Six Feet Younger
I’m really not obsessed with death. It’s just that people in my family keep dying! The generation before mine on the maternal side of my family has 11 members. Ten aunts and uncles, and then my mother was born in 1938. She is the youngest, and I am her youngest, as well as the youngest of my generation. That means that I could very well be in a position to watch everyone in my generation and older die.
At the moment, there’s little emotion behind that statement. Funerals have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was very young when my uncle Charlie died on my father’s side. My other uncle Frank held my hand as we walked over to the casket. I put my hand on Charlie’s arm, and it was cold and stiff. I asked Frank why that was. “He’s dead.” Oh, okay. Off to play with cousins. I wonder if the reason I relate so well to the family in the show Six Feet Under is that death is a normal part of their lives.
Because I’m so much younger than the rest of the family, many of them grew up and moved off to live their own lives long before I came along. So while I would frequently hear that so-and-so died, and that they were related to me in X manner, a flood of memories never came rushing in. What did come rushing in were thoughts of visiting living family and sometimes getting out of school. Of course, as I’ve gotten older and more understanding of the permanency of death, those thoughts are accompanied by thoughts that my family is slipping away before I get to know many of its members. Now all I have to remember them are other family members’ memories, and I am aware of how much memory changes over time.
My uncle Gerry died this week, and he and his wife Ruth are like a second set of parents to me. They lived fairly close to us, so we spent a lot of time together. My parents frequently took vacations with them; when I was younger they usually spent Christmas with us; Ruth used to sneak cigarettes with me before my parents knew that I smoked back then; and Gerry told me that he knew Ruth smoked behind his back, but he didn’t have the heart to nag her about it. I don’t think I ever told her that he knew. I’ll tell her when I see her next week. They were married for 59 years. Our lives are marked by constant and sometimes revolutionary changes, and I can’t imagine losing the one string that stayed with me for almost 60 years.
My life has been partially defined by trying to make my father proud, but I’ve always tried to make Gerry proud too. I can’t claim to have always been successful, but I know that I have two very handsome men cheering for me from the cosmic sidelines.
Entitlement, breaking the law, and programming
Admittedly, I got up late this morning. I’m usually up by 7:30, but today it was more like 8:30. Our bed runs parallel to the front of the house, and on my side of the bed is a window. Every morning I get up and check the world outside to make sure it’s still there. This morning, I saw the man who repaired our gutters parked in front of our driveway, blocking it, and dispensing some seamless eavestroughing to our next door neighbor’s grown son. Okay, maybe they’re getting some work done too, now, but that wasn’t likely, considering that the father next door is a contractor.
I got dressed and looked out the side window as I walked down the stairs. There was an electrical cord running from his truck to our outdoor outlet. The neighbor he was feeding troughing to is on the other side of our house. I wondered “are we getting a free upgrade or something?” So, I put on my shoes and coat and went outside. The gutter man was no longer in sight, but neighbor boy was. He asked if I needed to get our car out. Nope, that was the least of my worries. Then gutter man reappeared and gave his greeting, to which I replied my greeting. He said something about having more business in the neighborhood, and then continued to say “yeah, I’m using your electricity, too.” I replied “Yes, what’s up with that?” trying to maintain a friendly tone. He laughed and said “I’ll pay you for it.” Hmmm. We had needed to call him anyway to fix up two leaks that were being stubborn, which he said might happen. No surprise there. He said he’d come back over the weekend and do more caulking. I went back inside. At this point, Paul was stirring from the commotion as well.
Gutter man knocked on our door when he was finished, and we let him in to chat. I asked him if the neighbor was having work done too, and he said no, that he just sold him the troughing to use in his own construction work. Apparently, contractors find it difficult to purchase eavestroughing from businesses specific to eavestroughing. That kind of arrangement takes business away from the eavestroughers. Understandable.
As he left, he gave a passing apology for the electricity and said he’d be back this weekend. At first, I couldn’t help but laugh. But now that the situation has settled, I’m not happy that our gutter man stole our electricity. If he had asked, I would have had no problem with it. Instead, he chose to cut a corner, and now I’m left wondering how many other corners he cut while working on our roof. I had planned on recommending him to people and even got some extra business cards from him in order to do so. I don’t see that happening now.
In other news, Paul and I both had a massive, collective brain fail today. Because I let my driver’s license from Virginia expire in 2007 and didn’t bother getting a Canadian one, I’m now going through Ontario’s graduated licensing system. I currently hold what’s called a G1 license, which is basically a Learner’s Permit. I can only drive with an experienced, fully licensed driver in the car; I can’t drive on highways; and I can’t drive between midnight and 5 am. Paul and I had to run errands downtown today, then do some grocery shopping, and I drove us. We went over the lunch hour, so traffic was heavy, by Smiths Falls standards, and parking was sparse. Paul needed to go inside the bank, but I couldn’t find a parking spot. He said, “just drop me off, and I’ll meet you at the post office when we’re both done.” Sounds like a plan! I double-parked while he got out and continued to the end of the block. As I reached the stop sign, I thought, “Oh, shit, I’m not supposed to drive by myself!” I don’t take chances here in Canada, as I’m not yet a full citizen. I didn’t even jaywalk until I got Permanent Residence. I began to get anxious and desperately searched for a parking place. Lo and behold, I saw a police car pulled over ahead with its lights flashing. I turned onto the next side street and kept going straight until I found a space with no chance of hitting another car, i.e., no parallel parking, which surprisingly enough, I’m good at. I wasn’t interested in taking any chance, though. Everything is fine now, but we had a good scare, and laugh, out of the whole thing.
Oh, and I finished the guessing game for my final project in C programming and got an A+ in the course! Yippee!
you want what in two days?
For the past week, particularly the last two days [which would have been Saturday & Sunday- see below], my ability to procrastinate has never been stronger. Particularly yesterday, I found reason after reason not to plant myself at the computer and get some programming done. I can normally resist the urge to follow the tumbleweed, and at least get things done at a slower pace. Not yesterday. The crossword puzzle on my iGoogle page called to me. Then, I remembered that I needed to pick up something at the pharmacy. Of course, that entailed recruiting Paul for a long walk, including a stop at a new cafe in town. We then sat on a park bench watching the motorcyclists and hot rod drivers congregate across the street at Tim Horton’s. Did I mention we live in a small town?
Somehow, between winterizing the house, working on other courses, and registering for next term, among other things, I fell behind in my C class by about two weeks. I did catch up this week, but I am still struggling with the very last part of my final project, due tomorrow at midnight. I wrote a program for a guessing game with two variations. The first has the computer randomly pick a number between one and one thousand by using the computer’s clock to seed the random number generator. The user then makes guesses. This game is finished and wasn’t too much trouble. The second variation has the user pick a secret number, and the program tries to guess the user’s number. The user enters the lowest possible number and the highest possible number, and informs the program whether its guesses are too high or too low. (I even got the program to catch cheaters who set the lowest possible number at a point that is higher than the highest possible number. I’ll give you a minute to wrap your head around that.)
The user needs to communicate to the program a string, “too high,” “too low” or “correct.” My brain is mush at this point from staring at so much code, and I’m drawing a blank at having the program test a string. C is great with math, but when it comes to strings, I find it a bit archaic. (Not that I have experience in other languages that are perhaps better with strings.)
So, off I go for more programming and will hopefully resolve this problem. As always, I’m sure the answer is hiding in plain sight. I actually felt nauseated at the end of the day yesterday. I wonder if it was the non-stop programming, and I hope it doesn’t happen again today.
Say what?
*I started writing this entry three days ago, and I’ll mention the appropriateness of that fact, even though it can be inferred by those with a keen subtlety radar.
Bar Code Art
I wish I had a product to sell so that I could hire these Japanese artists to make a bar code for it. Found on Geekologie.
CSS Sprites!
The word “sprite” is somehow reminiscent of Halloween, as in “I’m going to be a sprite for Halloween,” so I thought today I’d write about my very first CSS sprite. I’m not learning about sprites from a textbook. Rather, I’m picking up bits and pieces here and there, and I’m having trouble with my very first one.
A CSS sprite is a compilation of small images into one larger image that will be used on a site. For every image a web page has, the browser has to send a request to a server. The more images, the more requests, the less efficient, the slower the page load. With me? Combining as many images as possible into one speeds up the page load time, thereby improving your life such that you squeal like a little girl!
What am I talking about? My favorite sprite spots are Chris Coyier’s CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Nettuts+, and they explain sprites a lot better than I can. I’m grateful to these peeps for sharing so much information. I daresay that the web design and development community has restored my faith in humanity. The level of collaboration, support, and overall generosity of web geeks has astounded me- things that I haven’t experienced enough in quite some time. ‘Nough said.
So, now you know that a sprite looks something like this.
CSS sprite
You also know that the area of the image that is displayed changes according to the image position coordinates. The problem I’m having with my sprite is represented by the diagram below. I’m doing something different than I’ve seen others do. Not that no one else is doing it; it’s just that I haven’t seen it yet. I have two images that, when combined, make up my header, div id =”header.” The total width is 1000 pixels, and each image is 500 pixels. The title image floats left in the header div, and the menu image rests beside it, giving the illusion of one wide image. The menu image is the one that utilizes the sprite. There are four anchors- gallery, about, elsewhere and contact, and my sprite represents three anchor states: link, hover, and active. Active will hopefully be manipulated with jQuery to highlight the current page. Eventually, when my portfolio site grows, I may have a sub-menu sprite as well, which will complicate things a bit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve gotten three different effects with my errant coding, none of which I actually want.
- The images collapse on top of one another on the left side;
- Only the active state of my sprite (the bottom row) is visible on the menu side;
- Only the gallery anchor is displayed, as demonstrated by my diagram.
So I ask, “WTH?” I’d be thrilled with some advice. I guess I’ll have to get over my shyness and share myself with some peeps so that they might come back to my blog and read it. Being a n00b is tough sometimes, but I’ve got to learn somehow.
sprite problem
Photoshop Halloween
Ok, so I went a little crazy. Kill me…
Halloween spooks!
Thanks to this lovely person for the blood spatter brushes.
Out of Focus?
Wow, I haven’t used my 35 mm camera in about a year. I broke him out today to take close-up shots of leaves and other organic stuff in the yard while I was raking leaves. Either something has happened to the lens, or I need to start wearing the glasses that I never wear. I couldn’t get the thing to focus at all. I’ll try again later with my glasses on.
Torn
I think things should be pretty. I think people are happier when things are pretty. Pretty, well-designed things tell people “Hey! There’s no need to worry about us. We’re all good, and we know what we’re doing. You can focus on things that are more important, like making ugly things pretty!”
I love design. I’ve loved it since I was a tot. My concentration during high school was visual arts, and I have a knack specifically for graphic design (versus fine arts.) I am now studying the Intertubes, so that I can make the Web pretty and functional. On the functional front, yesterday I finished up a section on operators in my C language class, and I was enthralled with my ability to interact with the user of the program using printf() and scanf(). I wrote a program that calculates the GST & PST (sales taxes in Canada) on a subtotal and then outputs a final cost. This is all based on the user entering the price per widget and number of widgets.
All this widget talk and number manipulation is rather rudimentary as far as C goes. I’m in a beginner’s course, after all. For the course, students are given participatory marks, which includes a Friday evening chat with the instructor. Last Friday, I asked about common uses of the program, as, being a n00b, I know little about its capabilities. My instructor told me that he wrote a program (and now maintains it) that gathers information on time of day and fish migration patterns, among other things, from data sources in order to control the behavior of a hydro dam. That is far from rudimentary and sounds pretty cool to me.
Someday, I hope to be able to concoct such computery brews. While design is still a love of my life, geeky, computery is quickly gaining momentum. I think I might be a back-end sort of gal. Hey! Get yer mind out of the gutter. We’re talking computers here.
hammer is to nail as victim is to ______
Have you ever heard the phrase, “if you only have a hammer, everything will look like a nail?”
I propose that if you think you’re a victim, everything will look menacing.
Seriously, everyone carries around a pile of shit, baggage, skeletons, whatever. We’re all generally trying to get rid of our piles of shit. Many times, we try to pass on that pile of shit to someone else, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
I’m here to say that we have a choice whether or not to accept other people’s piles of shit. If you don’t want it, don’t take it! Let them keep it and learn how to deal with it in a better way. Focus on your own shit!
You are what you believe you are. Really.
That is all.
