Month: September 2005

SchoolLeave a comment

Olessia gives Russia Presentation

Rob

Olessia and I were invited by my Russian prof to come in and speak to two classes. Olessia showed pictures when she was in Moscow this year as well as pictures her sister took in Siberia (there’s new pictures in this album as of last week).

The Moscow pics were great. People really enjoyed the TGI Fridays pics. The Siberia pics were great. There were a lot of “oohs and ahs” from the audience. We worked on reading some of the signs. We learned a little bit about the largest fresh water lake in the world. It was great stuff (and I learned a bit too!). Plus, it was great saying the pictures displayed nice and big taking up a good part of the classroom wall.

Its понедельник (Monday) and its going to probably be another busy week of work and school. I have some other news which I’ll post later which will explain the delay in getting the news up on the site…
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CrittersLeave a comment

Cats on the loose!

Rob

Ack!

Olessia calls me from upstairs – the cats got outside!

I come up and here, the sliding door is half open and both cats are milling around outside. Now its past 8pm and its dark already. We both go outside. Murzik doesn’t know what to do and is happily waltzing around outside. She’s sniffing the air and the grass. Powder, he’s busy sniffing too, but he sees me walking his way and he knows I’m out to end his fun. He bolts off towards the back of the yard. I tried to get him between me and the house. My fear was he’d jump the short fence we have or find a rabbit hole under the fence. He ended up bolting for the house and I freaked because we leave our side gate open. I called out to Olessia to watch for Powder because he was coming her way and to close the gate (Olessia almost had scooped up Murzik). She ran for the gate and he saw that and stopped before the house. Now he was a little confused as to what was going on. He ended up cautiously walking to the middle of the yard and I followed. On my way to Powder, I was able to scoop up Murzik. I wasn’t too worried about her. Murzik isn’t as street smart as Powder is. When I scooped up Murzik, Powder saw that and he was freaked out. His tail was poofed up and his back was arched with all his back hair sticking up. I was able to scoop him up as well and return the two to the house. I have no idea how the patio door got opened. I may have left it open because I was grilling. Or maybe I had left it a crack open and they managed to get it opened further, but for some reason I doubt that. the doors aren’t easy to open. Hmm… Well, they’re safe and back in the house.
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Site NewsLeave a comment

FEMA disaster website is IE only – Whoops!

Rob

The article.

And quote:


    “Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind.”

How about designing a site to be cross-browser friendly (aka: base web standards) from the start?

From a consulting standpoint, who ever wrote the app will probably have to come back out to redo the IE code and get paid on top of what they got paid when they started. You really want to consult with these folks? If it was done in house, then this was short-sighted thinking on the part of those responsible for building the site.

Is it a big deal? Consider this: IE doesn’t run on Linux. IE is no longer supported on Mac. That’s now a healthy number of people your site can’t help. For an e-comm website, I’d say “who cares?” because that was the e-comm’s decision to make their site inaccessible to this market. But a government website?
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HouseLeave a comment

Fixing up the house

Rob

Labor Day weekend gave me some time to hammer out some house projects. Olessia wanted to display her dolls she brought back from Russia. So we had picked out some shelves and lighting and I got those mounted (pictures are in the gallery). I’m not quite ready to do my own track lighting install, so the wall mount approach was used.

We went to the Cleveland Air Show on Monday. We got back late on Monday so last night (Tuesday) I finished the last of the home projects – gluing the front siding back up on the front of the house. This was a different section which hadn’t been glued yet. So now the front of the house is looking good again.

The Air Show was good. Not a lot of static displays. There were about 4 A-10s, 2 F-18s, A C-130, a Navy helicopter (the Navy’s newest apparently), Metro Life Flight’s helicopter, a Continental airlines plane, 4 Canadian military aircraft, and some other Navy stuff. That was about it. No C-5 Galaxy or handful of C-130 aircraft. In fact, I don’t think there was any Air Force aircraft on static display (the C-130 was Air Force Reserves). I’m guessing all the aircraft are out and about saving the world from evil-doers. Sadly, and to put things in perspective, there were more consession booths then there were static aircraft.

The show wasn’t all bad though. We really had a lot of fun at NASA Glen’s display. Every year their display gets better and better (I think) and bigger too. They had a bus setup as a theatre and we kinda looked at it like it was goofy (it looked goofy on the outside), but inside it was really nicely decked out. They had a big flat panel display in the back and you sit in a swivle lounge chair. We watched a 7 minute movie on MER. The video was awesome. Great choice of music – Lenny Kravitz’s “I want to fly away” (I think that was the song) as they showed the launch and landing of a rover. Then the movie ended with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith telling us to stay in school (that kind of made us laugh). From the bus, we moved onto their display tent and it had a lot of displays showing the work done at Glen Research in Cleveland. If I read the display correctly, they used their wind tunnels to help test the foam insolation for Discovery’s return to flight (they even had foam we could touch). Olessia even had her picture taken – I have to get it scanned in. They had a setup where they take a picture and then almost instantly impose the person’s face inside a space suit and then print it out – all in under a minute, I would say.

Ok, so we had fun at the NASA booth. The highlight of the show, the reason we paid crazy prices for tickets and for food, the reason why we waited and walked around the show for 3+ hours, was all to see the Thunderbirds demonstration. It was an excellent show. What was cool was on Saturday and Sunday, we could hear the Thunderbirds getting ready over our house area – about 5-10 minutes before 4pm (4pm is when their show actually starts). It was good stuff. I have pictures from this event being developed – I should have them on Thursday, maybe.
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