Charlie and I attended the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society‘s “Beginner Bonsai” Course at the Bon Air library. For $40, you got a very nice little bonsai tree, expert instruction, potting and basic trimming and forming. Pretty cool stuff, and an excellent introduction to any sort of gardening, as you can do it indoors. Humble is the name of the game here, folks. Bonsai is fascinating to me because of the humble grace and artistic qualities of the crafting of the tree. It’s one thing to plant some pansies in your front yard — but to craft yourself a beautiful miniature tree! Well, perhaps that is a little too obtuse for some readers, but I dig it and you don’t have to, and I guess therein lies the beauty of bonsai. In any case, I would suggest viewing the Bonsai gallery.

I got some mail (of the electronic persuasion) from yet another Brit with some silly problem with my instantRSS project, so I did a little work, and fixed it up. Voila! New version 1.3, now validates with CSS validating thingies: http://feeds.archive.org/validator/ and http://rss.scripting.com/.

Brand new, just for you. I have been working on this redesign for longer than I care to mention (most of that time being me fiddling with the portfolio section.

The new design is intended to be very clean, and very easy to redesign, as it is completely controlled via CSS. Long explanation short, Cascading Style Sheets are a way to “style” HTML from a central point, and you can control a LOT of stuff, including font size, line spacing, block positioning, colors, overlapping, nerd nerd, nerd nerd nerd, nerd. In any case, to give you an idea of the “power of CSS”, I suggest you take a look at CSS Zen Garden, which is a showcase of a single HTML page, but with different style sheets submitted by different people. Each stylesheet radically redesigns the HTML, but keeps the content the same.

In any case, I hope you enjoy the new design, and let me know what you think!

I hacked up camE, a handy and small webcam app for Linux a while back, and finally put the finishing touches on it tonight. Considering camE is written in C, I’m pretty happy I made it work! Najati helped me out quite a bit, tho’ I’m pretty sure he really just wanted another person that knows C/C++ so that they may enjoy the genius that is Citrus :)

Anyway, you can snag my patch here. Note well that my “home” webcam is now fully functioning in the manner that I would like it to…

In other news, I put MPy3‘s new code into CVS @ Sourceforge. This was prompted solely by Paul Jennings submission of a huge patchola (which is in the CVS) that cleans up MPy3 quite a bit. Word to your mother, Paul.

I just finished the page and documentation for snow2.js, a little javascript toy that makes explosive snow rain down upon your page!

i’ve been messing around with this little javascript snow-thing today whilst at work (it’s been a bit stop-and-go today, and I’m frazzled). I went to sleep late last night, and have been drinking coffee. While I feel great because I’ve been doing good work today, and there is snow outside, things are getting hectic on this project i’m on.

In that spirit, when you clicky on the snowflakes that are falling on this page, they explode.

You can pause them with the “pause snow” link over here –>