Month: November 2003

Going to Palo Alto — Ride to the Airport?

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

This year, my family is spending Thanksgiving in Palo Alto with my brother — he’s attending Stanford for his graduate degree there. At the time I booked the flights, I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to get off from work, so I booked Wednesday through Saturday.

To San Francisco:

  • Flight: American Airlines flight 1471
  • Depart: Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW) - Terminal Information Unavailable
  • - Wed, Nov 26 at 11:57am
  • Arrive: San Francisco, CA (SFO)
  • - Wed, Nov 26 at 1:49pm

Back to Dallas:

  • Flight: American Airlines flight 1366
  • Depart: San Francisco, CA (SFO) - Terminal 3
  • - Sat, Nov 29 at 2:37pm
  • Arrive: Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW) - Terminal Information Unavailable
  • - Sat, Nov 29 at 8:06pm

Anyhow, would anyone be able to give a ride to or from the airport? I’d probably need to get to the airport around 10:30am that Wednesday, which would mean leaving my apartment around 9:45am.

New CSS Support in IE6

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

One of my recent projects has the luxury of only requiring support for IE6 (and Mozilla, natch). This is a rare occurrence, since most clients require support for least a version or two back (and justifiably so). However, in this case, a web application in another portion of the website (contracted to another vendor) already required IE6, so that support cascaded to the rest of the site.

Coding for such recent browsers is a bit surreal, in a way — all of a sudden, I can write standards compliant code and there’s a good chance it could work work without fiddling ;). Along those lines, I decided to check on new CSS support that may have been introduced into IE6. Generally, I wouldn’t give much thought to the workings of such a recent browser, but such knowledge could be useful to me this time.

So, after briefly searching Google, I found this MSDN Library article on CSS Enhancements in IE6. I was already aware of several of the features, such as IE6’s support for the CSS box model (in short, the CSS spec states that padding is added to an element’s width, and IE versions before 6 ignored this).

I was also pleased to see that IE6 includes some useful bits such as support for min-height (you can specify the minimum height on an element). Interestingly enough, the article didn’t mention min-width, which I would think they could have implemented at the same time (or, should have been). Perhaps most amusing to me, though, is that IE6 only now supports padding on images. How is it that image-padding slipped under their radar for so long?

Sennhesier Noise-Canceling Headphones for $93

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

DealNews is a website which reports on good deals found online (their tongue-in-cheek slogan is “How to go broke saving money”). And in today's update, they mentioned that SelectRebate offers Sennheiser’s PXC-250 noise-canceling headphones for $93. A press release on Sennheiser’s website gives this description:

With excellent sound reproduction and the active noise compensation system NoiseGard™, which can be switched on whenever it is needed, the dynamic closed PXC 250 tops the range of Sennheiser mini-headphones. Soft ring ear pads ensure a high level of comfort without unpleasant pressure. The extremely thin, ultra-lightweight voice coil is a guarantee for high efficiency and generous volume, both for low-impedance portable players and for high-impedance inflight entertainment systems. A special adapter is included for use on planes. […]

Considering that I have some airline trips coming up (for Thanksgiving and Christmas), the built-in noise-canceling appealed to me. And, $93 was also a good price — the lowest on PriceGrabber is $130. So, I ordered a pair :). Interestingly enough, the DealNews entry mentioned free shipping through a coupon code, but that must have already expired since it didn’t work for me. Even so, ground shipping was only $5.

Sam’s Club for Digital Prints

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I was chatting with my friend Paul at the Dallas Camera Club meeting this evening. And, we got to talking about digital prints since both he and I have digital cameras (a Nikon Coolpix 5700 in my case and a Canon EOS-D10 in his).

And since it’s a digital camera, I haven’t had much need for prints. But, I have had some prints made for some of my better shots. In those cases, I went to dotPhoto. They’re an online store with reasonable prices and — unlike some other online print shops — they also offer matte prints (which I prefer).

In any case, Paul mentioned that Sam's Club actually does digital prints as well (I was aware of their film processing, but it didn’t occur to me that they might do digital). Apparently, you can just bring in a CDR or even a memory card (including CompactFlash) and they’ll make prints. Paul mentioned that they have a self-serve kiosk but that it can actually be faster sometimes to just go up to the counter — either way, it only takes about an hour or less.

dotPhoto’s prices were some of the best that I could find online (such as $2 8x10s, if they’re running a special), so I had a general idea of what Sam’s prices should be. So, I was pleased to hear that their 8x10s are regularly just $2 — and that’s especially tempting considering that it’s only an hour for processing (as opposed to at least a few days with online print shops).

Paul also mentioned Dry Creek Photo which has professional-printer “profiles”. As I understand it, you can download a profile specific to the digital printer that Sam’s Club or other processors use. Then, you can adjust your image on your screen at home, “print to” the profile (I’m guessing that it’s a faux printer driver) and then take that file to Sam’s Club. And, since all color correction was done on your local box, you can decline color correction on their end.

Being that Sam’s Club takes pride in their low prices, I do have my doubts about all this ;). But, at $2 per 8x10, I think ’ll give it a try. And, if it doesn’t turn out how I’d like, I’ll just go back to dotPhoto.

Black Adder on PBS/KERA

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I’ve heard good things about Black Adder (a British sitcom) but my local PBS station wasn’t airing it. So, for about a year now, I’ve had a TiVo Wishlist for “Black Adder” (TiVo Wishlists record shows based on characteristics such as keywords in a show’s title).

My TiVo also has a To-Do section where it lists upcoming programs that will be recorded. I check that from time to time and a couple days ago I noticed some Black Adder episodes in there! It looks like they’ll be airing on Sundays at 12:30am. This Sunday (11/9) is Series I — Episode 1 (“The Foretelling”) followed by Series I — Episode 2 (“Born to Be King”) the following week.

I’m especially pleased that the series is starting from the beginning so that I won’t be at the disadvantage of missing out on reoccuring jokes from episodes past. Of course, I’m not even sure if I’ll like the show, but I’m willing to give it a try. And, with Rowan Atkinson, how bad could it be? :)