1. Initiate your drag-and-drop (or other “mouse-down sensitive”) operation;
2. ⌘⇧4 to invoke the screenshot area selector;
3. hit the spacebar to convert it to the window selecting “camera”;
4. click the window with the right mouse button.

Voila!  Simple and effective.

2008

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…minus a few children’s books.

1. Write at least three hours per week.  This goal is one of the mainstays; what would a year be without re-asserting my commitment to my craft?  There’s a pessimistic side of me that considers where I landed in ‘08 and how much I slowed down (slacked off?) in November/December.  But there is also the part that desperately wants this to work.  I made a 5-year plan for writing for crying out loud¹ so why wouldn’t I at least declare that I’m making the effort?  So it appears here like it does every year.  With the stakes raised.  But that’s mostly to mask the real goal of maybe actually perhaps managing to publish one or two of my “more mature” short stories during ‘09.
2. Read 36 new books during 2009.  In 2008, I read slightly shy of 50 books² for the year.  The goals was to read 24 books that I’d never read before — and I raised the stakes by specifying that 6 of those needed to be non-fiction titles.  I more than hit that one.  In ‘09 I’d like to raise the bar again and put another 36 new titles under my belt.  It may not be 86 but it’s one that I think is realistic for me.  To raise the stakes for myself this year, I’m piling on an extra layer.  Not only do I want to read 36 new-to-me titles, I have a list of a dozen specific books that I keep putting off or else have had recommended to me about a zillion times.  Those books include:
   1. Roots
   2. Stranger in a Strange Land
   3. Dhalgren
      • Our local library doesn’t have it; help a brother out?
   4. Shōgun
   5. The Selfish Gene
   6. Foucault’s Pendulum
   7. Ficciones
   8. Nights at the Circus
      • The local library doesn’t have this either; little help?
   9. Theodore Rex
   10. An Obedient Father
   11. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
   12. The Elegant Universe
3. Walk at least 10 miles every week.  Same as every year.  Now with 100% less running.  But if history tells us anything, this is harder to achieve than it sounds.
4. Climb at least once each week.  Because I needed another reason to go climbing³?
5. Finish up my Ortho theme for WordPress.  It would be nice to put some spit-and-polish on my custom WordPress theme (”Ortho”) and package it for publication and distribution on WordPress.org.  Hopefully I’ll pick up more than a few webdev tricks along the way.
6. Get outside more often.  A little vague?  Maybe so but toward the end of ‘08, it started to feel like we were hardly ever getting outside anymore.  A big part of that has to do with H. — it’s not easy to get out and hike a mountain every weekend when you’ve got an infant.  We made an effort to do so but by the time we were sipping cheap champagne as the clock struck 2009, it wasn’t nearly as often as we would have liked.  So this year we’ll do it.  Take the boy camping at Elmore State Park?  Climb Mt. Hunger with him?  Take him sledding?  Whatever.  We just need to get him (and ourselves) into the fresh air.

That should do it, I think.  There’s always a million more other little things that could get tacked on but we need to leave something for 2010, right?  Not that there aren’t a few more things I’d like to fit in this year.  I’d like to get proficient enough at Ext to author a few re-usable user extensions.  I’d like to get ambulothanatophobia kinda/sorta officially recognized; or barring that, maybe make some money from it.  I’d also like to brew my own beer.  But I think I need more of a basement for that.

What are your goals for the year?

1. That I’ve altered it already is beside the point? [↩]
2. Depends on how you count “read”, I suppose.  But 50 is a nice round easy number, and close enough to the truth. [↩]
3. Actually, if/when A. gets her wish and we manage to move then this could get tricky.  A local/within-state move?  No problem.  An out-of-state move?  Well… [↩]

Photo by Ken Signorello (Green Destiny on Flickr).

or:

fast torpedo sled
bike from ME to AK
holiday book lists

As an aside to last month’s search term haikus, a couple of interesting observations from December’s search terms:

1. 229 “zombie phobia”-related searches referred — including 21 for “ambulothanatophobia” and even one for “ambulothanatophobia get over it”.  (WTF? FTW!)  Maybe it’s time I started selling t-shirts?
2. Looks like 18 searches referred here using some combination of “Facebook” and “breastfeeding”.
3. This one has me confused and flabbergasted:  ”peter watts science fiction or interview or blindsight or starfish or maelstrom or behemoth or ten monkeys or marine mammal -floyd -millennium -panoramic earth -old west -gynt -ibsen”.  (Que?)

“Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, I do need to follow the rules.

1. Write for at least 2 hours every week.  At the end of September, if you had told me that I was going to take a nose dive in my writing momentum, I would have laughed in your face.  But the proof is right there:
   
   I went from averaging about 17-18 hours per month to “hardly at all” — I spent a total of 5.25 hours writing between November and December.  Call it the anti-NaNoWriMo. Two big things contributed to this decline:  our daily (nightly) rhythms with H. changed and I started a new job in November.  Ultimately, any excuse is lame.  It’s up to the writer to make the time, right?  Still, I tallied up just shy of 176 hours worth of writing this year and I’ve got it figured that it accounts for somewhere around 236,000 words between the various drafts written and edited.
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week.  As if to preemptively defend myself:  the spirit of this goal has always been to encourage myself to walk to-and-from work as much as possible.  With the walk to work coming in at about 1.4 miles, that means about 3½ round trips.  With 5 “work days” per week and the fact that we live (practically) downtown, this should be problem at all.  And yet somehow I have a short-fall 8 of the 12 months this year:
   
   The winter months are usually a wash — so cold, so often…  A.’s pregnancy in the beginning of the year meant that we were carpooling quite a bit more often than in 2007.  On top of that though, rock-climbing after work (vide infra) meant that I was getting a lift home 2 of 5 nights out of the work week.  Oh well, 418 miles for the year still isn’t too shabby/  But let’s not talk about running.  Previous attempts and statements to the contrary, I don’t run.
3. Hike 10 new trails.  Um…  Uh… No.
   
4. Go climbing (or bouldering) at least once each week.  For all intents and purposes, win:
   
   There were maybe two weeks all year where I didn’t climb at all.  And every month I managed to get to the rock gym at least four times.  Even made it outside a few times.  All in all?  93 trips for just over 142 hours.  No wonder my shoes are looking a little threadbare.
5. Read at least 24 new books in 2008 (with at least 6 non-fiction titles).  I kick reading’s ass:
   
   A guide to the below list: Books marked with a dagger [†] are non-fiction (or a non-fiction equivalent — e.g., David Sedaris); an double-dagger [‡] marks books that I had previously read; and an asterisk [*] indicates a book that was unfinished.  And now:      
   1. Blindness
   2. Radio Free Albemuth
   3. Freakonomics†
   4. Ghostwritten
   5. The New Phrenology†
   6. Wastelands
   7. World War Z
   8. Don’t Make Me Think†
   9. Consider the Lobster†
   10. The Algebraist
   11. Selected Stories of PKD
   12. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World‡
   13. Jennifer Government
   14. Catcher in the Rye‡
   15. The Moral Animal†
   16. Powers of Ten†
   17. Writing Down the Bones†
   18. This Year You Write Your Novel†
   19. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing†*
   20. Rock Climbing: Mastering Basic Skills†
   21. Idoru‡
   22. Dozois’ Year’s Best SciFi 24th
   23. Farthing
   24. DSLR Photography for Dummies†
   25. Soon I Will Be Invincible
   26. A Canticle for Liebowitz
   27. When You Are Engulfed In Flames†
   28. Hyperion
   29. Sputnik Sweetheart
   30. Coyote Blue
   31. Pastoralia
   32. The Road
   33. Gun, With Occasional Music
   34. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
   35. Cosmos†
   36. Look to Windward
   37. Year’s Best SciFi 22nd*
   38. Vermont Encyclopedia†*
   39. Foop!
   40. Where I’m Calling From*
   41. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov*
   42. Slippage*
   43. Cryptonomicon‡
   44. The New Space Opera
   45. JavaScript: The Good Parts†
   46. How to Get Happily Published†*
   47. The Cold War: An Illustrated History†*
   48. Ringworld
   49. Into Thin Air†
   50. Just After Sunset (Pending. I’m about halfway through the stories.)
   51. Snow Crash‡ (Pending. I love this book so much it hurts.)
   52. Dirty Wow Wow†

   It’s over 18,000 pages.  With only 5 re-reads — that’s pretty good for me, actually — and a total of 17 non-fiction titles in the year’s stack.  I only regret that I slacked off so much in November and December.

Where to from here?  I’ll see if I can’t get my ‘09 goals rounded up (like some people) and posted here in the next couple of days.  There are quite a few I want to keep and quite a few I’d like to swap for something different.  Hmm…  See you on the other side of the New Year!

What you see is a carved-out screenshot from this recent post.  Looks fine in any decent, modern browser.  But as you can see from that screen cap, looks like shit in Internet Explorer 6.  My gut reaction is to take a page from Mr. John Gruber:

If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care.

But the evidence in my logs suggests that a significant-enough portion of my pages are getting served up to IE6¹ and so I feel like I should make a best effort to resolve something that so seriously screws up the layout.  So web standards aside, IE6 mockery aside, there was the challenge of getting things to look right.

Now as a brief aside:  I have no intention of bending over backwards on this issue.  The site’s footer looks pretty shitty in IE6.  And probably for the same reason (viz. the floats) that the images do.  But the footer is way down there and generally not something that folks are spending too much time worrying about.  And so I’m spending no extra effort on the footer.  Though I, incidentally, believe that once I get this thing with the image floats figured out, the fix for the footer will seem downright trivial.

Now where was I?  Oh right, the float styles that are applied to the images.

This isn’t something that I made up on the spot back in March of ‘07.  I did not pull these styles out of my ass.  I did what any smart coder would do:  I ripped it off from somewhere else — somewhere where I knew it to be working.

Now, there is the obvious argument that ripping off code from one place and dropping it into a new context is no guarantee that it will work the way that you expect it to.  After all, you didn’t write it, so you can’t very well say that you know all of what it’s doing.  What else does it depend upon? &c.

But let’s brush off that argument as irrelevant.  I understand these dozen-or-so lines of CSS well enough to know what they’re supposed to do, that they function well enough on their own without additional supporting code, and that I haven’t created any conflicts.

Or at least:  no conflicts that I know of.

In the screenshot above, the image has a class of alignright applied to it.  The “meat” of this class is as follows:

img { border: none; }
.post-body img, .post-body * img {
    margin: 0.25em;
    padding: 2px;
    border: 1px solid #666;
    max-width: 100%;
}
img, .alignleft, .alignright { display: inline;/*forIE*/ }
.alignright, img[align="right"] {
    float: right;
    margin-right: 0px;
}

Or so it was at the time I began my examination.  I did a couple of searches for IE6 float bugs and how to resolve them.  I found a lot of stuff about sidebars, three-column layouts, and the usual forum posts with the usual litany of complaints that either go unanswered or else answered by unhelpful trolls.  I did manage to find two interesting pieces² but nothing that seemed to solve the problem I was experiencing.  I was already using the “it’s so simple, it’s almost stupid” display:inline fix so I felt as though I could safely assume that wasn’t the answer.  So I tried…:

1. adding clear:none to accompany display:inline (no luck)
2. adding width:auto to accompany display:inline (and though that partially helped with the otherwise unusually large size of next/previous links, I still wouldn’t call it a win)
3. adding width:auto and clear:none to accompany display:inline (no luck here either)

Leaving me pretty much out of ideas.  Baffling!  Everything I have found so far seems to suggest that setting display:inline is enough and (where it’s not) you probably just need to set a width (e.g., width:auto) and you’re good to go. The clear:none business was just me grasping at straws.

Any readers out there with ideas on this one?

UPDATE: In case you’re curious: (1) I also wound up removing the position:relative from #page³ and (2) the current state of the CSS applied to the img elements stands as such:

img { border: none; width: auto; }
.post-body img, .post-body * img {
    margin: 0.25em;
    padding: 2px;
    border: 1px solid #666;
    max-width: 100%;
}
img, .alignleft, .alignright { display: inline;/*forIE*/ }
.alignright, img[align="right"] {
    float: right;
    margin-right: 0px;
}

And again: ideas? Because I still can’t seem to track this down — despite trying to recreate this one from scratch by reverse engineering it. Such a dilly of a pickle.

1. But my site stats log also tells me that the #6 browser visiting blog.founddrama.net is something called “porn_viewer larbin2.6.3″ so who really knows what’s up with all of that. [↩]
2. Position Is Everything has probably the classic explanation of IE6’s float/double-margin bug and Smashing Magazine had a “CSS Float Theory” round-up with some useful nuggets. [↩]
3. Which appeared to make sense given the outcome of a reverse-engineering exercise but alas did nothing helpful nor harmful… [↩]

(Original photo on Flickr.)

• pizza dinner on Xmas Eve
• the misadventures of Clark W. Griswold, Jr.
• Bush Tree!
• scratch lottery tickets

What are yours?

A minirevolt is underway at Facebook after photos of mothers nursing their babies were removed from their personal pages. ¶ More than 58,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” to complain about the censorship.

The article’s comment thread is a real study in how ignorant some trolls can be about this issue.

Facebook’s assertion that they only remove images where the entire breast is exposed is weak.  The bottom line is that breastfeeding is about as natural of an act as any that a woman can participate in.  Whether the baby is latched on or not should make no difference in judging the context of the image.  A breastfeeding mother that chooses to post such a picture is doing it with full knowledge of how she is depicting herself and her baby; there is nothing obscene about it.  The article referenced above has the following quote from Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt:

“These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children [over the age of 13] who use the site…”

…and from exactly what are we trying to protect these children?  Babies getting their snack on?  A nipple?

It’s a sad state of affairs when the hyper-sexualization of a woman’s body leads to poor policy decisions like this.  The assertion that it’s motivated by the desire to create “a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users” doesn’t resolve — there’s plenty of advertising on their network to the contrary.

Which is not to say that I’m advocating pulling that shit down.  Just a little common sense all around would be nice.

The virtual nurse-in is scheduled for Saturday, December 27.  Facebook users can join the group here.  For more information about breastfeeding, check out Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers by Nancy Mohrbacher & Kathleen Kendall-Tacket or The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (a La Leche League publication).

(Original photo page on Flickr.)

Winter comes, time passes. You miss some opportunities, you stumble on to some others.

(Original on Flickr.)

Where do we stand?

As of this evening, and after lots of unacceptably bad best case scenarios described, the damage is relatively minimal.  Mail has been back solidly for a while; A.’s project seems to have escaped the outage with a little stress and downtime as its only casualty; this blog here has fared slightly worse.  Things seem to be back up and no data seems to have been lost but the WordPress admin app was curiously inaccessible at first.  Trawling the forums turned up a tip that recommended adding DirectoryIndex index.php to the root .htaccess file and though this appeared to buy us a ticket in, it’s horrendously slow to load the Dashboard page.  The only other thing that seems to help folks is a complete reinstallation.

Hmm…  I’d rather not.  Time will tell if I can live with the slow initial load or not.  I’m backing up my plugins, my custom theme, etc. in the meantime.

As for the hosting provider…  Dreamhost has been a pretty good value to date.  We pay next to nothing for what we’ve got through them and thus far the service has been good and the uptime tolerable.  What has me torn is that on the one hand, this inflammatory response appears in the comment thread of the related post of their system status blog:

…but it’s a comment thread so…  Really, that could have come from anywhere.  The official email response that went around was much better, talking about a full recovery of the data and a credit toward the effected accounts, etc.  Which does seem like an adequate response…  So again:  I guess we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime:  (1) Backing up and (2) any of you dear readers have any idea why that .htaccess trick would help but still jam things down to a creeping crawl?