TJamesWhite.com

If you ever wondered, here’s a quick idea of the difference between my race tires and regular old street tires. (Keep in mind that the race tires are actually DOT street-approved tires.)

• Street tire treadware: 480
• Race tire treadware: 100

100 is the mean – larger numbers have a longer life

Also, I took the new race tires to a local dealer to have them mounted, but to no avail. The sidewall on the old race tires are so stiff that they couldn’t get them the rims. Guess I’ll just have to try another dealer.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Eric Meyer on CSS. While the projects in the book are a little goofy, the practicality of them is indispensable, and sneaky. Sneaky because I have found that they have worked their way into my daily coding — and that is a good thing.

For example, I recently retooled the e-newsletters that I produce at my day job. I had eight very similar, yet subtly different templates. They utilized several different classes, which were applied to various paragraphs throughout. Over time I had tweaked the templates, but the tweaks didn’t always get moved from one to the next. So I had to remember which newsletter had the latest code and try to copy it to the one I was working on.

Yes, it was a pain.

With the retooling, I’m down to one template and only one or two classes. All other styling has been moved up to the highest parent element possible. This means no more classes for each paragraph — just create a paragraph and, depending on where it is, voila! it’s styled correctly.

I was able to reduce 8 into 1 because all of the newsletters have the same layout, just different header images and color schemes. By added a <div> that wraps the entire content, I just have to change the id of that <div> and the color scheme changes throughout.

There are two further bonuses to the improved coding. For one, the new layout degrades better in non-compliant e-mail/browser clients. Also, I have implemented semantic markup and replaced image-based headers with text. Now when I create text versions, using NoteTab Lite, all of the headers are in place and there is less clean-up for me to do.

I went to work this morning and then remembered I was going to take today off. So I worked a half day and came home. It’s not really a big deal, I didn’t have any plans or anything, it’s just that today was “bring you kid to work” day. I try to make it my personal holiday every year and stay home.

I forgot about it because I’ve been so busy lately, at work and home. I actually had some stuff that had to get done this morning, so that worked out well.

Yesterday I worked my full day, and then came home and worked almost another half day on my freelance work. My contractor called me and asked if I could have a new page created last night – upping the timeline from delivery this weekend. I was planning on putting a couple of hours into the work anyway, so I just kept slugging along until it was done.

Now that frees up some weekend time so I can get work done on the race car and make Jack’s game on Saturday.

Yesterday was also Delivery Day here. We had multiple packages arrive, including a new Compact Flash card for Herman and four new race tires (Toyo Proxes RA-1 205/55-14s if you care). My new seat belts arrived last week, so it’s time to get busy. I’ll get the new belts mounted and try to get the tires mounted this weekend.

If I don’t forget any more…

I often wonder what people are thinking when they put ads and fliers together. For those of us in the web-building profession, we see all sorts of web sites that just make our heads hurt.

But here is a special treat from the bulletin board at work:

So, if you are looking to have your house giving a jaunty lean, here’s who to call. I only wish you could see the full flier. The distortion of the house comes through much better. And for sake of size I didn’t include the full list of what this “handyman” can do for you — it is a nice little list with the last item vertically truncated. You’d think that our intrepid builder would at least notice that when photocopying.

Here’s a few more of my favorite shots:

I took Herman (the camera) out for a stroll around the garden. Here are some of the results (click to enlarge):

I’ll post some more later.

Yesterday after school Sarah stopped by the local Toyota dealer and ordered herself a Prius.

We are both excited by the prospect of owning a hybrid car, doing our part for the environment and to cut fuel costs. With gas prices climbing the hybrids are getting more and more popular. In fact, Sarah is on an 8-month waiting list! It is going to be hard waiting that long, but it will be worth it. (That is, if it comes in in 8 months. Back in November the wait was 3 months and some of those people are still waiting.)

Toyota has really done a nice job with the Prius. For starters, they treat is not as a specialty gimmick but a car in their line up. The current Prius is also the second generation and they have made some very cool changes to their Hybrid Synergy Drive®. It’s also got a cool touch screen control system for the heating, cooling and radio.

I understand that the interior volume is also nearly as large as the Camry, so large that some consider it mid-size instead of a compact. Sarah sat in one and said that there is plenty of headroom for me, even in the rear seats. (I’m a shade over 6′ tall.)

There are a couple of good things about the long wait. We know that the car will be a 2005 model year, and that also means that the latest tweaks will be included. The only down side is it may have a 2005 price.

The Toyota dealers around here have also been very friendly to Sarah and have very nice service. Because the Prius is in such high demand, all you need to order one is $500, which is fully refundable if you don’t want the car.

Friendly service, an step in the right environmental direction, 55mpg in an attractive package for around $21,000. I can’t wait.

[I know that it seems somewhat odd that while I drive a race car I'm excited about owning a "green" car. The fact is, because I race car I do what I can in the rest of my life to make up for it. (Also, my race car burns far less gas than many of the SUVs out there.)]