I read an article about the American Library Association’s opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act. Most notably the statute granting the federal government the power to suppress the free and open exchange of knowledge and information by spying on your library checkout records. This particular violation of your constitutional right to privacy is only meant to intimidate individuals exercising free inquiry.
I thought it would be interesting to start an experiment to discover just how close they’re paying attention to library checkout records so today I went down to my local public library and signed up for a card. It was a rather quick and painless process aside from the part where I declined to offer up my SSN. Seems the ability to reserve books and renew card accounts online has been tied to your social security number. Your online PIN is also the last four digits of your SSN which opens a whole added realm of identity theft issues. Anyone with your information can sign up for a library card or pretend to be you by merely providing the last four digits. Admittedly commiting identity theft to steal books from the library is more than a little juvenile, but if you’re out to ruin someone a monster of a book replacement/late fee would just add insult to injury.
I’ve resolved to check out every book I can related to every terrorism cliche I can think of. I started off with a collection of books on chemistry and demolition with a humdinger I stumbled upon about how the World Trade Center collapsed and other famous structural failures. I intend to keep the books for the duration of the allowed checkout time (I think two weeks) and then swap them out for three more of similar interest. I’ve already made a list of about 30 books ranging from chemistry and explosives/demolition to religious extremism and guerilla warfare.
There aren’t as many books on these subjects as I thought, but I’ll keep it up for a few months (or until I get tired of going to the library) and see if I get contacted by the powers that be. Ought to be interresting.
I found a lady’s purse while I was walking my dog tonight. Gave the lady a call and found it had been stolen on the other side of town almost a month ago. I go by that spot every day and know it wasn’t there yesterday. No idea why some dipshit would have waited a month to dump it on the other side of town. Probably watches too much CSI and thought the cops would bust out some magic forensic voodoo and track them down. Bunch of savages in this town…
So some friends were asking me what the point of the images on the left are. They’re dead right now, but when i get the free time (hopefully this weekend) they’ll be links to various sections I plan on writing about. I plan on putting my comics database online, but I’m in the process of fixing 2000+ issue numbers after a night of drunken coding where I managed to change the issue number field from INT(4) to YEAR thus changing ever #1 to 2001, #2 to 2002 and so on. Drunk coding is like christmas; someone works all night delivering goodies and you get to wake up the next morning and see what you got. More often than not you end up with more work than you started out with…
Today’s was my mom’s birthday. I took her out for lunch and attempted to see a movie. Century was all but empty which was a good sign until I realized that regal had gotten all of the new movies worth seeing (War of the Worlds can suck it). So that’ll have to wait until Monday or Tuesday when we can hit Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Fantastic Four early without the place being packed wall to wall with kids.
After making my first theme, which seemed cooler at the time, I remembered how much I hate fixed width designs. I don’t usually keep my browser maximized, but it annoys the piss out of me when all of these people make sites seemlingly designed for 800×600 or even less (700px wide? come on!). It’s safe to say that the vast majority of people use at least 1024×768 so quit squeezing the page to make it look as if you have more content!
I dug up an old design that I made around ‘98 and, oddly enough, still thoroughly enjoy. Nice design, good flow, great color scheme, fully XHTML and CSS compliant and in our time of “the more useless crap the better” web design, it’s very simple. Best of all the new design, titled Maroon, is variable width with 100% column heights set to the height of the tallest column and a fix for the background breakage problem.
Normally with CSS you would set the background image of a column in the div for that column (in the case of my site #leftcol). The problem with that is that CSS doesn’t really handle height for elements, an element only uses the amount of space it needs to fit it’s content. The solution is to set the html and body elements to 100% and use their height to set the height for the column.
That solves the problem of the column not actually spanning the full height of the page. As for the breakage of the background I changed the background from being set on #leftcol to being set as the page background aligned to the top left and scrolled vertically (repeat-y top left;). That’s it. A background image that fills the entirety of the page and fits the height of the tallest column. For anyone interested the same thing was done for #rightcol that’s not an image, but a colored background. Rather that bloat this page with code snippets anyone whose interested can dig through the css and source for the site and see how it’s done. Shouldn’t be too difficult for anyone with a decent grasp on things.
E-mail me if you have any questions…
Hurricane Dennis is kicking Cuba’s ass right now. I was hoping it would destroy Guantanamo and kill everyone there, then all of the Christians would think it was God’s will. Instead it just downed a guard tower.
Pussy hurricane…
Hell yeah! First four day weekend in over a year. Not since my current employer bought out my last and we were moved from four 10’s to five 8’s. Damn I miss those three day weekends. I’ve been on the new schedule for almost a year and every weekend seems like it’s way too short. I’ve got today off because we don’t have enough work to do to justify turning the light switch on let alone having the crew even bother getting out of bed. We’ve gotten some over time this pay period to cover it so fuck it, I’ll take it. Monday’s the Fourth of July rounding out the weekend.
One thing I love about the summer around here is the fact that this town empties out almost every weekend as the God-fearing, mom and apple pie types pile their 2.5 kids into the Winnebago and head for the hills. If only I could figure out a way for them to not come back I’d be set.
