Archive for April, 2008

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Re-painting the Jeep flares

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

black jeep flares loking more like like light grey

Are your Jeep flares loosing their luster? Black looks more like washed-up gray?

There’s a really easy fix for that. It’s called Krylon Fusion paint cans. Seriously!

What you’ll need:

  1. 3 cans of Krylon Fusion Black Satin paint cans
  2. Very light sand paper

Step 1 – Sand off the residue

Take the light sand paper and rub gently on the flares. This is just to remove the debris and old paint that was there so the new paint will stick better to the plastic. When you’re done sanding, just take soapy water and clean the flares.

Step 2 – Tape of the Jeep

To paint the flares you have 2 options: 1) remove the flares completely 2) tape off the jeep.

I went with option #2 as it pretty easy and less knuckle scraping.

Step 3 – Start spaying

When you Jeep is nicely covered, start spraying. Like any spray paint job, you need to spray evenly across the surface in a horizontal manner. From left to right and right to left, etc…

Apply 3 generous coats, the third being the coat that makes sure you got every inch of flare painted and your done.

For more pictures, check out my Re-painting jeep flares set in my flickr account.

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Posted in Writing | 4 Comments »

Reviving old blog entries

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I actually started blogging more seriously back in 2003 or around that time. I had a few Jeep write-ups then which I found out through WP.com stats that I’m still getting referrers from various Jeeps forums so… with that in mind I decided to “revive” some of my old posts (there’s still in the database collecting dust).

Now I need to find all the pictures that were associated with all those write-ups and put them up on flickr so I can reference them again.

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Posted in Note | No Comments »

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface

Monday, April 14th, 2008

A four-part series by Cameron Moll

“Throughout the duration of this series, we’ll be speaking extensively about markup — XHTML, CSS, and a little scripting. Marking up a website is akin to speaking Spanish. There’s more than one way say something, and there’s certainly more than one way to code something.”

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Symphony X in Montreal – What a show!

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Mike Lepond from Symphony X

Wednesday afternoon, my husband and I drove to my parents to drop off Alexandra where she would spend the night while we drove to Montreal to go see Symphony X. It’s only 1 hour and 30 minutes away, so the road trip is short. We got to the venue – Le Medley – 10 minutes before doors opened and the line was already a few blocks. Luckily, we ran into my husbands band mates just a short block away from the venue so we got in with them.

Since the show was a general admission show, as it usually is in bars, we decided to go to the balcony to check out the first 2 bands – Into Eternity and Epica. We picked 2 chairs on the side and sat and watched.

When the first band got on, I noticed people coming through some doors that lead basically backstage where *most* of the time it’s people from the bar bringing up cases of beer to the bar on the balcony but just when I decided to look that way, I notice this slim guy with long hair and a goat-tee stepping through, he looked at the band playing and took a seat just 2 tables away from us. I turned to my husband and said: “That looks alot like Mike Lepond” (the bass player for Symphony X. He said : “No way!” So, I ignored it and watch the band playing and enjoyed the music and every so often I would turn and look at the guy again. Finally, I said to my husband: “Hun … that IS Mke. Just look at him!” we started laughing ’cause some kids sat down just beside him and they didn’t clue in. So, Yves (my husband) got up to grab a beer and decided to go talk to him.

I was right ;) It was him!

Very nice guy! Yves didn’t talk to him for too long ’cause he didn’t want to bug him or have other people notice him and bug him before the show. But he did go and brag to his fellow band-mates tho :p One of them came up and chatted with him (for quite a long time). I then decided to go and say Hi to him and wish him luck with the show. I also told him that I hoped they continued to make music for years and years to come to which he replied “Yeah! Me too!”.

The first band was almost done playing and Yves’ bandmate was still chatting him with him. By that time, a few kids noticed Mike and asked for his autograph. Yves got up and went to Mike Lepond and Steve (bandmate) and told him jokingly to stop bugging the man. When Yves walked back to our seat, those same kids started following him and asked him is he was Russell and if they could get his autograph. I started laughing ’cause quite frankly, my husband looks nothing like Russell. It was dark and I guess in person, Russell would look slimmer … maybe! Funny stuff!

When the second band started playing, I went to the car and got my Rebel XT back in the club with me. I had my 50mm f1.8 lens with me. Nice and small. When the second band was done with their set, we made our way downstairs and into the “pit” and waited for Symphony X to start. I wasn’t expecting to get any decent shots since I don’t use flash and focusing is a challenge on it’s own, imaging in a pit of sweaty, rockin’ fans :o

I managed to get a few (91 in total) very nice, mostly sharp pictures:

and my favorite

The show itself was totally awesome. Russel Allen is, in my opinion, one of the best (if not the best) front man in this day and age. The poor guy had the flu and doctors told him that he wasn’t suppose to sing but that wasn’t going to work. We (the crowd) helped him out and sang some of the choruses for him and he also joked around

Allen: “God I wanna sing”
God: “No”
Allen: “Why?”
God: “Because!”
Allen: “And than Satans down there and he is like….”
Satan: “ROCK ON MUTHAFUCKAH”

And he did! And we love him for it!

The setlist was great:

  • Set The World
  • Domination
  • Serpents Kiss
  • Masquerade
  • Paradise Lost
  • Egypt / Death
  • Babylon
  • Inferno
  • Smoke
  • Revelation / Divine

Encore

  • Eve of Seduction
  • Sea of Lies

Originally, the encore was suppose to be “Eve Of Seduction”, “Of Sins and Shadows” and “Out of The Ashes” but due to Russell having a really hard time singing by the end, they changed that up a bit. It’s too bad ’cause I REALLY wanted to hear “Out of The Ashes”! Oh well … next show maybe :)

For more pictures, check the Symphony X set in my flickr account ;)

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Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »

7 Easy Tips To Make Your HTML Efficient

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Now let’s see what you can do to make your HTML better.

Use a DOCTYPE

Probably the most important tag in your HTML is the DOCTYPE. This is what will tell the browser how to deal with your page. Here’s an example of a full DOCTYPE:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Here is a list of recommended DOCTYPEs and a great article from Alistapart that explains how to fix your site with the right DOCTYPE.

A title

Please don’t forget to put the title tag in your HTML document.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title>Some title</title>
    ......

How embarrassing is it to have Untitled Document as the title of your site.

Proper encoding

Make sure you have proper encoding for your site.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title>Some title</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    ......

It is recommended to either use ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 if the content of your site will be in the english language. Use ISO 8859-15 if you need characters like the Euro sign and UTF-16 if you are writing in an Eastern Asian language like Chinese or Japanese.

Adhere to your DOCTYPE

If you are using an XHTML DOCTYPE, make sure you don’t forget the little things like closing empty elements (img, br, etc…) that differentiates XHTML from HTML.

Indent your code

It’s very easy to get lost in your mark-up when you don’t indent it properly. When everything is in one line, it’s hard to notice if the element is properly closed or missing.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title>Some title</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>

<div id="header">
    <h1>Welcome to my site</h1>
</div>

<div id="main">

    <div id="content">
        <h2>Content</h2>
        ........
    </div>

    <div id="sidebar">
        <h2>Sidebar</h2>
        .........
    </div>

</div>

</body>
</html>

Comment your code

An easy thing to do so you can find yourself quicky in your code

Use the proper element for the job

This ties in with making your CSS efficient but it’s also important to use the proper element for displaying the information. If you are displaying tabular data (like a calendar) use the table element. If you are displaying a title, use the proper heading element (h1, h2, … h5). No need for a tag soup of divs and classes to complicate things.

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Posted in Writing | 1 Comment »

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