Mike Rundle's Weblog

Utica City Amateur

At around 1:30 in the morning early on Saturday, my buddy Mike calls me from a local stripclub, complete with the "bow chika wow wow" thumping beat in the background.

Mike: "Dude, what are you doin tomorrow morning?"
Me:"I dunno man, but I'm not gonna caddy for you in the City Amateur"
Mike: "No no no, our fourth cancelled, you wanna play?"
Me: "I don't think so, I had my ingrown toenail half-removed earlier today and I don't think it'll be a very good idea..."
Mike: "Dude, we're gettin' carts, it'll be all good"
Me: "Sweet, I'll be there.... what time?"
Mike: "6am"

So I set my alarm clock for 5:10 because the course is about a half hour away, and I had to register and putt first. It was still dark when I got there.

It was a fun round, no pressure, just playing golf with some friends of mine. I ended up stinkin' up the course with an 83 while Mike shot even par (with 5 birds, go figure). That was the qualifying round for the final 18 today, and in a couple of hours we'll see how playing in the final group worked out for him.

Just to give you an idea of how long he is, Mike is around 5'10" 185, and hits his tee shots an average of 340 yards. PW: 155 yards. 8 iron: 175 yards.

I'm a weakling next to him — he outdrives me by about 20 yards and has about 5-10 yards per iron on me too. Oh well.

BTW: I caved and bought the membership to keep my TypePad weblog alive. If anyone wants a 20% off lifetime discount, email me and I'll see what I can do ;)

Su pérdida es mi ganancia

While I bask in the semi-warm glow of a fading Upstate NY sun, my posts will be few and far between. I go back to school September 5th, and as soon as I can jack the network cable into my lappy, be sure that posts and more deeply penetrating thoughts will emerge and flow forth.

Until then, go outside and join me as I play golf everyday for the next two weeks in a last-ditch effort to hold onto my youth... just kidding :)

Thanks for the memories...

For the past few weeks, I have been a beta tester on this great hosted blogging service, TypePad. The time has come however for me to return back to my rightful home and regular blog, phark.net.

Beware however, for the next few days, I will be in the process of moving some posts from here over to there, and updating the entire look and feel of the site (not to mention upgrading MovableType, changing all my index pages, stylesheets, RDF, etc.) - so the site might not look how you expect or might not work at all ;)

Please bear with me as I complete the transition over to the new design of phark.

To everyone who read this little webspace this past month, I appreciate it.

To those who have read phark.net in the past, get ready for a great new beginning.

Mike ~ mike@phark.net

Accessible Image Replacement

Ever since Todd Fahrner made famous his Fahrner Image Replacement (Doug Bowman explains) technique, people that use screen reading devices have been complaining that it doesn't work as they had hoped.

Now, I do not have a screen reader, nor have I ever used one, but I believe that I have found a better image replacement technique that actually works for people with screen reading software.

The goal is to keep the text "visible" to the browser, but hidden to the user. That is to say, the text must not be able to be seen by the person viewing the website, but still has to be there.

What I have been doing is this:

<div id="replaceText">
Some text goes here...
</div>

With this kind of CSS attached to it:

#replaceText {
text-indent: -9000px;
background: url(bg.gif);
.... }


Now, what this does, is move the text 9000 pixels to the left (or "before", depending on in which direction your text is written), such that is it no longer viewable in the parent container.

The text is "still there", however you cannot see it. The background image shines through proudly, and the screen reader will happily read your extremely negatively-indented text, disregarding the background!

Update: Thanks to my friend "Vavoom"'s usage of his screen-reader, the above-mentioned technique is now verified to work with the JAWS screen-reading software.

Note: IE5 on Windows has a problem with the technique, where it negatively indents the text and background image. To fix this, place the image replaced div inside of an absolutely positioned parent element. Just experiment, there are other workarounds for this bug :)

Tri-modal CSS Tabs

For a recent web project, we needed to create a tab navigation system, but instead of just an "off" or "on" state to the tabs, they needed to have three states: "available and currently selected", "available but not selected", and finally "not available yet, and cannot be selected".

This is what I came up with

I've only tested in Safari, IE5, and Mozilla, so comments regarding other browsers would be greatly appreciated ;)

Overturned

On I-294 this morning (I travel northbound and get off on the Touhy Ave exit), the traffic was terrible.

About a mile south of the I-90 exit, traffic came to a complete standstill and I glanced over to what southbound traffic was doing. I noticed 10 or so guys with ties on standing around a car that was flipped on its roof. On further inspection, it turned out to be an Illinois State Police car!

Audiopad

Have you seen this?

Audiopad (brainchild of Ben Recht, MIT Media Lab post-graduate student) is a visual system ala Minority Report that lets you mix beat-laden music in real time.

A special pad is attached to a computer running the Audiopad software, and it tracks the position and movement of "pucks" which are moved around on the pad itself.

I can't really explain it, click-through for a video description of it ;)

Hat tip, Wired.