Summer Vacation 2003 Pt. 3
Well, today was the last day in Maryland. Flying back tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. It was good to visit Katy. But before I re-cap the day, I’d like to note two things. First, I have been counting Nissan Altimas, and there is a disproportionate amount of them on the road here. It is the most strange thing. Every time we go somewhere, let’s say for about 2 miles, I’ll see about 5 to 10 Altimas. Who would have thought? It’s not just the new ones either, there are Altima’s of all model year driving around out here. Plus, no road salt so much less rust. And the other thing worth mentioning, I learned a term called “Kiss and Ride.” It means “drop-off.” See? I didn’t get it either. We were at the Metro terminal and they had a sign pointing to the “Kiss and Ride” area. I guess that’s the terminology for ya. Moooving on. We had a lovely breakfast together and then went to church. It was only 40 minutes long so that was good. We actually got the whole family there. That went well. Then I went with Katy to the University of Maryland College Park and we worked on the websites she’s creating. Nothing like the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer to make a website about. Anyways, we tweaked some CSS and worked with the links. It was successful despite the incredibly old computers that were hooked up to the internet. Why would you have to access the A: drive off of the command line? Those are some serious network administrator restrictions. That’s when I found out that my website looks like crap in IE 5.00something. Crap! I thought it would work reasonably well, but something in the top nav is conflicting with the layout and causing things to actually move around when you roll over the top links. I think IE interprets the nav code as a bastardization of CSS and messes things around accordingly. Perhaps a couple more pixels of space would help the other problem of column’s pushing one another around. After all, my thin right column is stuck at the bottom of the page in that browser. At least the design is standards compatible, as I know from testing in Mozilla and visiting the W3C site. However, I fear my accessibility is not what it could be. Shame on me. Seriously, I just don’t know about this design. Is it original enough? I spent so much time on it, why do I feel like I am fighting with it? Late one night when I couldn’t sleep I did think what that background image up top would be. Obviously since I used the SX-850 colors, I’ll take one of the hi-res E-Bay photos I got and use that for the background - preferably the radio tuning dial which would scale horizontally quite nicely. Off track again. We finished up at the lab and went to Ruby Tuesday’s. It was quite possibly the nicest dinner that we have all shared together in sometime. Which is also true of the vacation. We’ve visited our sites, taken our pictures, eaten out food, lifted our loads, enjoyed our time together, soaked up our sun; now it’s time to resume the rigmarole of daily life. We go back home to pick up the load again, our ability to bear it reinforced by the time and meditation our vacation has given to us. In a way, it’s back to the real world. Tomorrow I have a plan, a schedule, a task-list. This past week I didn’t. Tomorrow I have people to see, chores to finish, orientation to prepare for. Yesterday I didn’t. But still I’ll go to bed now, looking forward to the adventure that is tomorrow.