Emma did not care for the ocean (compare and contrast her facial expressions before and after touching the water).
Emma’s second-cousin Clara, who is five and a half weeks her elder, was at the beach too. At one point, Kaylor (Clara’s mother, who is my cousin) was holding Clara, and Scott (my brother) was with them, while some Asian family with a screaming baby was nearby (they were at a restaurant at the time). Some moron—who must not have looked closely enough at Clara to realize Scott was definitely not the father—said to Kaylor, “That’s what this country needs: more good, white babies.” Of course, Clara is only half white. I think the guy just walked away after that (I wasn’t there). Like I’ve said before on this blog, I’m always surprised that there are still truly racist people out there who are under the age of seventy. I mean, if you were, let’s say, over 25 years old in 1960, maybe you were already set in your ways before we as a society figured out that racism is a Bad Thing, so you’ve at least got a bad excuse for your behavior. For anyone younger than that: really? seriously? there are still people that ignorant? (Also, I can assure this guy that white babies are quite capable of screaming very loudly.)
Last night Stephanie, Emma, Stephanie’s dad, and myself were traveling to Florida to visit Stephanie’s sister. Along the way, we stopped for gas twice: once in South Carolina and once in Georgia. Both times, it took far too long for no good reason. At the first gas station, for some reason, you have to go inside and prepay for gas, even if you are paying at the pump. This makes no sense. The only reason to require someone to go inside and prepay is if they are paying cash, because you are afraid they will drive away. When you pay at the pump, the gas station has already ensured that you have enough funds on your credit card to cover the gas. The second time we stopped, an attendant walked up to us after we pulled up beside a pump and said they were changing shifts inside and the pumps were going to be off for about ten-to-fifteen minutes. (Also, he was smoking at the time.) Really? It takes fifteen minutes to balance the books when you change shifts?? And again, we were paying at the pump, which means we didn’t need to pay the guy at the register anything, so why couldn’t they at least leave the pumps open for people paying there?
Anyway, I just thought I’d share. Enjoy your Independence Day everyone!
While I agree, that is dumb, I’m also pretty sure that when you use a credit card at the pump they only check to make sure your card is valid. They don’t make sure that there are enough funds. This is part of the reason for it only allowing you to pump like 100 bucks at a time or whatever. The gas station is responsible for paying the gas company for the gas in the event you do drive off.
Nope, they reserve funds (I guess $100 if that’s the most you can pump at one time). If your card had less than $100 available credit, it wouldn’t let you pump.
Over the weekend—while I was back home for my brother’s wedding (some pictures will likely come soon)—I noticed that the organic milk my mom has started buying has a really long shelf life. The carton I was pouring milk from, for example, didn’t expire for well over a month. I was curious why this was the case so I did a little research and it seems that this milk has been treated with ultra-high-temperature (UHT) processing, rather than regular pasteurization. From what I’ve read on Wikipedia, it seems that UHT milk could actually sit at room temperature for months without going bad, and in Europe it’s actually sold unrefrigerated. Apparently they sell it refrigerated here because Americans wouldn’t buy unrefrigerated milk in test markets.
I couldn’t find a consensus as to why organic milk is UHT processed, though. Some people said it was because “organic cows” aren’t given antibiotics, so UHT must be used to be sure all bacteria are killed. Another said organic milk is typically shipped from further away, so they have to use UHT or it would be about to expire by the time it got to the store. I’m not sure which is the real reason and I don’t feel like doing any more research.
Anyway, I thought that was an interesting fact I’d share with the class.
This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s Count von Count from Sesame Street, singing a song in which the word “count” has been bleeped out, with hilarious results. (The video’s pretty old—maybe everyone has already seen this and they just forgot to tell me about it.)
I’ve come up with a very simple solution to the problem of browser-cached CSS files. What I mean by this is: when you update the CSS which manages your website’s presentation, it will take a while before some visitors actually see those changes. The reason, of course, is that browsers (this is at least true of IE and Firefox) will cache CSS files pretty aggressively, without checking very often to see if they have been updated. Usually refreshing the page will solve this, but most visitors aren’t going to care enough to do this. Meanwhile, your site will look pretty broken to them (especially if you’ve done something like styled a list so that it looks like a horizontal toolbar instead of a bulleted list, for example).
So here’s the very simple solution. Add the following rule to your root .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.[\d]\.css$ $1.css [L]
I’m assuming that you have a common include file or template or something which prints things like the page header. If so, whenever you update your CSS file (say, style.css), you update the link tag in your header to use style.0.css. This will look to the browser like it is a different file from style.css, so it will download it again. But Apache is really just loading the same CSS file through the magic of URL rewriting—you’re just ensuring that the user picks up your recent changes. You can repeat the process the next time you tweak your CSS, just change the header to style.1.css and so on.
Using a time stamp as the value guarantees that it’s unique each time. The great thing about this is you don’t have to remember to update anything (PHP does that for you). I found this useful for forcing an image update in my photo album software.
Yeah, I guess that would work too, but that way the browser would have to reload the CSS file with every single page view, even though CSS files don’t change all that often. Unless you are repeating your header code in every page, you’ll only have to update the link tag in one file, and only when you think you’ve made a big enough change that it would look broken with the old CSS. It does have the advantage that you don’t have to mess with .htaccess, but that’s only a one-time thing (I guess you don’t want to do that with something you’d want to redistribute though).
Wouldn’t that still cause the browser to load the CSS file on every page load? I don’t think browsers will cache URLs containing a query string, even if the query string in the next request is identical (I could be wrong about that, I’d have to do some experimenting to be sure). Plus that still seems like more work, you’d have to put code in that accesses the CSS file on the server for each page load.
I didn’t hold the highest opinion of Time Warner Cable before, but lately they’ve sunk to a new low. They want to start introducing bandwidth caps on users but they can’t do this for existing customers who signed up for unlimited internet. So what do they do? They offer a new “deal” where you can get cable, internet, and digital phone service for a “locked-in rate” for a year. Buried in the fine print is the fact that you’d also be signing up for a bandwidth cap. Even worse, the afore-mentioned locked-in rate requires you to sign a contract for a year of service. So if you found out after the fact that your bandwidth was capped, you’d have to pay a $150 early-termination fee to get out of the contract.
What is even more ridiculous is that the limit is set at 20GB per month. When I first read about the 20GB limit, I thought surely that is per day. That I could live with. The only way you’re likely to use 20GB a day is if you’re downloading torrents constantly (which I still say is none of their business—courts have already ruled that the ISP is not responsible for what users do on their network). But 20GB a month is very easy to reach even if you’re not pirating anything, especially if you watch TV online, or if you use VOIP (i.e. Vonage, Skype). It’s almost as if Time Warner’s internet department has some financial incentive to limit competition from Time Warner’s cable TV and digital phone departments! No, that’s just crazy talk.
July 4, 10:52 pm
While I agree, that is dumb, I’m also pretty sure that when you use a credit card at the pump they only check to make sure your card is valid. They don’t make sure that there are enough funds. This is part of the reason for it only allowing you to pump like 100 bucks at a time or whatever. The gas station is responsible for paying the gas company for the gas in the event you do drive off.
July 5, 9:15 pm
Nope, they reserve funds (I guess $100 if that’s the most you can pump at one time). If your card had less than $100 available credit, it wouldn’t let you pump.