Archive for December, 2004
30th December 2004
The week started out with us being both pretty tired from the long trip up to Michigan and back. Now, things are really up in the air. Sarah has started half packing, and then Wednesday and Thursday my work finally moved. We have a new office downtown in the Stutz building. So I have worked some physically harder days than normal, and I feel pretty tired myself when I get home at close to 7 pm.
We don’t have internet at work yet, so my updates may be a little sparse for a least a week. Not to mention, then there is closing next Tuesday and moving into our new house. So, just be thinking about us and pray for our patience, and we’ll talk later.
Ladder 49 (2004)
I am not sure what I really thought of this movie. It stars John Travolta and he does an excellent job like usual, but it also has Joaquin Phoenix who I haven’t ever really liked in any movie I have seen him in. He was pretty strong in this movie, but there was something else about the movie that buggs me.
Maybe it is the fact that any movie that deals heavily with Firefighters I always compare to the great Backdraft with Kurt Russell and Robert Dinero. This movie, the predictable kind of happens throughout the movie. The development of Joaquin’s character is created backwards, after an accident early on in the movie has him recollect on his time as a firefighter. There are deadly accidents that occur to some of his friends, and there is happiness with him getting married and starting a family.
But it is the end that is very sad, and actually, not particularly shocking but at the same time, the movie doesn’t fulfill your desire to have the good guys always win, and they aren’t infallible.
See this movie for John Travolta and the incredible 100 story fire that Ladder 49 has to battle, but don’t expect anything that hasn’t already been done, and anything that will come close to Backdraft from 14 years earlier.
Meet the Fockers (2004)
I went to see this movie primarily because of Sarah’s parents. I had seen Meet the Parents and didn’t see what the big deal was. I don’t really like painful movies, where the main character goes through some major struggle just for trying to be the good guy. But Sarah’s parents laugh their heads at Meet the Parents, where usually they are pretty contained, or asleep at any other movie.
So over Christmas break we went and saw the follow up to the original. I think that this movie was kind of the same idea. Jack (Robert Dinero) still doesn’t completely trust Greg (Ben Stiller) and as a result, he gets into really painful situations, from teaching the baby to say a very bad word, to his eccentric parents showing off his foreskin and then dropping it in the fondue.
Everyone around me keeps saying, “It wasn’t as good as the first” “It was just the same old thing.” And I say, “What is wrong with that?”
The reason that the first movie was so good, was that it was unexpected. At the time, the pairing of Ben Stiller and Robert Dinero in a comedy shocked everyone. The problem with this movie was that it had expectations from people coming in to be the same experience, when in fact it could never be.
But they did come up with even more bizarre situations and continued on in the theme where it seemed believable and you just could barely watch but had to know what would happen. It was funny, and it used the same formula of success from the first one, and was probably more funny. It is just too bad that everyone could have just forgotten all about the first one, and came in with no expectations. This movie would have blown their minds too.
Bourne Identity (2002)
We loved this movie when we saw it for the first time earlier this year, and it is one of those movies that gets better each time you see it.
When we rented this movie, we didn’t have any expectations. It had kind of slipped through the cracks of my “To Watch” movie list and we just got it on a whim. We were blown away.
Matt Damon plays a black ops agent that, at the beginning of the movie, can’t remember who he is or where he came from. The story is told through his eyes as he finds clues and makes a friend in a lowly American gypsy girl. They piece his clues back together all the way back to Paris, but not without major resistance.
Matt Damon, or Agent Jason Bourne, is the number one and his creators can’t just let him go without a fight. High speed chases in little cars through the streets of Europe, blinding fight scenes between trained killers, and a believable performance by Damon as this driven, calculating, confused killer trying to figure out what he was and what to do with that knowledge.
The movie comes to an end when Jason Bourne kills off another agent who is hunting him, (Clive Owen) and then turns and becomes the hunter to set things straight and make sure he is left alone.
Action, espionage, dark secrets, with a just a dash of lust, a great popcorn movie that doesn’t ever make you say, “Yeah, Right”.
How to Lose A Guy in Ten Days (2003)
I can remember seeing previews for this movie and thinking that it looked like one of the stupidest movies ever made. Over Christmas break we had a lot of relaxing time so we popped this in for free and gave it a chance. I actually laughed my head off.
The movie is about a quirky girl who works for a fashion magazine that is writing an article on how to do all of the classic dating mistakes to scare off of a guy in ten days. On the other end, is a guy who owns an ad agency that is trying to land a large diamond account and work his way into advertising for the world of jewelry. He makes a deal to prove how much he understands women, that he could make a woman of someone else’s choosing fall in love with him in ten days. With some insider information, he has this very girl picked for him.
The rest of the movie is all of the terribly awkward types of things that could happen in a serious relationship, from calling too much, to barging in on guy’s night, to buying pets together, they’re all there. I about busted a gut seeing all of these things, and Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey were the perfect leads of cute and southern charm.
Fun movie with a girly ending, I think that you can watch this if you are a secure guy, and laugh at all of the crap he puts up with to win a bet.
22nd December 2004
By the time some of you read this, we will be on our merry way back up to Michigan.
I am awake, tying up my own loose ends where I can. I was able to do a little write up on “Basic”, a movie we saw with John Travolta this past weekend.
I had that stretch this week that I didn’t write in which I was working on a client’s work heavily, developing the look for their website. I also got myself my first DVD burner, a BEN-Q 16X, and have been trying to figure that darn thing out. Not an easy thing.
We were also dealing with tying up our decision on our home owners insurance. We finally took care of that today thanks to Sarah, and as it looks right now, time is going to fly until our closing on the 4th. We have to do a walk through on the house, and that seems to be about it.
I also wrote up some helpful tips on “shorthanding” in CSS. This can save you lines of code that are unnecessary that make you site load even faster.
We will be in Michigan, as it looks now, until Monday night of next week. If you need to get a hold of us, give us a hollar at either of our parent’s houses. We won’t be doing too much and probably will be just visiting. I won’t be able to write at home, so everyone, have a Merry Christmas and we will talk next week!
How do I reduce the size of my CSS file? Can you teach me some “shorthand” tricks?
In the quest to have the best possible CSS site without going psycho like some of the CSS purists out there, I started to take another look at my CSS sheet.
Having written this over three months ago already, I have learned a great deal during that time about how to reduce some of the CSS rule declarations. I also have doubled my site from the original idea, so the sheet is getting a little unruly at 20k. But for now, I think that I will try to reduce where I can, but am not going to spend many hours for just a couple of “k”. Remember, when your users visit your site and load the homepage, the style sheet will go in their cache and won’t need to be loaded again while they are at your site.
So, the first thing I did that had nothing to do with “shorthanding” declarations, I removed the “px” from the end of any of my measurements with a “0″.
The reason for this being that “0″ is the same value, no matter what measurement you give it. 0px is the same as 0pt and that is the same as 0in.
Now, on to shorthands declarations.
What is the definition of shorthand? To shorthand in CSS is to basically combine a similar set of CSS declarations into one. The main two that I am going to be dealing with here and use on a day to day basis with CSS are the background and font declarations.
Here are some of the possible declarations and value pairs that you can have in CSS;
background-color:#444444;
background-image:url(../images/example.gif);
background-position:0 50%;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-attachment:fixed;
I hope that most of these declarations are familiar, but if they aren’t, you can always look to the W3C Schools for more information. I am just going to go over the last three that are a little less explanatory.
background-position - is where the background image is placed. You can either input measurements the first one being for “vertical” and the second being for the “horizontal” with the upper left corner of the browser being the axis, coordinates of 0,0. So I can either put an exact measurement for a position from the top, a percentage, or even some of the other values such as top, center, bottom, left, right.
background-repeat - is to specific how your background repeats. The possible values can be no-repeat, repeat, repeat-y, or repeat-x.
So for this example, we don’t want the background to repeat at all with the “no-repeat” value. But we can have the background repeat on the horizontal axis with a “repeat-x” or on the vertical axis with a “repeat-y”.
background-attachment - is to specify whether a background is fixed or scrolls with the rest of the page. This only has two values, scroll or fixed. I use this in my website because I never know how long my pages will get, but I can make my background image as high as I think the maximum viewing height of any browser will be. In my case I made my background image 1300 pixels high, which may be overkill in size, but I like the look and am willing to go over that little bit for aesthetics.
Back to the original idea.
So for shorthand, you can write all of these properties in one declaration called background. Here is how they would look re-written;
background:url(../images/example.gif) #444444 0 50% no-repeat fixed;
“What is the rhyme and reason to this?” you ask. Well, for the background declaration, you can list the values in any order you want. Also, I think the bare minimum to use this property is just one value, any value, just pick one. It is a flexible declaration and that can save you up to five lines of code when you are using background properties. But the “font” shorthand is not as easy going, but just as efficient.
Here are some of the declarations for the font family;
font-size:12px;
font-weight:bold;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-style:italic;
font-variant:normal;
I use the first three declarations here over an over on a daily basis. I will admit though that I have never used the “font-variant” declaration, which is basically to set the font in a “small-caps” size or “normal” sized font. There is also a way to incorporate the “line-height” declaration, but again, reference W3C schools for more information on that as it is beyond the scope of this article.
When using the shorthand for font here is what you need to know. In order to use the shorthand you must have at least the font-family and font-size declarations in place, and the size always comes first. So the bare minimum will look like this;
font: 12px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Now, you can put the other values in. I have found that there is a order to things, and that browsers react better when you put the other values first in order. So our final shorthand would look something like this;
font: normal italic bold 12px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
The success!
By taking out all of my “px” on all the measurements of 0 and shorthanding all of my font and background declarations I was able to cut out 1k of code from my stylesheet. That is good enough for me!
I hope this article was helpful, and didn’t glaze over too much when it comes to CSS. It does assume some knowledge base, but I assume if you are reading this you do have at least that. Send me any questions at my hotmail address, jrothe@rothecreations.com.
Basic (2003)
This movie came highly recommended from my co-workers, and when I found it on the shelves, I was surprised that I had never heard of it before with stars like John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.
That said, I thought this movie was ok. It had a whole bunch of twists where you never knew which way was up, and to tell you the truth, by the end I was so turned around that I didn’t really care.
The basic jist is that Samuel L. Jackson is an un liked Navy Seal officer who is killed and John Travolta is trying to find out who did it. There is corruption in the ranks, drug trafficking, and everyone’s favorite, a graphic scene of vomiting blood from Giovoni Risbi (Who did an excellent job).
Engaging, but I wouldn’t watch it again. I just can’t turn anything away with John Travolta in it.
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