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bubo and misty in the snow
November 23rd, 2007
We got our first snow of the year Wednesday. Yesterday we let the dogs out on our deck which had about 2-3 inches of snow. Misty was a bit shy at first but with our encouragement she finally stepped onto the deck. Bubo loved eating the snow. In one of the pictures you will see snow all over his face.
Bubo in the snow
Misty in the snow
Bubo & Misty in the snow (Misty goes: I march)
Chinglish
November 10th, 2007
I noticed that engrish.com has a Chinglish section now. For those who don’t know these are English translations in non-English speaking countries and Chinglish is specifically for the ones in China. I thought I’d share some with you. I will try my best to provide you with the correct translation for each.
For each plastic bag wasted, please pay two dollars.
Please ask for assistance.
To keep the restroom clean, please put trash in the trash can.
(This one is actually from Japan but it’s a classic.)
Temporary parking for unloading.
Handicapped.
Main entrance. (No sure how that came about.)
(No idea about this one.)
No cycling or skating. No soccer.
Eight Treasures.
(I guess at least it’s short and to the point.)
Self serving terminal.
(Really “Thunder” will be a good enough translation for this firework.)
Warm milk. (In Chinese the word for “Milk” and “Breast” is the same.)
Automatic flush.
Do not feed the fish with your own food.
How to STYLE a table using CSS (JSF examples)
October 18th, 2007
Tables are very important parts of the web interface. They are (hopefully) used for tabular data. It is one of the oldest and most basic HTML presentation tag but in order for it to smoothly fit into the new CSS age, we need to look at the most practical way in correctly setting up the markup and the CSS.
Nowadays, we no longer wish to make separate instances of a similar application for different clients. We want to thrive on making a single application that will fit the needs of as many clients as possible. This task is very challenging. In my opinion the ideal situation is to have the clients and developers both understand the benefits of the end goal and compromise to reach it. As developers we can always dream to have a single application reach the level of customization we can accomplish with many separate applications and yet don’t confuse the heck out of the end users. While I am unsure if that’s ever a possibility, I know ways that might help get us closer.
One of the biggest challenges is to give each client who uses the same application their own unique UI presentation. This is no small task and I only plan to address a small issue you might encounter in accomplishing this task. That’s how to mark up a table with the most amount of UI flexibility.
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Wisconsin Dells Vacation
September 2nd, 2007
We have planned this vacation in May and we finally did it. Even with all the moving, selling & buying house, getting a new job and going back to school, we still made it. It was an awesome vacation. We stayed at the Wisconsin Dells area for six days five nights. Two at Chula Vista and three at a whirlpool suite at Wintergreen resort. We spent most of our time in the Chula Vista indoor water park and the Mt. Olympus but we also visited Timbavati Wildlife Park, Ghost-Out-Post, went on the original duck tour, the jet boat tour, and watched the Tommy Bartlett Show. We also tried out some restaurants in the area. Here’s how I would rate everything.
Chula Vista – Love this resort. Next time we will definitely stay longer. The indoor water park here is even better than the one at Mt. Olympus. We rid the fast Ruby Run tube ride for oh maybe about 20 times. We didn’t realize it connects to the river walk so we did our walk around in a dumb route.
Wintergreen resort – The hotel is not impressive. The “suite” with the whirlpool is very crammed. They forgot to do housekeeping in our room after the first night. I was not happy. We had our breakfast at the hotel restaurant, it was decent.
Mt. Olympus – We went there coz the tickets came free with our stay with Wintergreen. The outdoor water park is decent but the roller coaster rides cost extra on top of your admission. What kind of sense does that make? After two days we find ourselves mostly in the wave pool and the lazy river. If we had any energy left, we’d probably check out Noah’s Ark but you get wore out after too many rides.
Timbavati Wildlife Park – a tiny worthless zoo. Not worth visiting if you don’t have young children.
Ghost-Out-Post – more disgusting than scary. Pretty short tour and feel cheap.
The Original Duck tour – Very interesting tour on both land and water. Don’t expect a lot of leg room in your seats.
Jet boat tour – Very fun and fast. The boats do hard brakes and spins and you will get wet.
Tommy Bartlett Show – We went to the night show and totally didn’t enjoy the water ski part of the show. I thought it was completely overrated. The the performers made multiple mistakes. The clown was unbearably cheesy. The story line was poorly written. The only impressive thing was the hang glider at the end. The second half was so so. The juggler was very entertaining and kept your attention for the entirety of his performance. Overall it kept me wondering if my money would be better spent going to a different attraction.
Crabby’s All You Can Eat Seafood – $29.99 per person and it doesn’t include drinks. What the hell? The food isn’t bad but it’s just not worth thirty bucks. We regret eating there but it’s a once in life time mistake.
Wild West All-You-Can-Eat Buffet – We stopped by since we had a coupon but the place smelled revolting to me so we left.
Paul Bunyan’s “Northwoods Cook Shanty” – Family style all you can eat restaurant. They just keep bring out fresh food. Very awesome. Loved it.
That’s all the unique places we visited. We were also surprised how many Eastern Europeans were working in the area. I don’t have many photos to share since we didn’t take many. Just two I kinda like.
While the duck was passing thru a canyon
A view of the Dells from the river walk
gas mileage for the new yaris
August 12th, 2007
So I did not have a chance to calculate the miles per gallon on my new yaris until today. Now most of this is high way driving coz Friday I had to make a round trip from Iowa City and Des Moines. But it’s not too bad at all
366.1 miles on 9.898 gallons = 36.99 miles per gallon
But understand that gas mileage does fluctuate up to a year on a new car.
my new toyota yaris
July 28th, 2007
This month has been hectic. I’ve moved to a new city for a new job. Temporarily sharing a room of a lady’s condo. We are selling our old condo, buying a new house and buying a new car for the new city. I’ve decided to return my one year old matrix (was on lease) and buy this 2007 toyota yaris instead. I got it today and just LOVE THE COLOR. The color is called jade sea metallic. Here are some photos to share.
my favorite feature of the car: an audio jack to plug your mp3 player in 
comes with power package: cruise control, air bags, power locks, power windows, the cd player plays mp3 & wma and all that jazz that gear toward younger generation which makes me very content.
i will miss the outside temp from the matrix tho. it’s not available on the yaris
Funny videos to share
July 10th, 2007
i’m quite overwhelmed by my new job. since i don’t have internet access at night, i haven’t been able to keep up with my sites. i hope everything will be a lot smoother by august. we are actually buying a new house here which i can move into. i know we haven’t sold our condo yet but it will be fine since andy’s staying with it until it’s sold.
this awesome fire fighter interview will make you laugh.
what about the dis from the old lady you’d never expect
you may say this dog is very stupid but he’s a comedian x5
oh AND if you use gmail notifier, you need to learn how to SECURE IT!
pure-essence.net is back
June 25th, 2007
What happened?
If you weren’t here when pure-essence.net went down, here’s a summary of the story.
PE got sponsored by http://edgewebhost.com/ in early 2006. The hosting was fine until mid May 2007. My site just all the sudden disappeared from the face of the internet and the owner of edgewebhost was nowhere to be found. I’ve tried everything I could to contact the owner. Emailed their support & admin, used their ticket system. I even went on webhostingtalk.com and found the owner & pmed him. I got absolute no response. I had no up-to-date backup of the site when it went down. The last backup I had was only to Jan 2006. I would have lost all my entries from Jan 2006 to May 2007. Thank goodness for webArchiver and Alberto, I was able to restore much of my loss. Web Archiver had my site logged up to May 2006 and Alberto sent me entries of my blog in his google feedreader from Dec 2005 to April 2007. Although I still lost entries and contents, without their help, it would have been worse.
What’s restored? What’s new?
If you are a regular visitor, you know I started PE way back in 2001. The site has gone through many evolutions in six years. Overall I want to stick to contents that work for me. I will remove the gallery section of the site and tentatively add a tutorial section. I might bring back some of the tutorials I wrote for Dodo’s New World that are still heavily requested. None of the static sections are done however. They will take longer to be restored. I will work on them but I don’t make any promises. I have a very busy life right now
Thank you thank you thank you!
I want to thank everyone who emailed with suggestions, comforting words and tips while the site was down. I also want to thank nagaki from xfluro.com for giving PE a new and stable home. To all visitors, please continue your support for pure-essence.net, I will keep up the good work
Thoughts Aside
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just want to strangle IE
April 5th, 2007
for a minor revamp of the web application i’m working on at work, i want to implment this css vertical menu. i was thrilled to find that it works great in IE 5.5 which is something we still need to support. after i put everything together, i realized it is not going to work due to this notorious SELECT z-index IE bug. basically IE ignores the rule of z-index when it comes to select tag. this means when the css menu popup out in the area where there is a select tag, in IE, the select tag will be rendered on top of the popup menu. the ONLY way you can place a layer on top of any SELECT tag in IE is by adding an iframe in the html source on top of the select. altho there is a pure css way to fix this issue, it’s far from pretty.
i’ve applied the fix to my css vertical menu now and it works locally. BUT i know i’m gonna run into more issues. because the app will be on a secure server (https) and in IE it will show security alert when you have iframe tag without the src attribute. i ran into this problem before trying to use the thickbox script. i had to put a real https URL in the iframe tag for IE to shut up. but i really don’t know how everything’s gonna turn out until i’ve switched everything over and the app is deployed to the secure server.
this is the wonderful IE. you have to use ugly hacks to fix its shortcomings and then add more unnecessary code to get around the problem the hacks cause.
isn’t it lovely?
finally got a Wii!
March 5th, 2007
we finally got a Wii yesterday! andy got up at 4:30 to get in line in toys r us to get it for me. i was so touched. he never forgot that was the birthday gift i wanted and never gave up trying. it was a month late but nevertheless a huge surprise. he also got a second controller and two nunchuks. not knowing that the wii came with a nunchuk, we got an extra one. so i’m selling it on ebay
i thought i heard the garage door open early morning yesterday but was too tired/sick to get up & check. andy came in around 9:30 to bring me breakfast and a huge bag from toys r us. i couldn’t believe it. how sweet was that! i am still sick and was coughing really hard but i couldn’t resist trying out the wii. we love the boxing and tennis game. the boxing game really gets me going. i get sweaty only after 3 rounds. amazing! i must be playing it hard too coz i beat andy every time we tried LOL . he also bought the wii zelda game. i was so wore out afterwards and went to bed at 6pm.
now i’m awake and my arms are so sore and totally want to do boxing again LMAO
