I sat down on the bed to check my email after lunch. Sam and bebop both decided that it was good time for a nap.

Looks like I be stuck.

The spammers must be getting desperate today.

First there was an influx of comment spam to my blog. Each comment consisted of a random set of letters and numbers like: “kas8j398sdnsd9fDF7″. Akismet blocked many of them, but several dozen got through.

Then the webteam email at work received several email messages like this. Notice that there is no real ad, or even a link - just a spoofed email address (which I won’t post here for obvious reasons).

Hi,

My mother in law who I was really close to passed away unexpectedly. As sad as it was she left behind a litter of adorable bulldog puppies and parents.

These dogs are well trained, playful with kids and other home pets and they come with complete shots and worming.

Puppies are very playful and they do the funniest things and you just can’t get enough of their playful antics.

Please contact me only if you are interested in providing a loving and caring home for these pets.

Have a nice day.

Lauren.

Perhaps it has to do with this slashdot article.

I just discovered a strange clip from my presentation at the 2008 HighEdWeb conference:

The clip is only 30 seconds long, but for some reason contains about 2 minutes of footage at an increased speed. When hooked to the normal audio it makes me appear to dance around.

Love the 2-arm wave at 0:28. Hallelujah!

We have lost one of the pivotal authors from my childhood.

I remember reading Juristic Park, on a camping trip with my parents. I was 10. The book had a big impact and influenced my career choices - not towards paleontology (as you might be thinking), but towards math/computers. You see, the coolest person in the book was a mathematician (Ian Malcolm) AND the most evil was a computer programer (Dennis Nedry).

After JP, I remember reading The Andromeda Strain, Sphere and Congo.

But, Crichton real power was as a gateway drug to the harder stuff from authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

You will be missed.

Just received the audience feedback from my 2008 HighEdWeb presentation and wanted to share. I thank everyone who attended. Got to love that last comment :)

Evaluation Summary

Comments

These are unedited

• This will help me to at least talk intelligently to the people who will actually do this.

• Great presentation!

• Very nice accessible plaer, lot of thought went into the development.

• Well received!

• Gabriel’s talk was really cool. A great talk on accessile Flash video.

• Would like to see this presentation again!

• I will definitely be sharing this information with our IT “media” guy. We don’t have tons of video yet but we’re working on it and I’m very interested in the use of a generic interface so that we spend our time on the video production NOT the web delivery.

• I’m in marketing, so definitely not technical. This was clearly geared more to technical people, but I would love to see a siilar workshop geared more to those as of us who are less technically savvy.

• Best presentation so far. Gabriel is very knowledgable and very giving of information and techniques. Presentation was extremely helpful. I will be implementing information ASAP.

• Very informative session and interesting! Going to look @ videos on my site again!

• Excellent!!!

• Awesome!

• Show your web site first or earlier. That way I can look at it as we go. It was good that he mentioned what was on the site so I didn’t have to take extensive notes.

• Nice that he provided example files!

• Excellent presnetation plus great resources and code online gives me nearly a plug-n-play solution.

• Me, I liked it. Flash all the way!

• Excellent. Thanks Gabriel!

• Wish had more time.

• I think thi was too technical fr UAD track, but not too technical for me

• Great Job!

• Most excellent.

• Good way to get started

• Well done.

• great job

• Thanks for sharing all of your source files!

• vey clear presentation friendly, communicative speaker

• Good Work!

• looks like I’ll just have to struggle with DragonSpeak….

• Too technical for my particular job description but very helpful in understanding the landscape of accessible video. Our institution has a similarly diverse of distance/infrastructure challenged constituency. Great ideas on accessibility and editabiity! -re distance learning. thanks!!

• Nicely done. Relevant.

• Great job explaining and illustrating the steps to take and the options you have available to consider when publishing an accessible video.

• a bit over my head, but a great presentation!

• Very knowledgable, charismatic, and well documented presentation with easy to follow slides.

• Great to have the presentation already available on his web site. good explanation of process and requirements.

• Very informative Liked it!

• Very God presentation

• Best presentation yet. Perfect balance and pacing.

• Nice nose ring!

Take a look at the two screen captures below.

Both are from the same parking services page. The first is in FireFox 3, the second is in IE 7. JavaScript is being used to change to HREF attribute of mailto links for @pcc.edu addresses. But, why is the inner HTML also changing when viewed in IE?

At first I thought it was a jQuery bug. Here is the code:
$(this).attr("href","http://www.pcc.edu/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address);

But, after searching it turns out to be an IE bug.

If the text and url of a link match - then Internet Explorer decides to assign them both to the HREF attribute! So, if you alter the HREF then the text will also change… Here is an example:
<a href="http://www.google.com">google.com</a>  // fine - changing href will not change text
<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a> // bad - changing href will change the inner html text


Solutions

1) One answer is to keep the text different, but you may not be the only contributor to the site…

2) Another solution is to keep the HREF local:
$(this).attr("href","/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address);

But, we have separate sub-domains and need all email to go to the www…

3) So, we are forced to store the inner html:
var linkHtml = $(this).html();
$(this).attr("href","http://www.pcc.edu/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address).html(linkHtml);

Why am I still surprised by these IE bugs?

It has been just over 2 weeks since Jamie and I spent the day picking grapes.

The buckets were kept upstairs where the ambient temperature was warmer. Each day, I would open the buckets and punch down the pomace that had risen to the top of the must. At first, the whole room smelled like bread+rotten fruit (sorry ’bout that sam). As the fermentation began to slow, the aroma turned fruity+alcoholic.

Yesterday, I finally got my hands on the carboys. Racking the wine this first time took forever. Grape skins and seeds kep getting stuck in the siphon. I should have strained it first.

Ever since I got my /5, I have wanted to dress it up for Halloween. It has a rack behind the seat that would be perfect for  jack-o-lantern. Unfortunately until 2008, I have either been out of town, or teh bike has been broken.

So, this year - the bike was working fine. I hooked up a pumpkin (foam) and added a highpower LED with switch. Everything looked great…

So of course the bike gets a flat right before the 31st :(

It’s the time of the year to stock up for winter. A poor season and ethanol subsidies kept the price of corn high for a long time. Finally it dropped to 5/$1.00. So, we grabbed/shucked/cooked/de-kenneled a hundred ears.

Would have prefered 10/$1 :)

For http://blog.vibrantjourney.com/2008/10/23/frida-kahlo-scarecrow/#respond