Jim Dalrymple.com

I’ll have a lot to say about CSS over the next few weeks. Not only have I redone this site using a lot of CSS instead of traditional HTML tags, but the company that I work for also redid its Web sites, Macworld and MacCentral, using an all CSS design.

For an idea of the power of CSS, take a look at the Zen Garden. Choose one of the different designs on the homepage and instantly the look and feel of the site will change. How useful is this? Take any industry and think about what you could do. What if you really celebrated Christmas and decorate the office — now with a click of a button, you can decorate your Web site too.

Of course, there are more practical uses for wanting to make a wholesale change to a Web site. For instance, a font change of size or color can be made with one small change to a style sheet instead of trying to go through a whole site, archive, etc. to change HTML font tags.

One year ago today, just after midnight, I was huddled in my bedroom with my wife, two kids and dog listening to the brutal winds of hurricane Juan ravage the Nova Scotia coastline. Meteorologists predicted a Category 1 or 2 Hurricane, but officials later confirmed that it was much worse, reaching Category 3 by the time it hit the coast.

Shortly after Juan began battering Halifax we lost power, leaving our only communication with the outside world a battery powered radio. We listened intently as CBC radio continuously updated us on the track of the storm and the damage it was causing. Much to our dismay, the brunt of the hurricane was set to hit Halifax — our house is on a hill facing the harbor.

A reporter from the CBC accompanied the military on a plane that flew into the hurricane — he reported back news that none of us wanted to hear. While the hurricane was supposed to be a Category 2, they expected it to hit Category three. My wife and I wondered how much worse it could get as we heard pieces of houses and debris fly into our house all night long.

When morning came we saw how lucky we were. While we were without power for a while, we made out better than some who were without power for almost a week. One of our neighbors had a tree fall on their house, hitting the brick chimney, sending it falling through the roof into the living room.

All-in-all, we made out pretty well. WE spent the day picking pieces of other people’s houses off of our roof and property, but that was minimal considering what others had to do. A hurricane is not something I want to experience again and I feel for the residents of Florida today.

I will go to great lengths to avoid the fights associated with driving with my kids. In my last vehicle I purchased the package that included a DVD player in the back, so the kids would be occupied. Complete with wireless headphones, the DVD player works well, but always having a new DVD on hand isn’t as easy as it sounds.

At 11 and nine my kids — like most others — have an uncanny ability to know just how long a trip is, giving them time to drag out the torture of fights and bickering until the very end. If we leave for a five minute drive to the mall, they will start fighting as soon as we get in the car, making sure we don’t miss a minute of arguements. If we go on a longer drive, they seem to get along, lulling us into a feeling of peacful bliss and then POW! the fights begin.

The latest thing my wife and I gave up are our iPods. Although we know the peacefulness won’t last forever, the last drive we went on was great — we never really heard from them and we didn’t have the constant, “what did you say,” while we were trying to have a conversation without the kids’ involvement.

When we pulled into McDonald’s on the way home, I noticed both kids bopping their heads to the music and staring intently at the iPod screens. When I looked closer, my daughter was playing Solitaire and my son was playing Parachute. What’s even stranger about this is that they both have new GameBoys — couldn’t they listen to music on the iPod and play their GameBoys?

The anwser — which I will never understand — is no. My daughter explained it to me, and while it seemed to make perfect sensse to them, the logic went right over my head. Suffice it to say, they really liked the combination of the iPod music and the games included in the device.

I think it was just another way for them to mess with my mind.

We took our dog Twiggy to the fly ball class on Sunday to see if she really was trained in the sport, like the rescue shelter told us. As you know from my previous posts, Twiggy is a high-energy dog, so we didn’t think much of her pulling on the leash and trying to get into the building when we arrived, but we had a nice surprise when we went in for the class.

We were there to observe only; just to see if we wanted to join. When the dogs started practicing, Twiggy freaked out and started barking and jumping and generally became very hard to control. One of the teachers came over and went through some basic exercises and commands with her and she responded just how she was supposed to.

Then they allowed her to run through the hurdles with the other dogs. They put them on a starting block and hold them back and then let them go — the dogs go through the hurdles like a rocket! Twiggy didn’t quite get it the first time around; she went around the hurdles and greeted me on the other end wagging her tail like she had just conquered the world.

The next two times she did it perfectly, and damn fast too! We enrolled her in the classes because she just had so much fun — she wouldn’t keep quiet the whole time, she just wanted to get to the hurdles and run.

When we took her to the vet in the summer, she said a Border Collie is like a brain with legs — can’t argue with that.

As you can see the site has changed quite a bit in the last few days. I’ve added quite a bit of stuff, like the left hand sidebar that shows the most recents posts on the blog, a category listing of the different posts, a calendar to see the current months post, a search and RSS feeds.

I have also worked with CSS to enable little treatments on the site like the dotted underlinging of links and changing color when you hover over them. Now, I am finally getting my photos online using an application I found today called Galerie. If you use iPhoto for your images and want to post them on the Web, this application is the best I’ve seen anywhere.

It was incredible simple to use and has more user-configurable features than any other plug-in or application — best of all, it’s free.

To make an album, just start the application — it launches iPhoto for you — and choose the iPhoto album that you want to use. Then it’s just a matter of changing the size of the images and thumbnails and Galerie looks after everything else for you. I tried to use the built-in upload feature, but I didn’t have any luck with that. No matter, I just uploaded them directly into the ftp and everything works.

I wish it had a feature to make an index page, but I can do one of those too. This is a damn cool application!

Update: Seems I made a mistake about the application’s ability to produce an index page of all the albums. I updated the blog.

Well, Twiggy has been with us for several months now and she is doing great. Earlier today we went to the local SPCA Dog Jog, an event that features fly ball and agility demonstrations, as well as showing some of the dogs that are currently in the SPCA waiting to be adopted.

Monique and I took the kids, but unfortunately we couldn’t take Twiggy with us — we just weren’t sure how she would react in that situation and didn’t want to take any chances. We did talk to the organizers of the fly ball club and told them Twiggy has been trained in the sport, so they invited us to a class tomorrow.

I’m pretty excited to see how she will do tomorrow because many of the characteristics we notice in Twiggy were present in the dogs today: high-energy, focus, determination, loyalty. It was really incredible to see so many dogs behaving like she does. We figured that fly ball would be a really good release for her and from what we hear, she was pretty good at it — maybe we’ll have a champion.

When we started fostering her, they recommended she be placed in a home without kids because of her demeanor, but she is doing very well with ours. We couldn’t ask for a better, if not a little calmer dog.

Tomorrow the largest ocean liner in the world — the Queen Mary II — will dock in Halifax. It should be quite a site when the ship comes into the harbor, considering how big it is. Just last night, I was watching the Apprentice and the winning team got to eat dinner on the QMII. They said it was as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as long as four football fields.

Here are a few facts about the Queen Mary II:

• QM2 is five times longer than Cunard’s first ship, Britannia (230 ft.)
• QM2 is 113 feet longer than the original Queen Mary
• QM2 is more than twice as long as the Washington Monument is tall (550 ft.)
• QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall (984 ft.)
• QM2 is more than 3 ½ times as long as Westminster Tower (Big Ben) is high (310 ft.)
• QM2 is only 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building is tall (1248 ft.)
• QM2 is more than three times as long as St. Paul’s Cathedral is tall (366 ft.)
• QM2 is as long as 41 double-decker London buses (31 ½ ft. each)
• QM2’s whistle will be audible for 10 miles

And in case you might want to buy a little boat like this, the estimated cost: $800 million.