I am at Nashville Startup Weekend waiting for these this thing to get started. So far turnout looks good and lots of people are ready to pitch.
I am thinking that I will use this posts for updates throughout. If I can remember to bring my USB cable then I will likely post some pictures as well.
I have a CSS problem I am having a hard time figuring out. Here are the facts:
Sounds simple right? Well, I am having a hard time figuring it out.
Each “module” is a div with a fixed width and height that is set to float left. the desired behavior is that the modules will be centered on the page regardless of whether there are 2, 3, or 4 modules across. This allows the most information to be “above the fold” as possible. The problem is that no matter what I do they are on the left side of the page.
I have tried wrapping all the modules in a div and aligning that div to the center with auto margins. I have tried putting the modules inside a table cell that has align = center. I have tried wrapping the module in a div, floating that div left, and adding another div on each side with a min-width and a max-witdh to allow the spacer divs to expand and contract to the point that the number of modules would change. I have also tried floating the divs and adding auto margins to them.
Nothing has worked.
Here is what it looks like now in 2 column and 3 column widths:
As you can see the problem is that there is extra whitespace on the right unless the browser is the perfect width.
This has to be a solvable problem right? Do you have any suggestions? I am at my wits end.
Thanks
Just a little self-promotion.
Check out an interview with me on the North Carolina Startup Blog about the value of an idea.
It was fun to revisit and I am looking forward to hopefully working more with the Startup Blog Network.
First off, let me say that Letterman’s flogging of John McCain has been hilarious! It seems full of genuine emotion. I am sure Letterman was not making a larger political statement about the lack of transparency in the McCain campaign, it sure has been a perfect example of the frustration the press seem to be feeling.
What amazes me is exactly how much power Letterman has.
“If we had done something like that to him, someone around here would end up getting fired,” one said.
The world has changed in the past few years. It is now acceptable to call someone out for being less than upfront. I think we are seeing this because we all are sick and tired of feeling like we are being lied to. The importance of honesty seems to be growing in our culture and I love it.
So kudos to you, David Letterman. Maybe the news department doesn’t have the clout to call bullshit when they see it, but apparently you do. Thanks for letting us all know that John McCain called you up personally and bold face lied to you. Thank you for making it abundantly clear that we can’t trust John McCain. I mean, if he would lie to a comedian in order to get out of an obligation, what tougher situations would he lie about?
I have been invited to a meeting about the Netroots in Nashville tonight. I feel honored to be invited and am looking forward to going. The thing is, and this is a little embarrassing to admit, I don’t really know what “Netroots” is.
I mean, I have a feeling for what it is, but I could be way off base. My feeling has always been that “Netroots” is used to describe the left-leaning blogosphere. I know there is a play on grassroots and therefor inherits the idea of a “by the people” kind of movement.
I got into this whole blogging thing because I liked the ideals of free information and felt that it is my responsibility to take advantage of the flattening of the world in regards to information dissemination. Part of that ideal is that I answer to no one. What I post here is a reflection of who I am, what I am thinking, and what my values are (not that most of my posts are high principled or anything).
Is “Netroots” an effort to corral a bunch of bloggers to unify around talking points? On the one hand that would be great because the left tends to be to specific at the detriment of “staying on message”, but on the other hand it feels counter to the beauty of self-publishing.
Regardless, I am really looking forward to learning about the Netroots tonight. It is odd that my career has spanned both technology and politics and yet I am on the outside of the union of the two. Maybe I need to get more involved.
Welcome Instapundit readers. If you have a blog, check out my new startup: statzen.com.
In case you haven’t heard, we are having a little gasoline problem here in Nashville. The problem is that most of he gas stations don’t have ANY gas.
This is very scary for the less-than-obvious reasons.
The basic problem is that a rumor started that Nashville was going to run out of gas. From what I heard the rumor seemed to be based on a pipeline that runs to Nashville from Houston, TX. Supposedly that pipeline was only going to be running at 25% for a month. As this rumor spread people started lining up at gas stations. First regular sold out, then mid grade, and last night I saw people lining up 50 deep to buy Premium gas at $4.40. Not only were they filling up their cars, but they were also filling up extra gas cans, lawn mowers, etc. It was completely irrational.
People were lining up 50 deep to buy gas at $4.40.
This morning I saw gasbuddy.com had a station in the Nashville area listed as selling gas for $4.79. I am sure people were lining up for it. As I was riding my bike around this morning I saw people lining up at Kroger in anticipation of a tanker truck showing up. It was completely irrational.
Irrational, but understandable.
People have panicked and there hasn’t really been a calming voice. Until this morning, most of the media (new and traditional) has exacerbated the problem. TV stations started broadcasting lines of cars. It was like 1973 all over again. News Channel 5 had their helicopter up in the air broadcasting lines at gas stations. The Tennessean reacted by publishing which station still had gas. Even the well-educated early adopters of Twitter helped spread panic by trying to be helpful and listing which stations still had gas. By the time of the evening news every single station had camera crews filming lines of cars at gas stations.
Where was the local leadership?
Why did Mayor Karl Dean not give a prime time televised address explaining the gas supply situation? Maybe he was too busy to give a televised address; maybe he was driving all over town looking for gas. (Lots of people drove great distances yesterday to fill up on gas). If I was the Mayor of Nashville yesterday here is what I would have done:
I think with those 5 simple steps the panic could have been avoided. All we as a community needed was some effective leadership.
From watching the past 24 hours in Nashville I wonder if there is a growing universal sub-concious feeling that something is terribly wrong. Does this sub-concious lead us to assume bad situations are much worse than they really are? Wouldn’t this make us more susceptible to irrational behavior?
Update: Apparently the Nashville Gas Panic is now a national story.
It looks like I am going to get an opportunity to revisit the valuation of ideas.
I’m preparing an interview with a guy who blogged (jokingly) about buying new innovative ideas for $0.02 a piece (his “two cents”). Soon he started receiving offers from around the world from wanna-be entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on their business concepts (from revolutionary golf tees to a system to locate kidnapped people). Many missed the part about the 2 cents and hoped to get many times that. The other part they missed is that the real value of their ideas lied in finding a way to execute on the idea, rather than selling it.
It should be fun. I will be interested to see how my perspective may have been influenced by trying to raise money for statzen.
There is a new video from Obama that I hope everyone gets to see
Back when I was in college as a Jazz major i had a theory. Ok, I had lot’s of theories, but I had one about time signatures.
A time signature is basically the way beats are divided up in a song. 95% of songs you know are in a 4/4 time signature. This means that there are 4 quarter notes. This is really no different than a time signature of 4/8 (4 eighth notes) or 4/2 (four half notes), etc. A waltz is typically 3/4. Some really great tunes are in 6/8. A good example is All Blues.
If you do a little math you can see that the time signature 12/8 can encapsulate just about all feels. I decided then that every tune I wrote would be in 12/8. I was living in New Orleans at the time and the inspiration came from many of the Hatian voodoo rhythms being most easily transcribed in 12/8. Once I started writing stuff in 12/8 I started finding lots of ways to have interplay between straight beats and waltzes. In a way, 12/8 allowed me to have rules to experiment with rhythms that I wouldn’t otherwise use.
In hindsight, this “theory” was less about some new discovery and more about creating a structure to compensate for some of my creative deficiencies (aka, hiding behind theory).
All of that is to say that I stumbled upon a really cool CSS framework for laying out web pages.
How are time signatures and CSS related?
960 Grid System is a CSS framework for laying out a web page in a grid. This approach is all about being able to slice up the page into as many column combinations as possible. This is very similar to how time signatures are used to divide up a measure in musical notation. It turns out 960 is about common divisors in the same vein as 12/8.
All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.
I plan to use this as a structure to make up for my creative deficiencies.
Michael Arrington has posted that TechCrunch has reached the 1,000,000 subscriber mark on FeedBurner. First off, congrats to TechCrunch; I have never seen someone hit that milestone before.
I don’t know that they really have one million subscribers, but I do know they have at least one… me.
I use NetNewsWire on my laptop and my phone. They both sync with NewsGator.com which pulls the feed for me and reports a subscriber to FeedBurner. Sometimes the NewsGator sync doesn’t work right so I turn it off. At that point my laptop appears to be a second subscriber to FeedBurner. As I go through my day I may check feed from my home, a coffee shop or two, and my office (subscriptions 3 and 4).
Of course, I have tried out many other feed readers. Some of them are web-based and continue to report that I am a subscriber. Off the top of my head I know Google Reader and Bloglines do (subscriptions 5 and 6). I am sure there are more places I have uploaded my OPML file that would each report me as an additional RSS subscriber.
I am in no way doubting that TechCrunch is one of the most widely read blogs on the internet. I just think it is completely within the realm of reason to assume that the actually number of people subscribing to the TechCrunch feed is 20% of what FeedBurner is reporting.
How do I know and why do I care?
At one point in time I added the “number of subscribers” metric to statzen.com. As I dug in and saw what was really happening I realized that it is just a bad number; it does not represent what it portrays to represent. It can be skewed so far in either direction that the number becomes meaningless.
