/life/sabbatical/Onward Journey
I took a ring with two keys on it, spun it off my keychain, and placed it on the countertop. I picked up two shoulder bags and two canvas bags, closed the door behind me, and left. Two couches and a foam mattress sat on the downstairs patio along with a couple bags of magazines — the last remnants of a flurry of freecycling. (The result was good: less than two "supplementary" large garbage bags of waste from two years of living.)
I often wish I had a timelapse photo of my keychain: a solitary bicycle key through highschool, the long UW-branded lanyard from first year that I spun around incessantly; the various sets of housekeys, eventually attached to my pocket knife, and then its progressive decay from an unforgiving life in my pocket; periods, like now, when there's a chaos of loaned keys from places where I'm staying; and still, brief times where the only key is for a bike lock...somehow these changes uniquely represent the transactional points in life.
I'm on a bus now, to Ottawa, back to the election campaign. In about two weeks, I'm going with my stuff to NYC, and then popping back up to finish off the campaign. Then begins my onward journey, on October 15th, to New York, for real. To the United States, a place I once thought I'd never work. To Google, and a new project and a new team. To a city absorbing the collapse of a major industry. To a country on the brink of a potentially game-changing election. To live in the same town as my sister for the first time in nearly ten years.
To my onward journey.
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/sabbatical/Credit Card Fraud
Yesterday I looked over my credit card, and noticed a charge I didn't recognize. A few phone calls later and it turned out someone had been using my card to buy wireless time in Toronto.
One of the merchants (who will rename nameless) erred somewhat in giving me the details of the purchaser — probably a violation of their privacy policy, notwithstanding the fraud — which included a phone number one digit off from mine (the phone is currently off), an email address @live.com, and an address that turns out to be a bike shop in Toronto.
Visa was prompt and effective, even promising to investigate the oldest fraudulent charge which was over three months ago. I'm surprised that they got away with it; it seems like the fact that they used a name, email and phone number that weren't mine would enable Visa to shut down that purchase, if the merchants were sharing that information.
The whole thing reminded me of this YouTube clip:
/life/sabbatical/A (Novel?) Pure CSS Image Rollover Technique
CSS:
a.rollover { background: no-repeat -9999px -9999px; display: block; }
a.rollover:hover { background: no-repeat top left; }
a.rollover:hover img { visibility: hidden; }
HTML:
<a class="rollover" style="background-image:url('blog-roll.png')" href="/blog">
<img border="0" alt="blog" src="blog.png"/>
</a>
This is a variant on other techniques I found. By setting the a tag to be a block-level element, it gets the size of the contained image; by setting the background by offsetting it, you get preload; by setting the foreground but using visibility:hidden (as opposed to display:none) it keeps its size. You also get a single point of truth for the button: image, rollver image and alt tag are all in the same place. Finally, this works everywhere I tested it (Safari 3.1.2; Firefox 2 and 3; IE6 and 7).
There are a few gotchas: don't be lazy and set background instead of background-image in the style tag, because that sets the other background CSS back to the default, specifically repeat:repeat. The images need to be the same size, pretty much. If you haven't cleared borders around images, they might be a problem, too.
I dunno if this is actually novel, but I didn't see it as I looked around. The (IMO less natural and more fiddly) technique of using a single image and changing the offset seems to be more popular.
