Where've I been?

Well, mostly I've been real busy.

I have though, in the past month, taken over the Naked in School collection site.

I must also admit that my own writing has suffered horribly of late. With all that's been going on I've barely written a page in the last month. I'm hoping to correct this soon.

Lately, I've been buying Michael Moore books. He's kind of like the idiot savant of the middle-left. I say middle left because he's not really even a liberal, he's more of a moderate that refuses to pluck out his own eyes like most people do. The man drives an SUV after all...

In addition, I've been reading crime statistics. Did you know America is one of the low crime countries in the western world with one exception: homocide. Couple that with the fact that:

Among all instances when guns are fired during a break-in while the owner is at home, in only 2 percent are guns used to shoot the intruder. The other 98 percent of the time, residents accidentally shoot a loved one or themselves—or the burglars take the gun and kill them with it.

--- Michael Moore, from 'Stupid White Men'. Statistics come from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "Guns in the Home" fact sheet.

What's the most common kind of drug in America? It's not that ghetto street stuff, it's meth - heroin, esctacy, speed, etc... and it's not in the hood, it's in the white suburbs...

Next up is cocaine, which is the drug among white collar workers. Crack is behind all of them, but it's the drug for the poor. Possession (not sale) of 5 grams of crack gets the same minimum mandatory sentence as 500 grams of cocaine. How long? 5 years min, 20 years max - even for a first time offender.

Another one for you... crime has, overall, been going steadily down for the past hundred years, with a few small bumps. Public perception though, has gone the other way. We're safer today than we've ever been - even for homocide. Yet since the late 80s we've been building prisons like mad... near trippling the number in California. Yet only 5% of the people we arrest are violent criminals. 12% are non violent crimes, the rest - 83% - are non index, like prostitution, drug USE or possession, curfew, gambling, drunkeness, and homelessness.

Most of the people in prison today are there for drug possession, or conspiracy. Conspiracy is often things like 'being in the room of a known drug user'. There's a boy in Alabamba serving three life sentences without parole for driving his cousin to meet people. The cousin and the people he was going to meet both dealt drugs - though that was never proven in court. No drugs where ever found, the cousin did not go to jail.

There's something terribly wrong in America, and it isn't the drugs.


Anyway... the more I keep reading this stuff, the more spooked I get. But I've got to keep reading it, that's what I do...


Back to life in general, I've got a new version of the 'Naked in School' site up now. It's still got some work that needs to be done, and I'm hoping it will clam down soon into a steady routine without any of the silly flame wars that took so much tims on assd this last month... I'm hoping that once that happens I can get back to writing. I actually did skip out on the whole flame war after a while when I realized it was just going nowhere.

Anyway, hope to have something new to say soon.

A bit on webdesign - Getting around layout images and tables

(This is reposted from a.s.s.d)

Getting around layout images and tables:

Given the new constraints on images due to bandwidth, it's time to get people a little familiar with one of the tricks of CSS.

Images and tables are often used to make a page lay itself out -just- right. However they load slow and tables can cause some text only browsers to get things in the wrong order.

To layout without them, you use the <DIV> tag.

First put all your content on your page in the order you want it to appear if it was being printed out for say... a school paper... or scrolling by on your TV.

In other words, put it all in a top to bottom order - the top is what is seen first in this horrid situation, the bottom last.

Now put a <DIV> and </DIV> tag around each block of content - one for your header, one for your navigation, one for your body, one for your footer, and so on...

Like this:

<DIV>Welcome to my page</DIV>

<DIV>
click here
or here
or maybe here
</DIV>

<DIV>
Read this useless nonsense I happen to like.
</DIV>

<DIV>
Donate to ASSTR - Copyright me, today - contact me here
</DIV>


Now for each DIV tag you do this:

Change that plain old <DIV> to:

<DIV style="position:absolute;top:10px;left:150px;height:400px;width:550px;">
Read this useless nonsense I happen to like.
</DIV>

That will make a body of content ten pixels from the top, 150 pixels from the left, 400 pixels tall -at least-, and 550 pixels wide. If you put too much content it will expand to fit in most browsers. If you are not sure, you can leave out the height and it will simply size to fit.

You can change the numbers to whatever you like - even putting things on top of each other for whatever mad reasons drive you... :)

you can give it a border:

border: 2px black solid;

or a background:

background-color: #blue;
background-image: url(my_bandwidth_hog.jpg);

padding (space between it's edge and the content):

padding:5px;

and a lot of other more complicated stuff you can learn later.


That's all you need to put the content anywhere on your page you want it, without any images or tables. If you lay it out top to bottom before the DIV tags like I suggested below, them those very old browsers, or strange text-only browsers will still see it in a very natural looking manner.

If you want little bars and lines all over your screen try this trick:


<div style="position:absolute;background-color:red;font-color:red;top:76; left:150;width:600;height:4;font-size:1px">.</div>

Note that I make the font so small, and the background and font colors the same - that hides the little dot...

You can put &nbsp; instead of a dot. That's a space...


That will let you draw all kinds of layout lines anywhere you want them, without any images or tables... put them as the very last thing in the HTML file, just before the closing </body> tag... that way people with old browsers don't encounter any funny business.


DIV tags can also be used to do rollovers, you make two of them in same location, and have javascript to change which is visible. No images needed. If you want to do this, there are plenty of websites out there on the topic, many of which have cut and paste code to use to do it with.