Kim Siever’s Blog

Aisling Elisabeth Winter Siever was born today at 17:23 (MDT). Labour went well (about 6.5 hours) and Mama and baby are nursing contently.

More details to be posted on our family website.

I came across the University of Dayton’s MyLife at UD site today and for some reason the little header icons they were using seemed very familiar. I could have sworn I had seen them before.

So, I went browsing to Dan Cederholm’s website because it looked like something he would have made. I browsed through his portfolio and sure enough there it was. microformats

Gotta love stealing. Oh, and to make the matter worse, the website wasn’t designed by U of D staff; it was designed by a so-called professional company named beepix.

Myself is a reflexive pronoun.

It is used to reflect back to the subject of a sentence. For example, in the sentence “I gave myself the day off”, “myself” reflects back to the subject “I”. On the other hand, in a sentence like “Joe, Bill, Jim and myself went to the game last night”, “myself” has nothing to which it can reflect. In sentences like this it is better to use either “I” or “me” (in this specific case it would be “I”).

There seems to be a tendency for people to use “myself” incorrectly (particularly among bloggers). I do not know why. Maybe they think it sound less presumptuous than using “I” or “me” or that it sounds more intellectual. Unfortunately, it only sounds lazy and awkward.

Some website developers are familiar with my ALA article “Spruced Up Site Maps” where I use CSS to format a plain site map in a way that resembles something more like a structured directory.

Due to a comment from an ALA reader, I added JavaScript later on to the site map in an effort to make it more interactive. Unfortunately, as I found out (thanks to Danjal Joensen), the JavaScript worked properly to only two levels. With every subsequent level, a new expand/collapse icon would appear. By the time you got to the sixth level, you’d have four icons instead of one for each parent element.

The problem was that the JavaScript wasn’t checking to see if the image had been corrected. Here’s the old code and the fix.

Old JavaScript

var li = a[z].parentNode;
var img = document.createElement('img');
img.className = 'icon';
img.src = '/man/images/maximise.gif';
img.style.verticalAlign = 'middle';
li.insertBefore(img, a[z]);
li.className = 'parent';

New JavaScript

var li = a[z].parentNode;
var imgChk = li.getElementsByTagName('img');
if(imgChk.length == 0){
var img = document.createElement('img');
img.className = 'icon';
img.src = '/man/images/maximise.gif';
img.style.verticalAlign = 'middle';
li.insertBefore(img, a[z]);
}


I’ve hit the big time.

You know you’re popular when your name is generated as random text in a spam blog.

Woodswesternwear

I feel like a movie star.

Looks like freepay.com (formerly Gratis Network) didn’t take too long to add the iPod Nano to their line-up of free offers.

If you don’t have one yet, it’s petty easy and you usually only have to fill out a small offer. I bought a package of vitamins for fifteen dollars (Canadian), shipping included.

Let’s say you run a company. Sales are down and profits are going down with them. It’s come to the point where you have to let go of an employee. You’ve narrowed it down to two. The first has been with the company longer than anyone else and has a larger salary. The second has been with the company for only a year and has a smaller salary. Everything else is equal.

Who would you fire?

Does anyone know of some thorough, comprehensive resources for learning the fundamentals of print design? My work responsibilities may be expanding in the near future and there are no local educational programmes for learning professional print design.