My life with dialysis and kidney disease
tech
Favorite podcasts
Mar 6th
So your new ipod has arrived, it’s all charged up – and you’re wondering: “what the heck am I going to do with this thing?”
You’re going to load it up with all your music, photos, movies. Then you’re going to wish you had a reason to use the thing every day.
Enter the podcast.
Contrary to the name, a podcast really has nothing to do with iPods. A podcast is simply an mp3 that is distributed/syndicated much like an ATOM or RSS feed.
Anyone with a computer can listen to these podcasts, and anyone with a microphone can make them.
I have however found a few useful ones lately.
A Spoonful of Russian
After marrying into a Russian family, I have been trying to learn some Russian for months now. But “I have a headache” and “the slower you go, the faster you get there” are statements that can only take me so far. I recently found a podcast entitled A Spoonful of Russian. It’s a great way for beginners (like me) to pick up some new words, and more importantly, to hear how to correctly say them. This is so important when learning a language. If you aren’t able to immerse yourself in a language, it’s imperative that you have a willing tutor like Natalia to guide you through the correct pronunciation of each word. Her website even has flash cards for studying and remembering the Cyrillic characters. Yes, the Russian language has its own alphabet, they don’t just take our letters and print them backwards.
Anyway, that’s helpful and useful podcast number one.
What’s Up in Astronomy
Somewhere out there is a young boy named Ryan who knows a lot more about stars than I do. His podcast (with an oh-so-clever-title) is a great guide to the night sky. Living in Colorado my whole life I’ve developed an appreciation of “dark sky”, and love to drive into the mountains to see some truly awe inspiring star-scapes. Ryan’s guide is a great way to keep up with what’s going on in astronomy. His podcasts are extremely informative, and easy to understand. Maybe I should ask him what’s a good telescope to get (some of you know I’ve been “looking” at telescopes for years now).
Dr. Laura Moment (download mp3′s directly or subscribe via iTunes)
Dr. Laura … What can I say here? Here is a controversial character who seems to genuinely care about her audience. I sometimes listen to her show on my way home from dialysis, and I have to say I am more often than not impressed with her advice. The catch though, is that you have to give her at least 3 or 4 weeks of your time. What I mean is, you can’t just listen to one show and decide whether or not you like her. You have to get used to her style of communication first, and second, you have to get tired of as many deadbeat callers as possible, so that you begin to understand why she cuts people off, or seems to tell them what they’re thinking/feeling.
She doesn’t always wait for someone to finish a sentence or thought – which is annoying. But I’ve found that more often than not, she has sniffed out a clue from some other statement the person has made, and is actually on the right track to identifying their real problem/reason for calling.
Anyway, these moments are just little snippets taken from the “call of the day” so to speak. If you’re not a Dr. Laura fan, or worse yet, if you’re opposed to all things not extremely left of center, it’s probably best not to even click the link.
VOD Cars
If you’re like me, and you enjoy cars – especially high performance ones – then you’ll probably love this. A couple of “guys” from New Jersey (hey’s you’s guy’s) give us one of the most entertaining video podcasts I’ve seen. The video clips these guys get are great. Everything from rented Lambos blazing down the turnpike to young Scandinavian children driving on their father’s lap at ridiculous speeds. I can’t vouch for content on this one, as I haven’t seen to many episodes – but from what I’ve seen so far this is a great video podcast for anyone with a penchant for fast cars (and no money to actually be out driving in one).
10 Best Ipod Deals EVER
Feb 17th
So I’m a little excited – I just ordered a new ipod from the apple store.
No, this isn’t about the 10 best deals ever, but it does contain two decent deals.
I decided to go for the new “Video” ipod model, and was excited to find a few “deals” online. No, I’m not talking about those “free ipod” offers that you see all over.
*break*
My wife is sitting here with me at dialysis, so I must say:
I Love My Wife!
The support I receive from her is awesome – she meets me here at dialysis, and brings a nice picnic lunch to enjoy with me, and then sits here for four hours as I degrade from normal to lousy.
She rocks … and the world now knows it.
*end break*
So back to the ipod… I kept finding these “deals” all around the web, but some of them are so misleading! For instance, what good is a $30 discount with $30 shipping?
I finally found an “educational discount” through the applestore, and jumped on it. This one truly was a $30 discount, and even with decent shipping was under the MSRP.
Interested? Check it out here.
The only other “real” deal I found was a 10% off promotional code at Target, which dropped their price ~$30.
promotional code: TCPDPTCD.
Next stop? An Ai-Net adaptor for my car stereo.
Getting Comfortable with CSS
Feb 15th
CSS and standards compliant web design might be old news for some of you, but for others it might be something you keep reading about, yet are afraid to try.
I thought it might be helpful to write a couple of CSS tutorials to aid in getting some of you to a point where you’re ready to “jump in”.
I mean, if I can help to make one web site on the web look a little better, I’ve done my part right?
So what is CSS anyway?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading style sheets are pages we author, which tell the browser how to display content. Many of you have relied on WYSIWYG editors to do all of the page layout for you, but what some of you don’t know, is that many of these spit out horrible code. Others of you are savvy enough to code things by hand, but are utilizing the old <table> tag to control page layout.
*hand slap* No! *hand slap* No!
If you plan on using <table> tags to control page layout, read no further.
CSS draws back the shades and lets the light in. It allows us to control page layout in an intuitive (sometimes) way that is extremely easy to change.
First of all, somewhere in the <head> of our HTML page, we need something telling the browser to go and grab the CSS page.
<link xhref=”style.css” mce_href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
Now, your style sheet can be created in any text editor. For now, just use whatever text editor you’re comfy with, and then experiment once you’ve gotten a pretty good idea of how this all works.
Before we get into the meat of it, let’s get an understanding of selectors and classes.
Classes and Selectors
All HTML elements can be used as selectors in CSS. For example, <P> is a commonly used element in HTML. Well P can be a selector in CSS, and can be given it’s own properties (everything between the { and } )
This might look something like:
P { font-size:15px;}
So we can use any HTML element as a selector, and then define whatever properties we want – cool.
Classes
.h {font-family:Verdana; font-size:20px; font-weight:bold;}
In this example, we’re naming the class “h”. In CSS we always put a “.” before whatever class we’re describing. We can call our class whatever we want, and we can give it whatever attributes we want. The HTML calling the class might look something like this:
<span class=”h”>text here</span>
We have two basic declarations in CSS:
Properties (things like font-family, margin, and color)
Values (things like 500px or #000000)
So properties are the parts of the element we’re going to manipulate with CSS, and values are how far we are going to manipulate it.
Looking back at our .h class we see the property “font-family”, denoting what font to use, whose value is going to be “Verdana”.
ID Selector
The ID selector references a specific part of an HTML element, and is called with the # sign.
An example of this would be:
#Left {font-family:Verdana;}
This means that an HTML element calling the ID #Left will have the Verdana font (or whatever other properties and values you’d like to assign).
In the HTML this would be called like so:
<div id=”Left”>
Phew! Is that confusing enough yet?
We then get into parent/child relationships between classes and selectors. I will go into this further along the line (perhaps in part 2 or 3).
An example of this though, would be:
P.h {font-family:Courier; font-size:10px;}
in this example, we’ve taken the selector P, and have said that anytime the class ‘h’ is called within a P tag, it should have the above attributes … but only within that <P>. Other instances of ‘.h’ will be treated as described in the .h class declaration.
In the HTML this would be called like this:
<p class=”h”>
The goal here is to get some of you comfortable enough with this that you can use it to save time, and increase ability to turn out decent pages. More importantly though, is to achieve and maintain a higher standard for your work.
So are you ready to play?
Emil Stenström has a wonderful tutorial (way better than mine), and some great examples of CSS in action.
CSS Zen Garden is also a must see – with some pretty amazing examples of how CSS can manipulate a chunk of HTML into just about anything you want.
A List Apart will also get you on your way with lots of helpful tips and tricks for CSS.
In fact, I don’t even know what I’m doing trying to write a tutorial on CSS – all of the above mentioned resources have WAY more info than I do. While I’ve been utilizing CSS for a few years, it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve started to see what it can really do. Start playing with it though, and you’ll be hooked.
I promise.
But now dialysis is over – sorry, no more for today.
Check out the links I gave you and have fun.
