The Coney Island Parachute Jump

Lawrence shared an article with me on Google reader about the attempts to reopen the parachute jump at Coney Island. Read it here...

Yet another blog I've Started

I have another new blog called Wikipedia Daily, where me, my brother and our friend Neil post random things from Wikipedia that we think are interesting or funny. This is my first blog where people that I've invited actually sign up and collaborated!

Other blogs I maintain (other than this one):
The Pirate Shack, a blog about pirates.
Ellen & Scott, a wedding stuff blog.
Art Gallery, where I post public domain artwork.
Amok Literature, the short attention span reading room.
Scott's Video Blog, videos of all shapes and sizes.

Plus there are some other blogs in my blogger account that I don't use much.

How to disable the flash in Photobooth

I read this on a forum somewhere, I think it was at macrumors. You can take an iSight picture in Photo Booth without the flash washing out your photo by inverting the screen colors. That way you screen flashes black instead of white. Inverting your screen colors is kind of scary if you have never done it before or if you accidently do it. Just strike your pose in front of your isight. Its better to pose before inverting your screen because its gets kind of hard to see what your taking once you invert (in my experience).

To invert (and to go back to normal when your done), hold down crtl+option+apple and hit 8.

Then take your picture and invert back.

plz votes 4 me

More on the online Poker Cats Contest

The Peg Leg Club

The Peg Leg Club, originally uploaded by sakraft1.

The bounty of Toy Fair

The bounty of Toy Fair
Originally uploaded by sakraft1

A promotional clown giveaway from Toy Fair 2008. Playmobil has a lot of exciting new stuff coming! Ellen brought the catalog back and my head exploded.

How to make you own header

This post will tell you how to insert your own header in the Minima template on blogger. This blog uses the Minima template with the default, text based header. Here is an example of another one of my blogs that does us a custom graphical header. To start off, if you look in the CSS and HTML for the template, there is a is a div with an id called header (which is where the header lives). It is 660 pixels wide. I suppose you could make a header wide than that, but I have not tried it with this template. For the sake of simplicity, cobble something together in Photoshop that is 660 pixels wide. The height does not have to be anything specific, the div will expand to whatever you put in it. Save is as a jpg or gif using Save For Web. Its good to keep the file size under 50k if possible.

Now go into the template for the blog in blogger. You don't have to change any of the CSS. In the HTML, look for a div tag with the attribute id="header"

You could delete everything inside, but its probably better just to comment out the parts you don't want. Inside the <div id="header"> tag, put <!-- above or in front of everything in there and put --> after it, just before the closing div tag that looks like this: </div>

That should comment out the contents of the header div. Its still there, but it won't show up in the page or effect it.

To put the header in, you need an image tag. I'm assuming you have the header image hosted somewhere. You can upload it to flickr or to your server if you have one. You can even upload it by putting it in a blog post if you have nowhere else to put it. In any case, you will need the url (http:// etc.) of the image. You put that in the source attribute of the image tag like so:

<img src="http://www.someplace.com/header.jpg" />

You will want to give the img tag an alt attribute (sometime referred to as an alt tag even though it is not a tag). This is so there will be some text in case your image fails to appear. You should make this the title of your blog, but you coud put anything in there. Your image with an alt tag will look like this:

<img src="http://www.someplace.com/header.jpg" alt="Your Blog Title" />

You will want to make the header hot, so that if someone clicks it, it will take them back to the main page of the blog. A normal link tag looks like this:

<a href="http://www.somehost.com/somepage.html">Click this text to use link</a>

Instead of the http://... (url), we are going to use a tag inside the source attribute. This is a tag that works in blogger templates to link to the main page of a blog. The tag is <$BlogUrl$>

So the whole thing looks like this:

<a href="<$BlogUrl$>"><img src="http://www.someplace.com/header.jpg" alt="Your Blog Title" /></a>

You may want to also add some tags to control the borders of the image. Some browsers put an ugly blue border around images that are inside of links (hot or clickable images). So, add the border attribute to the img tag:

<img src="http://www.someplace.com/header.jpg" alt="Your Blog Title" border="0" />

The last thing to do is to remove the border that the Minima template adds to images. There are a couple of ways to do this, but since I have already told you how to put attributes like alt and border in the image tag, we'll do it there. We will add the style attribute and use the border:none; style in it, like so:

<img src="http://www.someplace.com/header.jpg" alt="Your Blog Title" border="0" style="border:none;" />

make sure there is a space before the /> which is the closing part of the image tag.

And that should do it. If you have any questions, leave a comment and I'll respond in the comment.

Cough Medicine

If you can't laugh at yourself...

New blog headers

I finally got around to making some new blog headers. They're simple, but they make the pages look a lot better than the standard header you get with the blogger Minima template (see the header on this page for an example of that). The new headers appear on The Pirate Shack and on my wedding website. In a future post, I will tell you how to add your very own header to the Minima template.

On learning to draw

A friend of mine mentioned she wanted to take some art classes. The Nassau County Museum of Art is where my Mom takes drawing and painting classes (she has for over 20 years!) and its also where I took figure drawing and where I occasionally go to workshops.

There are also classes offered by the Art League of Long Island.

And then there is always the internet. There are tons of great blogs out there that I know of that offer free learning materials for people who want to draw. It is also great to look at the blogs of various artists/illusrators/cartoonists to study how they find solutions to various creative challenges. There are also tons of books. Jack Hamm has some great books about drawing all different kinds of subjects.

Don't read too much though. That is to say, spend more time drawing! Reading is good but you have to draw if you want to learn how. Practice also builds muscle memory into you hand, wrist etc. in the same way that athletes train their bodies.

The one piece of advice I can give you is this: anyone can learn to draw well (people that are supposedly born with 'talent' are probably rarer than a turquoise chipmunk, anyone can develop talent through practice). I don't draw too well because I don't practice. Even people who are exceptionally good have off days where they can draw well. Warm-up helps, like doing some quick sketching to loosen up (again, the athlete analogy works here). When you first set out to learn to draw, you (probably) won't like what your drawings look like when you first start. To be any good takes a lot of hard work and patience. Not everyone who can draw can draw everything. I know some people who are great at illustration or other kinds of drawing not great at realistic figure drawing (which is really really hard). I'm pretty terrible at it myself, but I don't let that stop me. I guess that's more than one piece of advice. Oh, and also its great to have a sketch book with you at all times. Sketch's aren't finished works of art, they are mostly for experimentation, which is how you learn to draw. I guess the one piece of advice is don't be discouraged if you don't find success immediately.

Just start drawing!

:-(

The volume on my LG VX8350 when used as an mp3 player is nearly intollerable even at the lowest volume setting :-(

I just made my own ringtone

To do so I had to make a pretty small mp3 file. Then I renamed it with a .mid file extension and transfered it to my phone via memory card. Then I send it to myself as a picture message and was able to save it as a ringtone! Woohoo! Hereis where I learned how to do it.

I fixed boxover!

I've been using boxover.js for the gallery on my wedding website. Those unfortunate enough to be using Internet Explorer (almost everyone) have been reporting that the photos were cut off (in certain versions). I had never seen this myself until today. I figured out by measuring a screen shot that the problem was in the piece of the boxover script show below. This sets the width of the header div for each popup (tooltip, box, whathaveyou). It was set to a width of 150px, so I changed it to the width of my widest image (500 px). Unfortunately, the background color still shows through, but I set it to white (#ffffff;) so that its less noticeable. I've been using the header div for the image and the body div for miscellaneous text, in most cases the year the photo is from. So the function to define the body styles is probably called defBodyStyle or something like that (to lazy to check right now). I'm just made excited that I was finally able to fix this.

function defHdrStyle() {
dvHdr.innerHTML='  '+dvHdr.innerHTML;
dvHdr.style.fontWeight='bold';
dvHdr.style.width='500px';
dvHdr.style.fontFamily='arial';
dvHdr.style.border='none';
dvHdr.style.padding='0';
dvHdr.style.fontSize='11';
dvHdr.style.color='#000000';
dvHdr.style.background='#ffffff';
dvHdr.style.filter='alpha(opacity=100)'; // IE
dvHdr.style.opacity='1.00'; // FF
}