cider for breakfast

Good morning, all! We're at Churchill's Pub so we can watch the West Ham v. Wigan football match.



Sorry if that pic seems a tad small - I'm going back to using smaller pics in the body of my posts for the time being, as it's the easiest solution I've found to the narrow-browser-window problem I mentioned a few posts ago. If you want to see a bigger version, you can always click on it. I'll work on figuring out a better way, but for now, y'all will just have to deal. Sorry. :(

So, Churchill's. We love this place. (Match update: West Ham just scored! Whooo!) It's a pub owned by a Brit expat situated in the middle of Miami's Little Haiti. On weekends, they show all the football matches on satellite TV (they show cricket and rugby, too - whatever people want to watch, basically), and expats & other football fans show up and start drinking at like, 9 or 10 in the morning. You can get bangers & mash, shepherd's pie, or fish & chips for grub. It is great.

Usually the crowd's a bit sparse until around noon, but it's pretty packed in here today. We figure it's 'cause it's near the end of the season and there are a lot of games on. (Update: West Ham scored again! It's 3-0 now! If they'd played this way all season, they wouldn't be in danger of getting relegated now.) We're at the far end of the bar from the TVs showing the West Ham game, so I can barely see what's going on, but the Middleborough v. Tottenham match on the closest telly is pretty interesting, too. Johnny does not have my nearsightedness, so he's telling me what's going on when I can't see it. All the matches today seem to be pretty high-scoring ones - in addition to the 3-0 West Ham tally, M'borough/T'ham is 2-3 and Portsmouth/Liverpool is 2-1.

Well, there are about 3 minutes to go until West Ham wins (they just showed an exodus of Wigan fans streaming out of the stadium), and then it will be time for us to get some bangers and mash to go with our cider. Mmm, sausages. Health food, it ain't - but it sure is tasty.

babies are expensive

Well, since it seems beyond the realm of possibility to have both our vehicles working at any one time, and since Bertie is holding up ok while we are waiting for his new fuel pump to arrive (the service people said it'd be alright to drive him for the time being, so we brought him home and have been driving him normally - his "check engine" light came on once for a day, but went off again on its own), this week it was Lucy's turn to need service. She is four and a half years old now, and has over 55,000 miles on her. She is due to start needing a lot of major maintenance work soon.

This time, she needed brake work, and her overheating problem which seemed like a coolant leak had returned, much to my alarm. A set of new brake pads and rotors and one new thermostat later, and I am $1410 poorer. Yikes! I gave her a little talking-to after I picked her up from the shop. Her driver's side window is having occasional sticking issues now, too (at least partially due to the dents left in the door by the two or three hit-and-run drivers who hit her while she was parked on our street in Syracuse, I am sure), but that would have been another $500-some dollars to fix, and I really don't have that much to spare right now. I told them to hold off on fixing that, since it's just not an essential repair. The body work I was hoping to have done on her is going to have to be postponed, now, as well. I want her to look all pretty again, but she needs to understand that I am not made of money.

*sigh* Kids these days.

aww...

R.I.P., Bobby "Boris" Pickett.

I didn't even know he was still alive. :(

tinkering again...

I'm banging around under the hood on this site, which is one among many reasons I haven't posted much lately (others include: having visitors, being visitors, and having to clean up our dump of an apartment in between having company and going away for the weekend and having company again).

I know this page doesn't render properly when it's viewed in a browser window that's not wide enough. Instead of giving a horizontal scroll bar, the right-hand column slides under the main column until it totally disappears (or, in the version of Firefox I'm using right now - version 1.5.0.7 - it just slides off the right edge of the screen, with no indication that it was ever there). The code (which I got from the BlueRobot Layout Reservoir) is designed to do that. I am trying to figure out whether that's the only way to get the correct stacking order of my page elements (main center column loads first, then the left menu column, then the right), because, as Bean has pointed out to me, a person could be stuck (say, at work) with a crappy old monitor with a screen resolution that's not big enough to accomodate the whole page. While a user with a small window on a higher-res screen could make the window bigger, a user with a lower-res screen can't make their window any larger. They'll never be able to see the hidden content without a scroll bar.

In my poking around on CSS discussion blogs, I seem to see a lot of comments which either imply or state outright that forcing a horizontal scroll bar on your page is a bad thing. I can't, at the moment, quite figure out why. But, if we accept that premise for the moment, then why have a layout that breaks by having some content overlap some other content? Why not have it break so the side content is forced further down the page if it doesn't fit beside the main content? Is that even something that could be implemented, given all the different ways code breaks in various browsers? The ultimate goal of site design is to have a site that degrades elegantly, so that even when bits of code can't render exactly as intended, all the content (the really important stuff) is still accessible. My site's not doing that now, and it bugs me.

I actually managed to force a horizontal scroll bar, somehow, at one point when I was first implementing this new template code last summer, but I changed the code when I realized that wasn't supposed to happen with this template (there's a comment in the code which explicitly states that a particular command "allows the content to overlap the right menu in narrow windows in good browsers"). Of course, now I can't remember why I thought it was a good idea to have my site break that way, nor, more importantly, can I remember what I did to force the scrolling. I feel like this whole process would be easier if I didn't have to work around Blogger's essential bits of code, but maybe I am just kidding myself about that. Is it too much to ask to have shit that just works? *sigh* Of course it is. I'm just so tired of messing with this.

But, while I'm messing with this, are there any other issues anyone's having with the site that you'd like me to look at? Please do leave me a comment...