Archive for January, 2005
28th January 2005
It always seems like there is more to write about then I have time. So I just kind of do those things that are easier and I do more often.
We took it easy tonight. I came home early from work to make some more changes that I needed online for. Then Sarah and I, still under our 15 day window for Family Video for half price rentals, went and got a movie and hung out in the bath for the second week in a row. The movie was Phone Booth, which was pretty good, suprisingly. And especially for .50 cents.
We made our first house payment today, so I needed something to take my mind off life for awhile.
Tonight I added a little tip in the HTML Coding section for using Radio Buttons.
Sections Updated: Movies P-R, HTML Coding
Phone Booth (2002)
This movie’s premise is fairly simple. Starring Colin Farrell as a New York publicist that doesn’t give a hoot about anyone, it’s a movie about the deep secrets and evils people hold in, and what truly motivates a person.
Farrell has a cell phone, but he goes everyday to this one remaining phone booth to make a call to a girl that he wants to have an affair with. While in the booth he gets a call and things quickly swirl out of hand. It seems that there is a sniper that knows a good deal about Farrell and his discretions and starts giving him orders on guard of his life.
The whole movie is very high tension, and you never know where or what is going to happen. I wasn’t personally crazy about how the movie was shot, or the director who I just loathe, Joel Schumaker. If you like Colin, this role is a little bit out of the ordinary for him, because he is extremely humbled and forced to confess his deepest secrets in front of the world. But if you like movies that are different, and can ignore the incessant language from the hookers and Farrell, this one may be right up your alley.
My radio buttons aren’t letting me select only one, but are selecting each individually when clicked.
I was having troubles the other day when adding some radio buttons to a form. Since I don’t use them that often I had forgotten to make them work the way I needed.
Typically a radio button’s function is to allow a user to pick one choice from a list, and that choice will have a green mark in the radio button.
But when I was working with my radio buttons, there were two of them, when I previewed the file and tried clicking either button, the both stayed clicked. I couldn’t remember why that was, and then I figured out why. Because of the idea behind a radio button, where a checkbox is for a list of choices that a user can pick more than one, you need to label the buttons accordinly.
The radio buttons must have the same name in order to be clickable one or the other, like this;
Last Name - Rothe <input type=”radio” name=”name” />
Chapman <input type=”radio” name=”name” />
This code will spit out these two radio buttons and if you try them, by setting the “Name” to the same value, only one is clickable at once.
Last Name - RotheChapman
27th January 2005
It was another long day, and it is hard to believe that February is almost here.
I had a fairly big deadline for work that had some small loose ends that needed to be tied up, but I had pretty much everything else covered by Wednesday night. But since I have been working from home my schedule for everything, from eating to waking has been off, because when you are at home, sometimes that line between work and not working is pretty fine and I have been doing some of the needed work later at night.
But starting tomorrow I will be heading back into the office. From what I understand we may have our T1 line installed on Monday which would be awesome.
I made some customer changes on a website tonight and then I went and ran in the bone chilling weather tonight and deposited some checks. There isn’t much snow, but gosh it sure is cold.
Like I mentioned last night, I was going to make a note about my adventures in working on my car on Sunday.
Before Christmas when I had my oil changed, the shop told me that I had less than 20% of my break pads left and that I needed to change them. They said it would be $90, which was talking to some people, isn’t that bad for breaks. But since my bud Chris at work knows how to change breaks, I figured, why not? I know barely anything about cars, and would always enjoy to learn something new that can save me money, and depending on how hard it is, I could do it by myself in the future.
It was not that hard at all. I went with him to an Autozone by his house and just told the guys there what type of car and what year it was. They gave me a set of front break that were close to factory installs, and away we went back to his place.
After about 3 hours total of having the car up on jacks, we had them switched out. They were not nearly as bad as the oil change place claimed, except for one break pad on the inner left wheel was really low. That must have been the one he saw but the others were maybe 50%. Which is fine, it was a lot less money to do myself, and I know for future reference. Plus, that 3 hours, a lot of that time was just determining how to get them off since every car is different. My old set were kind of rusted at the axis points, so we really had to work to get them out of there.
I read some more of my Flash book today. I thought I would include a couple of hints I picked up.
Sections Updated: Flash
How to I change a variable to a Boolean Value? What is a Boolean Value?
A Boolean is a value that is either True or False.
Translate True and False into numbers and you get False = 0, and True = 1.
Flash had a built in Method that will change a variable to a Boolean. Here is some sample code on how to implement that;
var myVariable:Boolean = Boolean(myValue);
This converts the value of “myValue” into a Boolean and stores it as a Boolean value in a variable called myVariable.
Now, what if the value of the variable “myValue” is a string? Well that will store “NaN” in myVariable. NaN translates into “Not a Number”. A string value can’t be change into a Boolean value.
Here are a couple more examples;
var mySample:Boolean = Boolean(123);
var mySample:Boolean = Boolean(0);
The first value evaluates to “True” because any number greater than one will evaluate to “True”. The second value will evaluate to False.
You may notice when I am defining these variables, the format looks like this - var mySample:Boolean. But you don’t know why you are adding a “:Boolean” after the name of the variable. This is data typing. You are defining the type of variable data that can be stored in this variable.
I hope to explain this in a little more depth in the near future.
26th January 2005
Things have been really crazy with work for a change. But today was good, if for nothing else, I got Bob Evans cinnamon pancakes for lunch with our remaining gift card.
This week I have been working at home for the past two days because we don’t have internet yet and I have a major deadline. I have been working with Aubrey, who is a contact that Glenn has, on developing this one site and we have been going back and forth about design stuff, and I have been training her in web design and Fireworks. She picks up fast, and is a great designer, and it is just really great to have someone to talk with that understands designer speak and jargon.
I have also been working from home this week because on Tuesday I had to go in for a Jury Duty pool. I was nervous for whatever reason about going, but found the building downtown without too much problem, and Christine had given me heads up to take plenty of reading material. I wasn’t selected until an hour in, in the second round of selections from the 25% of the people that were left. Then out of the 25 in our pool, I was number 15 to actually sit on the Jury and be interviewed by the lawyers. About 5-10 people were excused, but I was not one of them. The case was actually interesting to me and I wanted to do my best job and help see justice done if that was my duty. I knew the trial would last no more than two days, so that wasn’t a big deal.
But as some of the members were excused, and then the panel rearranged, I was far enough back, being the last original chosen, that once they had filled their seven person jury, I was excused from this round of the Jury Pool. So maybe next time.
I did watch one other movie on Monday night, and movie I borrowed from my co-worker Chris on Sunday when I went out to change my breaks. Hopefully I will write about that tomorrow. The movie, Collateral Damage, with the governor of California. Not bad.
Sections Updated: Movies C-D
Dinner at Bob Evans
What I said on the homepage about our trip to Bob Evans was pretty self explanitory. We ended going out on a “date” with some gift certificates and neither Sarah or I liked our dinners. We have always enjoyed Bob Evans in the past without too many expectations, so I don’t know if it is just this location, which would be unfortunate.
They had some interesting looking desert, and I figured that desert may be an option, so instead of getting my regular of Cinnamon pancakes, I went with the Western Omellette. The super part that it was one quarter onions. I am still working on getting rid of them today, oy. Sarah’s “Big Sandwhich” as it was described in the menu had one limp slice of lettuce, one piece of undercooked bacon, two half slices of the smallest bread ever in the history of the world, and then looked kind of like someone was checking it for springiness in the back by jumping on it.
Long and short, glad it was free. Yuck.
What is an .afm extension / file?
A .atm file stands for “Adobe Font Metrics”. Here is a definition that I found on this site called faq.org. Basically an .atm file is for storing readable data about the font metrics that a regular person can understand. Kind of like a structural guideline for how the makeup of the font should appear.
Here is what that link says…
AFM is Adobe’s ASCII-based file format used for storing font metric data as human-readable data. AFM is the standard Adobe font file format. This format is also known as the Adobe Multiple Font Metrics (AMFM) and Adobe Composite Font Metrics (ACFM) file formats.
In fact, AFM, AMFM, and ACFM are actually three variations of the same format. AFM files contain base or composite font information. One AFM file is used per master design of a font. AMFM files store control and global font information for a group of AFM files.
And ACFM files contain the global metrics of the composite font program. The specification for the AFM format is: Adobe Font Metrics File Format Specification (Version 4.0), Adobe Developer Support, 14 February 1992, P/N LPS5004. This document available via FTP as a Tech Note in PostScript format, or as hardcopy when obtained directly from Adobe (see the PostScript section for information on how to contact Adobe Systems, Inc.).
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