Street juggler, eating the tools of his trade. York, England
October 1988
2004.11.25
I downloaded the free GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) today and as soon as I grok how to use it, I hope to improve the quality of the images I post on this site. . .
I made the above image on a Sunday morning during a weekend visit to the northern city of York in England. The juggler was very good - a professional - and at the end of his peformance he juggled three apples of which he managed to take a bite from each without dropping them.
Boston Harbor Road, Boston Harbor, Washington State, USA
Spring 1980
2004.11.24
Spent several hours digging through a box of old negatives and slides that never got organized. Found several sets of b&w negatives I made in 1979/80 while I was a senior in high school. Chose the one you see above. For six years Boston Harbor Road was the path to the world - at one end was where I lived and at the other was the city of Olympia where I went to middle and high school. In between was the Boston Harbor Marina, where we bought cigarettes and stole candy, Quail Cove County Park where I learned how to re-start beach fires from smoldering embers and dry grass, and the Gull Harbor Mercantile, a country gas-station/store that was the half-way point to town. I walked up and down that road, I rode my bike on that road, I raced and wrecked my parents cars on that road, I left home on that road and I came home a year later to find that although the road hadn't changed, I had.
Rock and Sky, Olmstead Point, Yosemite N.P. USA
September 1997
2004.11.22
Returned from my week in Phoenix learning Oracle Forms development. It was a good class and I feel fortunate to have attended on my employer's dime. I also got to spend the week with my parents who live in Sun City. The commute was long but it was worth it to catch up and spend time with my folks. They have decided to return to Edinburgh, Scotland for their 50th wedding anniversary next August. I can't wait - I've already started planning photo opportunities as well as golf opportunities. Thorpe Wood, I'm coming for you!
I also discovered that I had gotten the margins for the three boxes that make up this page out of whack. My parents old Gateway PIII's screen resolution is set to 800x600. When I called the page up, the right and left boxes were clipping the text in the center box. So I readjusted and now it looks good at 800x600. Sometimes I forget not everyone in the world sets their display up like mine. . .
Added another freshly scanned slide (above). I took this photograph on my last visit to Yosemite National Park in September 1997. Olmstead Point is in the east side of the park. From Olmstead Point you can see Half Dome and the Merced River valley but thankfully not the tourists who swarm over that part of the park like ants. The east side of the park is much less crowded and home to the Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya Lake, and the drive up from Lee Vining is nothing short of spectacular. Someday I'll go back. Someday.
Stephen Devoy and friend, Smithfield Market, Dublin, Ireland
September 1986
2004.11.13
Spent all day getting the house in shape before Gina comes home Monday. I fly out to Phoenix early tomorrow morning for a week of Oracle Forms training and to visit with my parents. Thought I'd try scanning some b&w negatives - one result is displayed above. Stephen Devoy (the boy on the right, closest to the camera) was my nephew for nine years, before his aunt and I divorced. I took this photograph on the back of a horse cart driven by his father, Parky Devoy (my ex-wife's brother in-law), on the horse market Sunday in Dublin. It was a good time - more about that some other time.
Waterfall, Lundy Canyon, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
October 1996
2004.11.11
8:35 p.m. CST
Good news - I got the film scanner working. Source of the problem: operator error. Solution: RTFM. Above is one of my first scans. Next I have to figure out color balance, saturation, contrast, etc. etc. . . I also need to buy some canned air to blow all the dust off these old slides.
I also copied some javascript to display the current date and time under the page heading. I went looking for instructions on how to format the return from Date() function, but got fed up and made dinner instead (chicken cacciatorre - from scratch). So for now you'll get the whole darned string.
1:55 p.m. CST
Well, I had to keep messing with it. I ran the html behind this page through the W3C HTML 4.01 Validator and found out the bulleted lists should be encased in <ul></ul> or <ol></ol> tags. Turns out these tags provide the indentation for the <li> tag - about 40 pixels worth according to the W3C HTML 4.01 Specification. Apparently IE 6.0 adds indentation to the <ul></ul> or <ol></ol> tags, another fine example of the folks in Redmond doing our thinking for us. . . Firefox 1.0 on the other hand interprets the html strictly, so no <ul></ul><ul></ul> tags, no indentation of text contained in <li> tags.
So now the lists are indented in Firefox 1.0, but the left and right boxes were too narrow so I added another 20px to each id's width attribute. Looks better, I guess. . .
10:15 a.m. CST
Fixed the display of bulleted lists in the Firefox browser by creating an "column-list" id with the padding-left set to 10px. Encased the lists within <div id="column-list"></div> tags. Tried out adding a list-style-position: inside; attribute to the "left" and "right" id's. This moved the bullet symbols in from the margins, but I didn't like the way the text wrapped-around flush with the tag. Looks fine in IE 6.0 too.
2004.11.10
I'm bummed. The Konica Minolta DiMAGE Dual II film scanner I purchased on E-bay arrived today and it looks like it's broke. The eject button doesn't work and it won't accept the film holder. It also won't complete its boot sequence. This item was built for Windows 98/2000 and is not XP certified, so to be fair I'm going to install it on the old PC I have running Win98 and see what happens. But the broken eject button doesn't give me much hope.
Messed around with the css for this page to try and fix the <li> tags slamming into the margin. No luck. I could remove the <li> tags and encase the links in <p class="column-caption"> tags like those under the pics in the Galleries and Geek Stuff sections, but that would be too easy. Besides the bulleted list looks nice in IE 6.0. . .
Added another section - "Free Geek Stuff" - with links to a few of the open source aps I've been using lately. Check them out - they're free.
And finally, I changed the pic above. Maybe one of these days I'll get that Apache/MySQL/PHP server up and running and learn how to rotate them automatically.
2004.11.09
Firefox 1.0 was released today and if you are using it to view this page then you know the bulleted lists in the Left Box are still slammed against the margin. Looks like I'll have to figure out a kluge for it. . .
2004.11.08
Introduction
Welcome to JACoulter.net, my web design laboratory. This site was inspired by my desire to make my photography accessible to friends and strangers and has grown into a desire to learn about web design and the code behind the pages we browse through everyday. This hobby also feeds my curiosity about programming and computers in general.
If you've visited this site before, you've noticed how different this page looks compared to the old home page. If this is your first time to JACoulter.net, you can see my old home page here.
About this page
This page is laid out with a cascading style sheet (css). There are no tables, only <div> </div> tags defining the header across the top and the three columns below. Almost all of the layout and formatting is contained in the css, making this html document a heck of a lot easier to work with. No tables inside of tables inside of cells inside of tables! And it's all hand-coded - the only tool used to build this page was the simple but powerful Texturizer text editor.
The layout is terribly simple but it is fluid and will re-adjust itself to properly fit the screen resolution of the machine displaying it. I adapted my css and html from Owen Brigg's excellent "Box Lesson". I am also working with Elizabeth Castro's book "HTML For The World Wide Web With XHTML And CSS, 5th edition". You can look at the css behind this page with my comments here. To view the html, select View>Source from your browser's menu.
Note: If you are viewing this with Mozilla's Firefox 0.9.3 browser I apologize for the <li> tags slamming to the left margin. The tag's work properly in IE 6.0, but I'll try to fix it soon. Or hopefully, Firefox 1.0 will fix it for me - we'll find out in a few days. . .
About the galleries
The galleries are my favorite photographs and I plan to add more soon. But first I have to re-work the css behind the three you see in the right box so they display properly at the most common screen resolutions.
About me
I'm a 42-year old American living in Fort Walton Beach, Florida with my wife Gina and our two dogs Jake and Tilda. I recently closed a chapter in my life when I retired from the U.S. Air Force after 23 wonderful years of service (bio to be posted soon). I am now starting the next chapter of my life as a rookie Oracle database administrator/developer. I published my first web site The Black Dog Gallery in 1999 while stationed in Utah.
