for the masses. And besides that, I find it simply beautiful. Now if I could find a way to get a child car seat in there somewhere.. Hmmm…

I’m going to the Molson Grand Prix of Toronto tomorrow and Sunday! ..courtesy of a great Father’s Day gift from my wife. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to take some nice photos while I’m there…

Like many Blogger(tm) bloggers, one of the first things I did after starting my blog, was to find a way of getting trackbacks to work. Haloscan was the obvious (and likely only) choice. While it was easy to install, it not only enabled trackback functionality, but saddled you with using their commenting engine at the same time.

Now I normally don’t get a lot of comments on my blog (whether that’s due to the poor quality of my posts or some other more convenient excuse, I’ll let you, dear reader decide that!), but when I do, I like to be notified. And Haloscan wasn’t doing that. I also didn’t like the pop-up window with the footer text ads - a potential turn-off to would be commenters and not my style. I badly wanted back to Blogger’s standard commenting engine, but I didn’t necessarily want to give up trackback functionality again.

As is becoming more and more typical, blogs once again came to the rescue. A quick blogsearch on google revealed this post which explained the process quite quickly (despite the infinitely unreadable scrolling text on a static background of that site - hint: cut and paste baby…).

So now I’m back to Blogger comments, along with trackback functionality from Haloscan. Hooray! I’m sorry if lost any comments that people posted. I had to make the switch, and tonight was as right a time as any.

I don’t do a heck of a lot of TV watching, probably 4 or 5 hours a week total. It’s usually late at night, and usually comedic in nature (think Trailer Park Boys, Reno 911, and The Daily Show/Colbert Report).
However, one thing I have kept up with over the past few years is children’s programming - toddler age stuff. My 4 year old daughter doesn’t spend all day in front of the tube either (there are messes to make, cats to corral and things to get into) but it’s likely she watches significantly more TV than I do. I also have a tendency to sit and watch a fair amount of it with her when she does. Not because I’m worried about what she’s watching (TreehouseTV is quite good) but because I don’t like using it as a baby sitter, and I like to find out what she finds funny, challenging and interesting. She likes to ask questions and I like to be there to provide some kind of answer.

One other, perhaps less noble reason I sit and watch a lot of it with her is that I actually like most of it. She has her favourites (Little Bear, Max and Ruby, Berenstain Bears and more recently, George Shrinks and Rolie Polie Olie) and I have mine: (Peep and the Big Wide World, and Pocoyo). Note: If you don’t see Dora on that list it’s not a mistake. She’s ok with it, but it always seems to me that everyone’s always shouting everything on that show.. like each character’s volume knob is on 11 the whole time.. grrr.

Anyhow, Pocoyo is outstanding to me not only because it’s simple, educational and engaging, but I immediately found it attractive technically. What I mean is that the animation, colours and perhaps most notably, textures and lighting set it apart from other computer animated shows I’ve seen. The soft cushy textures and simple white background with soft shadowing are endearing to me (as funny as that sounds). It’s almost…dare I say it… Web two-oh-eee - Only this has real substance  .

They use a system called XSI by SoftImage for modelling and rendering.(And wouldn’t you know it, they have a blog too!). They’ve got some full size wallpapers available for download on their site (a piece of which heads this post). You can also watch little animated shorts at the site as well to see what I’m talking about.