Mostly Tech

The cassette deck I won on e-bay arrived and was added to the rehabbed stereo system. Nice to hear some of those old tapes again, some going back to live radio days of the late ’70s. I have a Gordon Lightfoot recording going as I compose this post. The deck is a low-end Nakamichi, and for those who might recognize the name, “low-end” in this case is still a pretty good deck. Nakamichi was considered the gold standard of decks in the mid to late ’80s.

Nakamichi cassette deck

I spent some time reorganizing my web site pages. I started using “stylesheets,” also known as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, to style certain elements that are common to all pages. Among these are the background image I use and the navigation links (links to other pages) that are present at the top and bottom of my  pages. I removed the code that generated a date and time message on each page. The results of these changes are pages that are more uniform in appearance and pages that load faster. Additionally, new pages take less time to create as the coding is simplified. I moved 3 galleries from sub-pages and put them on the main Galleries page and this process was simplified by the use of stylesheets.

Professionals who use stylesheets can create really stunning web pages. My stuff is very basic, but still useful in the 45 pages (mostly linked from the Galleries page) that now make up the site. CSS has been around for a while but is becoming more fully supported in modern web browsers, so I thought it was time to look into this technology and apply what I could. Going forward I will continue to develop more knowledge and apply what seems appropriate for my site.

(Just switched to a Moody Blues recording. What a hoot.)

Weather continues warm but there is a chance of rain/snow coming in a few days. Our tulips are sprouting new leaves and grass is greening up. Trees are budding out. I fear a hard frost will stunt a lot of growth that should be happening in early spring, not in mid-February. Pam worked on a corner of the lot yesterday, cleaning up a spot where I didn’t rake last fall. We also trimmed a tree growing in the neighbor’s empty (adjoining) lot; it had branches that were overhanging our lot over the parking spot we use for the RV.  Just general clean-up, but rare to be able to do this time of year.

And, one final photo from last week’s visit to the Sanderling mountain land:

South Park from Jer’s bench on Sanderling

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

I think I’ll buy a ukelele (a tenor one, not soprano).  Also, Westminster Dog Show on TV this week.

Happy Trails.